Preventing the DevOps Dilemma
Clayton Christensen, in his bestseller, “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” first outlines how innovation occurs, and then why large incumbents often fail to recognize, leverage and invest in new innovations in their industries. What is interesting about his view is that failure isn’t directly correlated to simply not recognizing, or even adopting, new innovations, but rather that […]
When IT Disaster Strikes, Part 2: Who You Gonna Call?
In Part One of this series, I provided a high-level overview of what an efficient incident response process entails from start to finish, including general framework for an incident response team. Now let’s delve a bit deeper into the role each person plays. In my experience, there are several core people who make up an […]
Advancing DevOps with Diagrams
The Application model can be incredibly useful to map out application features, planned changes and current flaws, and even for roadmapping. The model takes organizational time and effort, and can only be created and maintained when a universal language has been developed by a modeling team. The effort is well worth the cost, however, since […]
The Tester: Saving Your Soul in a DevOps World
Software testers have seen their careers go through some ups and downs in recent years. In the days of Waterfall, the tester’s job was clearly defined. Like other functions of software development and delivery, testers lived in a neat and tidy universe, testing features and design, finding bugs, sending back feedback to developers for correction […]
DevOps is Dead! Long Live DevOps!
Some are seekers on the quest for the one, true DevOps. They were misled. I’m here to say: Give it up. Whatever you find at the end of that journey isn’t it. That one true DevOps is dead. Dead and buried. The search is pointless or, kind of worse: The search misses the point altogether. DevOps began […]
When IT Disaster Strikes, Part 1: Resolving Incidents
As a developer or operations team member, there is nothing quite like the dread you feel when you hear the familiar ringtone of your on-call page at 3 a.m. Being on call means that you may be contacted at any time to investigate and fix issues that arise for the system, but that doesn’t mean […]
Using DevOps for Non-Code Artifacts
Figure: Linking various aspects for an article that can be connected through the “DevOps way of working” Innovation lies at the intersection of two or more otherwise-non-related areas. A very intriguing such instance I recently read was of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace setting up the foundation of the modern programmable computer by taking the […]
The Elusive Definition of DevOps
How do you define DevOps? If you went out and asked IT professionals at other organizations, could you guarantee their answer would be the same? In most cases, the answer to this question is no. DevOps, despite its growing popularity, still lacks a widely agreed-upon definition. There are a few fundamental principles that appear consistently […]
The State of DevOps Adoption and Trends in 2017
DevOps has come a long way, and we see a tremendous increase in adoption in the recent years. To outrank your competition and be ahead in the growth curve, it has become an essential element for software-powered organizations. DevOps has taken a center stage in the software development field with no signs of leaving. Below […]
Swarms: Adapting Guilds To Scale Agility
In my first article in this series, “Using Guilds to Combat Information Silos,” I reviewed the adoption of guilds at xMatters. As our company has grown, we’ve used guilds to keep critical information from languishing in silos—as often happens when an organization scales. Guilds have helped our engineers apply their creativity and critical problem-solving skills […]
DevOps: Making the Boring Things Stay Boring
“I, For One, Welcome Our New Robot Overlords,” is the title of Mykel Alvis’ (@mykelalvis) session at the 2016 All Day DevOps Conference. He wasn’t trying to curry favor with the new robot rulers, a lá Kent Brockman, but, instead, was evangelizing on the importance of precision in DevOps. Mykel is the DevOps Coach at Cotiviti Labs, the […]
Defining DevOps: Not Theory, nor Implementation
Ask a dozen engineers, developers, testers or their managers what their definition of DevOps is and you will get likely very different answers from each of them. Some may say it’s primarily about culture, others may say it’s about accelerating or automating the release of software and infrastructure changes and some may use the mantra, […]
Puppet Launches 2017 State of DevOps Survey
It’s that time of year again! We at Puppet have kicked off the 2017 annual State of DevOps. survey. Now in its sixth year, we have once again teamed up with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by our dear friends Gene Kim, Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren, to survey technology professionals worldwide in an […]
Everything Ops: Are DevOps Principles Being Applied Too Broadly?
From big data to storage to security, the DevOps concept is being applied to every field of IT operations under the sun today. This “Everything Ops” movement reflects the popularity of DevOps—but is it also diluting DevOps’s significance? DevOps itself focuses on software delivery. It’s about designing, building, testing, deploying and managing software applications. If […]
35+ Tools Every DevOps Expert Must Know
List of DevOps tools and resources: Here is the set of tools and resources that help every DevOps enthusiast must know. Learn coding: Code academy: Learn to code interactively, for free. Code school: Interactive programming courses and guided projects. Treehouse: Learn Web Design, Coding & Much More. Lynda: Technology and Creative Skills taught by industry experts. Tuts+: Thousands of free tutorials […]
Time, Training: How to Implement DevOps Effectively
Successful implementation of DevOps solutions requires two very important investments: time and training. New technologies have always transformed how the commercial world operates. The steam engine for example, fueled the industrial revolution of the 18th century and changed the face of business forever. This dramatic shift didn’t happen overnight, though; people had to learn new […]
The Code Doesn’t Lie, and Other Operations Mantras
As engineers, we spend a lot of time talking about things such as release processes, QA environments and deployments. But at the end of the day, most software systems fail because the software itself is faulty. The code doesn’t lie—you can almost always find the solution to your problem within the code itself. Of course, […]
Best DevOps Practices for 2017
Because the idea of DevOps is still so new, we’re continually having to hone what we view as best practices. At the start of the new year, many people make their own personal goals clear for the year (regardless of whether they intend to keep them), but we tend to head back to our work […]
Automic Helps DevOps Transformation Sparkle
Working closely with Automic, an international wholesaler and retailer of jewelery transformed a department of project managers, developers and operations responsible for all of the customer-facing websites into a DevOps organization. As a result, project delivery was completed with 90 percent fewer delays, and first customer-facing releases of projects could be delivered in less than […]
15 DevOps Expert Opinions on Continuous Integration and Delivery
We at Shippable recently approached some DevOps experts and asked them what they really think about continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD). The responses were just amazing, proving that CI/CD’s future is just bright and long in the software development process. Perhaps this insight might be of help to organizations, regardless of whether they […]
Using Guilds to Combat Information Silos
At xMatters, our group of 100 or so talented engineers is subdivided into teams tackling everything from front-end work to release automation to user interface (UI) and user experience (UX). As is common in an agile-minded organization, our engineering team members are cross-functional, with knowledge and expertise that carries over into areas outside their main […]
Breaking the Cycle of Dependency
While technology is an important component of DevOps and accelerating delivery, there are other aspects of process and culture that are critical to keeping the cycle moving to realize the goals of reducing lead time to become more responsive to the needs of the business. If you go to most agile teams and ask the […]
How Continuous Can Integration Be?
My blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps. One of the seven pillars is continuous integration (CI). The blog explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. A well-balanced CI implementation performs integrations that are fast enough […]