CFEngine is a

configuration management Configuration management (CM) is a management process for establishing and maintaining consistency of a product's performance, functional, and physical attributes with its requirements, design, and operational information throughout its life. ...

system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems, including the unified management of servers, desktops, consumer and industrial devices, embedded network devices, mobile

smartphone A smartphone is a mobile phone with advanced computing capabilities. It typically has a touchscreen interface, allowing users to access a wide range of applications and services, such as web browsing, email, and social media, as well as multi ...

s, and

tablet computer A tablet computer, commonly shortened to tablet, is a mobile device, typically with a mobile operating system and touchscreen display processing circuitry, and a rechargeable battery in a single, thin and flat package. Tablets, being computers ...

s. Released under the terms of the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public Licenses (GNU GPL or simply GPL) are a series of widely used free software licenses, or ''copyleft'' licenses, that guarantee end users the freedom to run, study, share, or modify the software. The GPL was the first ...

, CFEngine is

free software Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed open-source license, under terms that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, distribut ...

History

The CFEngine project began in 1993 as a way for author Mark Burgess (then a post-doctoral fellow of the Royal Society at

Oslo University The University of Oslo (; ) is a public research university located in Oslo, Norway. It is the oldest university in Norway. Originally named the Royal Frederick University, the university was established in 1811 as the de facto Norwegian conti ...

Norway Norway, officially the Kingdom of Norway, is a Nordic countries, Nordic country located on the Scandinavian Peninsula in Northern Europe. The remote Arctic island of Jan Mayen and the archipelago of Svalbard also form part of the Kingdom of ...

) to get his work done by automating the management of a small group of workstations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Burgess managed Unix workstations, scripting and fixing problems for users manually. Scripting took too much time, the flavours of Unix were significantly different, and scripts had to be maintained for multiple platforms, drowning in exception logic. After discussing the problems with a colleague, Burgess wrote the first version of CFEngine (''the configuration engine'') which was published as an internal report and presented at the CERN computing conference. It gained significant attention from a wider community because it hid platform differences using a domain-specific language. A year later, Burgess finished his post-doc but decided to stay in Oslo and took a job lecturing at

Oslo University College Oslo University College (; HiO) was the largest state university college in Norway from 1994 to 2011, with more than 18,000 students and approximately 1800 employees.

. Here he realized that there was little or no research being done into

, and he set about applying the principles of scientific modelling to understanding computer systems. He developed the notion of convergent operators, which remains a core of CFEngine. In 1998 Burgess wrote "Computer Immunology", a paper at the USENIX/LISA98 conference. It laid out a manifesto for creating self-healing systems, reiterated a few years later by IBM in their form of

Autonomic Computing Autonomic computing (AC) is distributed computing resources with self-management (computer science), self-managing characteristics, adapting to unpredictable changes while hiding intrinsic complexity to operators and users. Initiated by IBM in 2001 ...

. This started a research effort which led to a major re-write, ''CFEngine 2'', which added features for machine learning, anomaly detection and secure communications. Between 1998 and 2004, CFEngine grew in adoption along with the popularity of

Linux Linux ( ) is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an kernel (operating system), operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically package manager, pac ...

as a computing platform. During this time, Mark Burgess developed promise theory, a model of distributed cooperation for self-healing automation. In 2008, after more than five years of research, ''CFEngine 3'' was introduced, which incorporated promise theory as "a way to make CFEngine both simpler and more powerful at the same time", according to Burgess. The most significant re-write of the project to date, CFEngine 3 also integrated knowledge management and discovery mechanisms—allowing configuration management to scale to automate enterprise-class infrastructure. In June 2008 the company CFEngine AS was formed as a collaboration between author Mark Burgess, Oslo University College and the Oslo Innovation Centre in order to support users of CFEngine. In April 2009, the company launched the first commercial version of CFEngine - CFEngine Enterprise. The Enterprise version can be downloaded for free for up to 25 agents (clients). February 2011, the company received its first round of funding, from FERD Capital. The company has offices in Oslo, Norway and Mountain View, California, USA. In 2017, the company changed its name t
Northern.tech
to reflect that it is working on multiple software products, not only CFEngine.

Design

One of the main ideas in CFEngine is that changes in computer configuration should be carried out in a ''convergent'' manner. This means that each change operation made by the agent should have the character of a fixed point. Rather than describing the steps needed to make a change, CFEngine language describes the final state in which one wants to end up. The agent then ensures that the necessary steps are taken to end up in this "policy compliant state". Thus, CFEngine can be run again and again, whatever the initial state of a system, and it will end up with a predictable result. CFEngine supports the item of statistical compliance with policy, meaning that a system can never guarantee to be exactly in an ideal or desired state, rather one approaches (converges) towards the desired state by best-effort, at a rate that is determined by the ratio of the frequency of environmental change to the rate of CFEngine execution. CFEngine provides an operating system-independent interface to

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X, *nix or *NIX) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Uni ...

host configuration. It requires some expert knowledge to deal with peculiarities of different operating systems, but has the power to perform maintenance actions across multiple hosts. CFEngine can be used on Windows hosts as well, and is widely used for managing large numbers of Unix hosts that run heterogeneous

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

, e.g.

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AIX Aix or AIX may refer to: Computing * AIX, a line of IBM computer operating systems *Alternate index, for an IBM Virtual Storage Access Method key-sequenced data set * Athens Internet Exchange, a European Internet exchange point Places Belg ...

Tru64 Tru64 UNIX is a discontinued 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA), currently owned by Hewlett-Packard (HP). Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation (DE ...

and

HP-UX HP-UX (from "Hewlett Packard Unix") is a proprietary software, proprietary implementation of the Unix operating system developed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise; current versions support HPE Integrity Servers, based on Intel's Itanium architect ...

Users

CFEngine is used in both large and small companies, as well as in many universities and governmental institutions. The largest reported datacenter under management of CFEngine is above a million servers, while sites as large as 40,000 machines are publicly reported (

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented Social networking service, social network. It was launched on May 5, 2003 by Reid Hoffman and Eric Ly. Since December 2016, LinkedIn has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft. ...

), while sites of several thousand hosts running under CFEngine are common. According to statistics from CFEngine AS, probably several million computers run CFEngine around the world, and users from more than 100 countries have been registered.

Research

Shortly after its inception, CFEngine inspired a field of research into automated configuration management. The CFEngine project claims to attempt to place the problem of configuration management in a scientific framework. Its author Mark Burgess has developed a range of theoretical tools and results to talk about the problem, and has written several text books and

monograph A monograph is generally a long-form work on one (usually scholarly) subject, or one aspect of a subject, typically created by a single author or artist (or, sometimes, by two or more authors). Traditionally it is in written form and published a ...

s explaining them.

References

External links