Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

June 2020

Announcing the Relay public beta

Editor's note: This blog post was originally published on relay.sh. Today we announce Relay, an event-driven automation platform. Sign up now and try it out! Relay connects infrastructure and operations platforms, APIs, and tools together into a cohesive, easy-to-automate whole. Relay is simple enough for you to start automating common, if-this-then-that (IFTTT) style DevOps tasks in minutes and powerful enough to model multi-step, branching, parallelized DevOps processes when the need arises.

Bridge the gap between the past, present, and future with Puppet

It’s the end of a long week filled with countless taxing IT change requests. You put your mobile phone on vibrate, still apprehensive from the ALL CAPS text message abruptly received from the IT director last week. Your eyes are burning from the blue hue of your laptop. You begin to shut it down for the evening, lower the TV volume, and sluggishly doze into a deep sleep.

How one bank modernized their infrastructure and optimized costs

Back in 2005, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) Group was running about 600 Unix servers and they had a bunch of manual processes that slowed down their software delivery cycles and could cause huge delays. As David Sandilands, an infrastructure engineer at RBS, put it in a webinar he did with us, their releases weren’t quick enough.

Updated Puppet GPG signing key, 2020 edition

Editor's note: This change to the GPG signing key affects both Puppet Enterprise users and open source Puppet users. If you're using Puppet Enterprise, you'll be getting the new key in an upcoming release, or if you manually update your version of puppet-agent, you'll get it then. Thanks to Morgan Rhodes (@KnittyNerd) for all the technical details for this blog post.

Announcing record of remediation & audit logs in Puppet Remediate 1.3

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Puppet Remediate 1.3.0. This release includes new features requested by our customers, including even more capabilities to help you track and trace network activity, and give you more control of the data in your dashboard. Read on for background and a look at the new capabilities.

New Puppet facts for Windows

To manage your Windows desktops and servers based on the version / edition of Windows installed across your organisation, we’ve introduced Windows build-specific facts to Puppet. If you have a mix of Windows servers (Core and ServerStandard) and Windows desktops with varying versions and editions Windows, using Windows build-specific facts allows you to: Let’s see what all this looks like in some Puppet code.

Scaling open source Puppet

In my Puppet travels over the last 10 or so years, one topic has continued to arise time and again, and that has been the ability to scale open source Puppet to thousands of nodes. While the best route is to use Puppet Enterprise for solid support and a team of talented engineers to help you in your configuration management journey, sometimes the right solution for your needs is open source Puppet.

DevOps - The Path to Continuous Compliance and Better Security

With the proliferation of high-profile hacks, data breaches and ransomware, it's easy to feel insecure about your organization's security these days. But not all security issues have to do with purposeful hacks and attacks. For many IT teams, the challenge is maintaining strict rules and regulatory requirements for everything from credit card data to health information privacy. Failing to maintain compliance can put your organization at risk of everything from lost business to substantial fines - or worse.

Critical Considerations for Continuous Delivery

With the right foundation and optimizations, your teams can successfully adopt continuous delivery practices - and deliver software faster, with fewer bugs and lower risk. If you're getting started with continuous delivery or evolving your approach, there are a few strategic considerations that can keep you on the right path.