The Great Market Convergence is Coming
When you look around tech markets—almost any tech market—you can see an obvious overlap. Tons of markets that are complementary and that take different approaches to solving the same problem, or markets that have grown into each other over time. This happens in highly active marketplaces. People have great ideas and implement them but someone […]
The Problem With Security
As an IT professional with decades of experience at every level of technology and organizations—from cell phone prototyping to banking enterprise architecture, from entry-level to CTO—I can state definitively that I have spent an inordinate amount of time dwelling on and dealing with security. And I know I’m not alone. This is a common theme. […]
DevSecOps Tools: Hot Air Ahead
I, like most of you, don’t like hardcore marketing that hinges its statements on “Well, that’s technically true…” I also am not a fan of talking heads that spew predictions about the future. Sure, they’re right sometimes; that’s because we have so many people pontificating that random distribution means some will be correct. I am […]
Security Debt: Speed vs. Common Sense
A couple years ago, we had some spectacular security events that involved DevOps and Kubernetes, where the managing team simply redeployed containers whenever one crashed. It turned out that many organizations were doing the same thing, and, what’s worse, they were not talking about it because they knew it was not a long-term solution to […]
What We Don’t Know is Dangerous
Pop quiz: How many database management systems (be they RDBMS or NoSQL or even flat file) do you have running in your overall organization? Not actual databases, but management systems? How many containers do you have that are exposed to the internet, directly or indirectly? Not container management systems, because you’re only running a couple […]
Turnover, Documentation and Missing Links
When employee turnover spikes, IT in general and DevOps teams in particular need to be prepared. At the time of this writing, the stock market is roiling, and DevOps compensation is bouncing up. This has an impact on turnover because many in DevOps (and nearly all senior positions) have compensation that includes stock—stock that may […]
Sometimes, You Should Fix What Isn’t Broken
DevOps has been with us long enough now that there is a lot of legacy DevOps stuff running in all of the places I have eyes into. Ignoring items that are not actually working; those pieces that pose a serious security threat because they house vulnerabilities that have been fixed—there is a lot of “It […]
DevOps and Containers
“Works on my machine!” We’ve all had that co-worker. I have had one at pretty much every company I’ve worked for. At several jobs, it devolved into a running joke. There is a belief that containers alleviate this issue. And they may—or they may simply mask the issue. The choice is up to IT. Inevitably, […]
Where Has All the Testing Gone?
Testing has long been a problem child of IT in general, AppDev in particular, and now it is DevOps’ problem. There are things that DevOps can do to improve the chances of tests actually occurring for your application(s). Interestingly, there are some that think we no longer need testing; the argument is that because new […]
Watch Your Language(s)
Just about every organization I am familiar with today is using more languages, frameworks, libraries, etc. than they were a decade ago. Back then, most organizations were doing a lot of Java, and maybe a little bit of PHP or .NET (almost always VB.NET). Now we have Java, Python, Ruby, Go, Swift, etc. And etc., […]
No Matter How Things Change, Have a Plan
Had enough change yet? It is almost amusing that I and some other tech people had that conversation a decade ago, and since then, nothing has slowed down. Our conclusion was that, for the near future, change would be constant. That conclusion was right; I’d have to ping everyone else to see what they think, […]
It is Time to Secure Git
At this point, we’ve got a ton of experience with the bits of Git that we use. And locking down Git is well-documented. Okay, it is documented; we can say that, at least. Interestingly, much of the ‘how to secure Git’ information out there is actually ‘how to keep critical information out of Git,’ and […]
AI: It’s What Staff Crave!
If you’ve seen Idiocracy (Side note: I am not recommending the movie; I’m using a phrase from it we’ve all heard. The movie itself was a comedy not at all meant to be family-friendly when it was made, and changes in social mores since its 2006 release make it far less acceptable today), you are […]
The Life and Times of Feature Flags
A while back, I had the opportunity to look closely at DevSecOps tools (as the market currently defines them). There was a lot to like, and they are moving forward to a “Find all of the vulnerabilities, all of the time” future … Except there will be new vulnerabilities that aren’t as easy to catch […]
Best of 2021 – Hiring When You’re Not FAANG
As we close out 2021, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the twentieth in our series of the Best of 2021. Most of us are not FAANG, and we shouldn’t act like we are. Instead of using that, I’m going to use the term we used […]
Best of 2021 – Programming Languages: Choose Wisely?
As we close out 2021, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the first in our series of the Best of 2021. We’ve got decades of experience in programming and language adoption under our belt at this point, and there are a few things we can say […]
Some Change is Bad
Some time toward the end of the year, I start considering the volume of change we, as practitioners, have been under for … literally years, even decades. And I start to try and think of ways to keep you all from drowning in change. And then I write something that I hope helps you all […]
Are You Feeling the Hiring Crunch?
After years of experience, we can now definitively say one thing about information technology: There is always a hiring crunch, and it will always be better soon. I first noticed this trend in InfoSec years ago. Everyone was short-staffed and looking for available candidates. Everyone wrote their recruitment text like there was no shortage and […]
How Dispersed Can We Be?
It is interesting to consider DevOps from the storage perspective. DevOps in general—and specifically newer development and deployment models—tried to pretend that long-term storage was not a necessary component of software delivery. In short, it appears that because there wasn’t a good answer to long-term state in stateless development models, the storage and databases that […]
Organized Architecture
I’ve mentioned IT pendulums plenty of times before, but today I’m going to use them to explore a different angle on IT: The age of containers and microservices. It’s time to ask yourself if the current architectural design of the overall product offering of IT is the best one you can afford to offer. Agile […]
Learn a Bit About AI
Every once in a while, a trend becomes broad enough that I feel the need to offer career advice. This year it will be simple: Know enough about AI/ML to be dangerous. We are past the point where not having at least a basic understanding is a good idea. Looking around the data center, AI […]
Security is About People, not Technology
Just a random thought of the day: We have the world’s best example of how many of our security woes are actually people problems, not technology problems. We all know that. We’ve all discussed it—but let’s consider this example and have a quick discussion about 2FA. Epic Games had a problem not unlike the rest […]
But What About When You Fail?
One thing Agile and DevOps definitely brought IT was a more accepting view of the whole “mistakes happen” mantra. Crashing systems is no longer a guarantee of a free ticket out the door. Indeed, off the top of my head, I can think of at least two cases where a CIO themselves checked in sloppy […]