DevOps Survey Says! State of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation
What our surveys told us about the state of DevOps, Reliance on Scripting and IT Automation DevOps Survey Results: Scripting & IT Automation A lot of IT Operations teams including application owners, configuration managers, middleware specialists and database administrators are managing infrastructure configuration change with manual processes, spreadsheets and scripts. They are spending a lot […]
Adding Usability Testing to the CD Pipeline
Do you include usability tests in your continuous delivery pipeline? If not, you could be making a big mistake. Usability testing, which entails having actual users test an application for user-friendliness, intuitiveness and accessibility, gets easily lost within the DevOps conversation. If you want to do continuous delivery, waiting on manual usability tests may seem […]
A Ferrari and DevOps: More Similar Than You Might Think
In a world where customers aren’t short of options, all businesses are characterized by the need to achieve customer delight. From a technological standpoint, a large part of that hinges on fast-tracking the release of high-quality software. A release every quarter is being replaced by a release every week and sometimes even sooner. Expectations have […]
Infrastructure Management in the Age of DevOps
DevOps has emerged as the de facto cure-all for all that’s wrong with enterprise IT, breaking down silos and replacing them with agile and transparent relationships between developers and operations and seamless, fast workflows that drive greater efficiencies across IT. But legacy IT systems still need tending, even in a DevOps world. They must be […]
Are We Leaving Developers Out of DevOps Spinoffs?
SecOps. DataOps. NetOps. Reading these terms, you get the sense that the key to IT efficiency is to make IT Ops work with everyone else. But that’s a mistake, because it leaves developers out of the picture. It’s no secret that the DevOps movement has generated a number of other *Ops initiatives, including those listed […]
Debating the Future of DevOps
Change happens at an astronomical pace in the DevOps world, and I constantly see organizations shifting in their needs as the weeks and months go by. One week, the most essential need will be a specific configuration management tool and the next, it will be an urgent requirement to work on containerization. Many companies forget […]
Don’t Be Samsung: Here’s How You Can Protect Yourself
Imagine a factory building 100,000 units a day, and you can see how a small error can have huge consequences. Now imagine that factory is a database. The world’s top smartphone maker this month pulled the plug on its $882 Galaxy Note 7 after phones overheated and caught fire, concluding in a disastrous recall for […]
PyMongo Pointers: How to Make Robust and Highly Available Mongo Queries
In today’s clusters made of commodity servers, failures are the norm. Having your code fail because one data node happened to be down when you were querying it is frustrating and no fun. Based on my experience hardening our product, I wanted to share a few quick and easy pointers that can help make your […]
To DevOps Or Not To DevOps
Although enterprises today all claim to be software companies, there remain four distinct groups of organizations: the technology leaders, the technology followers, the technology hopefuls and the technology laggards. The first group are the industry leaders who are paving the way. These are the organizations coming up with new technologies, processes and cultural shifts. They […]
7 Strategies for Continuous Delivery and Deployment Success
One of the key advantages of cloud-native applications is the ability to quickly push updates into production for specific microservices—giving developers the ability to respond rapidly to changing business requirements without having to upgrade the entire application. Successfully doing this requires far more than just leveraging a continuous delivery platform. Everything from the culture of […]
All Day DevOps
Over the past year, I have traveled to and delivered presentations at 18 DevOps events. I’ve also heard that over the past several years, John Willis has participated in more than 200 DevOps events. But not all of us have the time or budget to get ourselves and our teams out to these events […]
Four Inspiration-Killing Concepts That Need Redefining
Software engineering is a creative process, and creativity cannot be measured by the hour. It can be measured only by the value of the contribution. Yet, a majority of companies still measure productivity by hourly contributions. Companies treat the development process as if it still existed in the days of the assembly line, and all […]
Continuous Integration vs. Continuous Delivery: There’s an Important Difference
If you read DevOps blogs today, it can be easy to assume that Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are synonymous terms. People often use them that way. But that’s a mistake. As an example of conflation of the terms CI and CD, take this page, which purports to be a “history of CI/CD […]
5 Ways to Ensure IT Service Desk Agility
The agile approach is everywhere. Born in the software development world, agility means adaptive planning, ongoing development and continuous improvement. Rapid and flexible response to change is critical. It is not surprising that the best practices of agile software development penetrated into other areas, and IT service management (ITSM) is no exception. The Service Desk […]
Last-Mile DevOps: How to Keep Employees Happy
Chances are that your company is embracing DevOps to make sure you can get fresh, new digital capabilities to your customers ASAP. That’s because in today’s market, you either have to be first—or quickly close any gaps between you and your more digitally innovative competitors. But when it comes to getting new capabilities into the […]
What Every Front-End Developer Needs to Know
One of the hardest things about being a front-end developer is the fact that everybody has very different expectations of what it means to be one. This, along with a technology stack that changes at the speed of light, makes interviewing for a front-end position tricky. To help you out, and to give you an […]
Getting Ready for All Day DevOps
DevOps Practitioners Unite On Nov. 15, we’ll be broadcasting 54 live sessions across 15 hours and 15 time zones. The All Day DevOps conference will be live, online and free. Anyone who registers can watch. We have invited some top-notch practitioners from around the world to speak at the event on topics ranging from DevOps […]
Reasons Why DevOps May Not Work for You
DevOps is a great way for many organizations to optimize software design and delivery. Yet, like every other technological innovation in history, DevOps is not perfect. Here are some examples of drawbacks associated with DevOps. By no means do I think DevOps is a bad idea in general. I want to be very clear about that. […]
Design for DevOps – Best Practices
Without good design practices, a DevOps implementation has no hope of delivering on its promise of accelerating innovation with high quality and scale. Anyone who has been a designer knows that good design for DevOps is easier said than done. My blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up […]
The 3 Secrets to Overcoming the Agility-Stability Paradox
Regardless of whether an organization subscribes to a bimodal IT approach, one thing is clear: It’s more important, and more difficult, than ever to fight the agility-stability paradox. Today’s businesses must build on a delicate balance of being compliant, plan-driven and keeping the lights on while also seeking ways to become more fluid and agile […]
21 DevOps and Docker Reference Architectures
When building DevOps or continuous delivery (CD) practices relying on Docker, you can learn a great deal from others. Reference architectures reveal what choices people made, what practices they put in place and how they connected the dots. We at Sonatype pulled together a set of 21 reference architectures for folks building CD and DevOps […]
Synthetic Monitoring: The Start of the Monitoring Journey
Under pressure to innovate and deliver rapid updates to their applications, developers often place monitoring as an after-thought. In today’s world, where a slowdown can translate to customer attrition and an outage can lead to millions of dollars in losses and negative press, ensuring satisfactory response time has evolved to be one of the most […]
Tasktop Survey Shows Customer, Business Needs Must Align
Recently, Tasktop surveyed 120 global IT professionals on their software delivery processes. The results were based on analysis obtained from its licensed Forrester Modern Application Assessment Tool, which helps organizations evaluate where they fall on the spectrum of modern software delivery and offers insight into what needs to happen next. The survey covered topics such […]