Incident Resolution for Remote Teams
People working in IT support and incident management right now are faced with unusual difficulties supporting large remote workforces and managing unpredictable workloads. On Reddit, system admins and other IT pros are bemoaning the hiccups and hassles of working in isolation while trying to resolve issues and maintain high SLAs. You can’t go grab your […]
How to Implement a Data Self-Service Program
Data self-service is a hot topic these days. By giving different people across an organization–marketers, technologists, business leaders, etc.–access to available data and analytics tools, you empower business users and decision makers to do their jobs effectively. But data self-service is still a work in progress at most organizations. According to a recent survey by IDG […]
DevOps Deeper Dive: Git Turns 15
Git, the version control system that arguably has enabled many DevOps advances over the last decade, is turning 15 this month. Git was developed by Linus Torvalds, best known for his contributions to Linux, and was so-named after he and the rest of the Linux community referred to it as “that stupid content tracker.” The […]
Open Source Vulnerabilities Were Up 50% in 2019 — How Will It Impact Software Development in 2020?
Open source vulnerabilities have been on the rise in recent years, but 2019 was truly one for the record books with a spike of nearly 50% over the previous year. According to the recently released State of Open Source Security Vulnerabilities report by the WhiteSource research team, the number of vulnerabilities jumped from 4,100 in […]
Top iOS Security Gotchas
Ensuring the security of user data within your app is critical to building trust in your business and contributing to the online safety of customers. Here’s a list of the top 10 essential security mechanisms that Apple offers to up the security posture of your iOS applications. Adopting these technologies and APIs within your products […]
Why DevOps are Keen on Open Source Logging
With the advent of DevOps, we are now moving toward more collaborative workflow models, where the integration of development and operations teams make it easier to quickly move development projects into production, and with fewer roadblocks. However, within DevOps, many of our activities are not as clear-cut as they were in previous siloed methods. While […]
TechStrong TV: Celebrating the Strength of the Tech Community
I wanted to tell you about two important initiatives we have been working on around here, TechStrong TV and TechStrong Con. They are a big part of our COVID-19 response. The past four weeks (has it been just four weeks?) have been a blur. The MediaOps team has shifted into overdrive to keep all of […]
Keys to the Kingdom: Protect Your Server from Hackers
Automation and DevOps undeniably improve the agility and responsiveness of IT. Most of us have taken up at least a bit of the wave of automation that DevOps and Agile have brought to our door, and many are far along on their DevOps journey. But every once in a while, we need to look back […]
Tips For Managing Development Teams Remotely During Coronavirus
Thanks to the global coronavirus pandemic, around a third of the world’s population is on lockdown in their homes, which means a huge number of businesses are currently trying to navigate remote working solutions. Trying to collaborate on software development is difficult at the best of times when your team is all in the same […]
Tips on Rightsizing to Reduce AWS Costs Now
In this business climate, everyone is looking to reduce costs. CFOs are reevaluating their software and infrastructure spend, and naturally, companies are looking for ways to optimize their AWS costs. In fact, we are now leveraging a major reason cloud is so compelling in the first place: you have more flexibility to control costs based […]
Twilio Provides 90-Day Free Developer Access to Video Service
Twilio this week announced it will make its video services available for free for three months to developers who are building applications to address COVID-19 pandemic uses cases in the health care, education and nonprofit sectors if they sign up to use the platform before June 30. Jesper Joergensen, general manager for voice and video […]
Is It Time to End the Software Metric Madness?
We have all heard the phrase “What gets measured, gets managed,” often attributed to Peter Drucker—interesting note about this quote, Drucker didn’t say it. In the DevOps space, or application development and delivery generally, this quote is often used as a justification to measure things like deployment velocity, bug fixes, lead time and so on, […]
The Key to Embracing DevOps: A Real-Time Roadmap
While the term “DevOps” has become somewhat of an industry buzzword, it represents an important shift in the way teams think about planning, building and deploying software. Drawing its inspiration from the Agile movement, DevOps extends many of Agile’s core principles beyond development to how teams deploy, monitor and inform their next round of product […]
Build Better CX Across the Entire User Journey with AIOps
Ready or not, digital experiences are now the gateway to customers and the standard-bearer of a company’s brand. Yet, as apps become more distributed, more intelligent and more real-time, they continue to run on infrastructure that resides within on-prem data centers as well as multiple public clouds. This complexity is underscored by gaps across IT […]
Practical Advice on How to Use Lead Time
Many ALM tools and Value Stream Management platforms graph lead time, but few really tell you what to do about it, how to use it and why you shouldn’t use the average. In fact, so much of what is written on this subject is rather vague and hand wavy. Part of the reason is that […]
New Relic Extends Reach and Scope of AI Capabilities
New Relic this week announced it has extended the capabilities within its New Relic AI module to include support for additional data sources and provide access to more advanced analytics. Integrations with Splunk, Grafana, Prometheus and Amazon CloudWatch are now provided along with support for a number of incident management platforms, including ServiceNow, OpsGenie and […]
GitHub Makes Private Repositories Free for Unlimited Users
GitHub this week announced is making available private repositories for an unlimited number of collaborators available to all GitHub accounts for free. Kelly Stirman, vice president of product strategy and marketing, said that subsidiary of Microsoft could make this move because it is now generating enough revenue from the enterprise edition of its platform to […]
In IT, Purity Is Not Necessarily a Virtue
Throughout the history of IT, we’ve had our share of purists. OS purists, language purists, etc. The stark one was the “That is not Object Oriented Programming” crowd. While the poster-children of IT purity, we don’t really hear from them anymore—and thank goodness for that. But a new crowd has reared its head in DevOps […]
Six Tips for a Successful DevOps Implementation
As we expand our digital world, there is an ever more urgent need to look after businesses that need to operate faster and with more agility. Because of this, DevOps has grown quickly and become central to a lot of organizations as they pursue a competitive advantage. However, some organizations struggle to implement DevOps as […]
Prevent Technical Debt by Knowing When to Remove Feature Flags
As more organizations use feature flags and experiments, it’s critical to understand that some of these changes should exist for only a short or specific period of time, and then be removed from your codebase. Removing flags when appropriate avoids technical debt and complexity that can make your code fragile, harder to test and more […]
Defining the Database Requirements of Dynamic JAMstack Applications
Zero-configuration hosting solutions such as Zeit Now and Netlify are taking the frontend community by storm due to their ease of use. If we add static site generators such as Gatsby/Next.js/Nuxt.js/Hugo/Jekyll to the mix and deploy our statically generated pages to a content delivery network (CDN), we get something highly desired with minimal effort: distributed […]
Debunking Five Common Automated Testing Myths
There is little argument that automated testing has emerged as an industry best practice. Yet, there remains a wide variety of adoption and maturity in the market. While automated testing is imperative for DevOps maturity and success, I see in my work several popular canards that often stand in the way. Reject these five common […]
SRE (Part 2): A Practical Approach
In my last piece on cultural SRE, I covered the basics of defining what SRE means for your team. However, some teams may not need dedicated SRE support. This is where the central organization comes in handy. Dedicated resources are focused on building guidelines, standards, services and platforms for teams to consume that can operate […]