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Automation

How certificates work in Puppet

This video gives you a basic introduction to certificates and explains how they’re used to secure Puppet communications. Certificates help to provide secure connections between different parts of your infrastructure as those parts communicate with each other. When you run the agent for the first time, it submits a CSR (Certificate Signing Request) to the primary server. Then the CSR is reviewed by the Puppet administrator and either accepted or denied.

How to Encrypt S3 Buckets Automatically with Torq

S3 buckets without encryption can leave sensitive data exposed and at risk. As a best practice and to meet a number of industry and governmental regulations, it’s important to ensure that S3 server side bucket encryption has been properly applied at all times. To do this, many security teams rely on their Cloud Posture Security Management (CSPM) platform and/or AWS GuardDuty to monitor their AWS resources and provide alerts when an S3 bucket is found unencrypted.

Code Manager improvements reduce deployment time and effort

Over the past few months, we set out to drastically reduce the amount of time Code Manager takes to deploy code and sand down some rough edges to make it more stable and robust. In order to understand what we were able to achieve, we need a quick primer on how code is deployed to a Puppet Server in the first place. There are three parts to a Code Manager code deployment: We’ve improved each of these three parts of the Code Manager code deployment.

Get powerful insights across your infrastructure with new data filters

Would your organization benefit from having powerful, yet easy-to-use filters to inspect your nodes? With our latest Continuous Delivery for Puppet Enterprise release, we’ve updated the filters in the user interface to support more advanced queries. SysAdmins, developers, DataOps, and IT managers will all benefit from having access to these powerful filters.

5 automation tools you should use or look into

One of the questions I regularly get asked is what common automation tools do I use or what do I advise people to use for various use cases? I thought I’d put this information into a blog for easy reference for our partners and others. Note: None of the recommendations below are commercial endorsements, but they are suggestions based on what I’ve used personally in the past. You are welcome to use whatever you want since most of the things below have other options, free or paid.

Puppet Enterprise installation and self-signed Intermediate CA

This article is about how to install Puppet Enterprise using your own self-signed Intermediate CA (Certificate Authority). In some environments, regulations require you to intercept and inspect all SSL traffic to detect malicious activities that could otherwise masquerade as legitimate encrypted traffic. This requires the ability to decrypt and re-encrypt the stream in real time, which can only be done with the proper certificates installed.