DevOps: The Glue of Workflow
The best tool in the DevOps continuum is the sticky wrapper that holds it all together. It is the workflow that binds it and makes sense out of the term “continuous.” CIOs often are enamored with a build or deploy tool, but it is the workflow tool in every DevOps strategy encapsulating more than one […]
Does Modeling Have a Place in DevOps?
As organizations adopt DevOps, they not only release smaller changes sooner, but they also change the way they develop software. Additionally, applications no longer are seen as giant monoliths, but rather as dispersed across dozens of services that may be built on different platforms (from Node.JS to .NET), depending on the team and technology du […]
8 Reasons to Go ‘All In’ and Attend Jenkins World
Jenkins World 2016, the world’s largest gathering of Jenkins users, is coming to the Santa Clara (California) Convention Center, Sept. 13-15. The lead organizing sponsor is CloudBees, along with a number of premier Jenkins ecosystem vendors including BlazeMeter, Undo and Black Duck. Jenkins World will offer attendees opportunities to learn, explore and network. This year’s […]
4 n00b MySQL Mistakes Every Programmer Makes
Even experienced programmers can sometimes be thrown for an infinite loop–or other code failure–with these common MySQL mistakes. When a database application goes belly up, the cause often can be traced to sloppy coding. Every now and then, the reason for a misbehaving app is an idiosyncrasy in the platform itself. Here’s how to prevent […]
Orchestration: How To Get Everyone in Tune
Automation is key to success in the cloud. When your entire infrastructure is accessible via an API, it doesn’t make sense to configure and install your applications by hand. This is where orchestration tools come into play. Simply put: You will not have long-term success in the cloud unless an orchestration tool is a core […]
Things to Know When Planning for Cassandra Backup
NoSQL databases such as Apache Cassandra, MongoDB, Amazon DynamoDB, Azure DocumentDB and others are being adopted by enterprises to meet the data requirements of next-generation applications. Specifically, Apache Cassandra database provides linear scalability, a flexible consistency model and shared-nothing architecture that enables enterprises to scale their database footprint according to performance needs. As mission-critical applications […]
Why IT Monitoring Matters: The State of Monitoring 2016
Times are changing rapidly in the world of IT monitoring. A once stable landscape consisting of just a few monolithic solutions has exploded and fragmented as a new wave of tools better-suited to the scale, complexity and agility of modern infrastructure and applications has emerged. Which is why the team at alert correlation platform vendor […]
Will Deduplication Solutions Work for Cassandra?
Cassandra is a popular next-generation database system (NoSQL) that powers the back end of high-performance web-scale applications in enterprises. It is database software for cloud applications that accelerates the organizations’ ability to power the growing number of cloud applications that require data distribution across data centers and clouds. While Cassandra offers high availability, it also […]
Using Case Management to Tackle the Unknown
One of the biggest challenges for an organization is producing IT response models that accurately reflect real-world scenarios. It’s pretty straightforward to establish protocols for predictable situations. We call these “standard” scenarios. It gets harder when you have to tackle the unknown. “Case management,” as it’s called, involves establishing strategies and methods to approach unpredictable […]
Backup and Recovery of MongoDB, Part 2
This blog is the second in a two-part series on backup and recovery for MongoDB. In one of my previous blogs, I covered why companies require both replication and backup for enterprise grade data protection. And in the first part of this blog series, I discussed the existing solutions for backup and recovery of MongoDB […]
Using MongoDB for a Product Catalog Application
In today’s era of data-driven business, enterprises are continuously adopting new technologies to gain a competitive advantage. Distributed and cloud databases is one such technology. These databases are fundamentally different from relational databases, offering scalability, availability and flexible data models that are beyond the capabilities of traditional relational databases. MongoDB is one of the leading […]
Avoid the DevOps Temptation to Build It Yourself
As tempting as building your own DevOps incident communication tool sounds, you should think twice. My colleagues and I recently were on the phone with a company seeking an IT incident communications and collaboration solution (a.k.a. IT alerting) to eliminate the time wasted with inefficient communications between teams when dealing with major IT issues. We […]
How to Fail at Test Automation
Let me start by admitting that I am not a test automation expert. I have done some work with test automation and have supervised teams who practiced it, but when it comes to the intricacies of it, I have to call a friend. It is from such friends that I have learned why so many […]
What Does DevOps Mean to Test Teams?
It wasn’t long ago that the Dev and test teams would work late hours, focused and rushed to meet a deadline: rapid fixing, reprioritizing and deferring bugs to close out the bug list, move everything to the staging server, do one last run of the regression and pass it over to Ops/IT to move to […]
What is JSON? How Do I Use It? Does It Beat BSON?
TL;DR: If you’ve ever wondered about JSON—what it is, how to use it or what it has to do with BSON—then you’ve come to the right place. In this article I’ll explore what these acronyms stand for and what these formats do in the world of programming and databases. What is JSON? JSON stands for […]
It’s Time to Slay the Universal Installer Unicorn
While many people want a universal “easy button installer,” they also want it to work on their unique snowflake of infrastructures, tools, networks and operating systems. I call them snowflakes because their small differences expand combinatorially. That divergence turns the idea of a prescriptive reference architecture into a destructive myth that limits community and ecosystem […]
Will MariaDB Soon Replace MySQL?
MariaDB is a database growing in popularity. Its lead developer is Michael “Monty” Widenius, who was part of the team that created MySQL. When MySQL was acquired by Oracle, Widenius and some of the other original MySQL developers decided to launch MariaDB as a fork of MySQL and keep it as open source to mitigate […]
Development Tools Sprawl and the Impact of Open Source: The Herding Kittens Survey
DevOps.com and Automic partnered up to conduct a survey back in February and March of several hundred respondents regarding their use of development tools, their use of Open Source and their rate of change. The survey report entitled: Managing Your DevOps Tool Chest, The Complexity of Herding Kittens is available from Automic here (fyi, registration is required to […]
Q&A: Sematext’s Thies on Docker Monitoring, Part 2
In part one of my conversation with Stefan Thies, Sematext DevOps expert. we spoke about Docker’s use of Sematext Logsene logging, anomaly detecting and alerting software and SPM monitoring software. Let’s continue the conversation. David Geer: What makes Logsene centralized? Where is it centralized a typical deployment? What are the advantages of it being centralized? […]
Q&A: Sematext’s Thies on Docker Monitoring, Part 1
Stefan Thies is DevOps evangelist Sematext Group. I recently spoke with him about Docker’s use of Sematext Logsene logging, anomaly detecting and alerting software and SPM monitoring software. Read on for part one of our conversation. David Geer: Technically speaking, for the purposes of this article, what is logging? Thies: Logging means to store the […]
Top 10 IT Management Tools
Staying up with the latest IT management tools is akin to keeping up on the latest Starbucks drink options. We simplify it here through a look at the most useful tools, from monitoring to DevOps orchestration and APM. IT management tools have entered a new heyday, thanks to the advent of cloud, DevOps and mobile […]
DevOps and ITaaS: Two Sides of the Same Coin
It seems IT practitioners haven’t realized yet the scale of digital disruption. Mired in the old IT thinking, they firmly believe that sophisticated tools are all businesses need to survive the ongoing digital disruption waves. Most of them warn, “Digital transformation is changing the way we do business, the way we deliver IT services must change, […]
Integrated Testing Without Integrated Migraines
I am always amazed at how many practitioners (or, rather, managers of) tout the benefits of test-driven development (TDD). This inherently changes the role of the traditional developer to one of developer and tester. But it would appear that as long as I am able to construct a test for the innovation I wish to […]