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Tag: Puppet

  • SecOps: The Next Stride for DevOps

    SecOps: The Next Stride for DevOps

    Global IT spending is now touching a figure of $4 trillion. In today’s technology-intensive environment, data is the biggest commodity, more valuable and powerful than ever. And like Peter Parker’s uncle Ben noted, “With great power comes great responsibility.”

    Security has always been a big concern for valuable things and IT is no exception. IT as a whole is trying to push security left in the development cycle—trying to involve it in every step of the development cycle. And just when development and operations teams are getting used to the “esprit de corps” we call DevOps, I think it’s time we add the third musketeer: security.

    What is SecOps?

    SecOps is a collaboration between security and operations teams, just like development and operations teams collaborate on DevOps front. SecOps is a set of practices organizations need to follow, processes they need to execute and tools they need to use to ensure the security of their application environment. SecOps is making sure organizations do not sacrifice security to attain set performance and uptime indexes.

    In a typical development cycle—requirements gathering, design, development, testing, implementation or deployment and maintenance—security normally is introduced in the later stages, somewhere between testing and deployment or even later. But SecOps is all about making sure to introduce aspects around security much earlier or at each stage of the software development life cycle (SDLC).

    I know what you are thinking: This is going to complicate things and increase the time to delivery. This is where operations and development teams need to join forces to uncomplicate the things and make it time efficient practice. Next thing you must be thinking of is, Why so much hassle? Think of it the other way. Wouldn’t it save more time when you address the security concerns at much earlier stages than at the time of delivery or implementation? All it takes is an amalgamation of the security group, development team and operations team; a little bit of planning; and a whole lot of execution.

    SecOps + Containers

    Containerization is slowly but steadily moving from an alternative to full virtualization to a serious platform for running your applications. Containers have some obvious advantages including scalability and flexibility, and this solves most of the problems related to resources in case of application development. Reduced size; reduced time to provision application environment and testing; platforms including Docker, Solaris Zones, BSD Jails; and orchestration platforms including Kubernetes, CoreOS Fleet, Amazon ECS and OpenShift make containers a more preferred option for application development environments.

    This increased traction toward containerization points to the increased need to concentrate on security aspects. Here are some best SecOps practices for container environment you and your organizational teams can follow:

    • Authentic sources and images: Always check for authenticity of container images. There are various tools such as Docker’s security scan. With Docker Cloud and Docker Hub you can scan images to check for potential security vulnerabilities. Most images are built from some base image and not built from scratch, so there is always a threat with the used images.
    • Vulnerability management tool: There are tools available in the market to analyze container image formats and libraries for threats before you actually start using them.
    • Follow benchmarks and hardening guidelines: Always make sure you do the checks and follow hardening guidelines for containers, images, hosts and platforms before you start with production. There are few standards and benchmark checks for containers such as CIS’s Docker security benchmark, PCI compliance checklist, etc.
    • Periodic auditing: Regular auditing of your application environment can help you save yourself from the future troubles. Moreover, automation of auditing process can help in detection of unused images and containers.
    • Use of management frameworks: Use frameworks that can automate behavior profiling and control all the users, authorize the access to the containers, images and hosts.
    • Security built in to container engine systems and third-party security solutions: Third-party vendors have a number of applications for container security in addition to security systems of container management platforms.

    Dev + Sec + Ops

    With the continuously increasing business demands for new applications and software, and new practices and development trends such as DevOps, Agile, cloud, automation, CI/CD and others, traditional security needs to upgraded in the new paradigm. Thankfully, some of these practices facilitate the security. Consider CI/CD as an example: Continuous integration requires continuous integration tools, or what we call build servers. Some popular examples are Jenkins, TeamCity, GitLab CI, Travis CI, Bamboo, Go CD, CircleCI and Codeship. The best SecOps practice is to check and fix vulnerabilities at early stages as a part of CI/CD workflow. Integration between authentication, scanning, management tools and CI/CD pipeline tools could be the best possible solution to your security-related problems. Some easy-to-implement solutions can include automated security testing, static code analysis, authentication checks and login tracking.

    SecOps enable organizations in lifecycle management, analysis of security threats, incident management, optimizing and measuring the effectiveness of security controls, reduced breach response time, reduced security risks and increased business security. The basic principle on which SecOps works is Avoid, Analyze, Respond, Review, Repeat. By analyzing the security events and data, you can build incident response plans to avoid future unwanted events.

    Frameworks and Tools

    Now that you have a clear understanding of why you need your security, development and operations teams to work together, let’s see what tools and frameworks you can use.

    • Docker-native tools: If you are using Docker as a platform then you can use few security tools provided by Docker itself for the security of production environment: Docker Bench and Docker Notary. Docker Bench is a script that checks common best practices around deploying Docker containers in production. Docker Notary enables you to check whether content is from a trusted publisher.
    • Chef: Chef provides different tools including Inspec to automate security testing.
    • Puppet: Puppet provides security compliance and policy defining frameworks.
    • Ansible: Ansible provides system tracking, setting up firewall rules, user lockdown and compliance automation solutions.
    • CoreOS Clair: CoreOS Clair is an open-source project for vulnerability analysis in applications and Docker containers.
    • SaltStack: SaltStack can help in orchestration and automation of security practices solutions for containers.

    This is just a look at some of the most popular ones. If you want, there are a number of others that can look after the security of your application environment.

    The main motive behind implying SecOps practices in any organization is involving security team at all possible stages to remove any ambiguity in any stage of development rather than security team providing analysis reports to the operations team and then sitting back and enjoying the show. When these teams perform in a synergistic manner, the business focus can be shifted to other important things.

    About the Author / Chaitanya Jawale

    Chaitanya Jawale is founder and CEO of Opcito Technologies, a leader in microservice-based product engineering and automation. Chaitanya comes with strong background in product engineering, data center automation, DevOps and multi-cloud orchestration and management.

  • Fleetsmith Pulls Apple into DevOps Orbit

    Fleetsmith Pulls Apple into DevOps Orbit

    For too long now Apple Macintosh systems have been the proverbial red-headed stepchild of DevOps. There are a lot of ways to incorporate Windows systems automatically into a larger DevOps pipeline, but Macintosh systems generally require a lot of manual intervention.

    As part of a larger effort to automate application deployments across Apple systems, Fleetsmith has announced that the platform it created for automating the management of Apple systems now supports both the Puppet and Chef automation frameworks. DevOps teams looking to extend the reach of those frameworks to Apple systems can now invoke Fleetsmith to automate the deployment of Chef and Puppet like any other Macintosh application.

