IBM and Red Hat: Now, That’s an Interesting Combination
Like everyone else, Sunday night I got a surprise with the pre-announcement of IBM’s intent to acquire Red Hat (I might have seen it a little earlier than the rest of you, as a friend from IBM shared it as soon as it was public). I’ve been mulling this over and checking out the information […]
DevOps and Containers: A Network Divided
The growth of DevOps and containers has created some interesting split responsibility scenarios. Not that this is necessarily a bad thing, but it is something that bears watching and fixing when it becomes problematic. Today’s topic is networking. Plenty of bits have been spewed about the situation, but it persists and is even getting more […]
Automated Management with Modern Architectures
We’ve come a long way. Just five years ago, with virtual machines (VMs) and decent monitoring, I would never have considered active automated system repairs for the average organization. There were many reasons for that. Monitoring was spread out and required a lot of work to spin together. The volume of logs from monitoring was […]
DevOps Abandonment: Reasons Not to Give Up
The Never-Ending Story When a new process or methodology comes along—particularly when one gets a lot of attention like DevOps has—there always will be failures. I’m not talking about those always-present group of people who say they’ve seen this cycle before and, thus, it is just a fad; I’m talking about actual implementers who, in […]
Choose Your Toolstack — and Manage It — Wisely
Every DevOps toolstack has a control point, be it a bus, an app, a management app or whatever. Something always is in control and driving the other pieces of the architecture to do their part. It is a basic tenet of automation that jobs are mostly kicked off by something in the software hierarchy. In […]
From Thought to Leadership
Thought leadership is a term that those of us in the industry hear a lot. A thought leader is a person who has ideas/thoughts that push the edge and brings great ideas to the rest of us. Most vendors want to be seen as thought leaders—and some do, through the agency of rocking individual employees. […]
DevOps: Build a Continuous Improvement Culture
DevOps was built around the concept of continuous everything. We even use it in many of the names—continuous delivery (CD), continuous testing, continuous integration (CI)—and it is a worthy goal to want to improve the places that form bottlenecks in your software delivery systems and processes. But what about the bottlenecks in the DevOps systems […]
Portability Shmortability: Most Applications are Going Nowhere
I’m a huge fan of the idea of taking our super-duper applications and deploying them where it makes most sense. I always have been. Those of us in application development spent forever bemoaning the fact that our applications weren’t all that portable between operating systems. In fact, looking back through the history of computers, you […]
DevOps: The Things We Must Stop
Anytime there is a popular movement in technology (and I would argue any other field), people get carried away. We’ve seen it over and over, and DevOps attracts this kind of attention. In fact, DevOps caters to those who get carried away by mainstream folks screaming, “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!” That type of hyperbole pushes those […]
Continuous Delivery is Not Continuous Deployment
Every once in a while, it is worth revisiting a topic that flies under most people’s radar. The differences between continuous delivery and continuous deployment is one of those topics. While those steeped in DevOps are well-aware that software can be delivered daily (or even more frequently), deployment is less frequent, and more dependent upon […]
Microsoft and GitHub: The Sky is Not Falling
The consternation seen in some corners of the internet over Microsoft’s agreement to acquire GitHub is overblown and too early. For those who don’t follow me normally, I am a developer for Windows, Android and Linux. I am also a user of both GitHub and BitBucket. While I am an advocate, I am more of […]
Don’t Forget to Automate Cloud Security
Cloud has been around long enough, and we’ve had enough breaches stemming from unsecured cloud (mostly data objects, but other items, too) that we should know better. I cringe whenever I see a security headline along the lines of “… Unsecured S3 Bucket.” Would you publicly expose a server in your data center and not […]
Continuous Testing and Business Assurance
As development moves ever faster, continuous testing can help further reduce the risk of introducing errors In IT circles, “risk management” implies information security. But in the business as a whole, risk management is a function that spans the organization. The risk that an application will negatively impact corporate image, sales or employee morale is […]
Functional Programming: Island of Misfit Functional Programming
The age of functional programming is dawning. The hype cycle has heated up, and IT departments are getting both real and perceived benefits out of the idea that a function runs on demand only. For some, the benefits are very real. Bursty processing, or things that are frequent and quickly resolved, see a benefit from […]
Repeat Warning: There is No Silver Bullet in DevOps
As the cycle of DevOps is repeated in a growing list of organizations, I feel compelled to reiterate the warning that this is not the pinnacle. Anyone who has been around for a while knows that the current fad is not the last fad. [[Cue DevOps people screaming at my choice of the word “fad”]] […]
Watch Your Language: Behavior Driven Development
There are two basic design methodologies in the software development world: top down and bottom up. In bottom up, the goal is to piece functionality together to “build up” to the desired result. In top down, the goal is to break the problem into smaller and smaller parts until you have implementable pieces. Both have […]
Catan vs. DevOps Implementation
My family has been playing a fair amount of the board game Settlers of Catan lately and, as happens with me, I got to considering the balancing act of the game versus the balancing act of moving to full-on DevOps. Most orgs have some amount of DevOps running at this point, but most have not […]
DevOps: Role Clarity is Important
Those who talk a lot about DevOps, particularly those who talk a lot about culture change, sometimes gloss over or “think it is obvious” that some roles change more than others when moving from Dev and Ops to DevOps. I was having a lighthearted chat with a friend who works for Compuware and realized that, […]
DevOps and Low-Code/No-Code Tools
Helping out a friend, I had reason to revisit low-code/no-code solutions and poke around a bit. The industry has been relatively quiet on the topic, but changes in systems and marketing made me feel the need to offer an update on the relation of current solutions to DevOps. Low-code/no-code solutions have been a panacea in […]
DevOps: It’s an Odyssey, not a Journey
It has become somewhat of a standard practice to tell people, “DevOps is a journey, not a destination,” which attempts to convey the fact that there is no end point that is set in stone. But a journey is a well-planned, point-to-point trip, while DevOps transformation is a messy, figure-out-the-next-steps-as-you-go trip. So I propose we […]
DevOps: What a Wonderful World it Would Be
The promises of DevOps are clear. They offer faster iterations, allowing ops to keep up with agile development and make an IT organization more responsive to business needs. DevOps doesn’t make less code. It doesn’t reduce configuration files. It doesn’t eliminate deployment issues (though it might reduce them). It doesn’t eliminate testing; indeed, it creates […]
Defects: Pay More Attention to What, Less to Who
Software defects have been with us forever, and while DevOps and agile can reduce the number of defects generated, it is unlikely this number will ever get to zero for a given organization—and even if it does, it won’t likely stay there. Simply put, we’re developing increasingly complex systems on increasingly short timelines. The reduction […]
Standardization, De Facto Style
The first decade or so of DevOps had one truth to it: It was about change. Not just change in the way that IT worked, but change in the way DevOps worked—particularly in the tools space, where products and product preferences both are in flux. We’re still seeing a massive change, but increasingly the effect […]