…And all Those Other DevOps Tools
When we started going through the DevOps toolchain for our new project, we found a ton of bits that normally we (and most likely you) wouldn’t pay too much attention to, because they don’t matter—until they do. Then we all pay attention. That’s why we added them to the toolchain list of options before they […]
Meet the New(ish) Pipeline
My company keeps a sample project running pretty much all of the time. Our current project (multi-target web/Android app using Java and Spring built with Gradle and Ant that we’ll call “Finder” here) is getting a bit long in the tooth, so we have been casting about for a new one over the last several […]
How Does That Stack Up?
There’s an entire class of successful innovations made up of things that people didn’t realize they needed. Things that were an obstacle they found a way around and didn’t think about until the innovation showed them an easier way. Think of things like virtualization (hardware was the bottleneck, but “That’s just the way it is,” […]
That Other Continuous: Data Protection
Looking around at things to add to our current project’s toolchain (that is one of the reasons we do these side projects; to check out all sorts of new ideas/tools/etc), and researching the company where a former coworker is the CMO, I was drawn into the resurgent world of continuous data protection (CDP). It is […]
So Many Options, So Little Time
So many language/framework options, so little testing time, that is. Recently, two projects I was working on drove me to check out a breadth of languages and/or frameworks to handle cross-platform development. While Unity and Unreal have traditionally been my game platforms of choice and I typically use Xamarin for cross-platform (though native development is […]
Yeah, You’re Doing DevOps
The Stack Overflow annual survey of developers came out this month, and it has a lot of interesting data points in it. There is a lot that I wish was different about their questions/methodology, but one thing caught my attention. Docker, Kubernetes and similar tools (Ansible and Terraform are in there at lower percentages, for […]
The State of DevOps Is Just Fine
There is a growing amount of hand-wringing about the state of DevOps; that adoption is not progressing apace, or that the full benefits of the methodology are not being realized by the majority of adherents. That we can and must do more and do it better, etc. That is just stupid. Or, my first reaction: […]
Swinging the Pendulum of IT Back to QA
I was reading Nuria Manuel’s excellent article about quality assurance (QA), and it got me thinking about the wide variety of ‘pendulums’ that impact IT. I call them pendulums because they follow the rule of “every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” and they work on fundamental truths of IT. For example, the one […]
Don’t Look at This! IT’S A SECRET!
To continue the discussion about secrets after perusing this excellent report by GitGuardian—last time I went a little nuts about the number of secrets exposed in IT folks’ personal repositories. And it is a lot. I mean a lot of secrets. But you know what is scarier than, “A lot of secrets are leaked in […]
Shhhh! It’s a Secret
In one of our regular back-and-forth breaks, Lori and I were talking shop a week or two ago, and she shared an excellent report by GitGuardian with me. Frankly, none of the information in the report was a huge surprise for me–Git is filled with information that companies probably don’t want out there, but that […]
The Forces Massing Against the Data Center
We’ve come a long way over the last few decades. A ton of stuff about IT has changed, even in the last five years. And it is true in IT that the only constant is change. We like to have control of our environment to provide the most stable platform for user satisfaction that we […]
Some Technical Debt is Self-Resolving
But don’t count on it. Fellow DevOps.com contributor Bill Doerrfeld recently wrote, “Enterprises Face Growing Technical Debt,” a great article about trends in technical debt, and it got me thinking about some of the things that have been going on in the industry over the last few years. As I’ve mentioned before, the changes underlying […]
Yes, You Do Need SCA
We often go to restaurants and treat ourselves to unfamiliar and exotic foods made with ingredients we’re only vaguely aware of. A chef and their team (or a manager and their crew) are our vouchsafe that what’s in there isn’t deadly. Most of the time, that works out just fine; but, very rarely, we end […]
Make a Plan for Test Automation
The amount of testing that we could be doing is massive. Most of us don’t look at testing across the spectrum and all-inclusively, but let’s do that for a second. We have functional testing at the code level, which is reasonably well automated already, if your shop is using such automation. Then we have integration […]
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to API Management
As API use has exploded across IT departments large and small, the need to manage APIs as independent entities—both APIs themselves and calls to them—rapidly became apparent. We have been through this cycle several times before–ORBs, DCOM, object repositories … the list goes on. There are several competing goals when introducing some management structure into […]
Cattle, Not Kittens – Revisited
The early days of DevOps were filled with pronouncements that we needed to treat our servers as cattle, not pets (kittens). For a year or so, the refrain was everywhere. And we did. We detached servers from dedicated hardware, we made spin up and spin down so easy that we just replaced malfunctioning servers (which […]
Our API Mess is Coming
APIs are the satisfaction of a long and deep need to be able to create consistent and reliable integrations between disparate systems, operating systems and datasets. As we started to use REST-based APIs, we also realized they fulfilled a previously little-addressed gap in automation. Frankly, they are a force multiplier in DevOps delivery. Early efforts […]
Dear Vendor: Letter to Technology Vendors
While I was writing my “Dear Management …” post, something was going on behind the scenes that inspired me to write another. We all have things we wish to say to vendors; this open letter picks some of the big points that they seem to invariably struggle with. Dear Vendor, We want to use your […]
Dear Management: Letter to DevOps Leaders
My occasional reminder that “Change is good, but predictability is better,” is in the form of a message to DevOps upper management. I thought it would be fun to write, and would offer a different perspective and drive than normal. Hope you enjoy! Dear Management, Too much of anything is bad. No matter the topic, […]
Next Up: Portable CI
One thing that we’re very good at in IT is breaking new ground, coming up with ideas that work astoundingly well, getting broad adoption, then standardizing them for interoperability. When a new technology (looking at you, cloud) has problems with standardization and interoperability, we find a way around vendors’ reluctance to give you freedom of […]
Languages and DevOps: Mainframe
In true DevOps fashion, I nearly forgot to cover the mainframe after saying it warranted its own blog! There is a lot going on right now in the mainframe space, so the question of mainframe language choices has several different answers. We’ve got Linux running on the mainframe, we’ve got cross-compiled open source capable of […]
Languages and DevOps: Recommendations
In light of the points brought up in these articles, what is my advice for which language to use on a given project? The same advice I have always given development teams: Use the right tool for the job. My father was a woodworker, and drilled that concept into me. I brought it to development, […]
Languages and DevOps: Network
It is fun to discuss the changes in network operations over the last couple decades. We’ve come full circle, and, honestly, ended up in a better place. Network specialists were super command-line wizards who kept us going, with few GUIs in sight. Everyone thought the next iteration would be GUIs, so network operations could be […]