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Sporadically delivered thoughts on Continuous Delivery

Cfengine Alternatives

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I’ve been working up a cfengine-based setup to manage a new server infrastructure. This will be my third cfengine-based infrastructure, so I should have learned enough to make a cleaner, tighter configuration. Unfortunately I’m still finding cfengine to be too damned awkward.

So, I’d like to put together a list of alternatives to cfengine. I’ll add them to this page, and hopefully add on notes and reviews as I learn more. If you have experience with these or others, please add a comment.

  • Puppet seems to be an up and comer. It looks to be designed to be much more extensible than cfengine is. It also lets you make sure each host only sees its own configuration, which is one of my peeves about cfengine. It’s my leading candidate at the moment.
  • bcfg2 was developed at the Argonne National Lab, according to this post they’ve been using it for 18 months. My main concern, without having even looked at the documentation, is that if it’s only been used in one environment it may not have the flexibility to cope with different situations and approaches than its original infrastructure.

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