    Of course, once Puppet or Chef are installed, IT organizations can control what gets deployed on those systems going forward. But in general, organizations that deploy Macintoshes prefer to employ tools that provide a native Macintosh experience when it comes to managing those systems, says Fleetsmith CEO Zack Blum. There are plenty of options when it comes to cross-platform management tools, but Blum notes each of the tools compromises the Apple Macintosh experience such that individuals who prefer Apple systems must manage those systems using a construct that was not primarily designed for use in, for example, a Windows environment.

    Over the years, a number of developers have shown a marked preference for Apple Macintosh systems. As a result, it’s difficult to develop a coherent approach to DevOps that does not include some way to automate the management of those platforms, including the ability to deploy DevOps tools such as Puppet and Chef. Blum says that, in time, Fleetsmith plans to increase the number of Macintosh applications that can be distributed via its platform.

    Naturally, Apple is too focused on the end-user experience to trifle with IT management issues. It prefers to leave those issues in the hands of partners such as Fleetsmith, JAMF Software, IBM and SAP. The other alternative is to rely on open-source software that has been created to address this same issue. But Blum says open-source alternatives are more complex than commercial software, while rival commercial approaches to provide the same level of fleet management of Apple system at scale.

    Fleetsmith was developed when its founders worked at Dropbox and Fandom. Both organizations had evaluated several Mac management options before deciding to develop their own code. The company launched last fall with $3.1 million in funding.

    Pricing for the service, which officially is still in beta, is $10 per month per device. The service is free for any organization with fewer than 10 Apple devices. In addition, Fleetsmith integrates with Google G-Suite to make it simple to authenticate users of the service.

    Obviously, there’s more to be done in terms of pulling Apple devices into the greater DevOps ecosystem. But as a first step, making it simpler to deploy Chef and Puppet on these systems signals greater awareness of the overall issue.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Survey: DevOps Divide Grows a Little Wider

    Survey: DevOps Divide Grows a Little Wider

    The gap between the number of organizations that have invested in DevOps is starting to narrow, and IT organizations that made the transition to DevOps earlier are starting to see accelerated returns on that investment, according to the latest survey by Puppet.

    The annual “State of DevOps Report” finds that out of 3,200 IT professionals surveyed, only 11 percent were part of organizations that could be considered high DevOps performers. High performers are deemed to have higher deployment frequencies, lower lead times for changes, better mean time to recovery (MTTR) and better change failure rates. The higher performers in this year’s survey are deploying applications 46 times faster than the same designated group of higher performers were last year.

    The survey also finds that higher-performing organizations have automated 72 percent of all configuration management processes. Those same high performers spend much less time (28 percent) employing manual configuration processes. Lower performers are spending almost half of their time (46 percent) on manual configuration.

    Just over a quarter (27 percent) of the respondents self-identified themselves as being part of a DevOps team, according to the survey. In contrast, only 16 percent said the same last year. Puppet CTO Nigel Kersten says those results suggest that understanding of the power of DevOps is increasing. It’s also apparent the early implementers of DevOps processes are enjoying a level of IT agility that is much greater than the average IT organization.

    In general, Kersten says that while much DevOps progress has been made, most IT organizations have automated only various pockets of silos. Developers, for example, may have automated some processes on their own, while IT operations specialists may have developed a custom script to automate the configuration of a handful of servers. Kersten notes IT leaders should be cognizant of the technical debt their organizations are incurring every time different elements of the IT organization employ different tools to automate the same basic processes time and again.

    Very few have automated their operations within the context of a continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, says Kersten. That becomes more challenging to accomplish as new computing models based on containers, for example, are added to the enterprise mix. On a more positive note, Kersten says more processes are being well-defined, as they are bounded by an application programming interface (APIs). Those APIs then become the core technology over which IT automation frameworks are then laid.

    The issue many IT organizations have yet to confront is the degree to which they want to stumble toward DevOps versus implementing a concerted plan of action. Much of the DevOps progress to date has been driven from the bottom up inside many organizations. The time is now approaching for IT leaders to imbue DevOps as a part of the IT culture that permeates the entire organization.

    To one degree or another it’s a safe bet every organization will implement some form of DevOps going forward. The challenge  will be figuring out how to transform all those isolated instances into something more akin to an actual IT strategy.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Chat: Puppet Extends Enterprise Credentials with Michael Olson

    DevOps Chat: Puppet Extends Enterprise Credentials with Michael Olson

    Puppet made three major announcements today around new versions of their flagship products, new products independent of Puppet Enterprise and a major expansion of partner programs and offices in the face of record growth over the last 12 months. As I detailed in my article on these announcements, these 3 taken together paint a clear picture of a market leader solidifying its position as an enterprise DevOps solutions provider. I had a chance to speak with Michael Olson of the Puppet product team about what these announcements mean.

    As usual, the streaming media player of our conversation is below. The transcript of our conversation follows immediately below (transcript will be updated shortly)

    Streaming Media

    Transcript of our Conversation

    Alan Shimel:                Hello everyone. This is Alan Shimel, Editor in Chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud and we’re here on another DevOps Chat. Very happy to be joined on this episode of DevOps Chat by Michael Olson from the Puppet Product Team. Michael, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Michael Olson:           Thanks Alan. Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

    Alan Shimel:                Pleasure. Pleasure to have you here Michael we always – actually we’ve had more than several people from Puppet over the years appear on DevOps Chat and we always – that’s always a great conversation.

    But today Michael you’re on here regarding several news announcements that Puppet put out recently today on May 11 and wanted to kind of go over them with you and cue our audience in to what I think are several major announcements coming kind of down the pike from Puppet.

    So if it’s okay with you Michael, you know the news as well as I do, do you want to lead off with what you think is the most important one or do you want me to pick?

    Michael Olson:           Sure, I’m happy to dig in. And today’s been certainly a pretty big day at Puppet, we’re pretty excited to announce a very significant set of investments that we think really continues to deliver on our mission of empowering IT to deliver better software faster, so looking forward to digging in to what that entails.

    It’s really around new products that help IT manage the complexities of their evolving and modern infrastructure as well as updates to some of our existing products that give really IT better control and situational awareness for the software that they deliver and run.

