Change Management & Continuous Delivery: Clash or Harmony?
Introducing changes into running software systems is risky. There’s always a chance of failure, and that can have a negative impact on your business. It’s important to mitigate that risk, but there’s more than one way to do so. Change Management is all about ensuring that changes to existing systems and software in production are […]
Top Skills for Enterprise DevOps
There is one question I hear almost every time I talk with my large enterprise customers about DevOps: What skills do my people need to be successful with DevOps? Talk of DevOps almost immediately focuses on culture – like having empathy for fellow workers, being flexible and adaptable, seeking continuous improvement, building relationships, etc. However, […]
Four key vectors for closing the DevOps feedback loop
A question I am asked frequently about DevOps – and a perennial challenge to all DevOps slide artists – is what exactly we mean by the idea of ‘closing the feedback loop’ Q. What do you mean when you mention ‘closing the feedback loop’? Ops monitor our systems today, and alert devs when they are […]
Being Agile is all about controlling the flow
For businesses, Agile is the new fashionable initiative as was E-business was in the 2000’s, Six Sigma was in the 90’s and Total Quality Management (TQM) was in the 80’s. If we look back across the spectrum of these initiatives, we need to examine how many of these initiatives met the goals the business was […]
Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale
Since I published my blog explaining the topic of ‘Big DevOps’ late last year, the concept of Enterprise DevOps has exploded, with commentary, experience, and advice (some good, some awful) popping up from many different quarters. Fortunately, many pundits have now come to agree that application delivery in a traditional enterprise is very different from […]
Is SDN just DevOps for the network?
The answer depends on your definition of SDN. There have been several vibrant discussions via Twitter of late on the relationship between SDN and DevOps, with some calling for a distinction to be made by referring to the marriage of the network and DevOps as “NetOps”, others dismissing that as unnecessary, and a whole lot […]
Infrastructure-as-code, new rules for the old game
There’s been a lot of discussion regarding DevOps and its role in fostering quality and continuous improvement through increased levels of automation. In turn, this automation is fostered through emerging infrastructure and software architectures that are exposing control plane and management programming interfaces, which has been dubbed in many circles as Infrastructure-as-Code. This movement allows […]
Nagios is not a monitoring strategy
When I visit clients to talk about DevOps, I usually ask them what their monitoring strategy is. Too often, the answer I hear is “We use Nagios”. I think Nagios is a great tool, but it sure is not a strategy. Nagios does a good job of monitoring infrastructure. It will alert you when you […]
Not all collaboration types are equal
Talking about collaboration in general terms is easy. I’ve done it and so has everyone else. It’s time now to dig deeper into the specifics of collaboration, meaning the different types – asynchronous vs. synchronous, vertical vs. horizontal – and how different companies fit into the magic collaboration quadrant. And yes, the quadrant is indeed […]
Automation versus Orchestration
Yes, Virginia, there is a difference. One of the things devops practitioners are tasked with is the provisioning and configuration of all sorts of infrastructure. Application servers, web servers, load balancers, proxies and database servers are among the lengthy (and no doubt growing) list of “boxes” devops needs to get up and running to support […]
A Winning DevOps Approach for Established Enterprises: Pace-layered
Does your bank offer the ability to deposit a check by taking its picture with your smartphone? When that feature debuted a few years back, I remember thinking it was interesting and convenient enough that if my bank didn’t offer it soon, I’d be willing to switch to one that did. I bring this example […]