Lean for DevOps: Measuring the meaningful
At a recent Lean project report out to stakeholders, a piece of analysis was presented which showed the quantity of metrics being captured, in various areas, at different organizational levels. IBM’s Watson had been used to generate the chart, and it told an interesting story. But that story needed some translating. ‘Look at all those […]
The complexity of communication: Are we all Masters of Disaster?
To better the communication between people in tech teams is one important issue in daily work. Although we all grew up with communication from our early childhood on, we know, that communication often fails. But what do we all do about this discrepancy? Why do we accept eyes wide open these frequently painful failures? Why […]
Survey says network agility is still immature
At least that’s the word from SDx Central’s Cloud Management, Orchestration and DevOps 2015 Report in which 76% of respondents said the network was the most immature component in the cloud management stack. Now to be fair, the network is one of the last components (I’m looking at you, security) to get on board the “automate […]
Free Your Metrics
If you’re not collecting metrics, how do you know how your organization is doing? Metrics provide the data to get to the root cause of an outage or uncover a bug that would otherwise go undetected. Metrics can also surface trends that are difficult to discern without visualization. Here are some ideas for making the […]
Analytics from a Developer’s Point-of-View
As a developer, I have found that most systems analytics tools can be both an important asset and an unnecessary expense. Their usefulness, in my experience, is ultimately determined by the size and stage of the company. If the company is at a low funding stage, the cost of some of the more advanced analytics […]
DevOps Connect: cdSummit at Austin Innotech
Last week I was down in Austin, Texas for the DevOps Connect: cdSummit @Innotech show. With almost 1900 people registered for Innotech, we had a solid 150 folks specifically for cdSummit. I think it fair to say that the attendees got their money’s worth! The morning started off with a great presentation by Jez Humble. […]
Creating Dev Environments With Docker Compose
The Slack notification popped up on my phone at 2pm Friday afternoon. “Argh. This is never good” I thought to myself. The message said “do you know anything about Vagrant?”. It was from a client of mine and I knew their environment well enough to know that this question was going to go down a […]
State of On-call Survey 2015 – Help Needed!
Last year, we launched the first ever State of On-call Report. We asked about tools, setting up on-call rotations, what team members are involved and what happens after the incident gets resolved…among other things. We got 500 responses and in the process, learned a lot about what people are doing to handle the challenge of […]
HomeOps – Learning DevOps At Home
When I took a job as Technology Evangelist for StackEngine, my wife’s first question was, “Why would someone pay to fly you around the country and talk about how you work?” My youngest son put a finer point on it, “Yeah Dad, we love you and we don’t listen when you talk about work!” I […]
Ten things you need to know before starting a career in DevOps
So you’re considering a shift to DevOps, Forbes recently reported that highly skilled DevOps specialists with just a high school degree earn a median salary of $106,734. A recent study of IT salaries revealed that 46% of companies plan on hiring DevOps in the coming year. The DevOps space is red hot but here’s the […]
Lean for DevOps: Is it OK to move the banana?
There is an urban legend about a Lean deployment which, in the process of applying the 5S to a workshop, drew lines on the desk to indicate where each worker should keep their banana. 5S, for the uninitiated, is a set of principles by which Lean practitioners organize a workspace – which might apply to […]
“Culture” isn’t a swear word
I’ve heard a number of lazy criticisms of DevOps recently particularly where individuals talk about culture and that gets my goat. “It’s fluffy” “It’s in-actionable” “DevOps is just automation” “Cultural change isn’t relevant in a bank – its a term used by the Facebook’s of this world” I think part of this is the continuing […]
To Be Continuous: Evolution of Continuous Delivery
In this segment of To Be Continuous, Edith Harbaugh and Paul Biggar discuss the evolution of continuous delivery. This podcast is brought to you by Heavybit, a 9-month program for developer startups. Edith is CEO and cofounder of LaunchDarkly, a continuous delivery tool of “feature flags as a service.” LaunchDarkly powers software teams to quickly […]
The Women of DevOps
No, this isn’t about some new calendar featuring scantily clad IT chicks. In fact the fact you even thought that is half the problem. This article arises out of the fact that I was speaking with a colleague the other day and once again had to regretfully recite that something like 95% of you reading […]
Do You Need Your Ticketing System for Real-Time Incident Management?
The term “operationally mature” characterizes companies that understand how incident management affects both employee well-being and business impacts. Operationally mature companies have a process in place with built-in reliability and accountability that limits high-severity incidents because of bugs. The more mature a company’s operations, the better it can maintain agility and adapt to change. So […]
Roll-up your sleeves – Launch a SAFe® Agile Release Train
Most organizations often begin their agile transformation with a series of low risk, stand-alone pilots. While these pilots may prove that teams can adopt small team agile practices such as “Scrum” or “XP”, however these pilots often don’t help prove that your organization can adopt agile at the enterprise level. Scaling agile to support larger […]
LinkedIn Preps Site Reliability Engineers (SREs) For Exciting Careers
Find and Fix, Sink or Swim A few LinkedIn NOC engineers including Ariel Casas had a hand in forming what the once fledgling business / professional networking company today calls its Site Reliability Engineering organization. “The main difference between SRE and devops is that SREs are basically developers who happen to be very good at […]
Are we really back to “just reboot it”?
The server infrastructure management style of pets vs cattle was originally coined by Bill Baker of Microsoft though Randy Bias of CloudScaling further popularized it in 2012 and revised and clarified in this presentation. Essentially the original “pets” style of server management has mainly hand-built, named, and configured servers that are heavily cared for as […]
The Sea Change that is DevOps – How it all started: Part 1
Over the last 20 years, software has slowly taken over the world. Businesses that historically operated on 8-hour business days are now 24×7, navigating a global economy that never sleeps. The Internet enablement of everything has thrust what was originally an important support role into the lifeline of a business. A decade ago, Agile software […]