Consumer Web Automation for DevOps?
These days event-based automation is everywhere from IFTTT recipes used by non-technical folks to cross post automatically to Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to email alerts for free iTunes downloads. And don’t forget the tech savvy that create even more complex sequences from Zapier and now Stamplay to track workloads and simple business processes or automate […]
The Dark Side of Infrastructure as Code
We spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of infrastructure as code. All of it is true. Treating infrastructure as code can add great value in terms of its ability to promote consistent, predictable and repeatable results during the application deployment process. One of the ways in which infrastructure is treated as code is […]
Trolling PuppetConf: Surveying Configuration Management
Troll (Internet) In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord … by starting arguments or upsetting people,[1] by posting inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in a… community …with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[4] -Wikipedia When I stopped by […]
5 ways APM can solve your DevOps worries
This week at the InterOp conference in New York I had the chance to talk to a lot of IT managers transforming their organizations to adopt a DevOps culture. One of the key questions I heard repeatedly was – are there some best practices to break down the wall between Dev and Ops? How do […]
Programming: from too hard to too easy
I can still remember how happy I was the first time my friends and I managed to program a Pong alike game on our Texas Instrument calculators. It took us weeks before figuring out the algorithm and months before being able to render something decent, almost playable, with zeros and ones on the screen. At […]
Counterpoint: Right-Picking the First Project to Go DevOps On
Lori and I were discussing DevOps and surveys the other day, and in what must be described a rare occurrence, we disagreed on the best path to undertake your first DevOps project. Her take is here , and well, you’re about to hear mine. Lori proposes that agile projects are the best for a first […]
Why Continuous Integration Doesn’t Work
Continuous integration is easy. Download Jenkins, install, create a job, click the button, and get a nice email saying that your build is broken (I assume your build is automated). Then, fix broken tests (I assume you have tests), and get a much better looking email saying that your build is clean. Then, tweet about it, claiming […]
Buzzword abuse: The anatomy of a DevOps Engineer
Once, people used the word genius only when describing someone who really was a genius. Someone with extraordinary intellectual and perceptual capabilities. Today every parent uses this word to describe their, likely cognitively regular child – and this term has lost any good taste. I find the same trend holds true for DevOps. And yet, […]
Time and complexity; or, Why are some things hard to do?
Why are some things hard to do? If we want to make complicated tasks easier, which is one of the goals of DevOps, we need to have some theory of why they are difficult in the first place. Richard Garfield, a mathematician and game designer, presents two factors that make tasks more difficult: time constraints […]
Lead from the Podium: 6 Essential Concepts New Technical Managers Miss
The transition from programmer to Team Lead or Software Manager can be a difficult one. One week, you’re in your cubicle cranking out masterful code, and the next, you’re managing a whole team that has to navigate innovative solutions, coordinate input from different departments, then anticipate and eliminate potential showstoppers. Stepping away from your identity […]
A Simple Service Discovery Solution for Docker
The ambassador pattern is an approach for multi-host Docker application deployment. It helps containers on different hosts to discover each other and communicate. Despite of the variants, the idea can be illustrated as the following: (web) –link–> (web proxy) —network—> (db proxy) –link–> (db) Instead of the web connecting with the db directly, A local web […]
Walgreens reminds us to keep our database healthy
It’s clear that the super app you developed with your team, is really something, and it has high chance to be the “Bread and butter 3.0”, but are you prepared for the worst? There is a good chance that some combination of data, events and circumstances out of your control will eventually collude against you, […]
The DevOps Juice is Worth the Squeeze
“To such an extent does nature delight and abound in variety that among her trees there is not one plant to be found which is exactly like another; and not only among the plants, but among the boughs, the leaves and the fruits, you will not find one which is exactly similar to another. […]
COBOL: Completely Obsolete But Omnipresent Language
The programming language COBOL is a nuisance, something everyone wants to get rid of; however, I’m about to advise you to learn it. It might be a gold mine. The IT world is a fast paced one where obsolescence is the rule and where things evolve so fast that any person who wants to understand […]
A Culture of Trust
Trust is by far the most critical element of a DevOps culture. It is also the most difficult to achieve. IT was not built for trust. The silo structure that is common in most IT organizations was built for specialization and territorial ownership. The silo walls are thick. While DevOps may not be able to break down […]
It’s About What Works.
Enterprises have been working through production delays and operational inefficiencies for decades. Don’t get sucked in too deeply to the ever-present mantra of “this time is different”. There is a lot of source material out there from people in a different kind of operations that have already been through the same wringer as DevOps presents. […]
Daddy DevOps
I found out this week I’m going to become a Dad. It’s a strange mix of emotions from excited, to terrified, to panicked and happiness. Not too dissimilar to undertaking a big new project, scoping out how complex it is, getting close to go-live and then delivering it 🙂 [if any one you say I […]
Me and My Kanban
There has been a growing interest in the Kanban board, a tool that helps teams visualize their workflows, limit work in progress and get more “done”. Kanban Boards are mostly associated with Agile Scrum teams as a collaborative means of seeing the burndown of a sprint. In fact, Scrum and Kanban are considered to be […]
It’s web performance, let’s not call it WebDevPerfOps
Velocity was great this year. It was only my 2nd time out to Santa Clara, but from what I understand every Velocity conference is great. Few conferences can provide such rapid payback. Velocity does a good job setting the right vibe. The talks are often as entertaining as they are informative. This video of Scott […]
Network Engineers as Programmers? Not so fast.
It is interesting, as the triplet new waves of hype evolve – cloud, SDN, and DevOps – that we are repeatedly hearing The Voice of Reason say things like “All network engineers need to be programmers”. While this is certainly not the only voice that demonstrates what I’m talking about, an example of it is […]
DevOps the movement, or the function?
All the ISVs and Enterprises are having the same question, who/what is DevOps. We get in a virtual room and talk about it, but we are often all scratching our heads at the same time. We are not confused from a technology or definition standpoint. There is so much chatter about this thing, it’s just […]
Now that you can consolidate, do not implode
The development world is changing in a big way. We all know it. And it usually happens first with the early stage startups, who have the luxury of adopting new approaches from day one. One of those major shifts is consolidation of team members, where automation is taking over previous roles. In the modern development […]
Change your thinking about Change Management
Change Management, let’s face it, it’s usually a checklist item and a CYA tool. But in the world of DevOps where change is part of the culture and processes. Change Management needs to be more than a cost center, and really a way to improve what you are doing. And there is no excuse not […]