    And then new partnerships and company investments that are really focused on ensuring that Puppet is where our customers need us to be, that our customers and our community and ecosystem really have the talents and the support needed to scale their success wherever they are, so looking forward to digging into it with you.

    Alan Shimel:                Okay. So if you don’t mind Michael I’d like to start off with the announcements around new products – Puppet Cloud Discover – and if I mispronounce it I apologize – Lumigon? Is that how you pronounce it?

    Michael Olson:           Alan, you nailed it. Well done.

    Alan Shimel:                Okay. Well every once in a while even a blind squirrel finds a nut. But anyway, so we have Puppet Cloud Discover and Lumigon – and these are offerings in the container and cloud native technology areas, but beyond that Michael why don’t we dig in a little bit. What exactly is Cloud Discovery first?

    Michael Olson:           Sure. And you’re exactly right. And I think before we dig in it’s useful just to set a little bit of context Alan and I’ll start by saying that our heritage really at Puppet has been rooted in helping IT professionals cope with sort of the complexity of managing an ever-growing infrastructure and application estate really by kind of harnessing automation.

    So for more than a decade our core focus has really been around helping our customers define a desired state model for their infrastructure and applications and then providing an engine that translates that desired state of how they want their infrastructure and applications to look into reality.

    So that has benefits of doing things like preventing configuration drift and eliminating manual intervention from the software delivery process.

    And one of the things that we’ve seen is – you know, over the course of this journey over the past 12 years is we’ve been very fortunate to be supported by a passionate open-source community that’s helped refine our offerings, coving every aspect of systems management so that our new users that are getting onboard with Puppet can hit the ground running so to speak as opposed to having to start from scratch.

    And so in light of that we are making investments to better support that journey for our customers and answering some of the common questions that we’re hearing from them. Things like, “How do we get started with automation and modeling?”

    And one of the most common starting points that we see our customers looking to solve for is just know what software they have running across their datacenter and their cloud and container environments: answering a simple question of, “What resources and applications do I have running today? How do I bring those resources under management?” And I kind of refer to that general category of problems as discovery

    So what we’re announcing today is really a new set of investments and offerings that are intended to give IT teams much better situational awareness into what they have running across their application and infrastructure estate regardless of whether that’s running in the cloud, in containers or on their traditional on-premise datacenter.

    Alan Shimel:                Got it. Got it. So Michael I think that kind of explains a little bit what Cloud Discover is – Puppet Cloud Discover. And I’m looking at these two names of Cloud Discover and Lumigon – I’m reminded back to my days at one of the security companies I helped co-found – Still Secure – but we always had this sort of battle between descriptive names or kind of catchy marketing type of names.

    And when I look at Puppet Cloud Discover that’s certainly a descriptive name, right? I think you almost get what it is from the title and it obviously fills a real need in the market as we get these – I guess you call it cloud sprawl – of an ever-expanding infrastructure and understanding what we’ve got there.

    Talk to me a little bit about the other one though, Lumigon. How did we come up with that name and what does it do?

    Michael Olson:           You bet. Yeah, Lumigon is a new offering from Puppet. It’s open-source so it’s something that is available for our community as well as anyone who is responsible for managing containerized environments within their organizations to go to our website and just simply pull down and start using today.

    And I think as we all know containers have really emerged as a new and common way of packaging applications with that container image being the artifact that’s handed off from development into operations, and we think containers represent a really big opportunity for orgs that want to accelerate their product delivery.

    But today what we’re often hearing is that those container environments are largely black boxes from an operational standpoint. What’s more, since there’s so many of them, containers tend to be ephemeral, so to speak, they tend to have shorter lifespans than VMs and that brings a whole set of challenges where you’re looking at bringing containers into production environments.

    So what we’ve announced today is a new offering. It’s open-source and free and available for anyone to go and pull down and start using of Lumigon which is an offering that really focuses on discovering what’s running inside all of those container environments and giving operators really better visibility and control around their container estate.

    So because this Lumigon effort is an open-source tool that can analyze applications – you know, we’re initially targeting docker containers and exposing application metadata about those but certainly looking at extending that over time as we continue to get feedback from the community.

    Alan Shimel:                Great. Now Michael over the years we’ve spoken to several Puppet people – among them Gareth Rushgrove, D-Pack, Sonja himself – and we’ve talked here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud about Project Blue Shift at Puppet which is kind of, as you probably are well-aware – Puppet looking at new technologies and making sure that they – that Puppet’s mission encompasses working with these new technologies.

    Is Lumigon something that maybe comes out of Project Blue Shift or independent of that?

    Michael Olson:           I think it really represents a common vision from Puppet which is you know we see a lot of organizations in our customers that are really looking to automation as a bridge to their future. As organizations look to modernize physical infrastructure and move it into the cloud, adopt containers in production environments they’re looking to have automation really baked in from day zero as they look to do that.

    And so Blue Shift is, as we’ve talked about in the past, really represents Puppet’s vision for helping our customers adopt the cloud and containers in consistent, repeatable and reliable ways. So it encompasses things like using automation to install docker or lay down operating environments in docker, for example, as well as do things like define and deploy the services that run inside of docker containers giving our customers really better portability to be able to kind of lift and shift workloads that they may have defined and are running on virtual infrastructure, for example, and getting that running in containers without having to adopt platform-specific tooling to do so.

    Alan Shimel:                Make sense. And certainly – I mean I’m fresh out of Docker Con two weeks ago now – it seems like two weeks – maybe it was last week – but in any event I mean the shift to a containerized application infrastructure is well underway and so a product such as this obviously I think should find a ready market and the fact that it is an open-source tool and everyone can get involved.

                                        Michael what is – or other – I know it’s early in the game but are there any plans to have an Enterprise or pay-for version of Lumigon out there?

    Michael Olson:           You know it’s certainly something that we’re looking at longer-term is as we continue to build off of this foundation, you know, ensuring that we’re meeting the needs of our large Enterprise customers as well as the broad community of more than 36,000 organizations that rely on Puppet technology today to deliver and operate their software

    And I think what we’re focused on right now is really making sure that we’re nailing that core set of problems with a sledge hammer which is, “How do I expose the black box and know what’s running inside of my container environments so I can do things like identify if I’m vulnerable to a potential CVE or if I’m vulnerable to a bug in a library dependency. You know, to know if for example my OS standards are being followed and adhered to within my organization.” These are the types of questions that Lumigon will help users answer today.

