More and more, companies from small businesses to global enterprises are migrating or deploying workloads in public cloud environments. Typically, their goal is cost optimization, as public clouds can dramatically reduce on-premises infrastructure costs and corresponding maintenance labor costs. Instead of installing more servers, storage, and networking components in your own datacenter, public cloud environments allow you to deploy dynamic cloud resources, usually with a short to medium lifespan.

With version 3.4, StackStorm code itself will only run on Python 3. For the v3.4 release, we have chosen to run on Python 3.6 across all of our supported platforms. For users still on Ubuntu 16.04, you will need to source your own Python 3.6 packages, but we have been using the Python 3.6 Ubuntu PPA without many issues. Looking forward to StackStorm 3.5, we will be removing the ability to install Python 2 packs.

The winter release of Puppet Enterprise is now available. Puppet continues to build out its flagship product to help organizations scale DevOps initiatives, meet compliance requirements, and deliver on cloud and hybrid initiatives. With this release, we’ve focused on delivering key enhancements to help boost productivity, giving organizations the ability to automate faster and more securely at scale.

Security is essential. It’s top of mind for organizations of all sizes and it’s certainly a top priority for Puppet. The latest release of Puppet Enterprise 2021.0 now offers support for SAML 2.0 providing a more secure and efficient authentication path for our customers to access their Puppet environments, applications and tooling.

Our 2020 State of DevOps Report focuses on two areas that can help organizations scale their DevOps initiative: a platform approach to software delivery and applying DevOps principles to change management. We found that internal platform usage is widespread — 63 percent of respondents report their company has at least one self-service internal platform.

Generally speaking, CFEngine and Ansible can be used to solve the same problems, but their approaches are different. In this blog post I’d like to discuss the different approaches, their consequences, some advantages of each tool, and even using them together.

Security is paramount in today's digital world. Bad actors can use sensitive data to wreak havoc across thousands of machines in minutes if organizations do not have a solid cybersecurity strategy. Compliance requirements and regulations are increasingly calling for key management and strong encryption as part of a business's cybersecurity strategy. These are no longer optional but mandatory security requirements as DevOps also gains in popularity for agile development and application deployment.

Most of you are familiar with the roles and profiles method of writing and classifying Puppet code. However, the roles and profiles method doesn’t have to exist only in your control repository. In fact, as I’ve been developing Puppet code centered around compliance, I’ve found that adapting the roles and profiles method into a design pattern to Puppet modules makes the code more auditable, reusable, and maintainable!

Moving to the cloud brings benefits such as reduced infrastructure costs, increased scalability, and added redundancy. As your company takes advantage of the cloud, you may follow the trend to automate both the creation and destruction of cloud resources.