To manage large infrastructures, efficient solutions for both making changes and observing the current state are necessary. As most information (inventory) about hosts is quite predictable and static, there are many opportunities for optimizations in terms of compression and avoiding re-transmission of the same data. In the CFEngine team, we are improving our reporting systems with a focus on correctness and low bandwidth consumption. This will benefit many users, both large data centers where bandwidth (networking equipment) is costly, as well as small IoT devices with limited connectivity.
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.
Ansible and CFEngine are two configuration management tools and at first glance they look like competitors - two tools dealing with the same problem, in very different ways. But are they? Maybe they are actually not dealing with the same problem and are not as incompatible as it seems. Read our Ansible|CFEngine white paper providing an analysis of this area to learn more:
