Puppet Takes Home Top Open Source Honours at 2017 DevOps Excellence Awards

Puppet, the configuration management and infrastructure automation platform, was awarded Best DevOps Tool for Open Source at the 2017 DevOps Excellence Awards. The ceremony took place on Wednesday, 22 March 2017 at the London Marriott Hotel in Mayfair, United Kingdom.

The annual DevOps Excellence Awards are judged by the editorial team at UK technology publication Computing, alongside a panel of independent industry experts. The awards recognise outstanding innovation in solutions, services, and individual contributions across the DevOps landscape.

Why Puppet Was Recognised

The Best DevOps Tool for Open Source category specifically acknowledges tools that deliver tangible value to the open source community. Puppet was recognised for its work in designing and maintaining a platform that helps organisations automate infrastructure provisioning and software delivery workflows — reducing manual effort, cutting operational costs, and accelerating deployment cycles.

Puppet’s open source project, available on GitHub, allows teams to define infrastructure as code using a declarative language. This approach enables consistent, repeatable configuration management across on-premises and cloud environments, which aligns closely with core DevOps principles around automation, version control, and continuous delivery.

Reaction from Puppet Leadership

Marianne Calder, VP of EMEA at Puppet, commented on the award:

“We are honoured to be recognised in the DevOps and Open Source space. The Open Source community is one we are grateful to be part of and we will continue to strive towards creating and developing new innovations for the better. At Puppet we believe in hard work and that is key to our success at these awards. We look forward to delivering real benefits as we build a stronger foothold in the U.K.”

Marianne Calder, VP of EMEA, Puppet

About Puppet

Puppet is headquartered in Portland, Oregon, and offers both open source and commercial editions of its automation platform. At the time of this award, the company reported more than 35,000 organisations using its solutions globally, with adoption across a significant share of Fortune 100 companies. Puppet’s platform is designed to help engineering teams adopt DevOps practices, maintain situational awareness of their infrastructure, and manage software change reliably at scale.

For teams evaluating configuration management tooling, Puppet remains one of the established players alongside Ansible, Chef, and SaltStack. Its declarative model and mature module ecosystem — available through the Puppet Forge — make it a widely used choice for large, heterogeneous infrastructure environments.

Visual Studio 2017 Officially Released on March 7

After a series of release candidates, Microsoft officially launched Visual Studio 2017 on March 7, 2017. The date was deliberately chosen to coincide with the 20th anniversary of the original Visual Studio release in 1997 — a version that shipped with tools including Visual J++, Visual FoxPro, Visual InterDev, and Visual C++.

The release represented a major milestone not just in terms of age, but in the scope of changes Microsoft made to modernize the IDE, improve startup and solution-load performance, and expand support for modern development workflows including containers, cloud, and cross-platform .NET development.

What the Final Release Candidate Introduced

The last release candidate before the formal launch (build 26206, released February 7, 2017) focused primarily on stability and bug fixes, but it did include two notable feature additions:

• dotnet new Templating Engine (.NET Core): The final RC included integration of the new dotnet new templating engine for .NET Core projects. This allowed developers to scaffold new projects from a wider range of templates directly from the command line, improving the CLI-based development experience.
• Redgate SQL Prompt: Microsoft bundled the Redgate SQL Prompt into the release, providing IntelliSense-style code completion for SQL queries and scripts. This was a notable addition for developers working with SQL Server databases directly inside the IDE.

Bug Fixes in Build 26206

Beyond new features, the final RC addressed a range of bugs across several areas:

VSIX and Extension Projects

Developers building or maintaining Visual Studio extensions (VSIX projects) received targeted fixes in this build. Issues affecting debugging and build pipelines for extension projects were resolved, making it more reliable to develop and test extensions against the new VS2017 host.

.NET Core and ASP.NET Core

Several bugs affecting .NET Core and ASP.NET Core project workflows were fixed, including:

• Problems saving project files correctly
• NuGet package restore and resolution issues
• Bugs in the .NET Core command-line tooling integration

These fixes were important given that .NET Core support was one of the headline features of VS2017 and was still maturing at the time of release.

How to Get Visual Studio 2017

At the time of the release candidate, Microsoft offered two upgrade paths for developers:

1. In-place update: Developers already running an earlier VS2017 RC could update directly from within the IDE using the built-in update notification.
2. Fresh installer download: A standalone installer was available from Microsoft’s official website for clean installations.

VS2017 introduced a new modular installer that replaced the monolithic setup experience of previous versions, allowing teams to install only the workloads and components they actually needed — significantly reducing install size and time.