    And then shifting to the Cloud Discovery announcement that we talked about briefly earlier we’re also introducing a new offering here at Puppet that’s really focused on giving IT teams better situational awareness into what’s running in their cloud infrastructure specifically in AWS.

    And so it’s really focused on helping IT teams go back and discover all of the resources and applications that are running in AWS. This is a limited preview that we’re offering for Cloud Discover today really to give those teams a better sense of what they have running in the cloud so they can make better decisions about how they want to bring them under management through automation.

    Alan Shimel:                Great. So Michael both the Cloud Discover and Lumigon in some ways are maybe the cabooses on the engine here with the announcement of a new version of Puppet Enterprise – or at least the availability of a new version of Puppet Enterprise.

    Why don’t you tell our audience a little bit about that?

    Michael Olson:           Sure, yeah. So Puppet Enterprise – we’ve introduced a new version, we call it 2017.2 per our naming conventions – and I’ve been at Puppet for a few years now and in my opinion it’s really not an exaggeration to say that it’s one of the more significant releases that we’ve had in several years, really with a focus on giving our customers better visibility into the software that they have running on premise in their datacenter no matter how they’re managing it, as well as easier, simpler tools to be able to orchestrate deployments and run deployments across infrastructure and applications using visual workflows.

    So the first set of innovation that we’ve introduced into the latest version of Puppet Enterprise is really around being able to inspect software packages that are running across your datacenter.

    And one of the areas of feedback that we frequently hear from IT teams is it’s hard to know what software packages are running across their infrastructure, what versions they’re running, for example, in order to easily identify packages that may be vulnerable to security risks.

    So we’re introducing some new reporting for our Puppet Enterprise customers in this version that’s really focused on giving IT easy visibility into the software packages that they’re running regardless of whether they’re being managed today by Puppet in order to really provide that insight to identify potential security issues a lot faster

    And then as our customers look to use automation in order to drive change across their software stack we’ve also introduced a whole set of orchestration capabilities over the course of the past year-and-a-half. With this release we’re extending that to the Puppet Enterprise Web UI essentially giving our customers the ability to define, run and monitor deployment jobs entirely using visual workflows within the Puppet Enterprise Web UI.

    So it’s easy to do things like define a deployment job, target a specific portion of your infrastructure, run a phase deployment for doing things like canary workflows, and then monitor the status of that deployment in real-time so if things aren’t going well you can hit the stop button, investigate, tinker as needed and then restart that deployment; so giving our customers a lot more flexibility into how they drive change across their software.

    Alan Shimel:                Fantastic. And I love the naming conventions here – I remember speaking earlier about it – I think it makes it easy for people to see where they are and what they have – but the simple naming kind of hides the fact that there’s a lot more punch in here. And by the way, that’s available now Michael?

    Michael Olson:           Correct, it is. Yeah. It’s available today for – certainly for current Puppet Enterprise customers – and for anybody who’s new to Puppet out there you can simply go to our website and pull down a copy, it’s free to try on up to 10 different servers, devices or applications.

    Alan Shimel:                Sure. Michael, and I didn’t ask this – my apologies – for the Cloud Discovery and Lumigon – what’s their availability?

    Michael Olson:           Yeah, Lumigon, which is really around, again, kind of exposing the black boxes of containers, is – that offering is available to try today and you can find a way to get there directly from our website at Puppet.com. And then the Cloud Discovery offering is available as part of a limited preview so what we’re really looking to do is if you’re interested sign up through our website and we’ll be in contact with you if you’re interested to discuss next steps.

    Alan Shimel:                Perfect. Next Michael let’s talk a little bit about the last announcement today, and this one was more around sort of momentum – it looks like a bunch of new Enterprise customers added as well as new locations and partners and partner offerings. I don’t know if I left anything out but give us some of the details there if you can.

    Michael Olson:           Sure, yeah, happy to do so. And you know you get this Alan, obviously you and I have talked before, but what we’ve really seen over the course of the past several years is just a huge surge in growth and momentum for Puppet and I think it’s been fueled by growing demand in the market for dev-ops and for digital transformation.

    So we’re really taking that momentum and using it to grow more aggressively and really help our customers be more successful, you know, laying the foundation for dev-ops wherever they are in the world.

    So what we’ve also announced today is a new set of partnerships with organizations like AWS and Cisco and others as well as global expansion for Puppet: we’re opening up new offices in Singapore really to better serve the needs of our customers internationally and ensure that Puppet is with them wherever they are and however they want to engage with us.

    Alan Shimel:                That’s great. What about from a partnership point of view though? Any new partners to announce or just partner offerings?

    Michael Olson:           Yeah, from a partnership perspective – I’ll touch upon a couple things – one of which is we have a new marketplace offering up on AWS that we also made available today and really the key takeaway there is as our customers are increasingly looking to kind of recognize the value of cloud-based environments – they’re using AWS – we’ve really deepened our relationship with Amazon Web Services and deepened that partnership with a new offering that basically makes Puppet Enterprise available on the AWS marketplace on an hourly pay-as-you-go basis.

    So it’s really focused on simplifying the installation of Puppet Enterprise and providing a way of securing configuration and getting better visibility into your AWS infrastructure through Puppet directly from within the AWS marketplace.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah. You know, to me Michael that’s a huge winner, right, because number one – I’m familiar with the AWS marketplace and there’s no lack of solutions up there – but once you’re in there and you have the ability to kind of piggyback the AWS billing, if you will, for hourly service and hourly offerings – it allows people to consume their services in the manner that they’re used to consuming them in AWS, right?

    I think early on there was a big rush to the AWS marketplace but if you weren’t truly integrated into AWS it just, you know, from a billing perspective and usage monitoring and all that, it – I think their customers just did it – it was just too clunky frankly, right? So this makes things a lot smoother in you’re an AWS customer.

    Michael Olson:           I think that’s spot on Alan. Like the constant feedback that we hear from our customers is they want us to meet their needs and engage them how they want to be engaged, so to speak, and I think this is a marker that helps payoff that objective that customers have is, you know, if you’re looking to bring automation into your cloud environments – you know, looking to get started for the first time – just, you know, click a few buttons and spin up Puppet directly through the AWS marketplace.

    And we’ve also really extended our partnership with Cisco in some of the partner-related announcements that came out today as well as we see more Cisco customers that want the power of Puppet as a way of defining, deploying and operating all of their software. So with our expanded partnership joint customers of Puppet and Cisco can now buy and get support for Puppet Enterprise directly from Cisco and any Cisco value-added reseller.

