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Automation

Three high level patterns in CFEngine

How do you deal with config files that need different settings based on various services that are running on a host and cooperate with other teams? It’s a common question, and it came up on in #cfengine on irc.freenode.net recently. The issue is that team A might be working on package A, which requires some environment variables set. But team B might be working on a totally different thing — and want to achieve the same thing.

CFEngine LTS 3.10.5 released

Today we are very happy to announce the maintenance release of CFEngine 3.10.5. This is an update to the LTS 3.10 series, adding improved stability, several bug fixes and increased performance. 3.10 LTS is the successor of 3.7 LTS that, since August 2018, is no longer supported. We recommend everyone still using CFEngine 3.7 to upgrade to either 3.10 or 3.12. We are available to support you with such an upgrade if you need it.

Using Automation to Improve Processes in Your MSP

One of the things we at IT Glue wanted to accomplish with the production of our inaugural Global MSP Benchmark Report was to identify what a top-performing MSP looks like. There were certainly some surprises—such as the reality that size doesn’t matter—but a lot of what we found was fairly intuitive. In this rapidly growing industry, there are around 20% of MSPs that are seeing both high growth (10%+ per annum) and high margins (20%+ net margin).

Restricting CFEngine to one CPU core using Systemd

In some performance critical situations, it makes sense to limit management software to a single CPU (core). We can do this using systemd and cgroups. CFEngine already provides systemd units on relevant platforms, we just need to tweak them. I’m using CFEngine Enterprise 3.12 on CentOS 7, but the steps should be very similar on other platforms/versions.

CFEngine 3.12.0 LTS Released

Today we are happy to announce the general availability of CFEngine 3.12.0 LTS! This release has a lot of new features, and we are very excited about all the new possibilities you get with CFEngine 3.12.0 LTS. If you are using the previous LTS, 3.10 you will also benefit from all the new features, improvements and testing of the 3.11 release, which you can read more about in the CFEngine 3.11 release post.