Containers as Disposable Servers?
There is a belief in the space where containers meet DevOps that a service hosted in a container crashing is no big deal, and you can just spin up a new one. It’s not a pervasive belief, but it is common enough that we’ve all heard/read it somewhere. I think this view of the world […]
‘Let the Developer Choose the Language’: Too Much of a Good Thing
As more and more enterprises drive into the DevOps space, this is less of an issue, but you still hear stories that make one cringe. The idea of DevOps (and, by extension, agile) is to get products to market faster and spend less time managing/fixing. Some take the idea to be freedom to choose—and it […]
Persistent Storage: You’ll be Hearing More
As containers take over the IT environment, a problem that has existed since virtual machines (VMs) became popular has become more urgent: how to keep persistent storage, and keep it consistent. Just as a business designed for foot traffic of 50 to 100 people per hour does not work well when it sees 500 to […]
No-Ops: It’s Been 5 Years
As I hinted in this post, the state of no-ops is not anywhere near no-ops for most use cases. The closest we have today would be software as a service (SaaS), which handles the majority of operations for us, but still requires some interaction by operations staff. The next closest I can think of is […]
The Role of Operations in a No-Ops World
It seems that every once in a while, we in high tech get wrapped up in the next thing that will eliminate work and/or jobs. Sometimes, as is the case with DevOps, we get something that reduces redundant work and actually makes our life easier in the long run. Most of the time, however, we […]
The Cloud and DevOps: Like Peanut Butter and Jelly
Cloud is practically designed for DevOps. No matter which cloud provider you are using, each has set up systems designed to spin up/spin down on demand, has the ability to run pretty much what you need and offer APIs/command lines to achieve your DevOps goals on the infrastructure side. That means that the infrastructure side […]
With DevOps Culture, It’s Mind Over Matter
There is quite a bit of conversation about tools versus culture, and sometimes, those constantly involved in the back-and-forth forget that not everyone is so steeped in the finer points of the conversation. Tools is the easy part. There are a ton of tools available to optimize IT operations, from small bespoke products such as […]
Sometimes It is More Than Culture, It’s About Gains
Almost since the beginning, there has been a tug-of-war between whether better toolchains or increased communications were “real” DevOps. The answer to that question is, Yes. Better tools undeniably speed the delivery process and streamline operations. Anyone who claims differently is not living in the real world. Jenkins alone can make your development world a […]
Finishing the Pipeline: Monitoring, Tools, Automation and …
It is true that DevOps has grown to be the beast in the room. I’ll co-opt the “cloudwashing” term to call it “DevOps-washing” because it seems every tool you’ve ever used to develop and deploy applications now has a DevOps angle to it. For example, the Jenkins update center is kind of overwhelming. While I […]
Barriers to DevOps Culture Change
In the quest for DevOps, there are two paths organizations can take. One is to start with automation and attempt to get as much as possible out of automation tools. The other is to start with culture change and use tools to address what increased communications uncovers. Both scenarios are happening in the wild, and […]
DevOps Introduces Complexity. Really
The larger the project, the more resources are generally dedicated to it. That is true of the vast majority of fields of human endeavor. Consider building the San Francisco Bridge versus building a crossing over a stream. Or World War II versus the Spanish Civil War. The resources dedicated scale with the size and complexity […]
Understanding is Key to Achieving DevOps Culture
Historically speaking, IT has been composed of silos. This has worked out rather well over the last half century or so, as one team developed systems, another kept them running, another handled security and yet another managed the infrastructure. But it was never nirvana. Working well is not the same as cannot be improved. The […]
Configuration Files and DevOps
When DevOps appeared on the scene, configuration file management tools already existed. They weren’t used by everyone, but a fair number of organizations saw the power of configuration file versioning/management, and were using them. An interesting thing seems to have happened while DevOps evolved. Those tools are more popular, but while we’ve standardized on things […]
Continuous Deployment and Monitoring of Microservices
Continuous deployment and continuous monitoring have grown up in DevOps, and microservices have grown up as a delivery platform. While all are relatively stable concepts at this point, there are still a fair number of practitioners that are struggling with the merging of these concepts to create a holistic environment that allows for deep understanding […]
DevOps and Data Portability
You have a classic car. You’re in the middle of restoring it, and it looks mighty sweet. Paint is polished, wheels are stock, hubcaps (or spokes) are shiny, engine is completely restored to original spec. But it has no gas tank. A bit of a stark comparison, but that’s where we’re at with application release […]
Electric Cloud and the Deployment Dashboard
As my regular readers know, I started a series on companies that I found intriguing who were going to Jenkins World both late (a couple weeks before the event started), and ad hoc. That meant that companies I talked to on a regular basis came to mind, simply because I knew what they were up […]
Automic Chart Maps Out Its DevOps Ecosystem
Everyone who follows me knows that I’m a fan of XebiaLabs’ Periodic Table of DevOps Tools. It was the first attempt I am aware of to arrange things in a way that helped DevOps teams navigate the increasingly bewildering world of DevOps toolsets. In fact, my friend Colin Walker over at ExtraHop and I have […]
XebiaLabs Shows Off ARA, More at Jenkins World
In this third spotlight on companies attending Jenkns World, another worth checking out came to mind, so I am taking a look at what XebiaLabs intends to do while there. XebiaLabs is one of the leading application release automation (ARA) vendors, and has a long history of working with Jenkins, so it’s a little more […]
CloudCoreo: Get Your Cloud Security on at Jenkins World
I mentioned in a previous blog post that I’d take some more of the people pinging me about Jenkins World 2017 and post about them. One of the companies I’ve picked to highlight is CloudCoreo, makers of AWS security controls and auditing. Disclosure: My company, Ingrained Technology, has a business relationship with CloudCoreo outside of […]
Jenkins World, Training and Infostretch
I’ve talked to a fair number of vendors about Jenkins World 2017, and I’ve spent a decent amount of time lately supporting DevOps training initiatives at a variety of vendors. The thing is, the DevOps world is changing fast enough and there are enough options out there that training is not something you need only […]
Don’t Underestimate the Work
It is relatively common in human endeavor to attempt to figure out how much work will be involved in a project, and be wrong. The more complex the work being done and the organizational system doing it, the further off estimates can be. This was one of the drivers for both Agile and DevOps: to […]
NetOps vs. DevOps: New Data is Enlightening
Traditionally, we have seen development—and, by extension, DevOps—as having a less-than-cordial relationship with network operations (NetOps). Since the goals of the two groups are sometimes at cross purposes—DevOps wants access to make everything run automated, and NetOps wants to control a production environment so that it is stable—we’ve naturally talked in those terms. I’m a […]
In Determining DevOps issues, Sometimes It’s the Process
It is pretty much standard DevOps process that when a server instance starts having problems, you simply kill it and start another. This is in line with the idea that servers are cattle and there isn’t a ton of difference between them. But it creates a problem that no amount of CI/CD or automated provisioning […]