The Release Candidate of CFEngine 3.5.0 Community Edition is now available for download at:
https://cfengine.com/inside/myspace
We’re looking forward to your feedback to the changes and improvements!
Significantly improved parsing and evaluation of policies A large number of parser and evaluation problems have been fixed. Iterating over arrays with nested lists has caused many headaches and workarounds in previous versions of CFEngine. With 3.5, many of those can disappear.
Policy developers get clear and consistent messages from the stricter parser. Note: If your policy has syntactically incorrect code, then the new parser will mark those as errors. Fixing those errors should be straight forward, but we’re interested in hearing about your experience with this so that we can make this as smooth as possible and document the typical issues for the final release!
The March snapshot release of CFEngine Community and Enterprise has just hit our webservers. The releases are called 3.5 Beta1 and 3.1 Beta1, respectively, and just as last month: this is work in progress.
Community Some low level changes have been introduced. It is now possible to have empty lists in policies, there is no need to use “cf_null” anymore.
We have continued our architectural work and we have changed FatalError for other less problematics error conditions along the code. This allows us to have a better error handling than what we used to have.
Upgrading from CFEngine 2 to CFEngine 3 is easier than you think!
In this Webinar, we will go through the steps required to successfully upgrade your CFEngine 2 environment to CFEngine 3. Topics covered in this Webinar will include:
Promise Theory and Convergence - How they are utilized in CFEngine 3 New features of the CFEngine 3 Language Migration strategies Policy translation - From Files to Bundles and beyond Validation, Testing and Rollout methods Q&A Session So, if you are currently running CFEngine 2 in your environment and are considering a move to CFEngine 3, please view this Webinar. (Recorded on Wednesday, February 13, 2013)
Highlights The CFEngine Enterprise version 2.2.0 release is here, and this release is bringing major customer requests.
The Mission Portal graphical user-interface has gotten the following new features.
Dynamic host grouping Access control for reports REST API Dynamic host grouping The new edition of CFEngine Enterprise allows you to use any CFEngine classes to build arbitrary groups of hosts. Groups can be arbitrarily nested, yielding a tree-like structure. Below is an example of how a grouping by operating system classes may look.
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.
At Tuesday night’s CFEngine Meet-the-Team BoF session at LISA, Joe Netzel, one of CFEngine’s talented Systems Engineers, showed off a small app that he has been building in his spare time to help new users become more comfortable developing their own CFEngine policies.
In Joe’s own words: “The CFEngine Policy Wizard attempts to bridge the gap between established concepts that are second nature to System Administrators – such as setting file permissions, process management and software installation – by offering a side-by-side comparative view of the CFEngine syntax.”
***Eystein Måløy Stenberg ****provides a sneak-peek into “Project Constellation”, new CFEngine Nova technology under development that will expand the universe of configuration management by integrating network, server and mobile management, as well as support both geographic diversity and massive scale.
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The Single Star
CFEngine 3 supports a wide variety of network architectures today, in environments with both reliable infrastructure and unreliable or mobile connectivity. The most common architecture is the “Star Network”, where you have one central hub responsible for sharing policies and collecting reports from all other hosts. This is the default network architecture adopted by CFEngine 3 Nova.
Today CFEngine releases the latest version of its commercial enterprise software for configuration management and IT operations.
In addition to all the usual power of scalable and convergent system configuration, CFEngine 3 Nova brings a higher level of information awareness to system administrators at very low cost.
Resource efficiency takes on a new importance as users increasingly work in the Cloud where every CPU cycle is billed. The CFEngine mantra of “Lightweight! Lightweight! Lightweight!” has pushed the new release even further in the direction of resource efficiency. Considerable improvements in network efficiency have also been achieved, allowing reporting of many thousands of hosts every 5 minutes to a single hub aggregator - far in advance of other solutions.
CFEngine no longer supports the conversion tool for upgrades from CFEngine version 2 to 3. Manual intervention was still needed after its usage, and a simple, direct translation can be a poor choice that misses the opportunity for improvement. We recommend following the Upgrading from CFEngine 2 to 3 guide, alternatively in combination with Professional Services from CFEngine to provide a ‘best effort’ conversion.
CFEngines 1 & 2 CFE3 Community Core CFE Nova World-wide deployment Consistent extensible syntax Introducing Knowledge Management Technology leader Enhanced configuration modelling Scalable reporting Brought convergent repair Lists, patterns, methods Native windows support User extensible without scripts SQL, LDAP integration Fault tolerance features CFDB searchable knowledge bank Generalized package model Spreadsheet model for content driven policies Simplified installation and upgrade Packaging Product integration Support