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.

After discussing the problems with a colleague, Burgess wrote the first version of CFEngine (the configuration engine) which was published as an internal report[4] and presented at the CERN computing conference.

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.

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.

During this time, Mark Burgess developed promise theory, a model of distributed cooperation for self-healing automation.

CFEngine supports the item of statistical compliance with policy, meaning that a system can never guarantee to be exactly in an ideal or desired state, rather one approaches (converges) towards the desired state by best-effort, at a rate that is determined by the ratio of the frequency of environmental change to the rate of CFEngine execution.

It requires some expert knowledge to deal with peculiarities of different operating systems, but has the power to perform maintenance actions across multiple hosts.

Its author Mark Burgess has developed a range of theoretical tools and results to talk about the problem, and has written several text books and monographs explaining them.