Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Latest Posts

Why "No-Code" Tools are a Non-Starter for Developers

Many attempts to simplify programming lead to visual interfaces that provide approachable settings for common tasks. These simplifications may appeal to non-developers, but they send experienced coders running for the command line. Yet, no code tools are rapidly expanding. Zapier, Integromat, and Workato are becoming more popular options and some believe developers won’t be needed for most integrations in the future.

How to Secure your WFH Environment

I am making a digital transformation during this novel work-from-home (WFH) era due to a COVID-19 quarantine. Many of you are going through the same and distractions abound while sharing a workspace with housemates, children, and pets. Moreover, we have to contend with an increased risk to cybersecurity, given recent attacks on work-related software such as Slack and Zoom.

The 2020 State of DevOps survey: quarantine edition

Normally we would have launched our 2020 State of DevOps survey a couple of months ago instead of today. But with all of us adjusting to working from home, often with kids also at home or other loved ones to care for, we recognized that the last thing anyone should focus on was taking a survey. So we’re late. The additional time to plan, however, gave us the chance to consider some new and interesting pathways to explore.

The State of Event-Driven Automation

Talking about competition can be hard. It’s understandable. Product positioning can be touchy subjects especially when those use cases overlap. In the DevOps space, event-driven architectures are certainly not a new concept. Companies like Netflix, LinkedIn, and Facebook have in-house tools built specifically for this type of automation. However, Relay’s mission is make it easy for everyone to build event-driven workflows – not the Netflix-es of the world.

User interface design and its importance in the user experience

A product’s user experience consists of the before, during, and after of a user’s interactions with it, or more precisely, their expectation, satisfaction, and fulfilment. Experience can be influenced by anything from marketing materials, product reviews, interaction with sales, through to cost, installation and onboarding process, product stability, post-sales support, and numerous other factors. So it’s clear that creating a positive experience is a collective responsibility.

Power your Puppet reports with PowerBI in 10 minutes

Every Puppet practitioner can appreciate the wealth of information stored inside PuppetDB. Although Puppet Enterprise console offers some insights into the data, we sometimes need rich dashboards, possibilities to correlate data about facts, nodes and reports and drill-down features. In short, we wish there were a way to unleash the full power of PuppetDB data to create situational awareness about our estate. This article will show that PowerBI is a very powerful companion to PuppetDB.

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.