Category: DevOps and ALM
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Tutorial: Running Ansible Playbooks from Puppet
Originally posted 2025-10-30 at: https://www.puppet.com/blog/run-ansible-playbooks-with-puppet-edge-playbook-runner When thinking about imperative infrastructure commands and Day 0 tasks for provisioning infrastructure, Ansible is an oft-mentioned tool that has been popular among practitioners for its easy YAML syntax and agentless architecture. You might have used Ansible to get your infrastructure started or for other…
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Build Tasks for Network Devices Faster with Code Assistance and Puppet Edge
Originally posted 2025-10-23 at: https://www.puppet.com/blog/puppet-edge-code-assist Whether you are an all-in vibe coder or AI skeptic, you probably know that most software developers are now incorporating AI into their day-to-day process. Google Cloud’s 2025 DORA report saw “the majority of survey respondents (90%) use AI as part of their work.” The 2025 StackOverflow Developer…
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Automating Network Devices with NETCONF and YANG in Puppet Edge
Originally posted 2025-10-16 at: https://www.puppet.com/blog/puppet-edge-netconf-yang-automation Infrastructure teams manage not only servers and cloud resources, but also complex network environments. Routers, switches, and firewalls…often from multiple vendors with many models and versions. The devices require a consistent configuration and strict compliance enforcement to meet enterprise requirements. Historically, network management has been…
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Expanding Your Infrastructure Automation Across the Lifecycle Using Puppet Edge
Originally posted 2025-10-13 at: https://www.puppet.com/blog/infrastructure-automation-lifecycle-edge-management Infrastructure automation is evolving… and so is Puppet! While Puppet has long been known for its strength in Day 2 operations through agent-based desired state configuration, Puppet also extends across Day 0 and Day 1 tasks. With Puppet Edge, you can target network devices alongside…
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Introducing Puppet Edge and new Puppet Enterprise releases!
Originally posted 2025-09-24 at: https://dev.to/puppet/introducing-puppet-edge-and-new-puppet-enterprise-releases-1ejf A New Way to Manage Network and Edge Devices Edge environments are expanding rapidly, yet most organizations lack visibility and control over these devices. Nearly half of network outages are caused by configuration errors, and traditional agent-based approaches aren’t practical for many edge or network…
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Tutorial: How to Remediate Vulnerabilities with Puppet Enterprise Advanced Patching
This blog first appeared on 2025-08-07 at puppet.com: https://www.puppet.com/blog/vulnerability-remediation-puppet-advanced-patching The rate at which vulnerabilities are being exploited is on the rise. The VulnCheck company, which specializes in vulnerability intelligence, found that in Q1 2025, 28.3% of vulnerabilities were exploited within 1 day of CVE disclosure. Keeping your systems up to date is…
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Puppet Enterprise: New Releases and a New Product Lifecycle
This post originally appeared on 2025-08-06 at dev.to: https://dev.to/puppet/puppet-enterprise-new-releases-and-a-new-product-lifecycle-4knn Lots of news in the Puppet Enterprise world this week! There are new releases of Puppet Enterprise (PE) 2023.8.5 and 2025.5 (PE and PE Advanced), big changes to the Puppet Enterprise Lifecycle, and a new EOL announced for Comply 2.x. Let’s…
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Developing Modules for Puppet and the Forge in 2025
This blog first appeared on 2025-07-03 at puppet.com: https://www.puppet.com/blog/puppet-module-developer-eula-faq Since announcing changes to our OSS plans as well as introducing the new licensing starting with PDK 3.5.0, the team has received questions from the community around how the changes will affect them. In this article, we’ll highlight some helpful resources about how you…
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Tutorial: Visualize Your Puppet Data in Grafana with the Observability Data Connector
This article was originally published on 2025-07-24 on puppet.com: https://www.puppet.com/blog/tutorial-puppet-grafana-observability When you manage complex IT infrastructure, it becomes critical to use tooling to understand what’s happening across all of your systems in terms of performance, reliability, and compliance. Monitoring key indicators manually is simply no longer possible at that scale. Puppet…
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Puppet Security Compliance Management (SCM) 3.5.0 and Puppet Comply 2.25.0 are now available!
