A New DevOps Database Platform is Needed
The diverse number of database platforms, deployment environments and data variants needed to support the plethora of applications and services required for rapid DevOps continuous delivery lead times, coupled with the challenges of integrating database changes for application pipelines, is a growing challenge for many organizations as they strive to accelerate their DevOps transformations. When […]
BMC Extends DevOps Reach from the Mainframe
BMC today announced it has extended its DevOps platform for mainframe environments to provide integrations with GitHub Actions, a framework for managing workflows, and HCL Launch, a continuous delivery platform from HCL Software. BMC gained the DevOps platform with the acquisition of Compuware in June 2020. John McKenny, senior vice president and general manager for […]
Best Practices for AWS Tagging With Yor
On the surface, AWS resource tags are simple, informational key:value metadata that you can assign to most AWS resources. They also have many hidden benefits, as outlined in this AWS Tagging Best Practices guide for improving cloud operations. There are six use cases author Brian Yost calls out in particular: AWS console organization and resource […]
Leveraging the Cloud for Mainframe Access
Now more than ever, organizations around the world are looking to extend their existing mainframe investments as part of larger digital transformation initiatives. As core systems of record and reliability, mainframes continue to run many organizations’ most important applications and the idea of replacing these systems comes with greater risk than reward. While organizations are […]
Continuous Testing Practices Gap Assessment
Continuous testing is an essential part of DevOps. To get the maximum value from continuous testing, it is important to use recommended best practices, inclusive of people, processes and technologies. A gap assessment is a great way to efficiently evaluate an organization’s practices for DevOps and determine a strategy for improvement. Gap analysis provides valuable […]
Managing Cloud Governance Costs Collaboratively
For those responsible for managing infrastructure, the concept of governance is common, especially as it relates to cloud services. For cloud services, it’s defined as a framework that guides how end users use these services by defining and creating policies to control costs, minimize security risks, improve efficiency and accelerate deployment. The term is often […]
The Forces Massing Against the Data Center
We’ve come a long way over the last few decades. A ton of stuff about IT has changed, even in the last five years. And it is true in IT that the only constant is change. We like to have control of our environment to provide the most stable platform for user satisfaction that we […]
Continuous Testing Practices – Part 3
In my prior blog, Continuous Testing – The Quest for Quality at Speed, I described five tenets and some of the practices for continuous testing to help with understanding what continuous testing is. In my consulting work, I find it necessary to use 15 categories of practices to assess an organizations’ continuous testing capabilities. Given […]
Continuous Testing Practices – Part 2
In my prior blog, Continuous Testing – The Quest for Quality at Speed, I described five tenets and some of the practices for continuous testing to help explain what continuous testing is. In my consulting work, I find it necessary to use 15 categories of practices to assess an organizations’ continuous testing capabilities. Given the […]
Continuous Testing Practices (Part 1)
In my prior blog, Continuous Testing – The Quest for Quality at Speed, I described five tenets and some of the practices for continuous testing (CT) to help those understand what continuous testing is. In my consulting work, I find it necessary to use 15 categories of practices to assess an organizations’ continuous testing capabilities. […]
Some Technical Debt is Self-Resolving
But don’t count on it. Fellow DevOps.com contributor Bill Doerrfeld recently wrote, “Enterprises Face Growing Technical Debt,” a great article about trends in technical debt, and it got me thinking about some of the things that have been going on in the industry over the last few years. As I’ve mentioned before, the changes underlying […]
Learning ‘The Third Way’ of DevOps – Continuous Improvement
I refer to the third way of DevOps–continuous experimentation and learning, as simply continuous improvement. In some sense, there is no way to learn the third way of DevOps because it is, by definition, a moving target. It does make sense to discuss what is needed to create a continuous learning organization for DevOps continuous […]
Yes, You Do Need SCA
We often go to restaurants and treat ourselves to unfamiliar and exotic foods made with ingredients we’re only vaguely aware of. A chef and their team (or a manager and their crew) are our vouchsafe that what’s in there isn’t deadly. Most of the time, that works out just fine; but, very rarely, we end […]
Learning ‘The Second Way’ of DevOps – Continuous Feedback
As indicated in my prior blog Learning the ‘First Way’ of DevOps–Continuous Flow, many organizations are struggling to realize well-engineered DevOps, even the ‘first way’ of DevOps – continuous flow. The first way of DevOps, continuous flow, is the foundation for DevOps. Once mastered, an organization will naturally want to master the second way of […]
Make a Plan for Test Automation
The amount of testing that we could be doing is massive. Most of us don’t look at testing across the spectrum and all-inclusively, but let’s do that for a second. We have functional testing at the code level, which is reasonably well automated already, if your shop is using such automation. Then we have integration […]
HashiCorp Increases Terraform’s Enterprise Appeal
During the online HashiConf Europe conference today, HashiCorp debuted the general availability of a 1.0 release of HashiCorp Terraform along with updates to HashiCorp Terraform Cloud service. Meghan Liese, senior director of product marketing for HashiCorp, said in both cases HashiCorp is moving to enable organizations to better secure and govern IT infrastructure-as-code provisioned using […]
Why AIOps Is Critical for Pandemic Business Recovery
As businesses worked to stay afloat over the last year, innovation in many areas fell behind. Business leaders struggled to understand the short-term and long-term impact the COVID-19 pandemic would have on their business, while employees worried about losing their jobs and customers scrambled to rearrange budgets. As we near the end and can finally […]
A Funny Thing Happened On the Way to API Management
As API use has exploded across IT departments large and small, the need to manage APIs as independent entities—both APIs themselves and calls to them—rapidly became apparent. We have been through this cycle several times before–ORBs, DCOM, object repositories … the list goes on. There are several competing goals when introducing some management structure into […]
Learning ‘The First Way’ of DevOps – Continuous Flow
Many organizations are struggling to realize well-engineered DevOps, even ‘the first way’ of DevOps – continuous flow. DevOps is an evolving body of knowledge. There is no one-stop shop that covers all roles and the complete range of skills required for DevOps. A DevOps-competent workforce requires an ongoing commitment to DevOps skills development and mastery. […]
Turbocharge Enterprise Apps With Contextual Analytics
Software product managers and developers typically treat analytics as a standalone capability—something to be integrated into their application’s dashboard or reporting module. As a product feature, analytics is undoubtedly a valuable tool. But offering it merely as a tacked-on function is an approach that lags behind where your users are today. When data analytics is […]
7 Step Transformation Blueprint for SecDevOps
The struggle for continuous software security is obvious, but the solutions are not. As I indicated in my prior blog, SecDevOps is the Solution to Cybersecurity, a security-first mindset, coupled with SecDevOps-specific practices, provides an opportunity to achieve true continuous security. But, in reality, how can an organization accomplish SecDevOps? This blog explains how to […]
Serverless Computing Brings New Security Risks
Attracted by lower costs and less operational overhead, serverless computing is an unmistakable undercurrent in the world of DevOps. Developers are drawn to the innovation because it requires no architecture to manage while offering continuous scaling for anything from a few requests per day to hundreds of thousands of requests per second. More than 50% […]
Cattle, Not Kittens – Revisited
The early days of DevOps were filled with pronouncements that we needed to treat our servers as cattle, not pets (kittens). For a year or so, the refrain was everywhere. And we did. We detached servers from dedicated hardware, we made spin up and spin down so easy that we just replaced malfunctioning servers (which […]