Computing infrastructures are growing rapidly. Hardware has become less expensive and their form factors smaller and smaller. With the advent of grid technologies, virtualization,and other distributed computing methods we need to find better ways to manage the the sheer number of resources being created.

Cfengine is an open source tool that allows system administrators to maintain 1 to thousands of unix based systems. It automates almost every aspect of system administration. Cfengine is a direct competitor to commercial software from Blade Logic and OPsware. Both of these commercial packages come with fancy GUIs and nice features, but they also come with hefty licensing fees (can get close to $1K per server managed + maintenance fees).