CFEngine 3.7.1 released: stability enhancements

Posted by: Eystein Maloy Stenberg

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We’re happy to announce that CFEngine 3.7.1 is now ready!

Given that this is the first maintenance release in the 3.7 branch, the focus is primarily on stability and reliability of new features added in 3.7.0. For improved resiliency of Enterprise High Availability in environments that need it, we also added support for an offsite replication node.

Offsite replication support for Enterprise High Availability

The High Availability cluster has until now consisted of 2 nodes; an active and passive. If the active goes down, the clients would fail over to the passive.

However, some environments require the CFEngine Server to continue to operate even during a complete datacenter failure. In 3.7.1, support for a third HA node has been added: an offisite replication node. This node will replicate data from the active node, and can be manually promoted to an active node in case both the two other nodes goes down.

You can read more in the new section of the High Availability installation documentation.

Stability enhancements

The new 3.7 packages promise has gotten a few minor behavioural changes, based on user feedback. Most notably, if you use policy => “absent”, it will in 3.7.1 remove dependencies required to complete a removal as well. In 3.7.0, it would stop if there were any dependencies that needed to be removed.

The init scripts have gotten extra checks to ensure all CFEngine processes are stopped if the “stop” state is issued. This will alleviate certain situations when upgrading from 3.7.1 to future versions, which could leave several CFEngine processes of the same type running.

Dependencies have been upgraded in the pre-compiled agent and hub packages in order to improve security and reliability.

As usual, you can find a more detailed list of changes in the Community Change Log and Enterprise Change Log.

Upgrading?

If you’re upgrading from a previous release, check out the upgrade documentation for guidelines to make the process as smooth as possible.

Get it!

As always, you can download CFEngine Enterprise 3.7.1 packages for the supported platforms, or give it a quick spin with the CFEngine 3.7.1 vagrant environment.

If you are using the Community Edition, we provide you with source code, packages, and package repositories – to make sure we cover the distribution channel of your choice!

We hope you enjoy 3.7.1, and we look forward to hearing about your experience in the CFEngine Google Group!