Start Automating Now
A bit of feedback I received from last week’s post is that I didn’t provide any background, I just jumped right in with examples. So let’s take a step back and talk about the bigger picture. It is always a surprise to me when I talk to enterprise friends and associates and hear that automation […]
Automation Relation
One thing that is absolutely true: This latest iteration of IT improvement is about automation. Whether making DevOps more automated, working on any of the various “X-as-code” movements or implementing AI, the idea is to create what one vendor portrayed as a “human-free zone.” A space where automation does everything that needs doing. And the […]
Things We Should Acknowledge, Part Two: Skills Are Less Relevant
This is perhaps the toughest issue for all of us to acknowledge: The longer you are in the space, the more skills you have filled out on LinkedIn (or wherever you are tracking your career for HR reps to look at) but the skills you possess today are, by definition, a subset of the skills […]
The Right Tool for the Job: Alerting Edition
In high-tech, we have a terrible predilection for finding a good tool and abusing it until we hate it. I’ve written several “Use the right tool for the job” articles and posts over the years, most notably an examination of trying to make one programming language (or another) into an all-purpose solution. We’re thankfully past […]
Things We Should Acknowledge, Part One: Hiring Sucks
I was talking to some friends about hiring the other day, and a common thread seems to run through all of their hiring activities: It is hard to find “good” DevOps people. This thought got me thinking that we assume a lot in DevOps, and that we should stop assuming and openly discuss those things. […]
Modern DevOps is a Chance to Make Security Part of the Process
I’ve mentioned before, and many of you have lived through, the slowly changing beliefs around DevOps versus security. We are past the days of “Security slows us down” and into “How can we bake security into the development process?” which is essential. Indeed, I would say it’s more essential every day as the number of […]
Raise Those (Feature) Flags
I’ve written about feature flags before, but I think it’s time for a solid bit of advice: “If you are not yet using feature flags for DevOps, it is past time to reconsider.” I say this because feature flags have been a slow-growth item, with a few spikes here and there in usage, but mostly […]
In DevOps, Chatbots are a People Problem
By now, you are undoubtedly aware that you can call up a chatbot or install an AI assistant into your IDE and generate entry-level code and deployment scripts. Indeed, if you just go to a site like ChatGPT and enter “generate Python code to do X” where X is something you need to be done–or […]
Managing Risk
We have built some beautiful toolchains that crank out a finished product on the fly without needing anything close to the level of intervention that was historically required. The most advanced organizations on an automation journey could change a line of code and then wait for the new version to hit production without doing a […]
Back to Basics
We here at DevOps.com do sometimes suffer from The Curse of Knowledge. We write about DevOps regularly for an audience that is doing or managing DevOps. We assume knowledge, but there are still a fair number of people and organizations who are unclear about some of the terminology/technology that we talk about. So if you […]
We Are Living in an Ephemeral World
We are lucky to live and work in the times that we do. Oh, we have our challenges, and I talk about them a fair amount here on these pages. But the things we can do in IT today have not been possible in the past, and the change isn’t over. Soon you will be […]
Looking Ahead, 2023 Edition
DevOps is in a perpetual state of change that keeps all of us engaged and busy, but makes a mess of things overall. Do you cloud-first? Are your APIs GraphQL yet? Are you doing SDN to connect to the VPN so you can put files on the CDN and build closer to the market? Sorry, […]
Don’t Hire for Product Expertise
We all know the jokes about talent recruitment that “requires a century of experience in AI/ML.” With the number of layoffs, no doubt this type of approach will get worse. But that is not generally a tech problem; it is an HR problem–the problem of having people hire in tech that aren’t active in or […]
Complexity is Still With Us
We have come a long way and had a lot of improvements over the years, but we still struggle with the ability to simplify things faster than we create complexity. It isn’t enough that each new wave of Really Important Bits™ comes with its own issues and layers and complexity; we also haven’t been cleaning […]
Are We Delivering?
I had an interesting conversation today where I was told, “We do great with CI but terrible at the CD part.” My immediate reaction was to point at all the great CD activity going on in vendor space right now. But as I stopped to ponder, I realized that we’re doing all of that great […]
Product Evaluation Discussions
Instead of doing a predictions blog like 99% of the punditry, I figured I would do an awareness blog to wrap up 2022. Every year, you deal with a wide variety of people trying to tell you about products that may (or may not) be useful to your IT efforts. Some of the products even […]
Best of 2022: CI/CD is the New Lock-In
As we close out 2022, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022. Welcome to 2022! Let’s start this year’s blogging off with a bang, and point out that we are in the process of creating the biggest […]
Best of 2022: Return to the Office? Nah.
As we close out 2022, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022. I was watching Charlene O’Hanlon’s interview with the CRO of Rollbar, discussing the slow growth of “return to office” policies. High-tech, because we are more […]
It’s a Toolchain!
I was talking with some friends the other day, and we got to discussing how inaccurate the word “toolchain” is. We pundits–and even a lot of marketers–use the word toolchain regularly and, while it’s not a terrible encapsulation of what we’re doing, it is, at best, a hasty generalization. There are a lot of reasons […]
We’re Doing More Less Development
My roots are in software development. I’ve written tax software, SmartGrid firmware and servers, enterprise integration code for many developed and purchased servers, mapping software, cell phone firmware—the list goes on. The point is development is in my blood. When I look at something that impacts software development, I look at it through a practitioner’s […]
Faster and Better Testing?
The whole concept of Agile and DevOps was to iterate development faster and deliver results in a more timely manner. As we learned more about both methodologies, processes and policies were put into place that improved the quality of what was created. Early ideas of quality like, “We can just do another iteration,” still exist, […]
What Customers Need From Sales and Marketing
There are plenty of historical examples of good solutions being buried by inadequate or outright wrong sales and marketing tactics. As an analyst, I often talk to the marketing, marcom or AR/PR department of a company and think they could do their solution more justice. Normally, it is little things; sometimes, not so much. But […]
Shift That [bleep] Left
Seriously. The more you can shift things like security and test to the left, the more responsive the DevOps process will be. Some things are better shifted right … But only while solving the problem with shifted-left work. A good example is blocking zero-day attacks proactively while the development process fixes the code to stop […]