Continuous Optimization: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
Agile makes development deliver code faster. CI makes testing move faster and CD makes delivery faster, but what keeps track of the volume of change all of this introduces and delivers optimizations faster? That is the question Opsani wants you to be asking. And it’s a valid question. Optimization in a complex and constantly changing […]
Split Software Adds Feature Monitoring to Feature Delivery Toolset
One of the issues that has long plagued both development and test is determining exactly where problem code exists. The increasing rate of change that agile and DevOps have brought to projects makes this problem worse than ever because changes today can impact code from yesterday–or yesteryear. The constant flux that modern software is in […]
When Shift Right is Shift Left
In some areas of IT, we utilize the idea of shift right quite a bit. Testing and security are two areas where it comes up often. The idea is that tracking late in the process–usually while the application is in production–leads us to find more insidious issues that might have remained hidden, and gives us […]
VMware Adds Cloud Automation for DevOps
Those who follow my blog will recall that I covered (and did some work for) CloudCoreo, a cloud security and compliance start-up. What the company was working on was intriguing to me because it pulled many things into the realm of DevOps through automation at a time when cloud security was a big issue. It’s […]
IBM Extends z/OS Toward DevOps Again
A few months ago, I wrote about the release of Zowe, the first Open Source project based on z/OS. Zowe is a framework for including z/OS in your applications with less pain than we have traditionally suffered. IBM supported this project as part of its view that enterprises need to have interoperability between platforms. This […]
The Right DevOps Tool for the Job
Innovation and environment are only two factors in determining which DevOps tools are best for your organization Any time there is a movement in IT that involves a new space and new toolsets, there is sudden growth, then inevitably consolidation and, finally, a selection of tools that suit the needs of most customers. Then the […]
Alerting Consolidation: What’s the DevOps Impact?
Over the last 12 to 18 months, the monitoring and alerting piece of the DevOps toolchain has been going through some serious consolidation. Companies are bracing to compete with the world or getting picked up by larger DevOps players, making their product more appealing through integrations. In general, if such changes don’t impact your toolchain, […]
SRE: How Do You Get to Blameless?
Site reliability engineering (SRE) is the companion to DevOps. If we take my normal divisions of DEVops versus devOPS, traditional DevOps is mostly the developer side, and SRE is mostly the Ops side. This isn’t a perfect comparison, but it is a good starting point, and for this blog, I’ll run with it. While DevOps […]
How Mainframes Live On
TL/DR: Highly controlled change is sometimes the best answer. For much of my career, I’ve worked in mainframe shops. I have never worked on a mainframe team, but I have worked closely with them. I’m in Northeast Wisconsin, and at one point we had the highest per-capita number of mainframes in the world, so pretty […]
Smashing the (DevOps) Stack for Fun and Profit
Most organizations that I deal with have a similar story for the promulgation of DevOps in their data center. The story is similar for bringing in most new technology and techniques: A team that usually does a new project without any attachments—relatively small compared to projects at the center of the business—adopted DevOps from the […]
Automation: We Have Not Yet Achieved Balance
I’m going to start this week’s blog out with a very clear statement that regular readers will already be aware of: I fall on the automation side of the DevOps equation. I see DevOps as automation first, process second. The problem is getting to that “second” part. The act of automating the entire pipeline should, […]
Open Mainframe Project: Zowe Ready for Prime Time
There is a lot of interest in updating mainframe technology/interfaces across traditional enterprises. As development environments and toolsets have evolved outside the mainframe, there is a struggle to keep up—partially because backward compatibility requirements make wild changes difficult and partly because the very architecture of mainframes is different. There have been several fragmented efforts over […]
APIs and DevOps
As always, there are interesting trends in DevOps, and I wanted to point out one that is starting to bother me: the “API economy,” and how it impacts DevOps decision-makers. Traditional infrastructure—SAN, LAN, physical systems, etc.—were generally controlled the best from the command line. While there are a million of them, Cisco IOS is probably […]
DevOps Hiring: What Do You Need?
IT has long had a problem with hiring. I’m not certain where it started; most of us blame HR, and that’s probably incorrect, but gives us someone to blame. It’s that we post jobs with insane requirements. Sometimes this is done to keep the applicant pool down, but most of the time it is a […]
DevOps and Agile: Your New Year’s Resolution
Don’t apply Agile principles to DevOps. That’s not how it works. We in the west often celebrate the new year with a promise to do more or less of something in the coming year. While these promises are often broken, they can occasionally be transformational. And it’s time your organization had a transformational one: More […]
The Limiting Factors of Microservices Also Apply to FaaS
In enterprise development and deployment, the pattern is easy to detect. A big monolithic application is targeted for re-architecting as a microservices architecture. People excited about microservices get together and break up the design to make it far less monolithic and far more loosely coupled. If your organization is lucky, it is at this stage […]
Containers: All Your Base are Belong to Us
The world is still changing. No surprise there, but the direction and velocity have been modified by the growth of container usage. Back in 2015, we at DevOps.com showcased a survey we performed that said container usage was staged to take off. That it did, with a vengeance. No matter the category—pilot programs, test, production—it […]
Culture, Not Changing Much in DevOps
One of the things that has bemused me from day one of the DevOps movement is how culture is viewed with an odd dichotomy. It is simultaneously DevOps’ greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Of course, there is a simple and reasonable explanation for this phenomenon. DevOps wants to change culture. Cultures that are resistant […]
DevOps and Security: Focus on Importance
Why have I written “DevOps and Security” and not DevSecOps or one of the other names that floats around? Because this post is aimed to apply to everyone—not just those far enough along to have melded some of their security practices into DevOps. Note: After I wrote this article but before I posted it, Bill […]
Survey Says: Digital Transformation is Hard
IDG and Insight Datalink recently conducted a survey into how companies were doing on their digital transformation journey. Like so much in technology these days, it is easy to feel as though you’ll be left behind if you aren’t well on your way with digital transformation. You’re not. Who Are You People, Anyway? The survey […]
The (Tool)Chains That Bind
As DevOps functionality continues to expand, we’re looking at a new vista for freedom of applications. Our apps can be moved around as we need them; we can build-test-deploy on the fly; and we have the ability to monitor whatever is needed. The price we pay is one we gladly take up: implementing new toolchains […]
Boxes vs. Services: The Infrastructure Equation
Infrastructure is changing as more services replace the need for hardware-based architectures There has been a lot of change in the last few years, and that change shows no sign of slowing down. I’m one of those people who likes to know they could work offline if needed, yet in this day and age if […]
DataOps: DevOps Plus Big Data
In traditional DevOps, there are the complimentary forms of development operations (that I call DEVops), and development operations (that I like to call devOPS). Between them they automate the toolchain and bring the people working on getting an application out to users onto the same team—not necessarily the same organizational team, but using their strengths […]