Latest from Dominic
Want a Successful Software Build? Just Say No
It is a truth which should be universally acknowledged that the most important skill for a customer-facing job in what we laughingly call “information technology” is a cast-iron ability to say no—and make it stick. The misguided desire to please other humans by attempting to deliver on their every request has sunk more projects than […]
Jan 16, 2019 · 3 minAll articles by Dominic Wellington
Showing 1–12A Vendor Guy Goes To Monitorama
I attended my very first Monitorama this year, in Amsterdam, and I have thoughts! First of all, it’s deeply weird speaking at Monitorama when you work for a vendor in the monitoring and observability space, but you’re not there as a sponsor. This would be pretty odd at the best of times, but the crowd at […]
Ops: The Other DevOps
Much of the conversation around DevOps, including right here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, is about helping developers get easier access to production systems, increasing agility by shortening release cycles. Most of the time, this focus on developers leads to a concentration on so-called “Day One” tasks, the Dev side of the equation, to the exclusion of “Day […]
From One-Size-Fits-All to Custom-Fit for IT Ops
The downfall of the all-in-one IT management suite and the rise of the customized IT Ops toolchain Here is how enterprise IT Ops used to work: you would make your choice among the Big Four vendors and buy in (quite literally!) to their strategy. This meant a suite of products that came preintegrated (more or […]
Sneckdowns In IT Operations
What IT operations professionals can learn from the actual paths people take through tools and processes, and the differences from the expected usage model. It has been a snowy winter across much of Europe, and although the snow is now beginning to melt in most places, there are still substantial sneckdowns to be seen across […]
Focusing on the Real Value of AI for IT Ops
In all the hype over AI, let’s concentrate on the real value it can provide, especially for busy IT Ops teams. 2018 is already shaping up to be the year when AI and machine learning (ML) go mainstream—at least in terms of public awareness, if not yet of actual usable products. As I write this, […]
Now is the Time for Full-Stack Operations
The idea of “full-stack developers” is becoming a fairly common one, although it is still widely contested. But what about full-stack operations? There are cycles in the IT industry, and if you wait long enough, you can see the same ideas swing in and out of favor. Business applications used to be fairly monolithic, and […]
Measure What’s Important: DevFinOps
Lately there seem to have been quite a few DevSomethingOps terms being coined. However, I do think we need one more: DevFinOps. Dev-What-Ops? One of the biggest problems in IT is working out the cost of IT. Left unchecked, IT will expand to fill whatever budget it is given. This may mean evermore involved business […]
AIOps: Managing the Second Law of IT Ops
Or, why IT systems keep breaking The tension between the two halves of DevOps is long-standing, going back long before the term was even invented. What underlies the split between Development and Operations is a fundamental difference, like an actual physical law. Let’s explore that analogy together. IT Ops is fundamentally a constant fight against […]
From Waterfall Incident Management to Collaborative IT Operations
What can Ops learn from Dev in the transition from sequential, reactive IT support to real-time DevOps? One of the signature ideas of DevOps is right there in the name: the blurring of the boundary between the historically separate worlds of Development and Operations. On the face of it, this seems like a great idea. […]
Dev & Ops: These Are Reconcilable Differences
The new world of IT requires a different approach from what worked in the past. As usual, the technology is the easy part, but without people and processes being aligned, it won’t deliver value. When evaluating how data science and machine learning can help manage highly dynamic IT environments, old reflexes may be actively harmful. By […]
Site Reliability Engineering: How to Make the Operations Side of DevOps Actually Work
The DevOps movement often has been accused of focusing too much on the first half (Development) and not enough on the second half (Operations). Certainly there has been more attention paid to deployment of payloads than to operating running systems, leading to the dismissal of the handover between Dev and Ops as “throwing it over […]