HashiCorp Packer is a free and open source tool for creating golden images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration. Packer makes it easy to codify VM images for Microsoft Azure. In this blog post we’ll look at how to use HashiCorp Packer and Puppet Bolt to define our VM templates in code.

DevOps and SRE teams are under intense pressure to reduce the Mean Time to Recovery (MTTR) in resolving incidents. With the proliferation of cloud services and the increasing complexity of DevOps toolchains, engineers today need to not only learn how to use these services but also troubleshoot them when an incident is raised at 2 AM. Incident response is still manual today – cobbling together runbooks and ad hoc scripts and orchestrating people to respond.

PowerShell DSC might be the new kid on the block when it comes to configuration management, but it's certainly not lacking in power. DSC resources offer unprecedented hooks into the Windows operating system and provide straightforward configuration functionality that will make your Unix coworkers green with envy. It's a shame it's not easier to use….

In an ever-changing world, the future of work is changing as well, and it has accelerated some areas of automation that we were already moving toward. I sat down with our guest speaker, Leslie Joseph, Principal Analyst Serving Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research, for a webinar to discuss these questions and get a better understanding around how automation plays an important role in supporting companies through crises and preparing them for an uncertain future.

In today's world, the need for organisations to have comprehensive cybersecurity solutions in place has never been greater. New vulnerabilities are exposed on a daily basis, and data breaches pose not only monetary but reputational risk.