I. Overview
cfengine is an automated and centralized management system tool, which aims to achieve "allow the user's system to always run in the desired mode." The idea of its realization is to formulate some strategies to let the system run a process regularly to check whether the current state of the system is consistent with the requirements of the strategy. If it is inconsistent, execute it again according to the requirements of the strategy. And this kind of strategy can be customized locally or configured in the central strategy server , and then notify the client to update the strategy and execute the strategy. When the server you manage becomes a certain scale, using this tool will greatly improve work efficiency.
Cfengine is suitable for managing various environments, from one host to a cluster of tens of thousands of hosts. It itself is based on policy configuration management, which can simplify system configuration and maintenance tasks to the greatest extent.
cfengine can be deployed on a stand-alone machine or as a central policy server. It can be used to distribute or let the managed server update its local commitments (policies ) regularly to achieve centralized management.
Official website: https://cfengine.com/
CFEngine software is divided into: Community Office and Enterprise Edition. Among them, the Community Office follows the GPL, and the enterprise version is free to use. After registering CFEngine Enterprise, you can connect up to 25 hosts for free, which is usually enough for small business deployment. A comprehensive set of features and SLA support have been added under the commercial license.
The latest version is: 3.15.3 LTS (supported until December 2022)
The official installation file also provides a binary tar installation package. The installation package contains the compiled CFEngine host (client) binary file that is adapted to run on most Linux systems. However, the official statement does not provide support, and it is recommended only for testing. , Because the official has not optimized specific libraries and platforms;
2. Working principle
In the picture above:
1) Mission Portal: Mission Portal provides an overall visual preview and observation of potential configuration issues , compliance information, and infrastructure inventory data in the environment through an easy-to-use dashboard and reporting system .
2) CFEngine Hub: CFEngine Strategy Center, which can be used as a repository for storing configurations and as an access point for Mission Portal.
3) CFEngine Agent: CFEngine Agent runs on each managed device, and automatically connects to the CFEngine Policy Center every 5 minutes by default to ensure compliance with the configuration on the managed object.