Le Morte d’Arthur— A DevOps Engineering Journey
The stories of King Arthur have fascinated me from the time I was young. Now that I am old DevOps_the_Gray, I enjoy relating the story of King Arthur to my experiences with DevOps. I hope you find this blog interesting and relevant too. Imagine a boy raised in Britain by the wizard Merlin who becomes […]
Our API Mess is Coming
APIs are the satisfaction of a long and deep need to be able to create consistent and reliable integrations between disparate systems, operating systems and datasets. As we started to use REST-based APIs, we also realized they fulfilled a previously little-addressed gap in automation. Frankly, they are a force multiplier in DevOps delivery. Early efforts […]
Despite Cloud Adoption, Enterprises Demand On-Premises Software
A recent report from Dimensional Research reveals that the demand for on-premises software is equal to that of public cloud. The report, which was commissioned by Replicated, a company specializing in on-premises software modernization, queried 405 participants in software development, executive, product management, sales and services roles to determine the needs, usage and challenges of […]
Dear Vendor: Letter to Technology Vendors
While I was writing my “Dear Management …” post, something was going on behind the scenes that inspired me to write another. We all have things we wish to say to vendors; this open letter picks some of the big points that they seem to invariably struggle with. Dear Vendor, We want to use your […]
The Role of APIs In Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is increasingly propelled by rapidly changing user expectations. Release frequency is increasing, as is the need to connect a growing number of applications and digital experiences. As a result, 83% of IT specialists consider API integration critical to their business, found the State of API Integration Report. Application programming interfaces (APIs) hold powerful […]
SecDevOps is the Solution to Cybersecurity
Anybody paying attention to world news will notice that the threats and risks perpetrated by cybercriminal actors, in many forms, is a serious problem on the rise, affecting individuals, organizations and nations daily. The cybersecurity threat space is indeed alarming and growing rapidly. The cybersecurity solution space is struggling to keep up. After all, there […]
Why We’re Swimming in Dashboards and Drowning in Data
Knowing how to use a dashboard is table stakes in the enterprise. Information technologies generate countless volumes of data from multiple sources, and dashboards are meant to harness all of that information, reduce the noise and display the stats you need to do your job. Yet businesses are still struggling to unlock the value of […]
Survey Illuminates Long Dark Road to Hybrid Cloud
While hybrid cloud computing will play a critical role in enabling digital business transformation it turns out most IT organizations lack the skills and technologies required to achieve it. A survey of 108 IT executives conducted by the research firm Pulse on behalf of CloudBolt Software, a provider of a cloud management platform, finds 94% […]
Dear Management: Letter to DevOps Leaders
My occasional reminder that “Change is good, but predictability is better,” is in the form of a message to DevOps upper management. I thought it would be fun to write, and would offer a different perspective and drive than normal. Hope you enjoy! Dear Management, Too much of anything is bad. No matter the topic, […]
More and More Enterprises Go Headless
IT faces high expectations for building and supporting omnichannel digital experiences. Simultaneously, web developers hold an evolving toolkit of architectural approaches to deliver content. One such framework gaining mindshare is headless, a style that decouples front end user experiences from back end application logic. Legacy options for content delivery can be somewhat cumbersome in that […]
How to Spot SRE Adoption Barriers
It’s no secret that site reliability engineering (SRE) adoption is growing. The operating model, it seems, is pivotal for digital transformations across the enterprise. According to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, 22% of respondents (up 7% from last year) cited SRE as the approach they need to continue automation in 2021. Common Adoption […]
DevOps Practices Gap Assessment
Using DevOps to continuously deliver software has proven value for organizations that are on a path towards digital transformation and continuous improvement. To get the maximum value from DevOps, 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 […]
‘Old Man Yells At Cloud’
These days, software programmers are increasingly estranged from hardware. Most millennials and Generation Z developers have never had to mount physical servers. They have never been lulled by the gentle hum of a server room chugging along in synchronous harmony. Today, you don’t even necessarily have to build your own PC or worry too much […]
Next Up: Portable CI
One thing that we’re very good at in IT is breaking new ground, coming up with ideas that work astoundingly well, getting broad adoption, then standardizing them for interoperability. When a new technology (looking at you, cloud) has problems with standardization and interoperability, we find a way around vendors’ reluctance to give you freedom of […]
IBM Unifies Cloud Services to Simplify App Dev
IBM announced today that an IBM Cloud Code Engine service that unifies the cloud platforms on which applications are built and deployed is now generally available. Built on top of a serverless computing platform, IBM Cloud Code Engine is a managed service that unifies access to a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, a container-as-a-service (CaaS) environment and […]
ADOC: Assessing DevOps Culture
The Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC) is crowdsourced, vendor-neutral and designed for individuals, teams and organizations who want to baseline their current DevOps state, identify the next target state, gain insights into how to improve their organization and team capabilities and measure and accelerate continuous improvement during their DevOps journey. The assessment models five DevOps […]
Languages and DevOps: Mainframe
In true DevOps fashion, I nearly forgot to cover the mainframe after saying it warranted its own blog! There is a lot going on right now in the mainframe space, so the question of mainframe language choices has several different answers. We’ve got Linux running on the mainframe, we’ve got cross-compiled open source capable of […]
DevSecOps Practices Gap Assessment
DevSecOps practices are essential to deliver software safely and securely withinDevOps value streams. To get the maximum security protection from DevSecOps, 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 DevSecOps and determine a strategy for […]
The Evolution of the Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC)
The Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC) is crowdsourced, vendor-neutral and designed for individuals, teams and organizations who want to baseline their current DevOps state, identify the next target state, gain insights into how to improve their organization and team capabilities and measure and accelerate continuous improvement during their DevOps journey. The assessment models five DevOps […]
How to Use the Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC)
The Assessment of DevOps Capabilities (ADOC) is crowdsourced, vendor-neutral and designed for individuals, teams and organizations who want to baseline their current DevOps state, identify the next target state, gain insights into how to improve their organization and team capabilities and measure and accelerate continuous improvement during their DevOps journey. The assessment models five DevOps […]
Languages and DevOps: Recommendations
In light of the points brought up in these articles, what is my advice for which language to use on a given project? The same advice I have always given development teams: Use the right tool for the job. My father was a woodworker, and drilled that concept into me. I brought it to development, […]
Seeing the Bigger Picture With BizDevSecOps
Not long ago, if you can believe it, software was shipped on physical floppy disks and CDs. These physical relics contained dense paper instruction books that humans read diligently for hours on end (I guess they had more time to spare back then?). Complexity was a given for computer-based tasks. Fast forward past the consumerization […]
Unified Enterprise DevOps Platforms Eliminate Bottlenecks
Nearly all enterprise digital transformation projects include moving software to DevOps processes and platforms. The effort, cost and time it takes to be successful with these transformations depend on a lot of factors, but one thing stands out: as indicated in my white paper Unified Enterprise DevOps Platform Why? How? And What?, “An enterprise with many […]