Why VS2017 Mattered for DevOps Teams

For DevOps and platform engineering teams, Visual Studio 2017 was significant for several reasons:

• Faster startup and load times: Microsoft made substantial performance investments, reducing the time to open the IDE and load large solutions.
• Improved .NET Core tooling: With .NET Core becoming the primary target for cross-platform and containerized workloads, better tooling integration mattered for CI/CD pipeline reliability.
• Docker and container support: VS2017 improved integration with Docker tooling, making it easier to develop and debug containerized ASP.NET Core applications locally.
• Live Unit Testing: Introduced in the Enterprise edition, this feature ran unit tests automatically in the background as code was edited, shortening the feedback loop without leaving the editor.

Further Reading

Full release notes for VS2017 RC build 26206 were published by Microsoft and detail every change included in that build. Developers evaluating the release or maintaining extensions should consult the official Microsoft documentation for the authoritative list of breaking changes and API updates.

The IT Profession Is Transforming

Constantly evolving technology is reshaping what it means to work in IT. Traditional, siloed roles — network administrator, storage administrator, systems administrator, database administrator — are being replaced by broader, more fluid responsibilities. The forces driving this change include the mainstream adoption of cloud computing, the rise of automation and machine-based technologies, and the spread of DevOps culture across the industry.

IT professionals who want to remain relevant must adapt. That means developing cross-functional skills, pursuing updated certifications, and learning how to communicate the business value of technology decisions to leadership — not just to peers on the technical team.

The Rise of the IT Generalist

The ability to rapidly learn new IT concepts and apply them in practice is becoming one of the most valuable attributes an IT professional can have. As workplaces grow more interconnected — through hybrid cloud environments, microservices architectures, and API-driven platforms — the rigid boundaries between IT disciplines are dissolving.

Deep expertise in a single technology is no longer sufficient on its own. Employers increasingly value professionals who can:

• Work across cloud, networking, storage, and application layers
• Bridge the gap between development and operations teams
• Understand containers and microservices, not just traditional infrastructure
• Translate technical decisions into business outcomes for non-technical stakeholders
• Act as IT liaisons between engineering teams and senior leadership

This is the profile of the modern IT generalist: solution-focused, adaptable, and capable of operating in hybrid and multi-cloud environments alongside automation tooling.

Automation and Machine-Based Technologies Are Changing Daily Responsibilities

Bots, intelligent monitoring systems, and automated workflows are taking over many of the routine, repetitive tasks that IT professionals once performed manually. Provisioning servers, applying configuration changes, monitoring system health, and responding to common alerts are all increasingly handled by automation tooling — from Ansible and Terraform to AI-driven observability platforms.

Rather than eliminating IT roles, this shift is elevating them. As automation handles lower-level operations, IT professionals move into more strategic positions:

• Evaluating and selecting automation tools that best fit the organisation’s infrastructure and security requirements
• Designing governance and oversight frameworks for machine-driven processes
• Advising leadership on which technologies to invest in and how to measure their return
• Owning security and monitoring for the automated pipelines and systems themselves

In practical terms, an IT professional who previously spent hours manually patching servers now needs to understand how to write and maintain the automation scripts — and audit them for correctness and security vulnerabilities.

DevOps Is No Longer Optional

DevOps is not a tool or a job title — it is a culture and a set of practices that brings software development and IT operations into a continuous, collaborative feedback loop. The core idea is that the teams who build software and the teams who run it should share ownership, share visibility, and work from a shared understanding of how the system behaves in production.

For IT professionals, adopting a DevOps mindset means:

• Participating in cross-functional teams rather than operating in isolation
• Treating infrastructure as code (IaC) using tools like Terraform, Ansible, or Pulumi
• Instrumenting and monitoring systems proactively, not reactively
• Contributing to CI/CD pipelines and understanding deployment processes
• Taking shared responsibility for the reliability and performance of production systems

Companies adopting DevOps practices see measurable improvements in deployment frequency, mean time to recovery, and overall software quality. IT professionals who can work within — and help build — these collaborative structures are in high demand.

Certifications and Continuous Learning Are Back in Focus

With new skill sets in demand, formal education and certification are re-emerging as important signals for employers. In particular, certifications related to the following areas are increasingly valued:

• Cloud platforms — AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud all offer structured certification tracks from associate to professional level
• DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) — including certifications from the DevOps Institute and platform-specific training
• Container orchestration — such as the Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) and Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• Security — with cloud-native and DevSecOps security disciplines growing rapidly in importance

Beyond formal certifications, IT professionals should build habits of continuous learning: following industry publications, participating in open-source communities, and regularly experimenting with emerging tooling in lab or sandbox environments.

IT Professionals Are Now Strategic Business Partners

Perhaps the most significant shift is cultural. IT professionals are no longer confined to the back room. They are active participants in business strategy — helping leadership understand what technology investments make sense, what risks need to be managed, and how digital infrastructure enables competitive advantage.

