We are at the beginning of a new year, example42 wishes all customers, partners, colleagues, friends, and supporters a healthy, successful, and happy 2021.

• Looking back on 2020
• Lookout to 2021

Looking back on 2020

2020 has been difficult for many people and organizations. Many of them have suffered due to lockdown and to local restrictions.

Just consider musicians, artists and their crews who had to cancel event after event. Or think about local small business which had to close their shops.

Others were able to continue their business and we are super happy that our customers enabled example42 to keep working.

It was astonishing to see how fast remote work options were created and how people adapted to a new way of working.

In the first few weeks of remote work we still saw people having difficulties with video conferences and how to communicate with many people attending.

On many occasions, we saw that a DevOps mindset, attitude, and behavior was super helpful. People started listening, asking questions, pushing themselves to make a meeting happen within the scheduled time.

This showed us that DevOps is one of the keys to success in IT.

Without the DevOps culture and its agile working methods, it would have not been possible for most organizations to enable new ways of working within a reasonable amount of time.

We also saw many companies moving - some for the very first time - to Open Source applications. Especially BigBlueButton or Jitsi were carefully proofread by security.

Understandably, it took the projects some time to adapt the findings.

But having hardware in a rack or a cloud account is not enough to enable teams to work fast. This is where IT automation comes into place - a core field of example42’s business.

Automation heavily reduces the time needed to deploy new systems or bring out changes with minimum effort.

Lookout to 2021

At example42, we are fans of Puppet, Terraform, Vagrant, Vault, GitLab, and many other tools which help to make IT a smarter place to work.

We appreciate all the support and feedback our customers provided to us within one of the most difficult years in modern times.

But support is something that any one of us can do easily. This does not mean spending a huge amount of money, but instead showing respect and thinking twice prior to making decisions.

Next time you are thinking about a spending: please think carefully who you want to support.

Do you want to go to a big company, run by unknown managers? Or will you go next door to a shop nearby?

Please consider supporting local, small business, these are the ones that most suffered in 2020 and these are the ones that make cities a lively place.

example42 wishes everybody a healthy, successful, and happy new year.

Please stay safe and take care of those who need your help.

Happy puppetizing,

Your team of example42: Alessandro, Jessica, Martin and Simon