In the past 2 and half months, we have refreshed the visual design of the CFEngine Mission Portal. You might already notice some differences in the navigation, iconography, and color set. This is a post to guide you through the major changes we made and also provide you an inside perspective into the design direction we are taking going forward.

Have you ever heard the mantra “Don’t deploy on Fridays?” There are blog posts, tweets, and t-shirts shouting this slogan to anyone who will listen. Maybe your organization follows this policy. The purpose of not deploying on Fridays is to give the team better work/life balance by preventing them from having to work on the weekends if something goes wrong during or after the deployment.

Running a network operations center has never been simple, yet the scale and complexity that digital transformation has added makes the future of automated network operations look downright dizzying.

Windows has been a huge focus for Puppet since the beginning, and never more so than with our recent news that the whole suite of DSC Resources are now accessible through the Forge, all fully supported by Puppet. Puppet and Windows have always gone hand in hand, but it hasn’t always been plain sailing.

Automation has been at the heart of technological progress as far back as the first industrial revolution. In 1733, John Kay’s revolutionary invention of the flying shuttle increased weaving speeds and changed manufacturing forever. The fourth industrial revolution, also known as Industry 4.0, began in 2010 and ushered in an era focused on digitization and virtualization fueled by IT automation.

Automation does not only eliminate the mundaneness of performing repetitive tasks, it can also help reduce errors and mistakes. Good cloud infrastructure encourages cloud automation. That should be one of the main motivators of implementing it. As ubiquitous as the idea of cloud computing has become in the last decade, there is still a lot of demystification to be done. People still don't fully understand its potential. Yes, it can save you money and time but how?

IT process automation can have several benefits for a managed service provider. It can increase productivity, lower costs, improve quality, reduce downtime, improve SLA management and keep customers happy. Until now, IT process automation was a benefit mostly enjoyed by large organizations. However, with the introduction of SaaS tools and standards for integrating these tools, it is now possible for any managed service provider to enjoy the same benefits.

There’s an interesting synergy between hybrid work and proactivity. If you have a large remote or hybrid workforce, difficulties will tend to take longer to troubleshoot – and will of course also cause even more disruption for the user. Let’s take a simple, everyday example of a failing laptop battery. In this scenario, every time a remote user wants to leave their desk, they can’t – the laptop cuts off as soon as they unplug it.