Originally appeared July 14th on dev.to: https://dev.to/puppet/puppet-security-compliance-management-scm-350-and-puppet-comply-2250-are-now-available-3n23 What’s new? Flexible Java management The Comply module now includes the option to use a locally installed Java runtime, instead of the Java bundled with the CIS-CAT Pro Assessor. This enhancement is ideal for customers with specific Java version requirements or those looking…
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Welcome the Puppet Infra Assistant to the Team!
This article was originally published on 2025-06-26 on dev.to: https://dev.to/puppet/welcome-the-puppet-infra-assistant-to-the-team-1902 Your Job isn’t Easy It’s Friday afternoon and you just want to hit the weekend, but another compliance audit request just came in. Oh joy! Responding quickly to these “fire drill” requests is getting harder. Infrastructure isn’t just growing –…
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Security Compliance Enforcement (SCE) Version 2.4.0 for Linux is now Available!
✨New in this release: You can now use SCE to enforce DISA STIG controls on RHEL 9 systems. This extends the existing support for STIG compliance on RHEL 7 and 8, helping organizations meet stringent security requirements. Developed by the US Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA), the Security Technical Implementation…
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PDK 3.5.0 is Now Available!
The latest release of the Puppet Development Kit (PDK 3.5.0) is now available through Puppet Core and the Developer EULA! PDK Joins Puppet Core Puppet Core is a hardened, enterprise-ready platform built on Open Source Puppet. It offers organisations the power of the Puppet ecosystem with added benefits, such as…
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Puppet Core v8.13.0 Release Announcement
The Perforce Puppet team is excited to announce the release of Puppet Core v8.13.0! This release includes several important updates and fixes to improve stability, security, and compatibility. New in v8.13.0 ℹ️Full 8.13.0 Release Notes You can access the full release notes for version 8.13.0 at help.puppet.com
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Does GitHub Copilot actually raise bugs in code by 41%?
“Many developers say AI coding assistants make them more productive, but a recent study set forth to measure their output and found no significant gains. Use of GitHub Copilot also introduced 41% more bugs, according to the study from Uplevel, a company providing insights from coding and collaboration data.” I’ve…
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How do I get a notification when my Vercel deployment fails?
My team was working on a project together and getting lots of ‘bot’ emails from our GitHub integration to Vercel. At least, we were getting emails when the build and deploy succeeded to Vercel. But what about when the deployment fails? Everything looked fine locally, the site was working, but…
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Should I #DockerAllTheThings?
A while back I was in a discussion about whether there was a benefit for all organizations to adopt Docker. I was of the opinion that there are scenarios where it just wasn’t a fit. The more I thought about this, the more I realized that the benefits are always…
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Should we host Sitecore on IaaS or PaaS? (Jan 2020)
This started as a question on the community forums, and my answer got so long I decided to capture it here as well. In general, when you are choosing an infrastructure model the first question you need to ask is what your team is comfortable having responsibility over, and what…
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Sitecore Symposium 2019 – So you think you can DevOps?
This year at Sitecore Symposium we launched a new DevOps track, with two rooms of sessions delivering what you need for day-to-day tactical solutions, but also bigger-picture, strategic guidance. Do you want to know how to deploy your code with Azure DevOps? We got you covered. Or maybe you are…
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Are you ready for the MongoDB 3.4 EOL?
