Successful Failure
In software development, success is all about failure. That may sound as if we are carrying the “fail fast, fail hard” philosophy a little too far, but which would you rather have — a quick, definite failure that you can identify, repeat, and analyze, or a series of semi-failures and partial recoveries that leave your […]
DevOps-in-Name-Only? Don’t do DOINO
Let’s not be ‘that’ guy. And let’s not be ‘that’ organization. You know, the one where “DevOps” is some magic pixie dust that we can sprinkle around, and then pat ourselves on the back for being forward-thinking, modern IT managers. It’s actually harder than that. Harder but simpler. Harder because DevOps involves humans. Simpler because pixie dust doesn’t actually exist. (I prefer software instead.) There […]
Nine Common Ops Mistakes (and How to Prevent Them)
Constant change is a reality for any growing, dynamic organization. Being receptive to change helps us quickly innovate and learn, yet at the same time, poorly-managed change can create instability and downtime. Ask any engineer what the number one cause of downtime in their systems is, and they’ll say change – software changes, network changes, […]
Is DevOps a Competitive Advantage? A Debate
The idea of DevOps being a competitive advantage is not a new one. Service providers, software sellers, and internal IT frequently use this argument to justify all kinds of investments. But is there any real merit to this argument? Is DevOps truly a source of sustainable competitive advantage? Or is it simply just hype and […]
9½ Simple Steps On How To Start With DevOps Today
Isn’t it funny that a lot of people, me included, don’t really know the difference between DevOps and Continuous Delivery? Wikipedia tells that both are pretty much overlapping. In order to continuously deliver one must be familiar with DevOps. Anyway, I will tell you what you can do now to start with DevOps and Continuous […]
The Hypocrisy of Vendor Neutrality
Disclaimer: I’m going to name the product and company I work for in this article. I assure you this does not mean this post is a product pitch. Really, I promise. In my capacity as the open source community manager/dev relations/community evangelist/[Enter Alternate Title Here] at Cloudify, I’m a huge advocate of knowledge sharing. My […]
7 Principles for Building Amazing Wearables
We are seeing a wave of wearable products coming to market. According to IDC research 19.2 million shipments this year will build to a global market of 111.9 million units by 2018. The long predicted rise of wearables is upon us. Fitness trackers were in the vanguard then came smartwatches. Pioneers like Pebble are now […]
What DevOps Needs to Know About Microservices
In this fast-moving, immature space, expect to spend cycles assessing where the greatest value lies for each team and the business as a whole. The term “microservices” is popping up everywhere in software development circles. Indeed, microservices are frequently touted as The Next Big Thing in terms of how to write applications to avoid the […]
Why do DevOps? Winning hearts and minds with a Lean boxscore
Change is difficult. It can be painful, disruptive, and costly. Making a case for change requires us to win over hearts and minds. In my experience, we need to win the hearts of the ‘do-ers’, the people whose daily work is going to be disrupted. And the minds of the executives, whose financial support and […]
Think you’ve established Kanban? Why you might only be halfway there
As a Lean Coach working in IT I often hear development teams refer proudly to their scrumboards as an example of Kanban. To which I say, ‘that’s a great start… but it’s really only just the start’. Let’s start with what a scrumboard is, and does. A scrumboard is a visual display of work, showing […]
Reducing Incident Resolution Time
From raw incident count to response time, there are several key metrics that top Operations teams track to measure and improve their performance. One of the most popular metrics teams track for is mean time to resolution (MTTR). It’s the time between failure and recovery from failure, and is directly linked to your uptime. While […]
Continuous Documentation
Is documentation dead in DevOps? Yes and no. It is transformed, it is automatic, and it is actionable. Back in the days of waterfall development, documentation always seemed to be the unwanted stepchild — it was an afterthought, a theoretically necessary chore that frequently went undone. And there were understandable reasons for this. For one […]
A Puzzle – Gradle or Maven
Build Tool Gradle vs Maven (or Both) The world of build tools evolved from simple compilation (gcc) to make files, then evolution of ant(+ivy) and Maven, now the latest build tool is Gradle. It’s always a puzzle which build tool to choose – Maven, Gradle or both. Sometime it’s first time project setup or it […]
Chef best practices
Chef Best practices This article is the II part covering Chef. Please refer to Automation, Provisioning & Configuration Management (CHEF) for an introduction. As a matter of fact, Chef is truly an astounding tool. It keeps the cooking metaphor actively going. Following is the list of best practices that I would like to cover in the article: […]
Balancing Between Impostor, Blowhard, and Burnout
I’m glad John Willis wrote his post on karojisatsu, or suicide from overwork, and that it has been getting the attention it deserves in the community. If it weren’t for the push behind the article that has kept it surfacing in my feeds the past few days I definitely wouldn’t have realized I needed to […]
“I want to do Continuous Deployment”
“We want to do continuous deployment” – i’ve heard this many times, but have yet to find a scenario where it actually fit. Why? Because you are confused. And rightly so. How many two letter acronyms can be thrown at you in one movement. DevOps takes the confusion further and has two of the acronyms […]
Repex – Regex Management Simplified
Our Versioning Complexity Cloudify is a Python shop. Our REST service is Python. Our Workflow Engine is Python. Our Plugins are Python. We have different version formats and different dependencies across different types of files which need to be changed when a version is updated. This is complex, to say the least. We didn’t want […]
Technology is All About the Business
In 2011 I joined a company as their fifth employee. They had been in business a little over a year. They had a product. They had customers. Oh, and the other four people? They were rockstars. Customers, however, were unhappy. The system was frequently down. Rebooting a machine was often necessary and lead to poor […]
Yes, I said “Culture” again
“Culture”. Any time that two or more people get together to do anything — whether it’s DevOps, or marketing, or just eating lunch — they form a culture. Even if they pointedly ignore each other, it’s a kind of culture (just not a very good one). When we the preachers of DevOps say the word […]
Expert, like Master, can be a Dangerous Word
William Sealy Gosset was a mathematician that published while working at Guinness. The company was concerned about trade secrets being leaked so all brewers had to write under a pseudonym. Given he was publishing strictly for academic purposes, he decided to write under the name “Student”. If you have ever taken a statistics course you’ve […]
6 Common Causes of Conflict DevOps Sets Out to Solve
It’s a very exciting time to work in Information Technology – as John Willis* put it: “DevOps finally proves how IT can be a strategic advantage that allows a business to beat the pants off the competition. This is the moment we’ve all been waiting for.” I work with organizations that are palpably excited that the […]
Evolution Not Revolution – DevOps in the Wild
Ever heard these questions: What is DevOps? How do I hire a DevOps Engineer? Should we have a Director of DevOps? Am I doing DevOps? Why is DevOps failing in my organization? More and more frequently, I run into engineers, managers and business leaders describing failures in their organization due to “DevOps.” Oddly, digging a […]
The Business Value in Software Quality
Software is taking over the world. You would be hard pressed today to find a company without dedicated software development efforts. But even in traditional business models, this is not confined to line-of-business applications. Organizations now have public, contractor and field team applications—as well as end users. And they must consider the results-focused future of […]