Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

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.

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.

DISA STIGs are an important compliance standard. There’s a security technical implementation guide (STIG) for almost every kind of technology in an IT environment, and each STIG can include hundreds of individual settings, configurations, and recommendations for ensuring compliance and security.

Found a bug, asking for help? Use cf-support to collect info quickly. cf-support was born from interactions supporting Enterprise customers to streamline data collection and was introduced in late 2022 with the release of 3.18.31 and 3.21.02. Furthermore, it was featured on The Agent is In3 episode 21 Troubleshooting with cf-support. It gathers various details about the system and creates an archive that you can attach to your ticket.

Editing and copying large files or large numbers of files is slow. For a configuration management tool, it is probably one of the slowest things we do, apart from waiting for other programs to finish or waiting for network communication. In this blog post, we look at how to copy files. More specifically, the most performant approaches available on modern Linux systems. We are working on implementing these techniques so CFEngine and all your policy will copy files more efficiently.