The CFEngine lab has been brewing on 3.6.4 over Christmas and is finally ready to release it to the world! With 3.6.4 being a patch release, it has a focus on stability and reliability of both the server and agent side. This is also the first release where user input has been incorporated in form of casting a vote for what to be improved - so make your voice heard!
Enterprise hub self-protection A major stability enhancement for report collection in CFEngine Enterprise hubs has been added to 3.6.4. The Enterprise hub collects reports from clients every 5 minutes by default, but in cases where it can not collect a round of reports from a client it will try to get what is missed the next time from that client; after another 5 minutes. This could happen for several reasons, for example that the client is temporarily offline. The amount of data that needs to be collected once the report collection succeeds again is proportional to the amount of time has passed since the last success. However, if the hub as been unsuccessful at collecting reports from a large amount of clients over a longer period of time, this can cause a high load on the hub once it succeeds again; potentially making the hub unstable and unresponsive until the collection is done. CFEngine 3.6.4 addresses this potential stability problem by introducing a maximum threshold on how long history the hub will try to collect from clients that have been offline; through the body hub control attribute client_history_timeout. By default the hub will discard the missed history (known as issuing a “rebase” collection query) from clients if more than 6 hours have passed since last successful collection in order to protect itself. If a client comes back after 6 hours, the load on the hub for discarding these last 6 hours versus collecting them are about the same – thus the 6 hour default. However, you can adjust this threshold if you expect your clients to be offline for longer amounts of time during normal operations. Note that in either case, history that already exists about the client in the hub’s database is not discarded.
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Configuration Management Camp in Ghent, Belgium is coming up, and CFEngine is of course going there! This year we’ll be sending two of CFEngine’s core developers, Dimitrios Apostolou and myself, Kristian Amlie. Our currently planned talks for the event are:
How to securely deploy CFEngine in the open Internet: manage trust, provide selective access to policies, securely bootstrap new hosts and revoke old ones. CFEngine releases, how do they happen? Learn how bug fixes, optimizations and features are scheduled for releases. Also a sneak peek at upcoming developments for CFEngine 3.7, and some time for discussion. Finding the problem: Learn how to triage bugs in CFEngine. Also learn how to write an acceptance test. There will of course be plenty of other talks as well and a good chance to meet the guys that make CFEngine happen! And of course you’ll be able to catch talks from other Configuration Management providers as well.
It’s sometimes difficult to maintain an overview over what issues matter most to the CFEngine community. Unfortunately our bug tracker, Redmine, has very poor support for letting the developers know what issues are important to the users, and prioritize according to this. So lately we have been looking into using the watcher count as a way to measure interest in issues. For clarity the watcher count is the number of people who have pressed the “Watch” button on a Redmine issue. Redmine doesn’t have built in support for filtering according to watcher count, but we have built our own custom query tool to get this information. So we hereby encourage the community to press “Watch” on all the issues that are important to them! We can of course not guarantee that all issues with many watchers will be resolved, but it certainly increases the odds that the particular issue makes it towards the top of the list. For technical reasons we can’t publish our query, but below is a sneak peek at the current list: The top 25 issues as of right now, according to watcher count. Merry Christmas!
CFEngine 3.6.3 is released! The new version brings broader platform support, UI performance and usability enhancements as well as bugfixes. It has again been about 8 weeks since the last release, and we are planning to further shorten the release intervals going forward to bring you enhancements faster. What you will also notice is that the focus is on stability and performance for 3.6.x releases, in order to make upgrades as safe as possible. Features and larger changes will be provided in the 3.7 branch.
Hearing a user speak is worth more than self-glorification! As we come up to year-end, it is time to start thinking about turkeys (well if you celebrate Thanksgiving like they do out here), and of course Christmas and the festive season it heralds. In this blog post I would like to thank a particular automation tool (no points for guessing which one), but really do so from the vantage point of a user and the progress they made with the tool. “Today I started learning CFEngine 3”. This was the title of an innocuous looking post from Remi on June 13’th 2013. In here he detailed his early experience attending a training session on CFEngine delivered by Diego Zamboni the author of Learning CFEngine 3. What stood out even back then and at first glance was that CFEngine is a pretty darn good monitoring tool. It is capable of fixing issues or reporting to the user.
Please nominate your favorite! The CFEngine Champion program rewards the voluntary efforts of individuals who have significantly enhanced the CFEngine Community by promoting CFEngine and its use. The contributions of the CFEngine Community are a vital part of our company’s ecosystem. View previous champions. Please nominate your 2014 candidate here
Thanks to Mike Svoboda at Linkedin and a league of experienced CFEngine users, we are happy to announce the “CFEngine Office Hour”. Meet with CFEngine folks, bring your questions! Here is what to expect: “Instead of lecturing about how we’ve used CFEngine, the focus of this office hour is dedicated to helping you!” “Have you ever had a question that you wanted to ask, but didn’t want to blast it out on the mailing list because its too public? Would you like for someone to take a look at one of your policies and maybe suggest improvements? Have a question about how to approach an automation problem?” “The idea behind the office hour is that we want to help other folks in the community bootstrap their environment.” “Getting over that initial learning curve can be quite a challenge. Having a video conference with a person whom you can ask questions of, and can interact with directly can make this process a lot easier.” “Even if you’ve been using CFEngine for a few years, feel free to drop in. Maybe you can learn a thing or two by looking at policy examples.” If you haven’t joined the #cfengine channel, we’re on libera.chat. Feel free to drop by and ask questions there as well, there are typically a few of us around. We will post the times of Open Office Hours on our Events page We hope to see you!
In this blog post I would like to show how one of the best configuration management solution integrates with an equally well known ticketing system - Jira When a specific policy becomes out of compliance, there is a common need to integrate this with a ticketing system. For example, you have an important web application configured and ensured to be running using CFEngine. If any aspect of that fails, you want to be notified immediately. But since you already get enough email, and you already use a ticketing system for all other tasks, you want to open an issue in the JIRA issue tracking system on such an event. CFEngine 3.6.2 introduces Custom actions as a notification method for alerts, which virtually enables any notification method for any event happening in your infrastructure. In our new How To, we show how to integrate CFEngine with JIRA using Custom actions. Let CFEngine open a ticket for you whenever something important happens with your infrastructure, and spend your time planning instead of monitoring!
Dear CFEngine Community, we are proud to announce our new mailing list: dev-cfengine. Given that the contributions in both Core and Masterfiles repositories have been steadily increasing, the need for such a list became apparent. While patch submissions and code reviews will still be taking place using GitHub’s pull requests, this list serves the purpose of facilitating any other discussion on the development of CFEngine. We are looking forward to seeing the community being active on that list. In addition, we, the CFEngine developers, are planning to participate with all our discussions that do not touch on CFEngine Enterprise. Regards, CFEngine AS
