In the past 2 and half months, we have refreshed the visual design of the CFEngine UI (Mission Portal). As part of the UX/UI design team, our goal is to provide an up-to-date design as well as an easy-to-use user interface. In this blog post, I will showcase the changes we made, the process behind the redesign, and the challenges encountered along the way. I am sharing the journey with you and hope to inspire the people who are currently planning to take a similar path.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.12.7 and 3.15.4! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates.
Changelogs As always, you can see a full list of changes and improvements in our changelogs:
3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.12.7 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.12.7 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Community 3.15.4 Changelog for CFEngine Enterprise 3.15.4 Changelog for Masterfiles Policy Framework Please note that the Enterprise changelogs contain only changes specific to enterprise. To get a full overview of all changes in a version, read all 3 changelogs.
Interested in seeing promise results (KEPT, REPAIRED, NOTKEPT) overlaid on top of the policy itself?
Craig (Digger) and Nick (Doer of Things) kick off the new series, “The agent is in” and take a look at the policy analyzer in CFEngine Enterprise Mission Portal.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
At the end of every webinar, we stop the recording for a nice and relaxed, off-the-record chat with attendees. Join the next webinar to not miss this discussion.
As we’ve hinted at before, 2021 will be a big year for CFEngine. In the summer, we will release CFEngine 3.18 LTS. This is the first LTS release with Compliance Reports, Custom Promise types, and all of the other improvements we’ve made over the past year.
Collaboration In addition to implementing valuable functionality for our users, we are focusing on better ways of interacting with them, and more opportunities for contribution, collaboration and sharing. The beginning of this was the introduction of GitHub Discussions - a platform where users can ask questions, submit ideas, or show off their CFEngine-related creations. One month later, in March, we launched our new website. The new website should make it easier for users to find what they’re looking for, and also has some sections with great content, such as videos, case studies, and white papers. Now, we are excited to share our plans for the rest of the year.
If you are debugging issues with a host, it is quite common to want to make changes to CFEngine policy, and speed up the process of fetching, evaluating and reporting for that host. You can do this by running cf-runagent and cf-hub from the command line, now we’ve brought this functionality into Mission Portal:
You can see the feature in action, here:
I have a setup at home where I keep a local git server running on a Raspberry Pi 3 which contains personal/work journal, dotfiles and a personal policy repository. It was set up manually so before adding a new git repository for a family password store I set about retrofiting the configuration in CFEngine. The goal in this blog is to ensure that what I have already is managed by CFEngine and that what I want to add, /srv/git/passwords.git, is created.
As an MSSP (Managed Security Service Provider), HIPAA Vault relies on CFEngine to automate & secure their infrastructure on behalf of their customers. HIPAA Vault has been a longtime CFEngine Community user since 2012 and recently upgraded to Enterprise in order to boost their infrastructure visibility through Mission Portal and features like Compliance Reporting that help them provide a more secure & compliant cloud hosting solution.
We chose CFEngine over others because it is the most trusted and reliable solution in the market. We are more interested in dependability than having the new shiny tool that just hit the market. says Gil Vidals, Founder & CEO of HIPAA Vault
New CFEngine Website Today we’re excited to announce the release of our new website. This has been several months in the making and just one of many big announcement we have planned for 2021. Our goal in redesigning the website is simply to enhance your experience when visiting.
Whether you’re an IT Manager evaluating our Enterprise feature set, a Systems Administrator interested in trying CFEngine for the first time or a long time community member, we hope our new website helps you find exactly what you’re looking for quickly and easily.
Generally speaking, CFEngine and Ansible can be used to solve the same problems, but their approaches are different. In this blog post I’d like to discuss the different approaches, their consequences, some advantages of each tool, and even using them together.
CFEngines autonomous agents CFEngine works by installing and running an agent on every host of your infrastructure. It is distributed, each CFEngine agent will evaluate its policy periodically and independently. They rely on a centralized hub for refreshing policy and reporting. Updating the policy, enforcing it, and reporting on the results are decoupled - each of these 3 steps can happen with different configurations / schedules.
cf-remote is a tool for downloading and installing/deploying CFEngine. It automates a lot of the things you have to do before CFEngine is actually installed on your infrastructure, such as provisioning cloud instances, downloading CFEngine installers, copying them to remote hosts and installing / bootstrapping. To make it as easy as possible to get started with cf-remote and CFEngine, it is now available on pypi.
Getting started Installing cf-remote is as easy as:
