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.

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.

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.

Today we are pleased to announce the release of Puppet Remediate 1.3.0. This release includes new features requested by our customers, including even more capabilities to help you track and trace network activity, and give you more control of the data in your dashboard. Read on for background and a look at the new capabilities.

To manage your Windows desktops and servers based on the version / edition of Windows installed across your organisation, we’ve introduced Windows build-specific facts to Puppet. If you have a mix of Windows servers (Core and ServerStandard) and Windows desktops with varying versions and editions Windows, using Windows build-specific facts allows you to: Let’s see what all this looks like in some Puppet code.

In my Puppet travels over the last 10 or so years, one topic has continued to arise time and again, and that has been the ability to scale open source Puppet to thousands of nodes. While the best route is to use Puppet Enterprise for solid support and a team of talented engineers to help you in your configuration management journey, sometimes the right solution for your needs is open source Puppet.

Here’s a situation that is likely familiar to you if you work in enterprise IT. The need for strong security practices is more pressing than ever, with known vulnerabilities growing exponentially, and nearly half of companies having experienced a data breach in the last two years. At the same time, organizations face demands to deploy software faster, and more frequently. IT executives consistently identify cybersecurity and speed among their top priorities.