Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

November 2020

Solving financial services regulatory challenges in Australia with Puppet

The recent record-breaking fine of $1.3 billion for money-laundering breaches exposed the dangers of poor systems in the banking industry. Now is the time to get compliance right. In my role, I regularly speak with FS&I clients about their security and compliance challenges, including vulnerability remediation. It’s a complex topic with many pieces that must coalesce to create a holistic solution.

Your lookback at Puppetize Digital 2020

That’s a wrap on Puppetize Digital 2020! Our first-ever virtual conference series attracted attendees from all over the world and brought the Puppet community together despite the pandemic’s attempt to keep us apart. With three events happening across three regions — Asia Pacific, Europe, and the Americas — all on the same day, there was something for every one of our users, customers, and partners. Let’s take a spin through the event highlights.

Deployment Rollbacks via FireHydrant Runbook

FireHydrant has a sophisticated set of response actions for coordinating communications, activities, and retrospectives for incidents that affect your services. Relay helps by automating remediations that involve orchestrating actions across your infrastructure. In this example workflow, an incident that affects an application deployed on Kubernetes can trigger a rollback to a previous version automatically.

Puppet Agent 7 - Filebucket hash algorithm update

Puppet 7 upgrades the default filebucket hash digest algorithm from MD5 to SHA256, which is generally a good thing. However, this makes upgrades just a little tricky. The mitigation for this is simply to set your digest algorithm to SHA256 on server and agent both before upgrade. Gabriel shows us how to do so in this video.

Puppet Agent 7 - SMF provider consistency

Service Management Facility (SMF) is the service management framework for Solaris as of version 10. In previous versions of Puppet, starting a service was effectively the same as enabling it. This meant that the service provider only supported starting and stopping each service. As of Puppet 7, it works the same as any other service provider.

Cloud CI Project

Puppet supports a lot of platforms, including some that aren't well represented in the cloud world, like AIX or Solaris. To cover all these platforms, much of our module testing happened on an internal Jenkins server and our in-house vmpooler infrastructure. This worked pretty well, but had the unfortunate side effect that PRs from community contributors would often get rejected by an opaque process that didn't even tell them what tests failed!

Puppet and Relay: The Future of Hybrid Cloud Automation

Over the past year, we’ve talked to people building and operating the next generation of applications. Across the map, we saw cloud-native applications built upon an ever-increasing number of public cloud infrastructure APIs, tools, and managed services. Modern infrastructure lets anyone create automation, not just a few gatekeepers. This shift is powerful, but comes at the cost of complexity, which we built Relay to manage.

A Platform to Automate All The Things

In my seven months at Puppet, I continue to be amazed at the opportunity we have to drive value in some of the biggest companies and institutions in the world. Automation is no longer a nice to have -- it’s a must. As more companies further their cloud strategies to include cloud-native infrastructures, the complexity increases, making automation indispensable.

2020 State of DevOps Report is here!

With only 49 days before this very long year comes to an end, we’re thrilled to announce the 2020 State of DevOps Report is finally here. We’re in our ninth year producing the State of DevOps Report; at this point, more than 35,000 technical professionals from around the world have contributed to this body of research, the longest-running and most widely referenced DevOps research in the industry.

Scheduling Puppet Plans in Puppet Enterprise

Puppet Plans were added in the 2019.2 release of Puppet Enterprise and Puppet Enterprise 2019.8.2 extends that functionality by adding support for scheduling Puppet Plans. This enables plans to be run at some point in the future or on a recurring schedule. Plans can be scheduled using the Puppet Enterprise console, Puppet Enterprise command line, or the Puppet Enterprise REST API. In this blog post we’ll walk through how to schedule a Puppet Plan in the Puppet Enterprise console.

Puppet's path to IPO and welcome to our new board members

We’ve had an exciting year here at Puppet, and although it’s not the year we could have expected, I’m encouraged and inspired every day by the resilience of our team, our commitment to each other, and our drive to help customers navigate through so much uncertainty and change.