    Alan Shimel:                Cool. Very cool. Okay. Michael, you know, I promised you we were going to do 15 minutes and here we are for over 20 – I apologize – but before we wrap things up did we miss anything in the announcements?

    Michael Olson:           I don’t think so Alan, this has been a great conversation and I think we touched upon most of the highlights.

    Alan Shimel:                Yeah, I think so too. You know not everything fits into a 15-minute bucket though in life so I apologize but I think it was well worth the time spent digging into these new, exciting developments and announcements over at Puppet.

    Michael Olson from the Product Team at Puppet thanks for being this episode’s guest on DevOps Chat. Hope to have you on again soon.

    Michael Olson:           Likewise. Thanks for having us Alan and it’s always great to catch up with you.

    Alan Shimel:                All righty. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. Thanks for listening everyone and we’ll see you on another DevOps Chat hopefully very soon.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Puppet Continues Global Momentum, Fueled by Surging Demand for DevOps and Digital Transformation

    Company Adds More Than 260 Enterprise Customers, Three New Global Locations and Introduces Partner Offerings as it Drives DevOps Success
    Portland, OR

    Puppet, the standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us, today announced continued global growth and new investments, fueled by surging demand for DevOps and digital transformation. More than 37,000 companies around the world, including more than 75 of the Fortune 100, rely on Puppet to continually deploy and manage mission critical software across their distributed applications and global infrastructures. In the past 12 months, Puppet added more than 250 new enterprise customers, highlighting the increasing demand of DevOps in the enterprise. Additional investments in its customers’ successes include expanding Puppet’s global footprint with new international offices, new partner offerings, new leadership and new products to its automation portfolio.

    “As we refocus our IT operations into the cloud, DevOps technologies and methodologies are a key part of our transformation,” said Bill Wilcox, IS engineer at a large, international retailer. “Puppet is a trusted partner whose technology and services are helping us develop our cloud strategy as well as expand and identify new opportunities to futureproof our business.”

    “Puppet’s momentum underscores the continued demand that we are experiencing from customers and organizations that need to improve agility, efficiency and reliability to support them through their DevOps and digital transformation journeys,” said Sanjay Mirchandani, president and CEO, Puppet. “Our success is a testament to the hard work of our talented team, customers, partners and community, which have all contributed to our growth globally. We look forward to continuing to provide products that will significantly help our customers accelerate modern software deployment while making it easier for them to manage their infrastructures. We have our sights set high on an even stronger 2017.”

    International growth & expansion 
    Puppet experienced its best-ever year in 2016, increasing broad adoption of Puppet Enterprise and expanding its global footprint with momentum across EMEA and Australia. Today, the company announced three new regional office openings to support its global expansion, including a new office in Singapore, a larger, world-class facility in Sydney and new R&D center in Seattle. The new office in Singapore will serve as Puppet’s regional headquarters for its APJ operations. This new regional headquarters will be home to software development, technical services and go-to-market functions.

    Puppet also announced the localization of its flagship offering, Puppet Enterprise, for Japan as the company prepares for additional expansion throughout the region. Building on its success in Australia, Puppet is expanding its presence in Sydney’s CBD, moving into a new office that provides additional space needed to accommodate employee growth and an increased focus on community engagement, with room to host regional community and customer events. Finally, Puppet is opening a new office in Seattle to tap into the rich local talent pool and expand its world-class engineering team.

    New partner offerings and growing ecosystem
    New offerings with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Cisco, Nutanix, VMware and critical security providers to make it easier for joint customers to buy, run and support Puppet Enterprise.

    “Many businesses rely on Puppet Enterprise to provision, operate and provide enhanced protection for their cloud environments,” said Barry Russell, general manager, AWS Marketplace and Catalog Services, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Puppet Enterprise helps customers quickly and easily deliver their software, and now they also have an incredibly simple way to purchase and employ it through AWS Marketplace.”

    • New AWS Marketplace offering: As enterprises continue to recognize the value of cloud-based environments, they are turning to AWS and other cloud providers for efficiency, savings and scalability. To support cloud efforts, AWS and Puppet deepened their collaboration, making Puppet Enterprise available on an hourly, pay-as-you-go basis through AWS Marketplace. The new offering simplifies installation, provides secure configuration and delivers immediate ROI.
    • Extended Cisco partnership: As software defined networking continues to evolve as a key tenet of the modern data center, Cisco customers want the power of Puppet Enterprise as a unified way of defining, deploying and operating all the software they run. Joint customers can now buy and get support for Puppet Enterprise directly from Cisco and any Cisco VAR.
    • New partners for security and DevOps: Puppet has added a number of important partners as part of its inaugural class to the Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAPP). By collaborating with F5, Splunk, Cumulus Networks, CloudPassage, Conjur, CyberArk, Onyx Point, Intelliment and Sensu, Puppet and its partners collectively deliver a better architecture around security and DevOps.

    “Puppet Enterprise has enabled us to efficiently migrate workloads to AWS and scale out our infrastructure, which has helped us triple our deployment frequency, eliminate downtime, and made it faster and easier to deploy changes with fewer errors,” said Brian Engler, CIO, ServiceChannel. “Puppet’s new pay-as-you-go marketplace offering gives us even more flexibility to experiment with new ideas that will help us stay ahead of the competition.”

    New innovation and Puppet Enterprise updates 
    As part of the company’s strategic plans to make the shortest path to better software a reality for enterprises, Puppet also today announced its first-ever standalone offerings, separate from Puppet Enterprise. Additionally, the company announced updates to its flagship product, Puppet Enterprise 2017.2. For more details visit: https://puppet.com/company/press-room/releases/puppet-announces-puppet-enterprise-20172

    Additional resources

    • Learn more about Puppet.
    • Subscribe to the Puppet blog.
    • Follow Puppet on Twitter @puppetize.
    • Try Puppet Enterprise for free.

    About Puppet

    Puppet is driving the movement to a world of unconstrained software change. Its revolutionary platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. More than 37,000 companies—including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100—use Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with more than 500 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.