If you are running Sitecore version 8.2.x, you are running MongoDB 3.4. Unfortunately, that also means you are impacted by the announcement by MongoDB that version 3.4 will reach end-of-life in January 2020. You have some options on how you want to fix this and it sort of depends on…
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Preparing your CMS infrastructure for traffic spikes
We’re living in the days of “going viral.” Consumers move faster than ever, and businesses need to be ready to respond to sudden demand the moment it arrives—or risk losing out to competitors. The right endorsement from the right person can generate global exposure and cause unprecedented numbers of people…
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I hate best practices and so do you
NOTE: This article first appeared in 2016 on the nonlinearcreations.com blog and was migrated to Valtech’s blog. “What would you say are the best practices for [your thing here]?” I’m about to slam my head into my keyboard, but I restrain myself. It’s a simple enough question and I probably have…
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New Microsoft Planner Due Date Notifications
A short while ago I wrote about our team’s initial adoption of Microsoft Planner. At the time, we were having issues with the due dates feature because there seemed to be no way to view our schedule. A few months later, we ran into another issue with due dates. The…
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Continuous Improvement for Sitecore DevOps
Did you miss out on my Montreal SUG presentation a few weeks back? Not to worry, I got your back! I recorded a run-through of my presentation and uploaded it so you can hear my thoughts on how we can continuously improve and invest in DevOps practices for our Sitecore…
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Microsoft Planner – The task tracker we deserve
For years, I have been a dedicated user of Trello as you may have seen in some blog posts. Recently, however, my team has been using O365 and Microsoft Teams in an effort to push Teams to its limit and get the most out of the integrations Microsoft has put…
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Managing feature flags with LaunchDarkly
I had the chance to work the Sitecore booth at MSBuild in Seattle last week and took the opportunity to walk around and meet some of the other partners in the Hub. A lot of folks are doing cool things, but one that caught my eye was the work being done…
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A first look at IBM Bluemix
On Thursday evening, I got my first taste of this hip and happening Internet of Things (IoT) by attending a workshop at the Ottawa IBM campus organized by Hacking Health Ottawa. The workshop was centered on getting folks ready for a hackathon coming up in April where we will focus on…
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Trello acquired by Atlassian
If you use Trello (and there are more than 19 million of us that do) you have probably heard about the acquisition of Trello by Atlassian. While Trello will essentially still be what it is today, the team behind Trello now has some serious R&D backing. As somebody who uses the…
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Twelfth day of Christmas… Deployment memes!
On the twelfth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… twelve Deployment memes! …eleven blogs a-plenty, ten women of Sitecore, nine sessions of training, eight tweets a-tweeting, seven VSTS features, six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Last year I brought you an installment…
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Seventh day of Christmas… VSTS features in 2016
On the seventh day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… seven Team Services features! …six GIFS a-dancing, five Golden Rules! Four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. If you have been using Visual Studio Team Services, you know that Microsoft regularly releases new functionality to…
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Fifth Day of Christmas… 5 Golden Rules
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… Five Golden Rules! …four Community Sites, three Maturity Models, two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Last year I provided a list of golden rules for DevOps and this year we tackle golden rules for continuous delivery!
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Third day of Christmas… Maturity Models!
