CFengine 3.12 new features 'missing_ok' and multiple 'augments'
At SURFsara we use CFEngine on our National Compute Cluster ( LISA ) and other systems as our configuration management tool. With the release of CFEngine 3.12 I want to highlight 2 new features, namely: missing_ok multiple augments We use these 2 new features heavily in our framework in combination with my open source library cf_surfsara_lib . This library aims to be a central repository for configuring services, eg: ssh . For configuring the services we use JSON as data format and it is easily to override the default values via JSON. Pre CFEngine 3.12 there is only one strategy possible: def.json : Setting the initial value def.cf : Override the initial value Due to this restriction we have a def.json for all hosts even when the difference between them are small. For minor tweaks we use def.cf with the aid of classes. As with CFEngine version 3.12 you can define multiple JSON files with the aid of the multiple augments feature. In our environment we have i