    Media contact

    pr@puppet.com

    — Parker Yates

  • Puppet Announces Availability of Puppet Enterprise 2017.2, Delivering Inventory Discovery and Visual Orchestration Workflows

    Continued Innovation Provides Enhanced Situational Awareness to Deploy Software Faster
    Portland, OR

    Puppet, the standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us, today announced the general availability of Puppet Enterprise 2017.2, and upcoming availability of Puppet 5 Platform, the latest version of Open Source Puppet. Significant updates to Puppet Enterprise 2017.2, now also available in Japanese, empower customers to orchestrate changes and phased deployments across their software with visual workflows, and greater visibility into the software packages running, no matter how they are managed. Additionally, Puppet’s core open source platform, Puppet 5 Platform, includes upgraded features offering open source customers an even more powerful common language to deliver and operate all of their software.

    “Today’s organizations are under increasing pressure to deliver better software faster. For enterprise IT, that means changing from releasing updates once every few quarters to delivering great software on demand—that’s a significant shift,” said Omri Gazitt, chief product officer, Puppet. “Puppet helps with that shift. Puppet gives enterprise IT the modern automation needed for DevOps agility, predictability and security. This release makes it easier than ever for IT to get started with automation, from visibility into unmanaged infrastructure, to better control for delivering software change.”

    Significant new capabilities of Puppet Enterprise 2017.2 include:

    • Package inspection: Users get started with automation by quickly identifying packages that aren’t being automatically managed, but should be. With package inspection, Puppet Enterprise users report on unmanaged infrastructure, making it easy to see the systems that would benefit most from automation to ensure their most critical software has the right maintenance updates, security patches and licenses.
    • Visual orchestration workflows: Users orchestrate infrastructure and application deployments entirely from within the Puppet Enterprise web UI, without writing a single line of Puppet code. Enterprises can target specific infrastructure environments using drop-down menus and filters, define workflows, monitor deployment status in real-time, and start, stop or restart deployments as needed, all with the click of a button.

    Also announced today is Puppet’s newest open source innovations, including Lumogon™ and Puppet 5 Platform. Updates to Puppet 5 Platform, the company’s core open source offering, which includes Puppet Agent, Puppet Server and PuppetDB, make it easier for users to download, implement and upgrade their Puppet deployment. The Puppet 5 Platform’s suite of components are guaranteed to work together without requiring the additional testing and troubleshooting commonly associated with other open source tools.

    Puppet Enterprise 2017.2 is available today to new and existing customers, and Puppet 5 Platform will be available in May 2017.

    Additional resources

    • Learn more about Puppet.
    • Subscribe to the Puppet blog.
    • Follow Puppet on Twitter @puppetize.
    • Try Puppet Enterprise for free.

    About Puppet

    Puppet is driving the movement to a world of unconstrained software change. Its revolutionary platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. More than 37,000 companies—including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100—use Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with more than 500 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.

    Media contact

    pr@puppet.com

    — Parker Yates

  • Puppet Solidifies Enterprise Provider Status With Bevy Of Announcements

    Puppet Solidifies Enterprise Provider Status With Bevy Of Announcements

    Puppet has been maturing from a company with an enthusiastic base of users of an open source tool, to a leading provider of enterprise DevOps solutions for the last few years. Things really accelerated with the appointment last year of Sanjay Mirchandani, as CEO and the group of experienced, A+ players he brought to the executive team. Today Puppet took another step towards solidifying their position as a leading provider of enterprise DevOps solutions with a string of news announcements highlighting new products, accelerated growth and new/expanded presence.

    Lets start with what for many of you will be the most important. Puppet today announced “the general availability of Puppet Enterprise 2017.2, and upcoming availability of Puppet 5 Platform, the latest version of Open Source Puppet.” I had a chance to chat with Puppet CTO Deepak Giridharagopal, Chief Product Officer, Omri Gazitt and VP of Marketing, Tim Zonca. In their considered opinion this new version of Puppet Enterprise, more than just another upgrade, may in fact be the most significant upgrade to Puppet ever.

    From the press release, the most significant of these new capabilities are:

    • Package inspection: Users get started with automation by quickly identifying packages that aren’t being automatically managed, but should be. With package inspection, Puppet Enterprise users report on unmanaged infrastructure, making it easy to see the systems that would benefit most from automation to ensure their most critical software has the right maintenance updates, security patches and licenses.
    • Visual orchestration workflows: Users orchestrate infrastructure and application deployments entirely from within the Puppet Enterprise web UI, without writing a single line of Puppet code. Enterprises can target specific infrastructure environments using drop-down menus and filters, define workflows, monitor deployment status in real-time, and start, stop or restart deployments as needed, all with the click of a button.

    Both of these are much deeper than the few words from the press release. In addition to these though, there are also even more new capabilities packed in to 2017.2. Additionally, the open source Puppet platform 5 has many new innovations and hooks that will continue to keep the large base of open Puppet users happy, if they don’t require or need the greater feature set of the enterprise version.

    Speaking of those many users, that is the lead in to the second announcement. Puppet is growing and growing fast. Over the last 12 months they have added more than 250 enterprise customers to the business. Today over 37,000 companies use Puppet, with over 75 of the Fortune 100 also relying on Puppet. To help satisfy this increasing demand, Puppet announced the opening of a new Asia-Pacific office in Singapore, a large expansion of their existing office in Sydney and the opening of a new R&D center in Seattle.

    Puppet also announced significant additions to its partner program and participants:

    • New AWS Marketplace offering: As enterprises continue to recognize the value of cloud-based environments, they are turning to AWS and other cloud platforms for efficiency, savings and scalability. To support cloud efforts, AWS and Puppet deepened their partnership, making Puppet Enterprise available on an hourly, pay-as-you-go basis. The new offering simplifies installation, provides secure configuration and delivers immediate ROI.
    • Extended Cisco partnership: As software defined networking continues to evolve as a key tenet of the modern data center, Cisco customers want the power of Puppet Enterprise as a unified way of defining, deploying and operating all the software they run. Joint customers can now buy and get support for Puppet Enterprise directly from Cisco and any Cisco VAR.
    • New partners for security and DevOps: Puppet has added a number of important partners as part of its inaugural class to the Technology Alliance Partner Program (TAPP). By collaborating with F5, Splunk, Cumulus Networks, CloudPassage, Conjur, CyberArk, Onyx Point, Intelliment and Sensu, Puppet and its partners collectively deliver a better architecture around security and DevOps.

    Again, all signs point to Puppet’s ascendence to enterprise provider status as it matures into its market leader position.

    The third and final announcement from Puppet is by no means the least of the three. In addition to the first two announcements, Puppet also announced two new offerings, Lumogon™ and Puppet Cloud Discovery™. With these the company expands its enterprise offerings beyond Puppet Enterprise, empowering companies to overcome challenges associated with modernizing infrastructure and application stacks.

