appOrbit: End-to-End Hypercloud
As cloud and DevOps have heated up, enterprise need for cloud portability and deeper DevOps integration have become pretty clear. The need for portability to avoid cloud lock-in has been a desire of enterprise cloud users from day one. A variety of people are attempting to address this need, but the market is still very […]
NetOps: Thorn in the Side of Continuous Deployment?
Over the last few years, we have definitely gotten continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) down. We now can maintain a relatively constant flow of deployable code sitting and waiting for the actual deployment step to take them to production. Moving to production has been the point at which caution is introduced into the system, […]
Application Release Automation: Why and Not
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 […]
Culture Change: Where It Matters in DevOps
Lori and I were in Russia in the late ’90s. It was an interesting dichotomy of life in a changing country. While we were there, the government devalued the ruble—just cut three zeros off the end of everything—to bring it into historical line with other world currencies. It was odd, because there was a mass […]
Automated Testing: Remember Security
Between continuous integration (CI) and release automation (RA), we’ve come a long way in making testing both integral and automated. This testing has allowed QA staff and developers to spend more time adding value by looking at problem areas instead of running tests by hand. Shops that have CI well-integrated into their application processes and […]
APIs: Automation is Great. So is Usability
Many developers are not so great at documentation. Ask anyone who’s been thrown into a large code base. Changes aren’t documented well, tribal knowledge thrives in the code comments, and anyone who says, “I’m confused, what does this chunk of spaghetti code mean?” is often treated with annoyance or even disdain. That is something that […]
Clean Up Those Ever-Fail Tests
One of the points of DevOps is to streamline development and focus on what is important. Things that don’t raise to a high enough level of importance end up in the category of backlog, and their tests are normally disabled or marked as “ignore results” in CI/CD tools. With CI/CD, this is a good step […]
Testing What’s Important: Keep Growing Your Test Base
In most human endeavors that take a stretch of time to complete, the idea is latched onto and people become excited about being involved. It doesn’t matter if it is building a skyscraper, inventorying a massive warehouse or even going to war. People are intrigued by the possibilities and want to get started doing the […]
Moving That Big Project to CI/CD
Any organization that has been around for more than a few years (and many who haven’t) have a massive system that would cost a fortune to replace. Most midsized enterprises have several of them. Those systems are one of the reasons that enterprises don’t adopt CI/CD at the same rate as startups. Sure, any new […]
Stop Talking About the Number of Times You’ll Deploy
It’s the late 1940s and the automobile industry is just taking off. You run one of the product marketing teams at Chrysler. Wanting to make the best of an exploding market, your marketing team says, “You’ll drive 1,200 times as much with the new Chrysler Windsor!” Of course, that advertising never makes it to the […]
One Team’s Microservices Journey and CD Growth
Dev Manager Vadim Madison published a chronicle of his team’s move from a monolithic application to a microservices model. In the process, the tools and methodologies they used for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) had to be expanded and even changed out in several stages. It’s a long read, but with the time, as there are […]
It’s About Communication, not Silos
Too often, when enterprise folks talk with DevOps aficionados, we get a loud chorus of “Culture Change” and “Take down the silos,” and frankly that scares any sane enterprise IT person. Not because they fear change, but because they fear that those of us who are fans of end-to-end DevOps have no clue what we’re […]
Test Driven Development, Continuous Test and Code Quality
We’ve gotten a lot of good out of agile development methodologies. I’m never a “One True Way” kind of person, but agile has a ton of benefits that development needed (and Ops increasingly needs). Extending that to the Dev side of DevOps is painless, since much of agile is wrapped in DevOps clothes these days. […]
It Is Not All Choice and Speed in DevOps
One of the stumbling blocks starting to show in the agile/DevOps world is that speed of delivery and developer choice are asserting themselves as the primary worthy goals. I’m a developer. I have that “look what I did” attitude when I tackle a particularly tough problem and I love it when an environment lets me […]
Think of the Future When Building Delivery
We’re in a strange state of the pendulum swing right now, where speed of delivery is king and all else seems to take a back seat. Many orgs even place quality behind speed in the claim that “we’ll get it right later,” but I’m talking about the more universal rush to deploy and the infrastructures […]
The Postman Delivers More
Most of us use Postman during API development. The company claims 3 million users, and as one of them, that number doesn’t raise my eyebrows any. But if you are like me, you’ve figured out collections, how to back up your data and perhaps looked at tests, but not done much more. As a tool […]
DevOps and Database Security
Osterman Research recently released a survey-based report on database security. The results don’t exactly instill confidence where username breaches are concerned: While more than 50 percent of respondents felt that a breach of the database would be a serious problem for their organization, 44 percent responded that it would take more than a day to […]
Using Load Balancing in Blue/Green Deployment
One of the biggest pains of automating the deployment process is that final step, when everyone agrees it is time to take the accumulated changes and expose them to the public. This process is the point at which systems go down and users find themselves suddenly cut off. Scheduling such changes for off periods may […]
Boots and Sandals: Know the Market
Boots and sandals are basically the same thing—something to protect your feet while you walk about. The thing is that they are intended for slightly different purposes. You wouldn’t wear sandals outside in the middle of a Wisconsin winter*, and you wouldn’t wear boots to your day off, hanging at the beach. The thing is […]
IoT Forcing the Coming DevOps Deluge
We can look back over the last few years and easily pick out the organizations that picked up DevOps and ran with it, forwarding the science of DevOps while benefitting the most from it. They were the large-scale, high frequency-of-change organizations. One place I worked readily called them the webmonsters, and that is not too […]
When DevOps Disrupts DevOps
As longtime readers of my blogs will know, one of my hobbies—when not writing about or playing with technology—is modeling. There is a similarity between quality tech work and quality modeling, but the brain power involved in modeling is much less, leaving me time to think about tech issues or listen to audiobooks (when I’m […]
DevOps Security: Stop Discussing, Start Implementing
Is it Strong DevOps? DevOps Security? Secure DevOps? DevSecOps? DevSecQAMktSalesOMGBBQOps? Who cares? Like a ton of people with an interest in information security, I was appalled when I read “The Phoenix Project.” Here was a book that portrayed DevOps, why it was required, how it could help and the benefits very well. But it served […]
The Right Automation Tool for the Job
My father was an antique dealer, and we did a lot of furniture repair in the workshop. All of us kids took turns working for the business as we grew up, and we learned some solid lessons in the process. One day, when I was still pretty young and very new at working on things, […]