Agile Web Operations

As promised in my last post about configuration management, I want to introduce you to one of the key Open Source configuration management players on the scene today - Cfengine. Embarked upon in 1993 by Mark Burgess, Cfengine has helped system administrators configuring and maintaining their servers in the data center for over a decade - bringing order to chaos and discipline to exhibitionism. This C based configuration management system can be manually executed, daemon driven and run by crontab and is controlled through a series of text-file configurations. Making use of a mostly declarative language, a single Cfengine statement can potentially cause hundreds of operations to be executed on multiple hosts across the network. Installation nowadays is as painless as yum install cfengine (Fedora Core/SuSE) or apt-get install cfengine2 (Debian).