Some Cfengine Users

CFENGINE NOVA CONCEPTS

Cfengine automates the operations in datacenters ensuring compliance and giving substantial cost-savings.

Cfengine Nova is a true self-repair technology for datacenters, with a focus on preservation and management of organizational knowledge. Using its secure pull-based architecture, local instances of Cfengine ensure system compliance according to a simple but powerful policy description language. Cfengine Nova is the result of more than 15 years of R&D and market feedback. Its concepts are based on Mark Burgess' Promise Theory and notions of voluntary cooperation. Below we have described what we believe are four major benefits of Cfengine Nova.

Evolution - not revolution

Cfengine Nova is an evolutionary solution. Small in size and quick to install, it is easy to be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Cfengine Nova is a versatile framework, which is fully policy driven. You can have one policy for controlling your webservers, another for your DNS-servers, a third for garbage-collection. Develop and introduce new templates at your own pace. When you feel comfortable with a process being controlled by Cfengine, move on to the next. Cfengine will grow with your needs. There are no minimum requirements to get started with Cfengine Nova.

Lightweight and flexible

End-users are always in the focus at Cfengine. Our goal is to realize the hands-free datacenter, in which humans make decisions and the technology becomes invisible. Ease of use means a reduced number and complexity of the options system administrators face, without compromising flexibility.

Many traditional vendors, believe the best way to solve new problems is to introduce new features, but adding more stuff never made anything simpler. At Cfengine, we work hard to avoid wasting users' time, shielding them from complexity. Cfengine focuses on the intentions and relegates details to libraries.

Self-repair - consistency

Cfengine is famous for its self-repair functionality. It was the first continuous self-repairing solution in the industry. The core design of the system enables continuous and effectively real-time convergence towards a desired end-state. Experienced Cfengine-users all over the world save time by letting the technology deploy and manage systems. Say good-bye to trouble tickets and alarms that require manual interventions.

Cfengine runs locally on every machine. It is based on world leading research, using a model known as Promise Theory and the concept of Voluntary Cooperation.

Cfengine Nova's self-repair functionality can be applied to most processes related to files, batch-jobs, scripts, databases and computer processes can be automated and defined into a compliance setting.

Preserve organizational knowledge and assist in planning

What happens when engineers leave your organization? They take their knowledge and magic with them. Usually this means that systems have to be rebuilt by their replacements, at high cost in loss of time and service to the organization. but there is no reason to lose this knowledge.

The future of Datacenter automation will bring increased focus on design and less on intervention and alarms.

Cfengine makes it simple for technicians to document processes directly in policy code, generating a knowledge base that remains in the organization forever. By commenting every policy to explain the intention behind it, you work with Cfengine's automation to build up a complete story as a browsable semantic web. The intentions follow rules throughout the system, and are visible to administrators and managers alike. Instead to rebuilding, you look forward to the next level of improvement.