On the third day of Christmas my true blog gave to me… three maturity models! .. two Sitecore PaaS features, and Sitecore in a NuGet feed. Customer Experience Maturity Model Sitecore released a maturity model a while back to guide organizations through the various stages of engaging a customer. Great for seeing…
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On the first day of Christmas… Sitecore in a NuGet Feed
On the first day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me… Sitecore in a NuGet feed! One of the great things announced this year was the Sitecore public NuGet feed for Sitecore DLLs. This really makes managing Sitecore dependencies on a project a lot easier and makes life deploying…
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VSTS and Sitecore NuGet feeds
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! When you are setting up your Continuous Integration build definition in Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS, formerly Visual Studio Online) you will get a NuGet Restore step…
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Sitecore Production Deployments: The Big Bad Wolf
SPECIAL NOTE: This article is a lead up for my November 30th #SCUniversity session on Continuous Integration and Deployment. Register for the webinar now! Do you need to secure 14 signatures and present technical documentation just to run a script on your production database? Does it take a group of enterprise…
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Corello brings dashboards to your Trello life
A while back, Corello came across my desk as something to look into for reporting on Trello boards. It took me some time to finally get around to it, but I’m glad I finally did. If you use Trello at any scale, you have probably hit the limits of your…
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Continuous Everything: The Art of Repetition
It is very fashionable to apply a single word to pretty much ANYTHING to try to get in on the latest trend. The current ‘Whatever-Ops’ trend (MarketingOps, ChatOps, OpsOps) is one such example. For a while, though, we’ve been having the word ‘Continuous’ thrown in front of a whole lot…
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TeamCity FTP plugin 501 error: Cannot accept argument
While investigating options for deploying Sitecore to Azure, I found a TeamCity deploy plugin that supported FTP (among other things). Unfortunately, after trying to get it up and running I ran into the following 501 error while using FTPES (explicit FTPS): “Failed to upload artifacts via FTP. Reply was: 501…
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TDS Custom Post Deploy Actions
With the release of TDS 5.5, deployments now support post-deploy actions with a few out of the box options. However, you can even add your own custom actions into the flow. With a little help from Hedgehog Sitecore MVP Sean Holmesby (Thanks Sean!), I was able to get this working…
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Fifth Day of Christmas… Five Golden Rules
On the fifth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Five Golden Rules! Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Today I offer you some best DevOps practices for your delivery team. Do, or do not. There is no…
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Fourth Day of Christmas… Continuous Integration tools!
On the fourth day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Four CI tools, Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. We all love checking out tools, so here are four Continuous Integration applications you can put under your tree this Christmas!
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Third day of Christmas… Powershell Scripts!
On the third day of Christmas, my true blog gave to me: Three powershell scripts, Two Keystone merge tips, …and a placeholder rule in the content tree. Let’s unwrap those scripts!
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Can I have my DevOps Fluffy with a side of Culture?
Wednesday afternoon, while at the DevOps East Conference, I attended a Continuous Integration (CI) session delivered by Chris Riley (@HoardingInfo). Chris was sharing his past experiences with CI and how to best roll it out to all types of organizations. I particularly liked his suggestion of putting the QA team front and center,…
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Sitecore DevOps: Scaling content deployments
When a solution is in operational support, handling ongoing changes in the Sitecore database can be challenging. System admins and content marketers need to be able to make changes in production authoring, the maintenance team needs to make quick fixes through all environments, and the development team needs to be…
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Can Trello Gold enhance your Scrum board?
A long time ago, in a blog post far, far away, I explored the use of Trello’s agile task tracking toolset to create a Scrum board for developer implementation. This has worked well for me over the years, especially when a project needs a little more structure than Kanban sometimes…
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Automate your server updates with OPAS and get some sleep at night
This week I got to see a demo of Infront’s Orchestrated Patch Automation Solution (OPAS). The software promises to automate away all the manual steps that operational staff need to perform to update servers and then validate that they are healthy after the update. This could put an end to…
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TDS “the package builder failed” after project rename
This is a quickie for anybody using Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) and encountering the mysterious “The package builder failed” error. In my scenario, the builder fails and informs you to check the build output log, but there are no build output log details. This makes debugging the issue rather difficult……
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Visual Studio Online: Project Renames and Fields on Cards
I was not surprised that a lot of news came out from Microsoft this past week during their Build event, but some of the changes announced specifically for Visual Studio Online (VSO) were very nice. The first announcement brought us the much sought-after team project renames. The second announcement was the…
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4 metrics to measure DevOps improvements
This week I wrote on the Nonlinear Digital blog a piece on DevOps metrics. The goal was to give organization’s 4 easy metrics that they can track to see whether or not the changes they are making to their tools and processes are improving their overall flow through development and operations…
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Using TDS with Visual Studio Online build server
Recently I needed to get builds running in Visual Studio Online (VSO) that contained Team Development for Sitecore (TDS) projects. Since I cannot install the TDS software on the VSO build server, I needed another way to get these projects to compile with a VSO build definition. The following blog post has…
St-Cyr Thoughts 