In DevOps, Speed Isn’t Always the Point
The high-tech industry has fallen into a rut and seems to be struggling to get out of it. This rut is most fervently seen when talking about DevOps, but it exists across the board. We’ve fallen in love with the idea that faster is always better. That idea is provably false, and the assumption that […]
Warning Signs Your Organization Needs CI/CD
Sometimes, taking a look at a problem from a different angle makes it look different. As a recent meme showed, a six and a nine are the same marks, just viewed from different angles. I don’t know who originally created this image; if you do, drop me a line and I’ll give them all the […]
F5 Networks’s State of Application Delivery, 2017
For the last three years, F5 Networks has surveyed its users and presented the “State of Application Delivery” report. This year’s report is already a couple of weeks old, and I’ve had the opportunity to read through it. There is good information in there for “NetOps” people—those who are focused on the network but want […]
VMs, Containers, Cloud, Cluster: Scheduling Differences
Scheduling is a large part of making the data center go, and more to the point of making the virtualized (be it VMs, cloud, containers, or clustering) portion of the data center work. While there are a lot of variables to virtualization performance, scheduling impacts performance all of the time. And yet we only really […]
The One Simple Reason to Consider Clustering
As you may know, I’m pretty interested in the newest round of clustered computing these days. I’m digging in pretty deep to see how well-suited it is to the enterprise, and how it is best used/architected/implemented. There is a reason for that, and I think this graphic probably gives it away: You’ll note that “container […]
Should Continuous Deployment Be Renamed?
I’m a technologist turned into a word person. For those of you who know me, I started as a developer, learned ops and security as it was needed, and eventually my love of talking about technology lead me to writing, tech marketing and evangelism. I still develop, though; I can’t stop that—it’s kind of a […]
Lessons Learned: We’re Still Killing Ourselves with Innovation
Since the widespread acceptance of virtual machines (VMs), we’ve been on a racetrack with changing technology, with little opportunity to stop and digest lessons learned. That’s not to say organizations haven’t done a good job of learning from experience and mistakes both; rather, the lessons learned are too frequently obsoleted by The Next Big Thing. […]
Mesos: Security Awareness and Considerations
As regular readers know, I’ve been digging into Mesos quite a bit these days and, for the most part, enjoying the entire ecosystem that has grown up around it. There are some very cool possibilities when organizing servers into one massive platform for application (or micro-service) delivery. While there is a bit of a learning […]
Understanding Mesos and Its Place in DevOps
When building a house, work is done in teams. This work is managed by a foreman, supervisor, or general contractor, but let’s restrict ourselves to the teams doing finish work, and a foreman. Foreman is old fashioned, but general contractor gets long to type over and over. Assume a large enough house to warrant a […]
Mesos Usage Survey: Big Clusters, Big Workloads
Mesosphere, purveyors of DC/OS, recently released a survey of Mesos users focused on Mesos deployment information. There were some interesting results, and a few things I wish they’d dug a little deeper on. If you’ve ever given a survey, then you know that the results inevitably spawn more questions. No doubt Mesosphere has the same […]
Mesos and Its Impact on the Data Center
One of the things that many of us have been observing is that in the midst of a sea of other changes, data center architectures also are changing. By a lot. RAID array sales are down, even though unstructured data is still going up; networking is getting an application programming interface (API) makeover in some […]
‘Best’ is Relative, but Starts at the Top
Your aging mom needs a new car. You are picking it out for her because she quit paying attention to cars long ago. All you ever buy is Fords. You also always buy trucks. Do you pop off and buy your Mom an F350? Not unless she actually needs an F350 (highly unlikely, but aging […]
Datadog Monitoring and JIRA Integration
Operations uses monitoring to provide early detection of issues with systems/servers/networks. Among those monitoring options is Datadog, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud service/application monitoring tool that allows Operations to be notified of issues with their applications in near-real time. Development teams, meanwhile, use JIRA to track tickets and manage overall agile development. But what if your […]
FLAP, Part 3: Full Data Center Provisioning
In the first two parts of this series (Part 1, Part 2), we covered server provisioning and application provisioning. Knowing a bit about each of these tools is useful (although one blog is hardly a thorough evaluation of strengths and weaknesses—I strongly suggest you do more research), knowing how they work together is the point […]
FLAP, Part 2: Application Provisioning
In part 1 of this series we talked about server provisioning tools. In that post, we mentioned some of the more prominent application provisioning tools on the market with regard to integrations. This post will focus on the application layer of full layer automated provisioning (FLAP). Application Provisioning Who’s Who Application provisioning technologies most likely are […]
FLAP, Part 1: Server Provisioning
We have reached the state where end-to-end data center provisioning is a reality. It’s early yet, so there is a certain amount of work involved, but today a DevOps team essentially can turn on the automation and move on to other DevOps priorities. It takes some effort, depending upon the solution chosen, but the end […]
Counterpoint: Right-Picking the First Project to Go DevOps On
Lori and I were discussing DevOps and surveys the other day, and in what must be described a rare occurrence, we disagreed on the best path to undertake your first DevOps project. Her take is here , and well, you’re about to hear mine. Lori proposes that agile projects are the best for a first […]
It’s About What Works.
Enterprises have been working through production delays and operational inefficiencies for decades. Don’t get sucked in too deeply to the ever-present mantra of “this time is different”. There is a lot of source material out there from people in a different kind of operations that have already been through the same wringer as DevOps presents. […]
Network Engineers as Programmers? Not so fast.
It is interesting, as the triplet new waves of hype evolve – cloud, SDN, and DevOps – that we are repeatedly hearing The Voice of Reason say things like “All network engineers need to be programmers”. While this is certainly not the only voice that demonstrates what I’m talking about, an example of it is […]
DevOps’ weakness and what it does best
Every great movement has its weaknesses, be the movement social, technical, or political, there are always ways in which it falls short and steps must be taken. DevOps is not some special case that is pure, and if you’ve worked in it, you know how very true that statement is. From meetings that are a […]
Coaching DevOps Baseball
Coaching DevOps Baseball Every technology gets surrounded by hype during its maturation, and DevOps is certainly not immune to that phenomenon. If you’ve spent more than five minutes looking into it, you know that, because the current discussion sounds something like this: “All right, there’s other stuff, but it’s just support, so I want you […]