Relative Origin of Cfengine, Puppet and Chef | Vertical Sysadmin

In Cfengine, creator Mark Burgess pioneered the idea of using a configuration description language to describe desired state on heterogeneous Unix and Unix-like systems. This language included “classes” or built-in if/then tests to control when and where the configuration should apply. In Cfengine 2, Mark introduced ideas of convergence to a desired state and self-healing (computer immunology).