This requires not just technical fluency, but communication skills. An IT professional who can explain the cost-benefit tradeoffs of moving a workload to a managed Kubernetes service — in plain terms that a CFO or CTO can act on — is far more valuable than one who cannot bridge that gap.

The road map is clear: stay adaptable, invest in cross-disciplinary skills, build fluency in automation and cloud-native approaches, and learn to speak the language of the business. IT professionals who do this will not only survive the current wave of transformation — they will lead it.

DevOps Moves Beyond Dev and Ops

By early 2017, DevOps had already moved well beyond being a niche methodology. Enterprises were adopting it primarily because it breaks down the silos between development and operations teams, enabling faster, more reliable software delivery and greater organisational agility overall.

At the time, CA Technologies identified three trends it expected to dominate DevOps conversations throughout the year. Notably, none of the three were narrowly about code development or infrastructure operations. Instead, they centred on testing, security, and metrics — three disciplines that cut across the entire software delivery lifecycle.

“As organisations race to deliver innovations to market, they will find that ensuring the quality, security and performance of their applications are just as important as speed.”

Richard Derdis, DevOps Vice President, Asia Pacific & Japan, CA Technologies

Trend 1: Continuous Testing

Faster release cycles create pressure on quality assurance. When testing is treated as a single, discrete phase at the end of the development pipeline, it becomes a bottleneck — and shortcuts become tempting. The result is code that reaches production before it has been adequately validated.

Continuous testing addresses this by embedding quality checks throughout the entire DevOps lifecycle rather than confining them to a single gate before release. In practice, this means:

• Unit and integration tests run automatically on every code commit.
• Test results are immediately visible to both developers and operations teams.
• Performance and regression tests are executed in staging environments that mirror production as closely as possible.
• Failed tests block promotion to the next pipeline stage rather than being deferred.

The underlying principle is straightforward: speed without quality is counterproductive. Continuous testing is the mechanism that lets teams move fast without accumulating technical debt or shipping defects to end users.

Trend 2: DevSecOps — Security Joins the Pipeline

Security had historically been treated as an afterthought in software delivery — a final review conducted by a separate team before a release was signed off. As cybercrime grew in both frequency and sophistication, this approach became untenable.

CA Technologies framed security validation as a specialised form of testing. Like functional testing, it needs to happen continuously and early — not just at the end of a release cycle. This approach gave rise to the term DevSecOps: the integration of security practices directly into the DevOps workflow.

What makes security testing distinct from standard functional testing includes:

• Dynamic requirements: Threat landscapes change constantly, so security test cases must be updated continuously.
• Specialist involvement: Security engineers, compliance officers, and sometimes external auditors need to be part of the process — stakeholders not traditionally included in dev or ops workflows.
• Toolchain integration: Static analysis (SAST), dynamic analysis (DAST), and dependency scanning tools must be integrated into the CI/CD pipeline so they run automatically.

The shift-left security model — catching vulnerabilities earlier in the development process — is now a mainstream practice, but it was only beginning to gain serious traction in 2017.

Trend 3: DevOps Metrics and Measurement

It is difficult to improve a process you cannot measure. Yet in 2017, many organisations had implemented DevOps tooling and culture without putting meaningful measurement frameworks in place. They knew deployments were happening faster, but they could not quantify by how much, or identify where the remaining bottlenecks lived.

The growing focus on DevOps metrics reflected a maturation of the discipline. Teams were moving past initial adoption and asking harder questions about optimisation and return on investment. Key metrics that began receiving wider attention include:

• Deployment frequency: How often code is successfully released to production.
• Lead time for changes: The time from a code commit to that code running in production.
• Mean time to recovery (MTTR): How quickly a team can restore service after an incident.
• Change failure rate: The percentage of deployments that result in a degraded service or require a hotfix.

These four metrics — later formalised as the DORA metrics — give teams an evidence-based view of their delivery performance. Identifying bottlenecks (such as a slow manual approval step or an unreliable test suite) becomes much easier when the data is in front of you.

The Common Thread: Balancing Speed with Quality

All three trends point to the same underlying challenge: organisations adopting DevOps primarily to move faster were discovering that velocity alone is not a sufficient goal. Shipping broken or insecure software quickly is worse than shipping good software slowly.

Continuous testing ensures quality keeps pace with speed. DevSecOps ensures security is not sacrificed for delivery timelines. Metrics ensure teams can see where they are succeeding and where they are not, so improvement is grounded in data rather than intuition.

These themes — testing throughout the lifecycle, security as a shared responsibility, and measurement as a foundation for improvement — have only grown in importance in the years since. They remain as relevant today as they were when first highlighted in 2017.