Automated Testing: Remember Security
Between continuous integration (CI) and release automation (RA), we’ve come a long way in making testing both integral and automated. This testing has allowed QA staff and developers to spend more time adding value by looking at problem areas instead of running tests by hand. Shops that have CI well-integrated into their application processes and […]
Clean Up Those Ever-Fail Tests
One of the points of DevOps is to streamline development and focus on what is important. Things that don’t raise to a high enough level of importance end up in the category of backlog, and their tests are normally disabled or marked as “ignore results” in CI/CD tools. With CI/CD, this is a good step […]
Testing What’s Important: Keep Growing Your Test Base
In most human endeavors that take a stretch of time to complete, the idea is latched onto and people become excited about being involved. It doesn’t matter if it is building a skyscraper, inventorying a massive warehouse or even going to war. People are intrigued by the possibilities and want to get started doing the […]
Moving That Big Project to CI/CD
Any organization that has been around for more than a few years (and many who haven’t) have a massive system that would cost a fortune to replace. Most midsized enterprises have several of them. Those systems are one of the reasons that enterprises don’t adopt CI/CD at the same rate as startups. Sure, any new […]
Why Your Company Needs An Automated Infrastructure
IT teams and software have started to embrace automation across all levels of the development life cycle, from planning and testing to deployment and maintenance. With the advent of DevOps, and the cloud, it’s now entirely possible for technical teams to spin up new environments in a matter of minutes instead of days. The process […]
Why DevOps Success Depends on the Right Infrastructure
Do you remember building with LEGOs? You could follow the directions that come in the box down to the letter, or you could go off-script to create something totally your own and evolve and refine it over time. Regardless of your level of creativity, if you had one of those classic green base plates to […]
7 Highly Effective Continuous Delivery Principles
If you’re in the IT space and you weren’t born yesterday, then you understand the need for speed. Development and release cycles are now faster than ever as companies implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CD). Browsers and social media sites, for example, are doing multiple releases a day, and organizations that want to keep […]
Stop Talking About the Number of Times You’ll Deploy
It’s the late 1940s and the automobile industry is just taking off. You run one of the product marketing teams at Chrysler. Wanting to make the best of an exploding market, your marketing team says, “You’ll drive 1,200 times as much with the new Chrysler Windsor!” Of course, that advertising never makes it to the […]
Avoid Crashes: 5 Best Practices for Load Testing
Demanding customer expectations and the rapid distribution of information across social media have made website and applications crashes an off-limits path for today’s companies and organizations. Crashes resulting from traffic spikes cause immediate and long-term loss of sales, as well as tarnishing the brand name. When servers or websites go down during highly anticipated events […]
Using DevOps Metrics Effectively
If you’re a DevOps leader, you have a very tough job. You have to radically transform processes and behaviors that have been ingrained in IT for decades. You have to adopt new technologies quickly while still delivering code quickly and cost-efficiently. And you have to do all this better than your peers at other companies. […]
One Team’s Microservices Journey and CD Growth
Dev Manager Vadim Madison published a chronicle of his team’s move from a monolithic application to a microservices model. In the process, the tools and methodologies they used for continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) had to be expanded and even changed out in several stages. It’s a long read, but with the time, as there are […]
DevOps is a Lifeline to Connected Mainframe ROI
A new IDC white paper sponsored by IBM and CA Technologies reveals the adoption of DevOps is a hallmark of those organizations that are actively modernizing and integrating legacy systems such as a mainframe to support digital transformation. Early adopters are blazing a path for faster innovation and greater ROI. DevOps Delivers Mainframe Modernization and […]
Test Driven Development, Continuous Test and Code Quality
We’ve gotten a lot of good out of agile development methodologies. I’m never a “One True Way” kind of person, but agile has a ton of benefits that development needed (and Ops increasingly needs). Extending that to the Dev side of DevOps is painless, since much of agile is wrapped in DevOps clothes these days. […]
AWS Extends DevOps Ambitions via Managed Services
Amazon Web Services (AWS) is signaling its increased interest in providing managed services spanning multiple aspects of DevOps with the launch of service that promises to make it easier to set up development projects. At a recent AWS Summit conference in San Francisco, CTO Werner Vogels described AWS CodeStar as a means for building pipelines […]
Think of the Future When Building Delivery
We’re in a strange state of the pendulum swing right now, where speed of delivery is king and all else seems to take a back seat. Many orgs even place quality behind speed in the claim that “we’ll get it right later,” but I’m talking about the more universal rush to deploy and the infrastructures […]
CD 101 Podcast: The What, How and Future of Continuous Delivery
Now that we’ve arrived at Episode 4 of our CD 101 Podcast, let’s address some basic concepts—like the what and how of it all and the future. Wait … perhaps we could—or should—have touched on these key topics earlier. Or not. At least not the future part? Anyway … While this (mostly) backwards-looking orientation may […]
Self-Healing Service Management and the Future of DevOps
How can DevOps teams take continuous delivery to the next step? Part of the answer lies in self healing, which could optimize performance management and monitoring and underpin the software delivery pipelines of the future. Self healing means the ability of systems or environments to detect and resolve problems automatically. It eliminates the need for […]
Using Load Balancing in Blue/Green Deployment
One of the biggest pains of automating the deployment process is that final step, when everyone agrees it is time to take the accumulated changes and expose them to the public. This process is the point at which systems go down and users find themselves suddenly cut off. Scheduling such changes for off periods may […]
The Top 10 Reasons to Use Cassandra
The Apache Cassandra database is the right choice of database if you are looking for scalability and high availability without compromising performance for your mission-critical applications. Additionally, Cassandra’s support for replicating across multiple data centers is best-in-class, providing lower latency for users and the peace of mind of knowing that you can survive regional outages. […]
Boots and Sandals: Know the Market
Boots and sandals are basically the same thing—something to protect your feet while you walk about. The thing is that they are intended for slightly different purposes. You wouldn’t wear sandals outside in the middle of a Wisconsin winter*, and you wouldn’t wear boots to your day off, hanging at the beach. The thing is […]
Metrics Only Matter When They Matter
Many studies have shown the significant value that DevOps can bring to a software organization. However, organizations on their own DevOps journey need more than general industry studies or case studies. Any practitioner needs to be able to show the value—specific to their organization—that the changes to people, process and tooling made in the name […]
Where Does the Database Fit into Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery (CD) is increasingly becoming the norm in software development, with companies releasing updates more and more frequently. Those that aren’t are exploring how they can catch up. But in all of this push to DevOps and CD, it’s vital not to forget the database. Changes to applications or web services often require changes […]
In the Application Economy, Every Company is a Software Company
Recently, I was in New York to attend the Third Annual DevOps Virtual Summit. (Yes, I had to be at a “virtual” summit in person—while it’s virtual for the attendees, it occurs in real life for the speakers, panelists and support staff.) The broadcast took place in a small recording studio that featured a lobby […]