There is No ‘I’ in Team: Transitioning Engineering Teams into a DevOps Model
As the pace of development and business continues to scale, teams need an agile and collaborative work environment to succeed. Moving to a DevOps model is a critical part of setting your engineering teams up to succeed, but making the transition can be challenging for many companies. What’s the deal? – Why you need a […]
15 must have Jenkins plugins to increase productivity
Jenkins is a vastly used continuous integration tool for the IT industry which is built and used around plugins. It’s core is the Jenkins tool and there are 100’s of plugins available to enhance its power and usability. Let’s take a look at a few of the best plugins to increase the productivity. Global Build […]
7 Tips for testing the usability of mobile apps
Of the one million mobile apps, only half are used more than 5 times If you study any random cross-section of successful mobile apps and games you’ll find that they have one common factor. All of them are accessible. They have user interfaces that people can navigate intuitively without instruction. This is partly about building […]
DevOps answers to high availability
Everyone want’s their application SLA to be 99.99999%. However with some applications it is not a desire, it is mandatory. The Consequences of failure in mission critical applications are drastic. And with commercial applications damaging, it is reputation, and internal support costs. Just ask the administration of London’s Heathrow Airport, the busiest airport in Europe, […]
DevOps – what does “good” look like?
I’ve blogged a lot about my definition of DevOps and what it means to me. I’ve always thought it much larger than “Dev” and “Ops” and that there isn’t really an end state – it’s an ever changing idea that will adapt to meet the needs of the business. That said, I’m asked quite often […]
DevOps Resolutions For The New Year
As we welcome in the New Year, it’s natural for us to set both personal and professional goals. While many are adding the obligatory eat healthier, spend more time with family, and exercise more to their personal list, some of our client are adding DevOps resolutions to their professional goals. During a recent customer roundtable […]
Breaking Builds II – The Butler did it
As editor-in-chief here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud and writing for several other publications I see more than my share of contests, promotions and other marketing campaigns (not to mention pitches from PR agencies), but I came across one this week that I really wanted to share with you. My friends at CloudBees, the Jenkins company are once […]
Tips to change culture (at least in your team).
DevOps is all about automation, enhancing the Application Lifecycle Management and culture change. In the last few years there have been tons of conferences and articles about the benefits of a cultural change on a project, but I have yet to read a paper about how to actually change culture. How do you manage to […]
Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment
A question comes to mind in what exactly do we need to do to move forward with Continuous Delivery and Continuous deployment, How should we start or rather where we should start from. Many times teams may not have achieved the continuous integration properly, maybe due to lack of proper tools, workflow or historical process. What […]
Service Virtualization – Window into “Advanced” DevOps
The new style of IT is pushing DevOps teams to reinvent software building, validation and delivering processes with an aim to shrink development cycle time and reducing defects in production. But in constrained testing environments, DevOps teams face a range of challenges in following the continuous integration and delivery approach for large multi-tier applications. Because […]
10 Top Tips for DevOps Cultural Change
DevOps is commonly recognised to be primarily about creating a culture of effective and seamless collaboration but this is often the hardest piece to enact when it involves changing an existing culture (as opposed to creating a culture from scratch in a startup type environment and having the luxury of hiring individuals with certain mindsets […]
DevOps: What It is and How to Cook It
What is DevOps? DevOps is a funny concept.I have spent the last few months trying to find an accurate explanation of what it is, reading books, articles and participating in discussions which led me to the following personal definition: DevOps is a set of processes which aims to enhance the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) of […]
DevOps: As critical for the Systems of Record as for the Systems of Engagement
There is a lot of talk about DevOps, and how it improves the process of delivering business value. Much of the discussion of DevOps has been focused on web based companies such as Facebook, or the mobile and distributed development teams. But DevOps principles apply just as well to the traditional Systems of Record, z/OS […]
SQL vs. NoSQL – Unsettled Debate & DevOps Pitfalls
Big Data, a relatively new phenomenon driving the industry hype-cycle is a mainstay in the database business. IT companies are convinced over the endless value proposition of the operational insight that comes with leveraging Big Data ( or Big Small Data ), so much so that it’s easy to overlook its impact on traditional database […]
AWS Best Practices – Enterprise Perspective
Amazon AWS has changed the IaaS game for startups and growth companies. There are several practices we must acknowledge the importance of during the adoption and implementation of AWS services. Readers are more than welcome to comment, suggest modifications and even add their own little practices they follow during roll outs and implementations. As clients […]
You Asked for Quality, You Got Alienated QA
The role of Quality Assurance (QA) is creating a bit of a buzz these days, because even as teams and budgets are shrinking, the demand for better quality is increasing. The chilling repercussions of service disruptions caused by software flaws warrants interest even at the executive level: “Nobody’s madder than me about the fact that […]
3 Prerequisites before Jumping on the DevOps Bandwagon
Top Three Prerequisites before Jumping on the DevOps Bandwagon The DevOps frenzy is truly upon us and organizations are under increasing pressure to jump on the bandwagon in order to deliver software faster and faster. However, Agile delivery and DevOps is not a plug-and-play proposition – it requires time, effort and persistence. Also most enterprises, […]
Waterfall to Agile to DevOps: The State of Stagnant Evolution
DevOps is all the rage. The hot IT buzzword intended to heal the expanding divide between development and IT operations is being used to sell a range of services and solutions to struggling development shops and enterprises, even though DevOps can’t be sold – it’s a cultural shift that nurtures under a strong leadership. Prior […]
The DevOps Scorecard
Mid-last year our team switched from doing Agile to doing DevOps. As we forayed into the journey trying to learn about DevOps and practice it at the same time, a lot of questions arose in the team. How was this different from agile and most importantly How were we going to be successful? That’s when we […]
Acorns Turns Sluggish FiServ on its Head with DevOps
Modern investment tools are popping up all over the place. Not only are they shifting the power from large institutions to the consumer, they are applying modern technology to a red-tape laden world. You can put FiServ technology in one of two categories: older institutions forced to build modern applications to compete, and financial techies […]
Scripts or Machine Images, What is the Best Way to bootstrap
Between the advent of handy tools, like Chef and Puppet, and virtual machine infrastructures, like VMWare and AWS, I feel like there has been a great debate about how to bootstrap machines. It seems like there are two extremes. On one side is heavy reliance on machine images (AMIs, in AWS speak) or scripting (recipes, […]
The Human Factor in DevOps
DevOps is about pinpointing and eliminating bottlenecks in order to deploy code often—shortening the time-to-market and increasing quality and effectiveness. One of the most common bottlenecks in the release process is the interaction between the developers and the integration services/operations group. Development (Dev) is entrusted with producing innovative software quickly while Operations (Ops) knows that […]
The fashionable IT crowd
The IT Crowd I was recently reading an article in Marie Claire UK (yes I do read non-nerdy publications, some higher AI should sentence my brain to enter a loop without an exit condition) which explained that women should start learning how to code in order to become successful professionally. That triggered my curiosity and […]