Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Hello, Puppet friends! It’s been a few months since we rolled out the latest major version of the Puppet platform, bumping PuppetDB, Puppet Server and Puppet Agent to “7.0.0.” First, we’d like to extend our gratitude to our vibrant Puppet community, who helped us immensely in locating and fixing some annoying bugs that managed to sneak through the release. We promptly provided follow-up releases, so be sure to check out the latest available versions for your operating system.

Facter is a cross platform system profiling tool. It gathers nuggets of information about a system such as its hostname, IP address and operating system. We call these nuggets of information facts and they are used by other Puppet products like Puppet, Puppet Server and Bolt to make decisions in their automation process. You can extend Facter by writing custom facts or external facts and use them in Puppet manifests.

Misconfigured resources are a big contributor to compromised cloud security. If you have misconfigured Amazon S3 buckets, for example, malicious actors could access your data, then inappropriately or illegally distribute this private information, putting your company’s security at risk. Policies and regular best practices enforcement are key to reducing this security risk.

Splunk Phantom 4.10 introduced many new enhancements, including the ability to develop playbooks in Python 3. In fact, Python 3 is now the default for Splunk Phantom playbooks. In doing so, we needed to create two different “playbook runners” to ensure we could continue to support playbooks written in Python 2.7 while also supporting Python 3.

Everyone knows that automation is set to have a profound impact on the world of work in the coming years. Often called the ‘fourth industrial revolution,’ the impact is widely expected to be as profound as the industrial revolution itself. Just as mechanical systems replaced the works of human hands in the 19th century, artificial intelligence is expected to significantly supplant human brainpower in the 21st century, with equally profound impact on our personal and professional lives.

We are excited to announce that CFEngine is now using GitHub Discussions. GitHub Discussions is a feature of GitHub repos, and similar to Q&A platforms like Stack Overflow, and other online forums. After testing it out for a few weeks we are pleased with how it works and want to encourage all our users to try it.

This blog post will focus on the bash programming part of implementing a promise type. To understand what custom promise types are, and how to use them, you should read the introduction first.

In the first post of this series, we provided guidance for managing the many facets of a compliance program — taming the “compliance beast.” While there are many factors to consider, I’d argue that none is more essential than a reliable means of enforcement.