We’ve had an exciting year here at Puppet, and although it’s not the year we could have expected, I’m encouraged and inspired every day by the resilience of our team, our commitment to each other, and our drive to help customers navigate through so much uncertainty and change.
We are pleased to announce two new patch releases for CFEngine, version 3.12.6 and 3.15.3! These releases mainly contain bug fixes and dependency updates, but in 3.15.3 there are also some new enhancements in Mission Portal. The new cf-secret binary is also included in 3.15.3 packages.
Automation is everywhere in our day-to-day IT practices. Many of the processes that have been created for managing hardware and software components were designed, or at least initiated, in a time when managing only a few instances of an application was the norm. When we look at the work required to create, deploy, and maintain applications at a modern scale, the shortcomings of these processes become apparent.
In this blog we’ll share the journey we went on to solve a not-so-easy customer problem: a critical Windows services restart during Puppet agent upgrades. As with most software fixes, it starts with a customer ticket: component DHCP Server service restarts after an upgrade. This troubleshooting journey goes from analyzing Windows installer logs, to using undocumented Windows API calls, and back to the Windows installer logs, until we eventually found a solution.
Automation has evolved from being a management consultant’s go-to-advice to being a central part of every organization’s strategic plan. The biggest misconception about automation is that it is exercised in areas where the company wants to reduce human capital. Contradictorily, automation standardizes mundane processes and frees employees to focus on more value-producing activities that require their unique skills and knowledge.
