Last month Infoworld published an article titled “Review: Puppet vs. Chef vs. Ansible vs. Salt” written by Paul Venezia, that prompted many people in the configuration management community to get in touch with us to ask why CFEngine was not included. Our answer was simple: “No, we have no clear reason as to why this has occurred and it is bizarre not to have included CFEngine in the article.”
The article seeks to present the reader with a choice of configuration management technologies according to the following needs:
“In some cases, we may be talking about large installations that exist only to support very large applications or large installations that support myriad smaller services. In either case, the ability to wave a wand and cause them all to bend to the will of the admin cannot be discounted. It’s the only way to manage these large and growing infrastructures.”
Certainly, the scope indicated suggests CFEngine should be on the shortlist!
While the article is titled and written in the style of a review we would seek to remind readers that any review of such technology that dedicates 5 to 7 paragraphs per technology is hardly exhaustive. Indeed, we need a decent testbed to deploy all these tools to in order to back up assertions and claims with hard data for this to be considered a factual review. Instead, at best, it can be considered a primer to the options available.
We thought we’d try and help out here and share some content that could easily be inserted into the existing article at Infoworld should the editors feel inclined to provide a more complete picture to their readership…
CFEngine in a nutshell
CFEngine also started out as an open source project, in 1993. Both the technology and the author, Mark Burgess, receive recognition for this on-going contribution and have been called the Grand/Godfather of Configuration Management. The latest version of CFEngine continues to build on scientific research conducted by Mark Burgess. The concept of promise theory, first proposed by Mark in 2004, and the facility to exploit this has been available since version 3 of CFEngine, released in 2009.
Isn’t CFEngine just a by-product of scientifc research? Yes and no. Yes, CFEngine continues to receive plenty of interest from academia. However, in 2008, CFEngine AS was founded to support the ever-growing commercial interest as enterprise had not missed the opportunity to benefit from such learning. Today, JP Morgan, LinkedIn, IBM and many other organisations publicly acknowledge the value they get from using CFEngine for configuration management. CFEngine is by far the most widely used technology in production and is a core sysadmin skillset, even for today’s cloud architects!
You can find CFEngine deployed on many different platforms: AIX support came in 2005, we now use agents across Android-based deployments and of course Microsoft’s platform is supported as well, albeit only the enterprise version of CFEngine and that requires purchase of a license. Either way, if you are running a mixed environment then CFEngine is a very interesting proposition for you.
Not one single tool uses the same approach, all tools require the understanding and use of their specific vocabulary and syntax. CFEngine is no exception and with that there is the inevitable learning curve. Where some of the other tools (Puppet and Chef) have opted to leverage the Ruby ecosystem and require the dependencies and resources that go along with such a decision, CFEngine’s unequaled strength in this regard is its lightweight approach. Written in C, with a very small footprint and far fewer dependencies, CFEngine continues to execute significantly faster and with greater reliability than any other tool thus far.
CFEngine in a Web UI
CFEngine AS offers an enterprise version with a Web UI, for a fee. There is also Rudder, from Normation that is free (100% open source, free software, with enterprise-grade support available). In terms of what one can get done using a Web UI and as we provide an enterprise Web UI in the form of Rudder we’ll talk about what you can do with CFEngine using Rudder.
With Rudder you have a complete web interface with which to administer and interact with your configuration management technology (CFEngine).
You can configure and manage nodes and their configuration. You are able to automate common system administration tasks (installation, configuration), enforce configuration over time (configuring once is good, ensuring that configuration is valid and automatically fixing it is better), establish and maintain an inventory of all managed nodes, and report on the compliance of configurations (desired vs actual state) by node or group(s).
Rudder’s workflow combines templates known as ‘Techniques’, from which new instances are created as ‘Directives’. Together, with Nodes that are grouped together according to user-specified patterns, Configuration Rules are generated that are responsible for applying the Directives to the associated Group(s). All of this is done via the web interface. Separation of user roles is also possible allowing for the implementation of change control throughout each and every stage of interaction with Rudder.
“Is my infrastructure compliant?” Rudder reports on the state of all configuration items under management providing a clear signal as to whether you have converged on your desired configuration state. Rudder will show you when configurations have failed to apply and display pertinent information to help with further investigations to resolve these configuration incidents.
In terms of what comes out-of-the-box, Rudder is loaded with predefined ‘techniques’ that cover most common configuration management needs and are easily customized and extended via the GUI for specific and complex use cases. In the latest version, Rudder also offers the ability to manage isolated groups of nodes via Rudder relay servers.
So, we hope Infoworld will appreciate the support and update their article in light of these arguments. Feel free to tweet to Paul and Infoworld to request they correct the omission and include CFEngine – you know it makes sense!
