Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As a follow up to my previous “personal policy” blog I have exciting news: An improved CFEngine is available for Termux!

When you see a notification on your smartphone, your brain processes the request quickly and determines how to react. It’s an efficient process and your nervous system is built for this use case. By contrast, most Internet-connected systems work in a less event-driven architecture. If there’s a change in one service, you won’t know about it until you check.

Using a Linux Domain controller such as Red Hat Identity Management or FreeIPA? If so then the fields are a bit different than some other LDAP interfaces, which makes it difficult for some to connect to for authentication. Here is a quick how-to on setting up Puppet Enterprise with authentication from FreeIPA. I am assuming that you already have Puppet Enterprise installed with eyaml configured. If not, then you may want to visit these prerequisites.

One of the best things about cloud computing is how it converts technical efficiencies into cost-savings. Some of those efficiencies are just part of the tool kit, like pay-per-use Lambda jobs. Good DevOps brings a lot of savings to the cloud, as well. It can smooth out high-friction state management challenges. Sprucing up how you provision cloud services, for example, speeds up deployments. That’s where treating infrastructure the same as workflows from the rest of your codebase comes in.

We’re very excited to announce that Ansible roles to deploy StackStorm have been promoted to new major version 2.0.0! There has been a lot of activity recently on the ansible-st2 repository, with 4 releases in the last couple of months. Ansible can now be used to deploy StackStorm on more modern operating systems and with newer third-party applications.

Eric Sorenson and Melissa Sussmann discuss Puppet’s event-driven automation platform, Relay, and how it helps clean up the “DevOps Dumping Ground” left behind from a tangled web of gitops and cloud events. Ditch your digital duct tape with a repeatable and reusable platform. Home-grown glue logic is expensive and high risk compared to the alternative.

Time trolls people. It speeds up in good times and slows down in bad. For instance, when you push code, your brain feels like it’s in a whirlwind. But when you’re debugging subsequent errors, the hours seem to slog by. This is particularly true if you are operating without context and without the help of automation. Fortunately, our friends at GitHub built an automation platform for products like Sentry to integrate with: Sentry Release GitHub Action.

As the automation surface area grows to accommodate hundreds of interconnected APIs on the cloud, developers are using their own, home-grown “digital duct tape” to manage a growing “DevOps dumping ground”. For a lot of organizations, home-grown glue logic is inconsistent, not repeatable, and expensive to maintain hundreds of event-based workflows and thousands of combinations. We believe that the answer lies in automation workflows.

SMEs struggle with keeping business processes running smoothly, from managing workflows to keeping records on sales and customer interactions. However, small businesses can make their life in business smarter and easier by integrating automation tools. Business automation is fast transforming how brands carry out their operations. In essence, the size of business does not matter when it comes to automation.