Everyone knows that automation is set to have a profound impact on the world of work in the coming years. Often called the ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ the impact is widely expected to be as profound as the industrial revolution itself. Just as mechanical systems replaced the works of human hands in the 19th century, artificial intelligence is expected to significantly supplant human brainpower in the 21st century, with equally profound impact on our personal and professional lives.

We are excited to announce that CFEngine is now using GitHub Discussions. GitHub Discussions is a feature of GitHub repos, and similar to Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, and other online forums. After testing it out for a few weeks we are pleased with how it works and want to encourage all our users to try it.

This blog post will focus on the bash programming part of implementing a promise type. To understand what custom promise types are, and how to use them, you should read the introduction first.

In the first post of this series, we provided guidance for managing the many facets of a compliance program — taming the “compliance beast.” While there are many factors to consider, I’d argue that none is more essential than a reliable means of enforcement.

Cloud environments are susceptible to security issues. A big contributor is misconfigured resources. Misconfigured S3 buckets are one example of a security risk that could expose your organization’s sensitive data to bad actors. Policies and regular enforcement of best practices are key to reducing this security risk. However, manually checking and enforcing security is time-consuming and can fall behind with all the demands a busy DevOps team faces every day.

Are you struggling to keep up with manual compliance across your infrastructure? In this 25-minute episode of the Pulling the Strings podcast, powered by Puppet, learn how Puppet Comply makes automating your configuration compliance easy -- with full view dashboards and the ability to assess, remediate and enforce all through the Puppet Enterprise solution. Listen in and discover:

Regulatory compliance is time-consuming and expensive. A recent survey of IT security professionals found that, on average, organizations must comply with 13 different regulations and spend an average of $3.5M annually on compliance activities, with audit-related activities consuming 232 person hours per year. With a team of five people, that adds up to 1.5 months a year devoted to audit-related activity. That’s a lot of hours that could have been spent on initiatives driving customer value.

CFEngine 3.17.0 introduced custom promise types, which enable CFEngine users to extend core functionality and policy language in a simple way. As an example of the power and simplicity of this new feature, I will show a promise type that helps to observe a website’s status. The module which implements this promise type was written in a couple of hours.

Several months ago I started the practice of using CFEngine Enterprise and its Mission Portal UI on a daily basis to manage the connected devices in my home. To start, I brought up an old desktop machine, cfengine-hub, to use as my hub and downloaded Enterprise, which is free for use up to 25 hosts. The next step in using best practices is to deploy policy from a version control repository.