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Cfengine for Enterprise Configuration Management

Issue 168

From Issue #168
April 2008

Apr 01, 2008  By Scott Lackey
 in
Cfengine makes it easier to manage configuration files across large numbers of machines.
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If you have a lot of hardware, go for Puppet

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Fri, 02/26/2010 - 11:09.

But, if you are concerned with resource consumption, Cfengine is the right choice. A recent report shows that Cfengine is up to 40 times more effective than Puppet (http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2010-02/pdfs/bjorgeengen.pdf. - Requires login). Follow the discussion on Puppet's group here.

a (possibly better) alternative

mschenck's picture
Submitted by mschenck on Thu, 12/04/2008 - 11:44.

cfEngine is cool, and might have been the first centralized configuration system with such vast reach. However, I must suggest readers also look into Puppet by Reductive Labs. It was covered last year by Linux Journal and continues to have very rapid development and an excellent support community.

I maintain a Puppeted environment, and have had nothing but good experiences with it.

Cheers,
Michael Schenck

tek-ops.com

Scale

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous on Wed, 03/17/2010 - 03:22.

Is your environment large?
The reason Cfengine was the only viable alternative of the two for me was the Ruby overhead.
We don't have the resources to maintain a fully fledged Ruby installation (with web servers) on *every* machine just to have Puppet installed.
Remember that Ruby also requires updates and maintenance.

Regards,
Tom

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