CFEngine

CFEngine is an open source configuration management system, written by Mark Burgess. Its primary function is to provide automated configuration and maintenance of large-scale computer systems, including the unified management of servers, desktops, consumer and industrial devices, embedded networked devices, mobile smartphones, and tablet computers.

History

CFEngine 1

The CFEngine project began in 1993 as a way for author Mark Burgess (then a post-doctoral fellow of the Royal Society at Oslo University, Norway) to get his work done by automating the management of a small group of workstations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Like many post-docs and PhD students, Burgess ended up with the task of managing Unix workstations, scripting and fixing problems for users manually. Scripting took too much time, the flavours of Unix were significantly different, and scripts had to be maintained for multiple platforms, drowning in exception logic.

After discussing the problems with a colleague, Burgess wrote the first version of CFEngine (the configuration engine) which was published as an internal report and presented at the CERN computing conference. It gained significant attention from a wider community because it was able to hide platform differences using a domain-specific language.