One of the things we at IT Glue wanted to accomplish with the production of our inaugural Global MSP Benchmark Report was to identify what a top-performing MSP looks like. There were certainly some surprises—such as the reality that size doesn’t matter—but a lot of what we found was fairly intuitive. In this rapidly growing industry, there are around 20% of MSPs that are seeing both high growth (10%+ per annum) and high margins (20%+ net margin).

At SURFsara we use CFEngine on our National Compute Cluster (LISA) and other systems as our configuration management tool. With the release of CFEngine 3.12 I want to highlight 2 new features, namely: missing_ok, multiple augments.

In some performance critical situations, it makes sense to limit management software to a single CPU (core). We can do this using systemd and cgroups. CFEngine already provides systemd units on relevant platforms, we just need to tweak them. I’m using CFEngine Enterprise 3.12 on CentOS 7, but the steps should be very similar on other platforms/versions.

Today we are happy to announce the general availability of CFEngine 3.12.0 LTS! This release has a lot of new features, and we are very excited about all the new possibilities you get with CFEngine 3.12.0 LTS. If you are using the previous LTS, 3.10 you will also benefit from all the new features, improvements and testing of the 3.11 release, which you can read more about in the CFEngine 3.11 release post.

Today we are happy to announce the general availability of CFEngine 3.12.0 LTS beta. The release of 3.12.0 beta took longer than expected. As a result we have decided to adjust our release schedule, and we releasing 3.12.0 beta now and later this year 3.12.0 will be the next official LTS release.

We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.7.6 is released! With 3.7 being a stable LTS branch, 3.7.6 brings bug fixes and stability enhancements to the CFEngine customers and community.

Today’s approach to securing IT infrastructure is passé. In a dynamic world of unpredictable and often frequent infrastructure changes, the traditional approach to security falls short. It is no longer sufficient to just scan frequently for vulnerabilities and then try to interpret this data in real time without (human) error. Additionally, despite smart analytics, this approach to illuminating security issues and remediating them is extremely time consuming.