Windows has been a huge focus for Puppet since the beginning, and never more so than with our recent news that the whole suite of DSC Resources are now accessible through the Forge, all fully supported by Puppet. Puppet and Windows have always gone hand in hand, but it hasn’t always been plain sailing.

This blog is the second in a four-part series on infrastructure automation for government agencies that are modernizing digital systems while grappling with budget and staffing constraints and the challenges of COVID-19.

Beaker is a Puppet testing harness focused on acceptance testing via interactions between multiple (virtual) machines. It provides platform abstraction between different Systems Under Test (SUTs), and it can also be used as a virtual machine provisioner setting up machines, running any commands on those machines, and then exiting. Recently, Vox Pupuli, a collective of Puppet community authors, has taken over responsibility to care and feed Beaker for its continued widespread community use.

Kubernetes — a popular open source container orchestration system — enables you to easily deploy, monitor, and scale cloud-native application workloads in both private and public cloud environments. In other words, Kubernetes does the hard work of managing containerized applications, giving you more time to spend building it.