Today, the CFEngine team is announcing CFEngine 3 Enterprise. With the major part of the CFEngine 3 technology being in an open source core, our exploratory commercial edition, was originally dubbed `CFEngine Nova’ – the `New star in configuration management’. Today, CFEngine 3 is no longer a newcomer, but a proven solution in datacentres around the world. With today’s launch, CFEngine 3 Enterprise leaves orbit and begins its voyage to manage an ever expanding universe of IT.
Update [April 12, 2012]: Added information about the new templating engine.
Highlights The CFEngine Community 3.3.0 release is here, with the largest set of improvements since the introduction of version 3.0! We have added Virtualization and SQL promises to the open source edition and introduced service-promises for Unix. A new templating engine is in place. Some potential “gotcha” issues have been fixed, to streamline and simplify the use of CFEngine. The embedded database code has been significantly refactored, optimized and made much more robust. A large number of useful variables, classes and functions have been introduced. And as usual, a set of bugs have been fixed.
Following the development of the community standard library, CFEngine has now released a conversion utility that transforms existing CFEngine 2 policies into a basic CFEngine 3 format. The output can be run in either the Community Edition, CFEngine Nova or any other version of CFEngine going forward.
Earlier this year, CFEngine released an upgrade manual for community users. Now with the core transformation utility, commercial customers will be able to save potentially hundreds of hours of conversion time on a large installation of cfengine, moving to version 3.
Following a sustained effort by the programming team at CFEngine AS, CFEngine Nova (the commercial version of CFEngine 3) will run natively on Windows NT platforms (not merely emulated under the Cygwin framework), with first release just into the new year 2010. Support has been added for registry management and Windows Access Control Lists, as well as integration with Event Manager and other goodies.
The plans over the next year include further integration of CFEngine with Active Directory and its group policies. CFEngine still has something to offer Windows users, even with the new tools that Microsoft is bringing to Windows 2008. One thing is integration of Windows resources into the CFEngine Knowledge Map, but also there is the ability to manage security through ACLs, and implement group policies convergently over time (not just one-off), as well as to integrate with a major Unix management system in a universal framework. Early rumours of the release have already led to a flurry of interest for the upcoming software release from a number of companies internationally.
