Top all-time · #4668
CFEngine
Company blog · cfengine.comsystemsprogramming
CFEngine is the company blog at cfengine.com, writing about systems and programming. Since 2011, 17 different Hacker News readers have linked it 21 times, most often “Whitepaper – Ansible|CFEngine”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Too few sampled comments (10) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link CFEngine's site as a reference for its configuration management tool, its manuals and product pages. The comments cite or ask about the product rather than judge the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 10 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
Automate your infrastructure, security & compliance.
Most-linked posts?
- Whitepaper – Ansible|CFEngine2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2020-09-10
What Hacker News says?
A couple of decades of experience is encoded in CFEngine: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFEngine http://cfengine.com/product/community/
Comment linking /product/community/
on “It's the Future”Submitted How CFEngine stays ahead of the pack as a story · 22 points
HN discussionYour admin uses cfengine for example https://cfengine.com/
Comment linking /
on “German state ditches Microsoft for Linux and LibreOffice”Submitted Whitepaper – Ansible|CFEngine as a story · 10 points
HN discussionComputer systems in the wild are stochastic - that's the fundamental assumption that leads to the design of tools that you call "PFCTs" here. This type of design leads to tooling which is relatively slow and often obtuse, but there are well-reasoned (and researched, start maybe with [1]) assumptions behind those tools. In particular: systems modeled by these tools are designed to run for years, include a large varie…
Comment linking /markburgess/papers/sysadmtheory3.pdf
on “Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck”Submitted Personal Policy with CFEngine as a story · 4 points
HN discussionIf bcfg2 was a complete system, it never caught on because the documentation was entirely missing. Every time I looked at it, I blocked on actually getting anything done because I couldn't find an equivalent to these reference manuals: http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/latest/type.html http://docs.opscode.com/resource.html https://cfengine.com/archive/manuals/cf-manuals/cf2-Referenc...
Comment linking /archive/manuals/cf-manuals/cf2-Reference
on “Salt: Like Puppet, Except It Doesn’t Suck”Submitted "We need to trust trust" as a story · 3 points
HN discussionHow does the free version of CFEngine http://cfengine.com/ compare to these two?
Comment linking /
on “Puppet vs Chef, Fight”Submitted Deconstructing the `CAP theorem' for CM and DevOps as a story · 3 points
HN discussionSo this is like CFEngine, a open source configuration management system?: http://cfengine.com/cfengine-code-editors
Comment linking /cfengine-code-editors
on “Apiary.io – REST tools for API documentation and testing”Submitted Friend or foe? Who cares if you got to manage 'em all as a story · 2 points
HN discussionYou really should check out CFEngine 3. Very few dependencies (pcre,berkeleydb,openssl), and they also provide free packages with all the dependencies included: http://cfengine.com/download The memory footprint is about 10 MB, install size maybe 30 MB.
Comment linking /download
on “Why Chef?”Submitted CFEngine and Docker - Ensure application availability and container integrity as a story · 2 points
HN discussionWell, someone still have to manage hardware nodes! So I use cf-engine to install smatrd, manage ssh keys, to install packages an so on. Also configuration management for the servers where state lives, like your git repos, db, documentation, internal knowledge systems. To ensure backup software is installed and running. I prefer cf-engine due to the fact it's compiled package, not dependent on any scripting language.…
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: Chef, Ansible, Puppet- When to Use Configuration Management?”Submitted Ansible and CFEngine Scalability White Paper as a story · 1 points
HN discussionTo help you make an informed choice, this summary of the Configuration Management Summit may be useful: http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2010-10/openpdfs/Co... To help you get started with Cfengine (my specialty): http://www.cfengine.com/pages/tech http://www.verticalsysadmin.com/cfengine/cfengine_examples.t...
Comment linking /pages/tech
on “Puppet 2.7 Released”Submitted How to aggregate multiple data with the help of GODS? as a story · 1 points
HN discussionKevin, thanks for pointing out many truths about the current state of configuration management. It is indeed a very important topic. (disclaimer: I work at CFEngine AS) I agree that there is definitely room for improvement in all the configuration management solutions, although all three major players (CFEngine, Chef and Puppet) have made great progress. For a good overview, I recommend reading the excellent series…
Comment linking /forum/
on “Configuration Management Software Sucks”