Panamax, Docker management for humans
Panamax, a new open source tool from CenturyLink brings the promise of building complex Docker based environments like a child using Legos. The tool is a management interface for managing and building multiple Docker environments. You can search the official Docker repository as well as a number of others to find best of breed, Docker […]
Rackspace DevOps automation service broadly available
Rackspace is the #1 player in managed cloud. While they recently announced they would be withdrawing from the pure IaaS market, they have now double-downed their bet on managed cloud with the general availability of the Rackspace DevOps automation service around managed cloud. Rackspace had previously announced their DevOps automation service a few months back, […]
IT Operations, Production Support and DevOps: 5 Tips for Remote Systems Tech Support
Cloud computing is a paradigm shift in how applications are delivered, developed, and managed. Because of this, Information that was available in the IT operations infrastructure may no longer accessible or available, putting the onus on architects, operation developer and DevOps teams to build capabilities into the application itself. Following these best practices can help establish […]
Reconciling DevOps Messages: Notes From DevOps Days Minneapolis
Last week Minneapolis was host to Major League Baseball’s All-Star game, but when they were done cleaning up after the game a group of IT professionals got together to exchange ideas and share experiences about DevOps. It was DevOps Days Minneapolis. The crowd was a highly diverse group of individuals including management and engineers, uncharacteristically […]
Waterfall and Agile, the effect of automation and continuous integration
Agile’s A Silly Idea? I was a young developer working at a large enterprise when I first heard about some of the principles that later became part of the Agile process back in the mid- to late-90s. I was skeptical about what I heard, to say the least. After all, what we today call waterfall […]
The Cloud IDE and it’s impact on DevOps
Recently I did an interview with IBMs Ken Walker. Co-lead on the Eclipse Orion Project, a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE). My interest in Cloud IDEs peaked at the beginning of the year and has been steadily growing since the interview and being an active user of Cloud9 ( My current favorite Cloud IDE). During this […]
From here to there: practical first DevOps steps
I’m a bad programmer. There, I got that out of the way. The truth is, I’m a sysadmin that writes code infrequently, on an island, and out of disciplined requirement, release, or QA practices. I need to run an ETL that kicks a file transfer. I’ll write some code. I’ve got a workflow that needs […]
An Introduction to DevOps
What is DevOps You can ask 10 people for a definition of DevOps and likely get 10 different answers. If you want to find a definition of your own, your research will probably begin by asking Google, “what is DevOps”. Naturally, Wikipedia is one of the first result so that is where we will begin. […]
From Simple Automation to DevOps Like a Boss
Automation as We Know It Today If you haven’t been hiding in a cave in the last year or two, you’ve probably heard the terms DevOps and infrastructure automation more than once… But even today, infrastructure automation is mostly focused on setup and deployment of complex systems. For example, if you’d like to deploy your […]
The Automation Continuum
The speed of innovation these days is often influenced by the speed of adoption of new and exciting tools, and specifically open source tools. Open source projects have been growing at an exponential speed over the course of the past few years; however the process for exploring, testing, configuring, and ultimately integrating these in production […]
Can you appreciate DevOps, if you can’t exactly say what it is?
I recently had a conversation with some SOX IT auditors and was asked what I meant when I said we were a DevOps shop. I stumbled a little, torn somewhere between an overly simplistic answer and a desire to baptize the unholy. I started by talking about collaboration between the developers and the admins. Mentioning […]
MongoDB Needs and Loves DevOps
DevOps is about more than just running infrastructure smarter, with more automation. It’s a means to engineering agile, robust, and modern software by blending the traditionally siloed areas of administration and development. This means infrastructure as code, and developer concern for operations. It means more than calling sysadmins “DevOps Engineers”; it means operators and developers […]
So, you wanna DevOps?
How do you start your career in DevOps? How do I shift my team to use those approaches? This is a question I run into more and more frequently. Either while speaking to candidates, or among colleagues looking to move their IT operations into a more devops aligned culture. I want to look at that […]