History: CFEngine 1 & CFEngine 2
The CFEngine project began in 1993 as a way for author Mark Burgess (then a post-doctoral fellow of the Royal Society at Oslo University, Norway) to get his work done by automating the management of a small group of workstations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Like many post-docs and PhD students, Burgess ended up with the task of managing Unix workstations, scripting and fixing problems for users manually. Scripting took too much time, the flavours of Unix were significantly different, and scripts had to be maintained for multiple platforms, drowning in exception logic.
After discussing the problems with a colleague, Burgess wrote the first version of CFEngine (the configuration engine) which was published as an internal report and presented at the CERN computing conference. It gained significant attention from a wider community because it was able to hide platform differences using a domain-specific language.
A year later, Burgess finished his post-doc but decided to stay in Oslo and took at job lecturing at Oslo University College. Here he realized that there was little or no research being done into configuration management, and he set about applying the principles of scientific modelling to understanding computer systems. In a short space of time, he developed the notion of convergent operators, which remains a core of CFEngine.
In 1998, dissatisfied with the level of understanding in the area and the ad hoc discussions of computer security at the time, Burgess wrote "Computer Immunology", a paper at the USENIX/LISA98 conference. It laid out a manifesto for creating self-healing systems, reiterated a few years later by at IBM in their form of Autonomic Computing. This started a research effort which led to a major re-write, CFEngine 2, which added features for machine learning, anomaly detection and secure communications.
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