Remember when IT was mostly about managing a few on-premise servers and ensuring email worked? Those days are long gone. Today’s IT landscape is an intricate web of cloud services, legacy systems, automation, security protocols, and more. It’s a challenge to navigate, and as a result, IT operations have become increasingly complex. The more intricate your operation becomes, the more you realize that automation isn’t a luxury anymore—it’s a necessity.

Developer self-service can sound like a dream: A platform that developers can use to freely develop — unburdened by sprawling IT, tools they shouldn’t need to know how to use, and tickets that take forever to complete. But in DevOps, self-service is becoming a differentiator for organizations with growth goals, widening skill gaps, a need for visibility, or just an appetite for better DevOps efficiency.

What’s the difference between an associative array and a data container in CFEngine? CFEngine has two ways in which structured data can be used, associative arrays (sometimes called classic arrays) and data containers. Let’s take a look at a simple data structure. Here we have two data structures, a_email an associative array and d_email a data container. The policy emits the JSON representation of each.

Workload management is ubiquitous when it comes to automating critical business processes. With time, workload management as a technology is going through a gradual evolution, from ‘just automation’ to an orchestrator of intelligent automation. This necessitates a layer of observability and intelligence to facilitate the move from workload automation to workload management.

A lot has changed for the National Institute of Standards and Technology NIST Framework since 2013, when former President Barack Obama signed Executive Order 13636 that directed the Executive Branch to: Since the creation of the NIST framework, we’ve seen an evolution in sophisticated cyberattacks on the rise with new challenges like AI.

Ever need to do some math during policy evaluation? Sometimes configuration settings are based on available resources. For example, what if you want to calculate the size of shared buffers to be 25% of your available memory? Let’s write some policy. First, we need to figure out how much memory we have. Let’s parse this out from /proc/meminfo: So, we have 65505464 kB of memory in total. Knowing that we can use eval() to calculate what 25% is. eval() can also be used to test truthfulness.

In this article, you will learn about efficient practices in overcoming IT automation challenges. Organizations of all sizes can struggle with implementing and maintaining effective automation processes. While automation promises to streamline operations and boost efficiency, it often introduces unexpected hurdles that can derail even your most well-planned initiatives.

Within the configuration management space, people often distinguish between agent-based and agent-less approaches. In short, an agent-based solution means that you install a software agent to run in the background / periodically on the system. That software agent then makes changes to the system as desired, and also commonly communicates over the network to send and receive updates, policy, commands, scripts, data, etc.