Whether you are migrating from Ansible to CFEngine to gain some of the benefits of scale or autonomy or just need some functionality in an Ansible module, the ansible promise type can be a great tool to utilize. It also provides a compelling alternative to ansible-pull and works around some of the caveats included with that strategy. CFEngine has battle-tested features needed for the pull architecture.

Are you familiar with CFEngines special variables? Probably you are familiar with sys variables like sys.fqhost (the fully qualified host name) and sys.policy_hub (the IP address of the machine the host is bootstrapped to) but I want to highlight a few other special variables you may not be so familiar with.

The drive to improve productivity and remove manual tasks from your team has resulted in a new automation project. The business benefits are clear and you now have a target to automate 10%, 20% or even 35% of manual IT processes, but strategically, how are you going to deploy or choose an automation platform?

Security is and will always be a huge concern, and Platform Engineering is here to stay: so, what are some Platform Engineering best practices that can support your data security and privacy efforts? You’d be surprised where they overlap, and what you can learn about putting security and productivity together — we’ll explain.

A leading retailer based in the U.K., in early 2021, was in search of help to solve a few problems its business was facing, and so they decided to implement automation—starting with the resolution of service desk tickets. There were too many tasks and processes that the company’s IT team was completing manually. They needed to automate such repetitive work, with the potential to build onto other automations already in place.

Did you know that CFEngine has namespaces? Let’s see how they can facilitate policy sharing while avoiding “duplicate definitions of bundle” errors. Most of the Masterfiles Policy Framework (MPF) and policy examples for CFEngine use the default namespace. However, body file control allows you to specify a namespace that applies for the rest of the file or until it’s set again by another body file control.