CFEngine is a software solution that helps system administrators and other stakeholders in the IT organization become more agile and respond faster to business requirements while ensuring SLAs and regulatory compliance, through automation.

CFEngine allows users, in code using the domain specific language of CFEngine, to define desired states of the IT infrastructure. Lightweight CFEngine agents continuously ensures that the actual states are converging toward the desired states, while reporting the outcome of each run. The solution is heavily researched and built upon Promise Theory.

Being a general purpose automation solution, CFEngine is used in a wide variety of ways, from building servers, deploying and patching software to configuration management tasks like scheduling, local user-management, process-management, security hardening, inventory and compliance management.

Many DevOps organizations use CFEngine to ensure consistency across different staging environments and automated application deployment. Due to its strong security track-record CFEngine is widely used in heavily regulated industries like financial services, telecom, health care and governmental agencies.

How CFEngine works

CFEngine is a fully distributed system that allows you to define desired states of everything from very large-scale infrastructures to small devices. The lightweight c-based cf-agent runs locally on each resource and persistently tries to converge towards the defined desired state. The actual states of managed resources are available in logs and an enterprise database for compliance and easy reporting. Using CFEngine, can be described in the following 3 simple steps.

1. Define Desired State
As an end-user you can use the CFEngine Domain Specific Language (DSL) to define desired states. CFEngine allows you to define a variety of states ranging from process management to software deployment and file integrity. You can check out CFEngine Promise Types to get an idea of the most common states you can define.

Normally, all desired states are stored in .cf text-files in the /var/cfengine/masterfiles directory on one or more central distribution points, referred to as CFEngine Policy Hubs.

2. Ensure Actual State
CFEngine typically runs locally on each managed resource. A resource can be anything from a server, network switch, raspberry pi, or any other computational device. CF-agent, the execution engine, is autonomous which means all the evaluations occur on the local node.

Before each run, which by default is every 5 minutes, the agent tries to connect to one of the Policy Hubs to check if there has been any policy updates. Upon policy updates, cf-agent will download the latest policy to its own /var/cfengine/inputs directory, run a syntax check and upon success start to execute.

3. Verify Actual State
Whenever the agent runs, it creates a log of local inventory, system states and execution results. The logs are stored in /var/cfengine/outputs. For enterprise customers, all data is also stored in a local database. 

Specifications

Industry :

Information technology