I re-stumbled across this mailing list post from Bryan Burke about some policy framework upgrade issues where he also asked about hooking in and customizing the update policy. I thought this sounded like a good opportunity for an example using a cfbs module. So, let’s take a look at making a cfbs module for a custom update policy. As mentioned in the thread there are just a couple of things you need to do in order to hook in and customize the behavior of the update policy.

IT service management (ITSM)—the management and support of IT services—is vital for good customer service. It encompasses problem management, incident management, change and release management, and service-level management. Because it’s an integral part of customer service, it’s important to keep it optimized and streamlined. Here are three ways automation can help with those efforts.

The state of cybersecurity today is, in a word, catastrophic. Breaches have become endemic. Not only do they continue at dizzying rates, but they are actually increasing in frequency by the month. Why are things so bad? And why do businesses seem so helpless to make them better? Those are complicated questions without simple answers, of course – but I believe that a major part of the answer has to do with the fact that, at most organizations, security remains the domain of elite security teams.

“Automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.” – Bill Gates A network, as we all know, is the connection of multiple devices to share information between them. While it’s a major task to manually manage every device connected to a network, a software-based feature called network automation can be utilized to help overcome this challenge.

Today, anyone can contribute to some of the world’s most important software platforms and frameworks, such as Kubernetes, the Linux kernel or Python. They can do this because these platforms are open source, meaning they are collaboratively developed by global communities. What if we applied the same principles of democratization and free access to cybersecurity?

Last year we had a look at managing local groups with the custom groups promise type. As you may or may not recall, we used JSON-strings to imitate CFEngine bodies. This was due to the fact that the promise module protocol did not support bodies at that time. Today, on the other hand, we’re happy to announce that as of CFEngine 3.20, this will no longer be the case. In this blog post we’ll introduce the long awaited feature; custom bodies.

CFEngine and Ansible are two complementary infrastructure management tools. Findings from our analysis show that they can be combined and used side by side with joint forces to handle all areas in the best possible way. Part of infrastructure management is hosts deployment, either when building a brand new infrastructure or when growing one by adding new hosts.

Last year, we released PagerDuty Rundeck Actions, a PagerDuty add-on product that connects responders to automated diagnostics and remediation for common problems directly in the PagerDuty incident response workflow. After working with our customers and listening to the community, we are excited to announce that PagerDuty Rundeck Actions now integrates with PagerDuty’s Slack integration.