CFEngine Glossary
CFEngine-Best-Practices
- Cfengine
- The name of the CFEngine Company, as well as the name of the Software. CFEngine comes from
a contraction of `ConFiguration engine'.
- CFEngine 3.x
- Major version 3 of the CFEngine software. This comes in several editions.
- CFEngine Community Edition
- Free and Open Source edition of the CFEngine software, published under the GPL3 license,
and optionally under the COSL license.
- CFEngine Community Open Promise-Body Library
- A collection of standard definitions that is open to the user community for comment and standardization.
- CFEngine Constellation
- The mid-level planned enterprise edition of CFEngine, that is designed to scale to huge
systems with a queryable integrated knowledge and inventory, replacing a traditional CMDB,
and binding large systems together.
- CFEngine Enterprise Editions
- Refers to commercial (paid) editions of the CFEngine software, published under the COSL license.
- CFEngine Galaxy
- The top of the range enterprise edition of CFEngine, planned for the future.
- CFEngine Nova
- The lowest level enterprise edition of cfengine.
- CMDB
- A Configuration Management Database. A term coined as part of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL)
as an outgrowth of an inventory database.
- COPBL
- CFEngine Community Open Promise-Body Library (abbrev: cfengine standard library).
A collection of standard definitions.
- COSL license
- The Commercial Open Source License used for the CFEngine
- GPL3
- The GNU Public License, version 3.
- Modular license
- A license granting partial functionality to an Enterprise Edition of CFEngine.
- Libraries
- A library generally refers to collection of standardized CFEngine code
that can be reused in different scenarios and environments. This might
be bundles of promises, or reusable body-parts.
- Packages
- Software binaries or executable files. The CFEngine company compiles and tests software
into packages suitable for different platforms.
- Knowledge Map
- Content portal containing datacentre information, privately managed
knowledge resources and CFEngine documentation.
- PCI compliance
- Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) is a set of
requirements designed to ensure that ALL companies that process, store
or transmit credit card information maintain a secure environment.
- Promise
- The CFEngine software manages every intended system outcome as `promises' to be kept.
A CFEngine Promise corresponds roughly to a rule in other software products, but importantly
promises are always things that can be kept and repaired continuously, on a real time basis,
not just once at install-time.
- Policy
- A policy is a set of intentions about the system, coded as a list of
promises. A policy is not a standard, but the result of specific
organizational management decisions.
- SOX Compliance
- Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance. An audited accolade for financial data security
required by all companies on the New York stock exchange.
- Standard library
- The CFEngine Standard library is a collection of standardized definitions (see COPBL).
- Template
- A template is an incomplete piece of CFEngine code, with blanks to fill in. It is often
a policy fragment that can be re-used in different scenarios. This is often used interchangeably
with the term `library'.