Imagine having the power to identify the exact lines of your CFEngine policy that are slowing down your executions. In this episode, we’ll guide you through the art of profiling CFEngine policy for improved performance.
In Episode 30 of “The agent is in,” Nick and team dives into the topic of profiling CFEngine policy. We explore tools and techniques to identify performance bottlenecks and optimize CFEngine deployments. The episode covers the following main points:
Have you been interested in automating the testing of your CFEngine policy?
Cody, Craig and Nick follow up on the Policy Examples episode and dive a bit deeper into testing. Nick walks through some policy and related tests that leverage lib/testing.cf from the Masterfiles Policy Framework and Craig walks through implementing a GitHub Workflow to run the tests in a Docker container for each Pull Request.
Video The video recording is available on YouTube:
This question was covered in The agent is in, Episode 27 - CFEngine Q&A: Policy questions.
Given the following JSON, how can I get a list containing just the values of name?
[ { "name": "Aurora", "description": "Illuminating" }, { "name": "Orion", "description": "Stellar" }, { "name": "Luna", "description": "Serene" }, { "name": "Phoenix", "description": "Resilient" }, { "name": "Atlas", "description": "Strong" } ] Using maparray() The most concise and direct way to achieve something like this is to use the maparray() function. It iterates over a list or data container applying a pattern based on $(this.k) and $(this.v) of the currently iterated element to produce a list.
This question was covered in The agent is in, Episode 27 - CFEngine Q&A: Policy questions.
Testing is an important part of the software life-cycle. Writing tests for your CFEngine policy can help to bring improved assurance that your policy behaves as expected. Follow along and write your first test policy.
Test stages When writing tests there are three or four basic stages that typically need to be handled.
Initialization - Set up the necessary conditions for the test, e.g. create some files to be edited. Testing - Running the policy whose behavior you wish to test. Checking - Inspecting the results of the test policy to see if they conform with expectations. Cleanup - You might need to cleanup artifacts produced by the test if your testing system does not handle it for you. These stages map well to a sequence of bundles. So, a simple test template could look like this:
Unlock the power of CFEngine with expert insights and get your burning policy questions.
Cody, Craig and Nick discuss and answer CFEngine policy questions submitted by users.
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.
I was chatting with someone recently about some security maintenance tasks and they were bemoaning that some software updates had turned into a yack shaving1. Updating this required updating that, required updating that on N hosts of varying platforms and flavors. So, they asked me how could they avoid updating a specific package and naturally I said, let’s just prototype some policy.
The incipiency of said yak shaving was updating packages via apt, Debian flavored systems default package manager. apt upgrade is being used to update all packages, but we need to exclude a specific package from the updates until the dependency chain has been resolved.
Been a CFEngine user for a while? Have you migrated to a cfbs managed policy set yet?
Live from the Northern.tech Summit in Castell de Sant Mori1! Cody, Craig and Nick walk through the process of migrating a policy set to cfbs management. Go through the process yourself following the detailed Migrating to cfbs blog post.
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.
Tired of hand crafting policy and arguing with people about spacing and alignment? Longing for regularity and easier scanning of your policy no matter who wrote it?
Cody, Craig and Nick wrap up the second year of The agent is in with Miek Gieben, CFEngine Community user and author of cffmt, a formatted written in go for CFEngine policy files. Check out the discussion about opinionated formatting, possible future developments and other tooling to improve qualify of life as a CFEngineer.
Have a burning desire to run sshd or another service on your VR headset?
Cody, Craig and Nick do time-boxed live hackathon working on developing CFEngine services promise type support for Termux. Watch Nick and Craig race to implement basic services support before the timer buzzes.
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.
I have stopped using my Linux distro’s package manager, and you should, too. Maybe I should clarify that. I don’t install software with my distro’s package manager any more. I still upgrade my system.
I became influenced by a few different factors. Top among these is something required in certain industries called a change advisory board or committee. This requirement says that changes to production computers have to be reviewed and approved by all stakeholders in that computer’s operations.