    These are first offerings independent of Puppet Enterprise offered by the company. The represent significant new capabilities in two quickly growing markets, cloud and containers.

    Lumogon empowers “anyone involved in running containers, like site reliability engineers (SREs), release engineers, DevOps engineers, and the application developers themselves, now have a tool to gain operational insights into what makes up their containers with Lumogon. Lumogon provides a transparent window into each Docker image and running container, and offers a way to collect, query and report on container application metadata.”

    “Puppet Cloud Discovery collects and visualizes a rich set of system data to give users better awareness of the state of their infrastructure. Unlike other tools on the market that were built for traditional on-premise infrastructure, Puppet Cloud Discovery is cloud-first and is designed to model ephemeral cloud infrastructure. Puppet Cloud Discovery is delivered as a service, making it easy for users to see immediate time-to-value.”

    So Puppet has raised the bar and solidified its position in the marketplace. When taken together these three announcements illustrate that Puppet is accelerating in almost every facet. It will be interesting to see how they continue to build in the months and years to come.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Puppet Announces Lumogon™ and Puppet Cloud Discovery™, Expands Offerings With New Container and Cloud-Native Technology

    New Offerings Empower Customers With Complete Visibility into Cloud and Container Operations
    Portland, OR

    Puppet, the standard for automating the delivery and operations of the software that powers everything around us, today announced Lumogon™ and Puppet Cloud Discovery™. The new offerings define modern infrastructure discovery and empower enterprise IT professionals with the situational awareness and visibility needed to securely and scalably run cloud infrastructure and container-based applications in production, across all public, private and hybrid cloud environments. Building on its market leadership in data center automation and beyond, these new innovations mark a major milestone for Puppet as the company expands its enterprise offerings beyond Puppet Enterprise, empowering companies to overcome challenges associated with modernizing infrastructure and application stacks.

    Discovery provided by Lumogon and Puppet Cloud Discovery breaks open the black box of container and cloud workloads, giving enterprise IT teams insights and visibility into the services running across containerized applications and cloud infrastructure. These advancements show them exactly what they have running, and where, so they can ensure consistency and compliance as they modernize their environments.

    “Today’s announcement is a pivotal moment for Puppet as we expand beyond the core Puppet Enterprise platform to offer our customers new ways to discover and manage modern mission critical infrastructure,” said Deepak Giridharagopal, CTO, Puppet. “Our new Lumogon and Puppet Cloud Discovery tools provide in-depth insights about the resources across your  container and cloud infrastructure. With that situational awareness, it’s easier to know what critical services aren’t being monitored and managed, but should be, especially for those who strive to deliver software in a more agile, predictable and consistent way.”

    Complete container transparency with Lumogon
    Anyone involved in running containers, like site reliability engineers (SREs), release engineers, DevOps engineers, and the application developers themselves, now have a tool to gain operational insights into what makes up their containers with Lumogon. Lumogon provides a transparent window into each Docker image and running container, and offers a way to collect, query and report on container application metadata.

    “Containers are the atomic units of software. But sometimes you need to inspect the particles that make up the atoms and know in what atoms exactly each particle lives,” said David Aronchick, Kubernetes product manager, Google. “We’re happy to see open solutions like the Lumogon project help users know what software is in their containers without having to change the way they build and run containers today.”

    Unlike modern orchestration tools that tend to only spin-up containers, Lumogon provides unparalleled insight into each running container and provides a historical record of all changes made through the container lifecycle. It also helps establish a new container reporting standard that allows efficient management of container infrastructure. Key capabilities of Lumogon include:

    • Insight into every container: Users can generate reports on the contents of a running container or an image without having to install special software in the container image or run a shell in a container namespace. The report contains information about the OS and all software installed in the container.
    • Centralized query tools for container fleet: Users can query the metadata information across all containers and images in an environment, making it possible for the first time to see your infrastructure in aggregate and over time.
    • Situational awareness at scale: Teams can scale queries and reports as the number of containers increase over time without having to add new tools. Information can be shared with other management or monitoring tools in your container management ecosystem to build a complete view across your entire container infrastructure.

    Instant cloud inventory and insights with Puppet Cloud Discovery
    According to Gartner, less than 20 percent of IT organizations have automation in their IT management portfolios. In order to adopt automation, IT needs to know what is already running, make sense of it, and take action based on that data. Incumbent tools might allow IT to gather massive amounts of data, but fall short of providing meaningful insights or the ability to manage systems with modern DevOps practices.

    Puppet Cloud Discovery collects and visualizes a rich set of system data to give users better awareness of the state of their infrastructure. Unlike other tools on the market that were built for traditional on-premise infrastructure, Puppet Cloud Discovery is cloud-first and is designed to model ephemeral cloud infrastructure. Puppet Cloud Discovery is delivered as a service, making it easy for users to see immediate time-to-value.

    Lumogon is available today, and a limited tech preview of Puppet Cloud Discovery will be available later this month (May 2017).

    Additional resources

    • Learn more about Puppet.
    • Subscribe to the Puppet blog.
    • Follow Puppet on Twitter @puppetize.
    • Try Puppet Enterprise for free.

    About Puppet

    Puppet is driving the movement to a world of unconstrained software change. Its revolutionary platform is the industry standard for automating the delivery and operation of the software that powers everything around us. More than 37,000 companies—including more than 75 percent of the Fortune 100—use Puppet’s open source and commercial solutions to adopt DevOps practices, achieve situational awareness and drive software change with confidence. Headquartered in Portland, Oregon, Puppet is a privately held company with more than 500 employees around the world. Learn more at puppet.com.

    Media contact

    pr@puppet.com

    — Parker Yates

  • Get Your DevOps Right With These 7 Technologies

    Get Your DevOps Right With These 7 Technologies

    Editors’ Note: As with all of our contributed articles, the views expressed in this article are of the author, not devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Due to its vendor-agnostic stance, devopsy.kinsta.cloud does not endorse any particular technology.

    There was a time when the operations team and the developers regularly were at each other’s throats. The developers were never satisfied with production code updates and the server administrators chafed at developers piling up the serve requests and circumventing the processes.

    However, the battle lines have been somewhat erased since the advent of DevOps. IT teams adopting DevOps can move rapidly from concept to production to enhance the business impact, quality and velocity of the application delivery. Many organizations are shifting to DevOps because of its high efficiency and the number of people taking DevOps training are also increasing due to numerous job opportunities in this field.

