Sudhir Pandey's List: CFEngine

• Configuration Management under FreeBSD with CFEngine 3
  
• "Puppet and CFEngine compared: time and resource consumption" by Jarle Bjoergeengen in Feb 2010 issue of USENIX ;login: magazine
  
• "A Survey of System Configuration Tools" LISA 2010 paper. See especially Section 4.1, "How do I choose a tool for my environment?"
  
• "Getting Started with Configuration Management" by Cory Lueninghoener in April 2011 issue of USENIX ;login: magazine
  
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cf-execd

 

The cf-execd process can be likened to the cron process in UNIX/Linux or the Windows Scheduler. It runs as a daemon and its job is to start the cf-agent process at a specified time interval. This user configurable interval defaults to 5 minutes.  
 

 

cf-agent

 

Is an agent that is called by the cf-execd process. The cf-agent component does the heavy work of system automation and maintenance.  
 

 

cf-serverd

 

The cf-serverd process is used to distribute policy and/or data files.  

 

In conjunction with the process/agents listed, CFEngine needs to know what you would like to automate, maintain or configure. For this purpose, CFEngine has two additional components: promises and policies. A promise is a statement, written in plain text using the CFEngine language, that describes the desired state of a system. A policy is a collection of one or more related promises, which is executed every time the cf-agent runs.  

Next are the actual working files which are processed by CFEngine whenever the cf-agent process runs. Perhaps the most important file is the default policy file, which is called promises.cf. It is stored locally on every host, enabling execution with or without network dependencies. If you would like to update a policy, you simply make a change to the desired policy file on the policy server or hub (Nova Only), then update promises.cf accordingly. Each client Agent will automatically pull the new version in, then execute the new instructions on the next run.