CFEngine and Ansible are two complementary infrastructure management tools that both work with so-called inventories. However, the common term can be quite confusing because the way they are defined and created is very different for an Ansible Inventory and for a CFEngine Inventory. In the most basic case, an Ansible Inventory is just a file with a list of hosts and groups of hosts that Ansible then manages when fed the inventory file.
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.
Scalability is an important feature of any infrastructure management solution. Either the to-be-managed infrastructure is big already or it is expected to grow as the business grows. Over time more and more resources are needed for CI/CD pipelines and more customers use the product(s). Generally, growing a business means more traffic and requests need to be handled by the infrastructure. Hence, scalability is an important metric for comparing infrastructure management tools when deciding which one to use.
Blazing the trail CFEngine was the first Configuration Management solution on the market, and while we have made many and significant changes and improvements to CFEngine in that time, we stay true to the principles that make it such a great product and technology. There are many things that have changed in the market, not at least the competitive situation, we believe that fundamentally many of the challenges stay the same.
