Ah, another blog about the “evolving” role of the CIO. Buckle up, because we’re about to dive into the world of “transformation,” “digital” this and “innovation” that. But instead of fluffing up the usual jargon, let’s get real about what it takes for a CIO not just to survive but to excel as costs tighten and automation takes over.

Did you know you can find classes by name and tag? classesmatching() dynamically sources information from the current state. For example, let’s say you have classes representing a system’s role. Furthermore, let’s say that we want a host to only have a single role class defined. Finally, if we have more than one role class defined, then we don’t want to proceed.

When’s the last time you did something without knowing how it could turn out? Surprises can add a little excitement to your day-to-day, but one place they’re not really welcome is in infrastructure code. That’s why we have change impact analysis, a method of predicting the effect one change can have on other parts of a system before you make it. Software change impact analysis, as you might imagine, assesses how changes to a piece of software can affect other parts of the same system.

CIS Benchmarks are important for security and compliance. In this blog, you'll get an overview, plus learn how to enforce CIS Benchmarks with Puppet.

Workflow management lets IT departments streamline processes, enhance efficiency, and reduce errors. By automating repetitive IT tasks, your IT team can focus on more strategic activities, ultimately driving innovation and improving service delivery. Here’s how to get started.

Service Orchestration and Automation Platforms (SOAPs) represent a significant advancement in enterprise orchestration, integrating various applications and infrastructures. SOAPs enable Infrastructure and Operations (I&O) leaders to design and implement business services by combining workflow orchestration, workload automation, and resource provisioning across an organization’s hybrid digital infrastructure.

Whether you are migrating from Ansible to CFEngine to gain some of the benefits of scale or autonomy or just need some functionality in an Ansible module, the ansible promise type can be a great tool to utilize. It also provides a compelling alternative to ansible-pull and works around some of the caveats included with that strategy. CFEngine has battle-tested features needed for the pull architecture.

Are you familiar with CFEngines special variables? Probably you are familiar with sys variables like sys.fqhost (the fully qualified host name) and sys.policy_hub (the IP address of the machine the host is bootstrapped to) but I want to highlight a few other special variables you may not be so familiar with.

The drive to improve productivity and remove manual tasks from your team has resulted in a new automation project. The business benefits are clear and you now have a target to automate 10%, 20% or even 35% of manual IT processes, but strategically, how are you going to deploy or choose an automation platform?