Know What You Want and Need
Over the years, what we purchase from vendors has changed significantly. It used to be that IT would define a need, go out and find a bit of software to solve it, install and configure the software and, in most cases, spend the majority of time on the project getting it to work correctly in […]
Where Does Your Data Go?
One of the most interesting developments in security and compliance in recent years is the ability to follow a piece of data through an application from input to consumption and see each bit that touches it. For me, the reason this is so interesting is that it allows postmortems to actually determine exactly what was […]
Cloud: Why Must We Be Confusing?
When I was a kid learning to play Dungeons & Dragons (D&D), the concept of level was never confusing—though the authors should have seen that it very well could be. For those unfamiliar, D&D has many uses of the word level—character level, caster level, spell level, dungeon level and, increasingly, as time went on, monster […]
Fear of the Unknown
We IT folks are pretty fearless. Because it is newer technology, and change in IT is easier than in areas like heavy manufacturing, we are regularly thrown new tools, products and methodologies and expected to be able to master them. And we do. And it works. If your career is more than a couple of […]
SCA, SBOMs and Floodgates
Two criteria are used to determine pervasiveness of a new idea. Availability of an easy-to-understand solution and customer need. Given both of these items, what might be a market-differentiating feature available in a single IT/DevOps market becomes a wave of options in multiple markets that an organization can (and should) choose from. What started this […]
This Has Been a Test
For nearly the entire history of application development—certainly since application development became available to a larger market with the adoption of the personal computer for expansive business use—testing has taken a back seat across most of the industry. This is not because we don’t care about code quality but because it takes resources away from […]
The Real Pipeline
I’ve made no secret of the fact that DevOps was a game-changing advance in how the business of IT was done. But people tend to get religious about the methodology and forget the point. That’s okay, DevOps has its roots in that mentality. After years of thinking bad things about the authors of The Phoenix […]
The Right Tool for the Job: Container Edition
I have written about “the right tool for the job” repeatedly. Because (again) we are absolutists in IT. My father was an antiques restorer that dabbled in flipping houses and was rather forceful about the “right tool for the job.” When I left the service and joined IT, it was something of a shock to […]
Focus on What You Can Do
Here we are in the second half of 2022 and the writing is on the wall. No matter how much budget you have had in the last few years, be it large or small, it is going to shrink. This is cyclical, and should not be a surprise. The amount of budget shrinkage may be […]
Build Once, Deploy Anywhere
This late in the game, it seems stunning to me that I have to write this, but there are plenty of you who aren’t there yet—so let’s try a different approach. A huge part of DevOps is reducing redundancy. We have cut the fat until it hurt, then refocused and cut some more. There is […]
Everything is DevOps
It’s funny how we in IT tend to be absolutists, shoving everything into the current bucket. XML was going to eliminate programming—even though it wasn’t even particularly good at data representation. NoCode was going to eliminate programming (yeah, that’s a theme, I’ll skip the other 50 or so ‘going to end programming’ cycles we’ve been […]
Who Controls Your Build Process?
We have come a long way in a short time in IT, and are currently in a ‘digestive’ state, where we take a bit of a break and prepare for the next wave of changes. Okay, not really a break, just a change in what we’re looking at. In the old days, CPU, memory speed, […]
Lock Down Your Toolchain
We have done amazing things with Agile and DevOps, increasing IT responsiveness to levels that most people would not have believed and our business counterparts only dreamed of even a decade ago. Think about it—we can check in a single source file and kick off a chain of events that involves half a dozen or […]
Filter the Firehose
We are tired. Information overload is a problem in the modern world. We hear instantly about events we never would have known about otherwise, or that we would have learned about months after the fact. Today, moments after an event, we have thousands of “professionals” analyzing it for us, a millions-strong army of amateurs telling […]
The Other Reasons for Password Management
I try not to write about ongoing work—if it is important enough to blog about then it is important enough to write about in the work product, and blog about something else. But every once in a great while, the need overrides my simple rule. After all, zealous adherence to rules is not really a […]
Quick! Define DevSecOps: Let’s Call it Development Security
For a good long while, DevSecOps referred specifically to vendors like Veracode that did static application security scanning, dynamic application security scanning, software composition analysis and some form of runtime monitoring (usually interactive scanning). Then we realized that DevSecOps was potentially a lot more than that and, like DevOps, we drove the word to encompass […]
At Some Point, We’ve Shifted Too Far Left
Those of us involved in DevOps have a tendency to see the world with blinders on. It is rather easy to fall into the “If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail” trap. We have used the phrase “shift left” with the attitude that this is the solution to every problem […]
Let Me Reiterate – Don’t Rush to Iterate
We in the DevOps world spend an inordinate amount of time talking about tools and roles—and there are always new tools and modifications of roles to talk about. Do you know what we don’t discuss as an industry? The day-to-day grind of being in DevOps. Oh, you can go to forums like Reddit and have […]
There are Few Enough Silver Bullets
I was working through this week’s blog this morning, and it was laser-focused on a narrow topic. I had examples of why too much of a good thing is bad, how absolutism about methodology is hurting the majority of organizations out there, and how to get past this issue to keep improving what IT does […]
The APIs You Really Don’t Know About
A few years ago, we were rightly warned about the amount of exposure our APIs created. A massive attack surface that often used “security by obscurity” as its primary method of protection. We’ve come a long way since then, building secrets, tokens, RBAC and even more into our API interfaces. We’re still behind in getting […]
The Scanner We Really Need
IT has scanners for everything. And by everything, I mean everything. We scan source code for vulnerabilities and data leaks. We scan apps for vulnerabilities. We scan the network for holes. We scan our cards for access … Okay, that last one doesn’t fit, but you get the idea. Know what we don’t scan for […]
Is Your Future in SaaS? Yes, Except …
The growth of SaaS—including IaaS—was phenomenal when it came and it has become somewhat pervasive. Today, there are SaaS tools in use at just about every business, large or small. From sales to marketing to customer management, there is a SaaS tool that does it affordably and well. For now. The same is true of […]
Update Those Ops Tools, Too
We’re all pretty well settled on the idea that the rate of change in IT has been on the increase over time. From the advent of VMs to Agile to DevOps to containers, the movement has been faster—and the same is true for internal development. I’m going to approach this topic from three perspectives instead […]