Author: danny

We are thrilled to announce that Puppet has Best DevOps Cloud Product for Relay at the #DevOpsExcellenceAwards in London!

CentOS 8 is end-of-life: Now what? There were many reasons people came to use CentOS as an alternative Linux platform to Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). CentOS was originally built as a downstream release of RHEL. It was free to use without support. CentOS became the de facto standard for many organizations that did not want to use RHEL for production workload. It’s basically the same thing after all, just rebranded.

While CentOS was originally a community project, over time Red Hat began contributing substantially and eventually took over maintenance of the linux Variant. This allowed them to shift the direction of the CentOS project, much to the dismay of its users — especially those who rely on it for their production workloads.

With the shift to “Stream,” Red Hat has moved CentOS 8 from being a downstream release (built after RHEL) to an upstream release (built before RHEL). This means that instead of a stabilized release, CentOS Stream is now somewhat of a development/QA release, which is unacceptable for production system use across most organizations.

With all the vulnerabilities in the wild, it’s simply not an option to leave these systems as-is. There are several options available including re-installation to a new OS, updating to CentOS Stream 8, or migration to another downstream RHEL variant (of which there are many available today).

CentOS 8 is end-of-life: Now what? Read the whole article here …

Happy birthday to Zimbra email! Do you think… “Bo👀ring!” when thinking Email? Email exists 50 years!

Email is the life of the party and the future of work. Email isn’t just email anymore. It’s all about productivity…

Celebrate with Zimbra, world leader in secure, private, business email & collaboration.

Join the party here.

Red Hat is still Red Hat. You’ve heard Paul Cormier say it over the past two years. Now, Gartner echoes this sentiment.

You’ve heard me and other Red Hatters say this many times over the last two years. We’ve proven that we’re leaning into that promise time and time again, not only with our words but with our actions. Our neutrality as the open hybrid cloud company is important not only to us but to IBM as a whole. This is how we help our customers connect and scale all clouds and applications. 

We’re not the only people who believe this. In the 2021 Gartner Vendor Rating: IBM report, IBM received an Overall “Positive” Rating. IBM acquired Red Hat in 2019, so this is the 7th consecutive time that we’ve received a “Positive” rating, including our prior ratings. Per our understanding, we were evaluated separately from IBM, which in our opinion is an acknowledgment of our neutrality and strategy, thus making it potentially the most meaningful.

This rating is a reflection of our open hybrid cloud portfolio that provides choice and flexibility to our customers as they work to build and scale IT systems. There’s no single right answer for every customer, which is why our mix of self-managed products and managed cloud services deliver the right composition whether organizations are developing new or modernizing legacy applications. 

I am so proud of what Red Hat has accomplished this year, and as I look into the future, our path is bright.

Compliancy?

During my tenure at Puppet, I’ve learned that almost everything we do is focused on two things. This is eliminating soul-crushing work, and the never-ending desire to solve really hard customer problems. Couple those with the positive and energetic attitude of the Puppet team, and we’re bound to have a profound impact on our customers. But I really believe we’re onto something here… Puppet’s journey into Continuous Compliance, our newest solution, carries on this theme.

Puppet on the rescue!

Customers have used Puppet for compliance long before Puppet Comply Even prior to the CIS Compliance service launched earlier this year. That’s because Puppet Enterprise allows our customers to take a model-driven approach to configuration management. With PE, customers can define how a system is supposed to look, so that when it gets deployed, it’s automatically configured to the desired state. If the defined configuration changes, Puppet reverts the system back to desired state, eliminating the problem of configuration drift. That’s awesome.

Naturally, this approach to configuration lends itself very well to compliance. I can define how a compliant system looks based on regulatory frameworks and internal security policy, and have PE enforce it. This keeps me automatically and continuously compliant. While Puppet Enterprise is great at enforcing compliance with a defined policy, it doesn’t help you understand HOW compliant you are. There are still some missing puzzle pieces: What’s my overall level of compliance? Which systems are out of compliance, and what do I need to remediate? That might be okay for some, but it’s not okay for most.

Our customers have asked us to provide visibility into their compliance status because defining the model isn’t enough anymore. Companies have entire programs, teams, and resources dedicated to managing compliance programs, and all of the processes and activities within them. They need to have solid programs, and they need to be able to provide proof of compliance. I once heard a customer refer to this as the burden of proof. It’s serious stuff.

Read more on the Puppet blog.

Find out what Puppet training is available @ Open-Future.