Beaker is a Puppet testing harness focused on acceptance testing via interactions between multiple (virtual) machines. It provides platform abstraction between different Systems Under Test (SUTs), and it can also be used as a virtual machine provisioner setting up machines, running any commands on those machines, and then exiting. Recently, Vox Pupuli, a collective of Puppet community authors, has taken over responsibility to care and feed Beaker for its continued widespread community use.

Kubernetes — a popular open source container orchestration system — enables you to easily deploy, monitor, and scale cloud-native application workloads in both private and public cloud environments. In other words, Kubernetes does the hard work of managing containerized applications, giving you more time to spend building it.

We have some exciting news for you about Puppet's support for the PowerShell DSC configuration framework for Windows. In short, content from the PowerShell Gallery will simply appear on the Puppet Forge and can be added to your Puppetfile and used just like any other Puppet module. This makes it by far the most flexible and maintainable iteration of DSC integration we've ever had. Pick and choose whatever DSC Resources you want and get all the VSCode IntelliSense magic you've come to expect.

As your DevOps and IT Service Management (ITSM) teams continue to increase, so should your ability to provide self-service infrastructure capabilities. Whether you are a ServiceNow or Puppet administrator looking to expand automation to other groups such as Site Reliability Engineering or the IT Service Desk, the integration of Puppet Enterprise and ServiceNow is now at your fingertips.

The spring release of Puppet Enterprise is now available. Puppet continues to build out its flagship product to help organizations scale DevOps initiatives, meet compliance requirements, and deliver on cloud and hybrid initiatives. With this release, we’ve focused on delivering key enhancements to help boost productivity, giving organizations the ability to automate faster and more securely at scale.

Security is essential. It’s top of mind for organizations of all sizes and it’s certainly a top priority for Puppet. The latest release of Puppet Enterprise 2021.1 now offers support for SAML 2.0 providing a more secure and efficient authentication path for our customers to access their Puppet environments, applications and tooling.

This blog is the first in a four-part series on infrastructure automation for government agencies that are modernizing digital systems while grappling with budget and staffing constraints and the challenges of COVID-19. The last 12 months have been a turning point for many government agencies. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the drive towards modernization and, with it, the need to ensure security and compliance requirements across a host of legacy systems and processes.