6 Big, Bad Mistakes in Configuration Management, Part 2
In Part One of my article on big, bad mistakes in configuration management, I reviewed the dangers of using the wrong tools for the configuration management job. Provisioning management tools, application release automation tools and continuous integration tools each have their place in your DevOps toolchain. But they should not be used as a substitute […]
6 Big, Bad Mistakes in Configuration Management, Part 1
Configuration problems come in many flavors. Some are mere nuisances. Often though, configuration errors can lead to more serious mishaps like application performance problems, policy compliance violations or even security vulnerabilities. They can often go undetected, quietly doing their damage in the background while everyone’s attention is focused elsewhere. Unfortunately, I find that configuration management […]
Getting the Most Out of QA in Complex Environments
We live in a world in which software is increasingly dominant. Not only do we rely ever more on software, but its complexity is becoming even greater. And with increased complexity, bugs are more likely to be intermittent, making failures difficult to reproduce. Sometimes this non-determinism results in failures never getting fixed. Any unfixed bug […]
Help Us Understand CI/CD, DevOps & Job Scheduling
While plenty of vendors tell us what they think is happening in the market, the only way to really learn is from you, our readers. So we are asking you to take a few minutes to take this important survey on the adoption of CI/CD, DevOps and job scheduling. We will be giving a $50 […]
How Developers Can Spend More Time Coding, Less Time Fixing
I don’t think anyone became a developer because they loved to spend their time debugging. As frustrating as it may be, making sure your build works is critical—and this burden is now falling on developers. If your organization wants to deliver highly rated apps faster, building quality into the development cycle is imperative. Even though […]
DataDog Announces APM. Why You Should Care
In case you missed it, DataDog announced it has added application performance monitoring to infrastructure and business goal monitoring. Part of my background includes a variety of clustered systems. First VMware, then OpenStack, Hadoop and its derivatives for a while, and these days the Mesos family. One of the many things I have learned along […]
Automation, ChatBots Can Improve DevOps
At its heart, the goal of DevOps is to foster better communication between the development team and operations team at an organization. When these two teams are systematically connected, they can easily stay in sync on most issues and there is strong coordination in building and delivering the product to customers. Automation and ChatBots can […]
Relevant Continuous Testing: The Primary Key to DevOps
My recent blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps and explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. One of the pillars is continuous testing (CT). For well-balanced DevOps, CT performs tests that are fast enough to […]
Automation: Achieving Faster Rollouts with Better Accuracy
A changing landscape requires new processes At the recent Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner shared a list of technologies and trends that will be important for organizations to embrace and prepare for in 2017. These trends, which are listed in the report, “Top Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption,” reinforce the […]
An Operational Approach to Benchmarking Microservices
Benchmarking microservices often falls behind on the engineering team’s to-do list. However, those that aren’t are missing out on a key component. The fundamental goal of benchmarking is to better understand the software, and test out the effects of various optimization techniques for microservices. In this post, I’ll describe an effective approach to benchmarking microservices. […]
Top Reasons to Use Node.js
When considering the architecture of a new web app, it might be a good idea to include Node.js in the discussion as a key part of that architecture. Node.js could provide you with additional speed, can be used on numerous platforms and has an active community from which to get modules and other assistance. What […]
Are You Paying a ‘Wait-Time Tax’ on Your Global DevOps?
Business increasingly is global, so DevOps has become global as well. In fact, for many enterprises, DevOps entails collaboration between development, test/QA and ops teams across multiple continents. This is in part due to the economics of IT labor and in part because applications for global enterprises have to be deployed globally. Unfortunately, enterprises executing […]
5 Reasons Why Companies Should Analyze Their Logs
At first thought it might seem as though analyzing logs is something that only affects the IT portion of your business. However, nothing could be further from the truth. In reality, log analysis affects every aspect of your business. This includes finance, legal, human resources, sales and marketing, security and operations. In fact, with log […]
Mainframe Apps and the Long View of DevOps Strategy
IT is constantly under intense short-term pressures. Line of business (LOB) executives demand a competitive advantage in digital customer engagement now. Marketing leaders demand better customer analytics now. Legal demands better audit reporting now. In fact, much of the investment that companies are making in Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery is due to the urgent, […]
From the Trenches: Zesty.io’s Google Cloud Migration
Zesty.io recently migrated its sites to the Google Cloud Platform from Rackspace—a process the company believes will make it more agile while streamlining its operations. Zesty.io community manager Phil Ballew recently spoke with Chris Hiestand, Zesty.io’s DevOps leader, to discuss some of the reasons for the migration and get a feel for just what the […]
How Agile Are Your User Stories?
Around the world, enterprises are adopting the concept of Agile development. This methodology is based on a set of principles for software development by which requirements and solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of teams. User stories form the foundation of the Agile requirements process, and teams gather to create them by exploring how users […]
Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously
Almost every product we buy or use today goes through some form of extensive testing before it’s released on the market; typically, these tests are designed to replicate the worst-case scenarios that a product may encounter under real-world conditions. Automobiles, for example, go through extensive hot and cold weather testing in remote locations, and are […]
How the Lure of an ‘Easy Button’ Installer Traps Projects
As preamble for this post, I wrote about the Unicorn Installer challenge. The challenge is that user needs are too deeply heterogeneous for good reasons to create a vertically integrated way (aka an “easy button”) that works for all users. The problem is not just current diversity, it’s also about how we cope with needed […]
Get to Know the New DevOps Stack
Deploying software has always been manual and labor-intensive. That’s fading into the past as continuous innovation has become a competitive differentiator for companies of all stages and sizes across every industry. DevOps has become a hot investment market in recent years. The mega-rounds we’ve been seeing show the massive demand for tools that enable optimal […]
Alerts Keep DevOps Teams Responsive, in Sync
Continuing our five-part series on “Continuous Monitoring: The Role of DevOps and APM,” this blog post will talk about how alert notification can help DevOps teams be more productive and agile. Amid the constant, rapid change and fluidity typical in DevOps organizations, there are some undeniable absolutes. These absolutes, present at each stage of the […]
Industry Alignment: Supporting Real-World DevOps Workflows
In our ongoing work to advance the interests of customers around adoption of Agile, DevOps and continuous delivery, the theme of evolving workflows to better suit human-scale work cycles often comes to the fore. While it’s easy to say that build, test, release and monitoring capacities should feed into each other to promote continuous collaboration, […]
Chef Boards the DevOps Express with CloudBees, Others
You often may have more questions than answers as you progress along your DevOps journey. Which tools should I choose? Do these tools work well together? What have other people done in my situation? You’re often left Googling to find the right integrations and piece together an architectural solution. Today, I’m excited to announce that […]
Enlisting the C-Suite in Disaster Recovery Initiatives
When disasters make headlines, corporate executives often have knee-jerk reactions and call for business continuity solutions to be implemented immediately. However, when push comes to shove, those very same executives tend to put up roadblocks with concerns over budget, priorities, vulnerability assessments and security. Perhaps more concerning, according to a June 2015 Ponemon Institute report, […]