    DevOps Technologies to Know

    A number of technologies have emerged to help in the shift to DevOps, providing services ranging from the configuration management to application portability. Following is a list of seven technologies worth noting.

    Splunk

    Splunk is used for detecting and fixing issues across the life cycle of an application in real time. It allows the developers to see data from the production environments, eliminating the need to access production machines. Splunk enables DevOps processes including continuous integration and deployment.

    The Splunk platform is used for DevOps to:

    • Provide end-to-end visibility across each and every component of the DevOps tool chain.
    • Utilize the objective metrics to make sure the code meets the quality SLAs and is operational.
    • Correlate the business metrics with changes in code to obtain new business insights.

    ScriptRock GuardRail

    ScriptRock Guardrail is designed to rapidly pinpoint the differences in configurations on desktops and servers, comparing the states between systems and over time. ScriptRock Guardrail shows what has changed, helping simplify diagnostics and decreasing downtime.

    Developers who work with agile methodologies are accustomed to a test-first way of working with the unit tests, making sure that everything works as planned. As continuous delivery becomes more prevalent, the DevOps and Ops teams need to take a similar approach. This is where the ScriptRock GuardRail comes into its own, providing you the tools to construct and build infrastructure level unit tests and view the results visually, thus making it very easy to rapidly drill into the real problem and get your services running.

    ScriptRock GuardRail focuses on addressing the key prerequisites to any DevOps, and, more precisely, initiative and automation. They are described below.

    • Visibility: The GuardRail platform delivers visual configurations showing differences between like devices, configuration drift monitoring and automated visualization and scanning of network device and server configurations.
    • Accountability: Users can curate and filter configurations to generate policies that can be utilized to ratify the configurations on a continuous or ad hoc basis.
    • Automation: All the policies can be exported to Windows PowerShell DSC, Docker, Ansible, Puppet and Chef.

    ScriptRock GuardRail works with any automation tool and can be delivered as single-tenant SaaS, multitenant SaaS or a virtual appliance on-premises.

    SaltStack

    The SaltStack Enterprise Software helps DevOps organizations by organizing the systematic motion of code into production by maintaining the complicated infrastructures refined for optimal application delivery and business service. While DevOps is not a tool, it requires a tool-centric approach to enable continuous delivery. SaltStack helps to configure as well as quickly deploy the dynamic applications and general-purpose infrastructure they run on. DevOps is gaining wide popularity around the world because of the tools like SaltStack that enhances its efficiency.

    SaltStack is a cloud infrastructure tool and delivers the systems management for application configuration, cloud building, server provisioning and data automation. It is an event-driven tool and can automate the tasks within DevOps workflow and makes the operations highly approachable for the developers. SaltStack provides a common language and common way to manage the servers and thus helps to bridge the gap between Devs and Ops.

    Puppet

    Automation is the foundation for many DevOps practices. It is the key to continuous delivery and faster deployments. Automation imposes consistency across the production, testing and development environments. It makes sure users can rapidly orchestrate the changes throughout the infrastructure: container and cloud deployments, virtual machines and bare-metal servers.

    No matter where it runs, Puppet provides a standard way of operating as well as delivering a software. Users define what they want their infrastructure and apps to look like utilizing an easy-to-read common language. From there, they can enforce, test and share the changes they want to make across their data center. Reporting and visibility is available at every step of the way to help prove compliance and make decisions.

    The Puppet Enterprise enables users to test changes before deploying them to production. With Puppet Enterprise, the infrastructure is defined as code, which enables users to adopt the best practices of agile development including automated deployment and testing, and deliver the software more reliably. This is because the configurations are consistently promoted, shared and tested across all environments, from Dev laptops through test to production.

    Atlas

    Atlas was the first commercial product released by HashiCorp, provider of open-source tools that enable the efficient deployment of software-defined applications and data centers. Atlas provides visibility into the infrastructure, including virtual machines, containers and servers, in addition to service discovery and configuration management. Building on the popular open-source projects of HashiCorp such as Terraform, Consul, Serf, Packer and Vagrant, the closed-source proprietary Atlas enables DevOps across different cloud services, which include OpenStack, Azure, Google Compute Engine and AWS, and provides a dashboard for maintaining, deploying and developing applications.

    Many engineers are shifting to Atlas today for their organizations’ customer engagement platforms. Atlas brings it in one place and enables the companies to handle end-to-end starting from configuration management to container deployments across various cloud environments. Every open-source tool is fine alone, but the capability to handle and orchestrate them as a whole is extremely powerful.

    Chef

    Chef is a cloud infrastructure and systems framework that automates the management, deploying and building of the infrastructure via repeatable, short scripts known as “recipes.” But the actual strength of Chef lies in its utilization of the pluggable configuration modules(also known as cookbooks), about 2,000 of which are available through Chef community. Facebook, the high-profile user of Chef, recently open-sourced few of its own Chef cookbooks, which include its Grocery Delivery and Taste Tester testing framework, which watches a source code repository such as Git and keeps the local Chef server in sync.

    The complex tasks are automated by Chef that are otherwise resource- and time-intensive. But, more importantly, Chef allows users to focus their efforts on improving and innovating the quality of their services. It also opens the door to more efficiency and collaboration across the organization.

    Docker

    Through its containerization technology, Docker brings portability to the applications wherein the applications run in self-contained units that can be moved across the platforms. It consists of Docker Hub, a cloud service for workflow automation and application-sharing and Docker Engine, which is a lightweight packaging and runtime tool.

    Docker has revolutionized the containerization of applications enabling DevOps to package any kind of application in a lightweight environment. The packaging is done in a way as easy as installing a mobile app. Docker is considered as the most popular DevOps tool. By using docker, the developers can containerize their apps and can run them anywhere. Built on top of Linux containers, docker is a powerful ecosystem where DevOps can use many apps (available on Docker Hub) to the maximum advantage.

    About the Author / Savaram Ravindra

    Ravindra was born and raised in Hyderabad, India, popularly known as the ‘City of Pearls’. He is presently working as a Content Writer at Appmajix Technologies. His previous professional experience includes Programmer Analyst at Cognizant Technology Solutions. He holds a Masters degree in Nanotechnology from VIT University. He enjoys spending time with his friends. He can be contacted at savaramravindra4@gmail.com. Connect with him also on Twitter and LinkedIn.

  • Security Implications for a DevOps Transformation

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

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