Aleksey's CFEngine Resources

Starting with CFEngine 3

• Guide to CFEngine 3 Body of Knowledge - Overview of the documentation.
• Getting Started with CFEngine 3 - An introductory guide.
• CFEngine Syntax Pattern - The basic pattern of the CFEngine 3 syntax.
• Practical Examples - a collection of practical examples used in professional CFEngine 3 training.

Articles

• "Intro to Automating System Administration with CFEngine 3" in Linux-Mag.com, 8 June 2010
• "State of the Art of Automating System Administration with Open Source Configuration Management Tools", 9 July 2010
• "The State of Open Source System Automation" in Linux-Mag.com, 19 Aug 2010
• "Relative Origin of CFEngine, Puppet and Chef", Sep 2010
• "Configuration Management Summit" in USENIX ;login: magazine, Oct 2010
• "Security monitoring and enforcement with CFEngine 3" in Linux Journal, May 2011 | Source code
• "Guide to CFEngine 3 Body of Knowledge", Sep 2011
• "High-Level Configuration Management with CFEngine Sketches", 25 Dec 2012

Classes

• Introduction to Automating System Administration with CFEngine 3: 3 or 4 day class
Agenda for 3 day class | Course outline for 4 day class
• CFengine 3: Advanced Topics: 1 or 2 day class

Past Trainings

• "Automating Database System Administration with CFEngine 3" at PgDay Denver, 21 October 2011
• Presentation to Cascadia IT Conference, 12 Mar 2011 (screencast of EC2 system integration demo)
• CFEngine 3 class at LOPSA LA, 21 Oct 2010 (2:41 hour video, courtesy of Media Temple) | Source code
• CFEngine 2 presentation to UUASC LA on 1 Oct 2009

Other CFEngine Resources

• Learning CFEngine 3 - An excellent book by Diego Zamboni.
• Mark Burgess's Overview of CFEngine from Configuration Management 2010 Summit
• Ben Bomgardner's Tips for Getting Started with CFEngine 3
• Paper by Mark Burgess introducing CFEngine 1
• "Hit the ground running... with CFENGINE" by Ed Brown of Los Alamos National Laboratory, LISA 2005 presentation on CFengine 2
• CFEngine.com Demo Videos
• Neil Watson's vim syntax highlighter for cf3
• The Lifecycle of a (Physical) Machine diagram from "An Analysis of UNIX System Configuration" (LISA 1997 paper)
• Brendan Strejcek's "Managing the network with 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
• Summary of Promise Theory, and links to get more details.
• CFEngine page from "A Survey of System Configuration Tools" USENIX LISA 2010 project
• Comparison of CFEngine with other tools, from CFEngine, Inc.

Wins from Using CFEngine

Cfengine 3.3.1 now administrates the #10 website in the US by traffic and one of the largest social networks in the world. With splay_class operational, our next step is to start implementing multiple master policy servers via software load balancing. Thanks again for the work put forward on this release which allows us to continue to scale.

I have rolled out cfengine to about 50 servers across the state of New Mexico. A few minor bumps, but all in all very successful. And the peace of mind is priceless :)