Think the Developer Tool Market Is Annoying? Just Wait…
I recently attended the Velocity Conference and DevOps Days in the Bay Area. While I usually pride myself in being “in the know” of what is available and possible. It never fails that every time I do a search on some aspect of the development process, or attend events like these, I’m shocked to discover […]
Will you have your IDE in a box? On a Train? With a Firefox?
As predicted the Cloud IDE race is picking up. Now I’m sure. Cloud IDE or no Cloud IDE it is not a choice. But it is an huge opportunity. If you have seem my previous posts on Cloud IDEs, like this one, this one, or even this one, you know how crazy I am about […]
Mixed Martial DevOps vs.The Scrum Master
Royce Grace won the most tournaments in UFC history before he retired. With a record of 14 wins, 2 losses, and 2 draws, it’s understandable why he’s considered by some to be the most influential figure in the history of modern MMA. With 100% of his finishes from submissions, he’s undeniably Brazilian Jujitsu royalty. You’d […]
You can’t automate relationships
As an organization sold on the idea of DevOps what’s your first step in the journey? Despite a constant deluge of well-reasoned guides for implementing DevOps the most prevalent step most companies have made is simply contributing to a proliferation of DevOps job titles. Most likely it’s in no small part because asking the HR department to […]
Coaching DevOps Baseball
Coaching DevOps Baseball Every technology gets surrounded by hype during its maturation, and DevOps is certainly not immune to that phenomenon. If you’ve spent more than five minutes looking into it, you know that, because the current discussion sounds something like this: “All right, there’s other stuff, but it’s just support, so I want you […]
The Delivery Pipeline is your DevOps Signature
Where is DevOps? Searching for it is like querying a rainbow for pots of gold. No single element in a development team’s lifecycle defines them as a DevOps-enabled organization. Were anything the rainbow and the gold, it would be the delivery pipeline. The deployment pipeline centers the team and the process, functioning as the signature […]
A/B Test with Caution
When the morning news starts talking about A/B Testing of course my ears perk up, and I eat my cereal a little slower. But when it becomes a conversation about how ethical it is to use customer usage data to iteratively improve the product, it spawns this blog post. It’s hard to believe that A/B […]
DevOps, Growth Hacking & other ways to rule the world
DevOps will disrupt management styles, speed the end to ancient IT practices, and flatten away processes that don’t focus on doing more with less. But DevOps is not the only dev-led movement that will impact and reshape the High-Tech industry. So called “growth hacking” will also disrupt organizational charts by bringing development tools, methods and […]
Environment Variables – The Ultimate Gotcha
We all think that we understand variables very well. After all, if you are a coder, a variable is something you create and use every day. But when it comes to DevOps the variable is the thing we seek to eliminate, but often neglect. Before this post turns into the variables word game, let me […]
Releasing your team from Release Thinking
How much time do you spend optimizing your delivery pipeline? My guess is none. Many teams have figured out great ways to automate their releases, and some even automate testing and monitoring. But they don’t often take the next step and learn from those results to refine the delivery processes. Automated load testing and application […]
Who’s side are you on anyway? DevOps Culture
Shame on you! Yes you, because there is a good chance you are thinking about DevOps all wrong. If you are a developer you might be thinking DevOps means IT goes away and you control all the infrastructure. If you are from IT you are thinking that DevOps is just automating what you already do, more. […]
The Double-Edged DevOps Job Title
Last month at GWO in Atlanta I met Nathen Harvey with Chef. I liked his DevOps presentation, “DevOp With Me!”, especially how he used “Walk This Way” by Run DMC and Aerosmith as an example for how collaboration in a DevOps environment often ends up playing out. They literally break down walls in the music […]
The Cloud IDE and it’s impact on DevOps
Recently I did an interview with IBMs Ken Walker. Co-lead on the Eclipse Orion Project, a cloud-based integrated development environment (IDE). My interest in Cloud IDEs peaked at the beginning of the year and has been steadily growing since the interview and being an active user of Cloud9 ( My current favorite Cloud IDE). During this […]
DevOps culture meets the SLA
The goal of every SaaS provider should be 100% availability – it should be ingrained in their culture. But it’s far more common to see a series of nines. Numerically, these are clearly not the same value and culturally, they are a world apart. When you have an availability target that is less that 100%, […]
Meet Infrastructure as Code
Maybe you have already heard the terms “Programmable Infrastructure” and “Infrastructure as code”. But even if you have not, if you are interested in DevOps it’s something you need to know. Most new lingo causes me to roll my eyes. But in this case, it’s not just new lingo, it’s an entirely new concept. Besides making […]
An outage war room primer
One aspect of the DevOps movement I’ve seen adopted at numerous companies is the idea that everyone supports their products by being on-call for any incidents that occur in the production environment. This responsibility often leads to participation in the outage war room. For those of you who may be new to this experience, I’m […]
No DevOps Roadmap? No Problem.
I’m a huge fan of The Phoenix Project and I’m honored to count Gene Kim both as one of my professional inspirations and also as a personal friend. There is, however, a dangerous precipice inside of the Phoenix Project that, if misunderstood, could cause many DevOps practitioners and enterprise IT shops a daunting problem in […]
Are the Milliseconds Worth It?
The pressure to prove one’s coding prowess can make a developer do some very clever and creative things with their source code. Sometimes it’s just a unique approach, but every once in a while this cleverness may shave a few milliseconds off of some performance metrics as well. In the end it’s not worth it. […]
The Importance of the Bus Driver
The topic of DevOps has been a topic for many a debate over recent months years. Without adding fuel to the fire I’d like to present a slightly different take on the DevOps culture. The phrase ‘what if I was hit by a bus?’ can often be heard within the vicinity of software development teams. It […]
Collaboration – A DevOps Tenet
You can’t turn around in the tech space without hearing about collaboration. Whether it has to do with the new economy being built around collaboration or the platforms designed to improve it or the various strategies one might implement to spur more of it on your team, collaboration is the hot new term, especially when […]
Systems of Things
What do Chevy V8s and DevOps have in common? They’re both complex systems with many interactions between their moving parts. The first time I did minor surgery on a Chevy engine I learned a lot about systems. The engine was a tired 283 cubic inch V8 in a 1966 Chevy Malibu which my grandfather purchased new […]
My DevOps Bookshelf
Aside from the many technical manuals on our bookshelves, I bet everyone has a few that are more process or philosophically oriented which hold a special place in our hearts. To me, these are the ones we continue to go back to and that have helped develop us as engineers, software, operations, quality assurance or […]
A Critical First Step in Bringing Dev and Ops Together
We all want to deliver excellent software to our customers. We now have a greater awareness than ever before of the interconnectedness of all the activities required to do so. The agile movement started this but it was not until the advent of DevOps that Ops was considered part of the full picture. In this […]