Patching systems is not a new problem; this is something that organizations are very familiar with. Organizations have tried solving this issue in various ways by cobbling together multiple tools, processes, different teams, and more. Organizations are constantly trying to stay secure and keep their systems up to date, but patch management isn’t a simple process. In fact, applying the patch itself is just one part of the overall workflow, which involves multiple teams and various steps.

In classic Puppet deployment architecture, compile masters are widely used when the number of managed nodes goes up. Multiple compile masters sit behind a load balancer to take care of the additional workloads. It is not rare to see Puppet adopters launching the compile masters in the public cloud, such as Amazon Web Service (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.