Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Thousands of organizations rely on open source community builds for infrastructure automation. But if you're tasked with certifying, maintaining, and patching those builds yourself, you know the burden firsthand. The reality is that managing open source internally consumes time, introduces risk, and diverts resources from higher-value initiatives. When critical vulnerabilities emerge, your team scrambles to assess, test, and deploy fixes, all while keeping production environments stable.

The “agent vs agentless” debate usually comes up when teams are trying to choose an infrastructure automation approach that will not compromise security, compliance, or impact day-to-day operations. You need to manage a hybrid estate, avoid creating more work for already stretched teams, and ideally do it without stitching together multiple tools. That pressure often turns the conversation into a binary choice: which approach is better?

Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the act of writing infrastructure configurations as code so they can be understood, repeated, and enforced with less manual effort. IaC is also a powerful way to convert institutional knowledge into technical knowledge. It’s a far-reaching and essential part of managing infrastructure at scale, with benefits that have expanded to platform engineering, security and compliance, network administration, and so much more.

In the high-stakes world of modern infrastructure management, "move fast but break things" is not a viable strategy. As organizations scale their digital footprints, the competing demands of velocity and vulnerability have created a new operational reality. Today, the integrity of your infrastructure is synonymous with the integrity of your business. For system administrators and DevOps engineers, the landscape has shifted. It is not enough to simply provision servers and deploy applications.

We’ve seen a huge explosion of interest in DevOps over the last few years. But for people who are new to these ideas, it’s not always obvious what DevOps entails and what the benefits are, particularly in larger environments. So, what is DevOps all about? And what do you need to know to succeed? In this blog, you’ll get a breakdown of how DevOps works, its benefits, and the best practices and tools that help teams build and deploy software with speed and confidence.

In 2025, DevOps teams faced a pivotal moment. The era of treating security as an afterthought was over. Practically overnight, airtight protection became a non-negotiable requirement across every layer of the technology stack, whether on prem, in the cloud, or at the network’s edge. For many teams, this wasn’t just a technical hurdle; it was a daily source of stress.

Python is deeply embedded in modern infrastructure, but many organizations continue to run outdated Python across critical systems. Sticking with older runtimes may seem harmless, but it quickly piles up technical debt as teams spend more time maintaining fragile code and applying workarounds. Over time, that debt translates into a high financial drain.

IT compliance is a broad discipline that ensures your organization’s systems operate in line with privacy, security, and regulatory expectations. Security and compliance teams use technical controls and automation to monitor, correct, and maintain compliance across the entire IT estate. Without a solid IT compliance management strategy, your organization faces elevated risks, from security breaches and downtime to financial penalties and legal consequences.

Puppet Edge Workflows, available with Puppet Enterprise Advanced, provide the orchestration tools to define multistep workflows to run against your infrastructure. This allows Puppet experts to create workflows that Ops teams can run without having deep Puppet language knowledge or the underlying infrastructure.

Over the course of 2025, the Puppet Core team has been committed to developing secure, hardened Puppet code that our customers can rely on. As part of that shift, many Puppet platform components, including Facter, were brought under the Puppet Core model and were moved into private repositories.