Avoiding Application Integration Fails
Trying to integrate applications on your own can eat your project alive. A seemingly simple project may look harmless when you start, but in the end do-it-yourself software delivery tool integrations can devour your entire software process. The problem may be that building simple integrations appears easy. How hard can an integration be? But let’s […]
Fighting Deployment Anxiety: 5 Tips from the Pros
You know the feeling: You’ve put in hours of work developing a new feature. It has gone through QA, been tested and passed all stakeholder inspections, and now you’re ready to deploy. Despite your experience and preparation, you have a pit in your stomach. What if something goes wrong and it brings your app to […]
appOrbit: End-to-End Hypercloud
As cloud and DevOps have heated up, enterprise need for cloud portability and deeper DevOps integration have become pretty clear. The need for portability to avoid cloud lock-in has been a desire of enterprise cloud users from day one. A variety of people are attempting to address this need, but the market is still very […]
Splunk and the ELK Stack: A Side-by-Side Comparison
This article’s purpose is to compare the “big two” in the log analytics world—Splunk and the ELK Stack. But before we go into details, a short introduction to the competitors is required. Splunk is the “Google for log files” heavyset enterprise tool that was the first log analysis software and has been the market leader […]
Riverbed Aims to Unify App, Network Performance Management
Much of the initial focus on DevOps has been on accelerating the rate at which applications are built and deployed. But once those applications are deployed, it’s not too long before the focus shifts to the quality of the end-user experience. Aiming to make it easier to determine what the quality of that experience really […]
Cisco Looks to Bridge Gap Between Networking and DevOps
Networking in the enterprise has always stood apart. It might take two minutes or less to spin up a virtual machine, but it can take two weeks to set up the network connections. To help bridge some of the gaps between networking and the rest of the DevOps team, Cisco Systems this week unveiled a […]
BMC Pushes Automation to the DevOps Left
Much of the inherent conflict that exists between developers and IT operations teams often comes down to how IT automation processes are implemented. IT operations teams generally have their own preferred tools for automating operations while developers have another. To resolve that issue, BMC Software unveiled Control-M Workbench, a set of development tools that extends […]
APIs: Automation is Great. So is Usability
Many developers are not so great at documentation. Ask anyone who’s been thrown into a large code base. Changes aren’t documented well, tribal knowledge thrives in the code comments, and anyone who says, “I’m confused, what does this chunk of spaghetti code mean?” is often treated with annoyance or even disdain. That is something that […]
Managing Complexity in Dev/Test Infrastructure Using Machine Learning
Businesses are increasingly developing software solutions that can drive innovation and digital transformation. As the number of developers increases in the organization, the ratio of developers to IT also increases over time. The net result: more dynamic and complex dev/test infrastructure requirements and slower support from IT. Developers and testers often cannot get their hands […]
Tailoring Enterprise Collaboration: Strategies for Success
In the age of SCRUM, Agile and DevOps, developers collaborate with their peers and colleagues more than ever before. Many developers already use a variety of collaboration tools on a daily basis, such as a team messaging application, an online discussion forum, or an open code repository. But while developers love to collaborate, it can […]
DevOps 2.0 for Digital Transformation
We already know that DevOps is a culture, a movement, a philosophy of software development and delivery. It focuses on the communication, collaboration and continuous integration of the entire organization—a new conception of software development whose adoption is not easy. It aims to streamline software delivery by removing barriers between developers and IT operations teams. […]
Feature Branching vs. Feature Flags: What’s the Right Tool for the Job?
A dev team’s branch management strategy can have a significant impact on the rate at which it can release high-quality software. In this article we’ll explore the pros and cons of several different approaches for enabling multiple concurrent streams of dev work in the same codebase. We’ll see that two major factors—the cost of merge […]
Best Practices for Internal Communication in DevOps
DevOps has become a widely popular method of collaboration in the IT world. The combination of development, operations and quality assurance, DevOps requires every project have clear communication channels between development teams and individuals. In this article, we’re going to explore some of the best practices for internal communication within the DevOps structure. Software development […]
5 Team Skills That Make DevOps a Success
When starting their DevOps journey, your team will discover it needs to develop some new skills. Most likely the team is good at typing code and solving issues, but what about the soft skills? Many teams have to learn how to deal with issues themselves—as self-supporting teams, there is no longer a manager who will […]
SRE vs. DevOps — a False Distinction?
Just a few days before he died at the beginning of the 1990s, a wise man taught us that “the show must go on.” Freddie Mercury’s parting words have long provided the guiding light for many, if not all, ops teams. In their eyes, the production environment should be exposed to minimum risk, even at […]
ChatOps: Has the Fat Lady Already Sung?
One of the sometimes unsung stars of the DevOps scene is ChatOps. I have heard lots of folks use the term, but what does it really mean to you? ChatOps is a phenomenon that started, perhaps not surprisingly, inside of GitHub. It was only natural that developers leveraging the repository to share and build better […]
Get Your DevOps Right With These 7 Technologies
Editors’ Note: As with all of our contributed articles, the views expressed in this article are of the author, not DevOps.com. Due to its vendor-agnostic stance, DevOps.com does not endorse any particular technology. There was a time when the operations team and the developers regularly were at each other’s throats. The developers were never satisfied […]
How Much QA is Enough in Software Development?
People working in quality assurance as testers, managers or engineers know what it’s like having to justify their existence; it’s been part of the job for many years. QA experts have had to fight the perception that what they do is a bottleneck, overkill and it slows everyone down. Finally, however, QA is getting the […]
DevOps: Here’s How to Slack Securely
With 1.7 million daily active users, it’s clear Slack has come to dominate the team chat world, especially in the tech industry. This, however, means that a fair amount of security is required to ensure that strategic assets remain safe. From a security perspective, Slack has done a solid job of keeping its assets on […]
Site Reliability Engineering: How to Make the Operations Side of DevOps Actually Work
The DevOps movement often has been accused of focusing too much on the first half (Development) and not enough on the second half (Operations). Certainly there has been more attention paid to deployment of payloads than to operating running systems, leading to the dismissal of the handover between Dev and Ops as “throwing it over […]
The Postman Delivers More
Most of us use Postman during API development. The company claims 3 million users, and as one of them, that number doesn’t raise my eyebrows any. But if you are like me, you’ve figured out collections, how to back up your data and perhaps looked at tests, but not done much more. As a tool […]
AppDynamics Extends Performance Monitoring Reach to Developers
AppDynamics, fresh off its acquisition by Cisco Systems, this week moved to extend the reach of its monitoring services all the way out to individual developers. The spring 2017 edition of the AppDynamics service now includes a developer toolkit intended to make it simpler for developers to track the performance of their code without having […]
Testing: Your Secret Weapon for DevOps Success
I spend virtually all day, every day, speaking with IT leaders who recognize that their bottom line ultimately rests on their ability to accelerate the delivery of innovative software. That’s why they’ve invested so much in digital transformation initiatives—including hiring the best and brightest developers, scaling Agile, driving DevOps adoption, automating the continuous delivery pipeline, […]