Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

This blog is the second 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.

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.