Editing CFEngine (section)

== History ==

The CFEngine project began in 1993 as a way for author Mark Burgess (then a post-doctoral fellow of the Royal Society at [[University of Oslo|Oslo University]], [[Norway]]) to get his work done by automating the management of a small group of workstations in the Department of Theoretical Physics. Burgess managed 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<ref name="CFEngine History">{{cite web |url=http://www.iu.hio.no/~mark/papers/cfengine_history.pdf |title=University of Oslo : Cfengine V2.0 : A network configuration tool |first=Mark |last=Burgess |authorlink=Mark Burgess (computer scientist) |publisher=Iu.hio.no |accessdate=2013-09-08 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130723160143/http://www.iu.hio.no/~mark/papers/cfengine_history.pdf |archive-date=2013-07-23 |url-status=dead }}</ref> and presented at the CERN computing conference. It gained significant attention from a wider community because it hid platform differences using a domain-specific language. 

A year later, Burgess finished his post-doc but decided to stay in Oslo and took a 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. He developed the notion of [[#Convergence|convergent operators]], which remains a core of CFEngine.

In 1998 Burgess wrote "Computer Immunology", a paper at the USENIX/LISA98 conference.<ref name="LISA98">{{cite web|url=http://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedings/lisa98/full_papers/burgess/burgess.pdf |title=Computer Immunology|publisher=Usenix.org|accessdate=2013-09-08|date=December 1998|first=Mark |last=Burgess |authorlink=Mark Burgess (computer scientist) }}</ref> It laid out a manifesto for creating self-healing systems, reiterated a few years later by 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.

Between 1998 and 2004, CFEngine grew in adoption along with the popularity of [[Linux]] as a computing platform. During this time, Mark Burgess developed [[promise theory]], a model of distributed cooperation for self-healing automation.<ref name="MACE2006">{{cite web|first1=Mark |last1=Burgess |authorlink=Mark Burgess (computer scientist) |first2=Alva |last2=Couch |title=Autonomic Computing Approximated by Fixed-Point Promises, Proceedings of First IEEE International Workshop on Modelling Autonomic Communication Environments (MACE2006) |date=2006-11-28 |pages=197–222 |url=http://research.iu.hio.no/papers/MACE-v2.pdf |url-status= |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120425125919/http://research.iu.hio.no/papers/MACE-v2.pdf |archivedate=2012-04-25}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web |last=Hogg |first=Scott |date=July 1, 2014 |title=Promise Theory |url=https://www.networkworld.com/article/2449562/promise-theory-mark-burgess-cfengine-sdn-cisco-aci-apic-opflex.html |access-date=September 1, 2023 |website=Network World}}</ref> In 2008, after more than five years of research, ''CFEngine 3'' was introduced, which incorporated promise theory as "a way to make CFEngine both simpler and more powerful at the same time", according to Burgess. The most significant re-write of the project to date, CFEngine 3 also integrated knowledge management and discovery mechanisms—allowing configuration management to scale to automate enterprise-class infrastructure.

In June 2008 the company CFEngine AS was formed as a collaboration between author Mark Burgess, Oslo University College and the Oslo Innovation Centre in order to support users of CFEngine. In April 2009, the company launched the first commercial version of CFEngine - CFEngine Enterprise. The Enterprise version can be downloaded for free for up to 25 agents (clients). February 2011, the company received its first round of funding, from FERD Capital.<ref name="PRNewsire">{{cite press release |date=2011-04-04 |title=Cfengine Completes Series A Investment |url=http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/cfengine-completes-series-a-investment-119167974.html |type=Press release |location=Oslo, Norway |publisher=[[PRNewswire]] |accessdate=2014-08-22}}</ref> The company has offices in Oslo, Norway and Mountain View, California, USA.

In 2017, the company changed its name to [https://www.northern.tech/ Northern.tech], to reflect that it is working on multiple software products, not only CFEngine.<ref>{{cite web |last=Ryd |first=Thomas |date=2017-07-01 |df=mdy |url=https://northern.tech/careers/blog/welcome-to-northern-tech |title=Welcome to Northern.tech |department=Blog |website=Northern.tech |language=en |access-date=2024-07-28}}</ref>