No Excuses: Lock Down RDP
We’ve been at the “everyone working remote” thing for months now, and still there are horror stories of people being attacked via Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP). Early on, it was understandable if not acceptable—but we’re not early on any more. During the rush of doing whatever it took to help people work from home, exposed […]
Training and Certifications: Get It, Don’t Sweat It
At my company, we’re pretty big on continuous learning. It’s not so much which corner of tech you are learning about, as that you are expanding your professional horizons. Knowing that many of you are the same way, I thought I’d offer some insight into the state of online education and online certification in the […]
Keys to the Kingdom: Protect Your Server from Hackers
Automation and DevOps undeniably improve the agility and responsiveness of IT. Most of us have taken up at least a bit of the wave of automation that DevOps and Agile have brought to our door, and many are far along on their DevOps journey. But every once in a while, we need to look back […]
In IT, Purity Is Not Necessarily a Virtue
Throughout the history of IT, we’ve had our share of purists. OS purists, language purists, etc. The stark one was the “That is not Object Oriented Programming” crowd. While the poster-children of IT purity, we don’t really hear from them anymore—and thank goodness for that. But a new crowd has reared its head in DevOps […]
DevOps Institute Upskilling the Enterprise
DevOps Institute released its annual Upskilling the Enterprise survey and the results are as interesting as last year. The organization of DevOps teams and its interaction with speed/success was one area that intrigued me, and sent me off looking for more information on the topic. This led me to this interesting site that does a […]
We All Have to Have Standards
I was working on an e-book recently about the state of the market for certain DevOps toolsets, and got really interested in how standardized organizations are becoming. We have been on this roller coaster of changing technology and different teams making different choices in language, libraries, platforms and toolchains. We all knew that couldn’t go […]
How to Properly Approach Automation
Imagine if you backed out of your driveway, tapped the gas and BAM! You are at work. Nothing to worry about along the way, no traffic congestion, no other cars to worry about, etc. That is, unfortunately, how many of us approach automation. “Fire and forget” is real, until a problem crops up. I could […]
COVID-19: Don’t Sacrifice DevOps
Like everyone else, I’ve been following COVID-19/Coronavirus issues. My focus is more on the IT impact of the disease and its status as a pandemic. Let’s start by saying it isn’t the end of the world. Yes, it’s serious. Yes, it will be disruptive. Yes, those impacted by the worst aspects of the disease will […]
You Still Have to Make Time for Maintenance
I’m going to take a side trek today into home computing with applicability to IT. Bear with me. We maintain a pretty complex home network, as home networks go. With three NAS servers, a small one-box SAN, some web servers and connections to several hosted environments. We both work from home, and my business is […]
The Right Toolchain Is the One You Build
One of several iterations that IT likes to go through is corporate standards for technology versus best tool for the job. We like to have standardization because it allows staffing portability between projects, but we like right tool for the job because from the moment you choose a standard, competitive factors and changes in needs […]
Never Ignore the E-Factor
When cloud burst upon the scene, we were treated to wild-eyed prognosticators telling us about the death of the traditional data center. This is a trend in IT that you would think we’d learn from, but we repeat every couple of years. 4GLs, no, XML, no…Were all going to end development, and yet here we […]
Is Agile Methodology Right for Your Project?
I’ve read a few articles of late that have declared the end of Agile development. They are interesting reads for the most part, and they make some interesting arguments, but I see none of them as compelling. I do, however hope that this is the beginning of applying “Right Tool for the Job” to how […]
Pendulums and DevOps
I have long noted the trend of pendulums in IT, particularly in organizations with longer histories. Centralized IT will be achieved, its weaknesses noticed and a movement will begin to decentralize. Decentralized IT is achieved, and people remember its weaknesses, causing centralization. The same is true with speed of delivery versus quality. Faster will be […]
API Security in DevOps: Are We Too Comfortable?
Postman performed its annual survey of developers, and as this survey and many other surveys have shown, developers are generally comfortable with the level of API security that their organization has implemented. This has been a consistent trend, with most developers being comfortable that they are protected. The problem is most organizations also put API […]
Don’t Expect Miracles
Let’s run some fun scenarios to start this one off, shall we? “We’ll decide what language to use at a meeting next month. Until then, get to writing code!” “We might deploy internally, though Azure is a strong option, and we’ve discussed GCP. Now get operations up and running, we’ll tell you when we’ve decided.” […]
App Mobility Is the New Use Case
Selling increased investment in DevOps is not always easy. It takes time to implement, resource away from other projects and inevitably there is cash outlay. If not done carefully, it also appears to introduce chaos, something most of us in IT strive to avoid. But the benefits, at this point, are easy to document. Plenty […]
Moving Things Around: The Acquisition of Protego
I received a note from Protego Labs’ vice president of marketing about Check Point Software acquiring Protego. We see a fair number of acquisition announcements, and usually don’t write about them–though we read them and stay abreast of industry happenings. I used to follow Check Point, and haven’t looked into what they’re doing in a […]
The Use of Feature Flags in Code: Too Many Flags?
It is interesting to watch the growth of an idea over time. The idea of using flags in code to do different things is as old as programming itself. Old-school configuration files used them, and they worked, so they were adapted. Thing is, given an idea that works, humanity inevitably takes it too far, and […]
DevOps: Get the Basics Right to Avoid Costly Mistakes
It is a truth of both agile and DevOps that speed is of the essence. This is a relative statement—some apps/portfolios/orgs envision speed completely differently than others—but if you are releasing more frequently than you were in the past, thanks to DevOps, that’s kind of the point. Yet, we see a whole selection of things […]
Oracle v. Google and Its Impact on APIs and Code
What, if any, impact will the Supreme Court’s rulings on Oracle v. Google have on the industry at large? TL/DR: It is unlikely to impact the vast majority of us, vendor and enterprise developer alike. Disclaimer: I am a technologist, not a lawyer. I have done some research, and talked to lawyers, but all that […]
IoT, AIOps and OMG!
The task of keeping networking straight while expanding the definition of network to include both physical and virtual networking has fallen heavily upon the op-centric side of DevOps–or what I like to call devOPS. What is defined as networking has grown, sometimes at a ridiculous rate. While the terms are familiar, how you manage them […]
An Embarrassment of Riches
History says people rarely appreciate what they have in the heat of the moment. Our highly connected and high-speed world is no exception to this rule. The things that frustrate us are in our faces, while the things that make nearly everything better/safer/faster are taken for granted. That is every bit as true in IT […]
Optimism Matters and so Does a Sense of Wonder
I’m a terrible video game player. For as much fun as people have with me at the table for Table Top RPGs (TTRPGs), I’m a pain when playing video games. As a guy with a masters in computer science, and years of experience ranging from embedded drivers to enterprise architecture, I see bugs or bad […]