DevOps: The Things We Must Stop
Anytime there is a popular movement in technology (and I would argue any other field), people get carried away. We’ve seen it over and over, and DevOps attracts this kind of attention. In fact, DevOps caters to those who get carried away by mainstream folks screaming, “THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!” That type of hyperbole pushes those […]
Repeat Warning: There is No Silver Bullet in DevOps
As the cycle of DevOps is repeated in a growing list of organizations, I feel compelled to reiterate the warning that this is not the pinnacle. Anyone who has been around for a while knows that the current fad is not the last fad. [[Cue DevOps people screaming at my choice of the word “fad”]] […]
Enterprise Infrastructure: Adapt or Face Extinction
In my previous blog, I explored how new ways of working—DevOps, Agile, cloud and startup thinking—have brought in a tectonic shift in the ways of working of enterprises. For infrastructure leadership and management, this is nothing short of a perfect storm that they need to navigate. While these new ways have impacted every aspect of […]
Agile and DevOps: Where the Rubber (Literally) Meets the Road
Do Agile and DevOps methodologies apply outside of technology? More specifically, can we apply them to sport? I decided to answer these questions by analyzing the application of Agile and DevOps principles within my road-cycling team. For those of you who don’t know, cycling is a very data-driven sport. While we are training and racing, […]
The Human Touch: The Key to Optimizing Your Software Value Stream Network
Software has no intrinsic value until it’s working in production and supporting a customer’s business initiatives. With that in mind, it’s imperative that organizations focus on how they reduce the time to value, not just time to deploy. And that’s achieved through people. A common misconception is that technology underpins a software delivery value stream. […]
Time to Rethink Infrastructure Operations in Enterprises
“Business is technology and technology is business” seems to be the new mantra as the rules of corporate strategy are being rewritten across industries. According to IDC’s survey in 2017, “Two-thirds of global CEOs will have digital transformation as part of their corporate strategy.” That’s CEOs—not CIOs—who will have digital transformation as part of their corporate […]
DevOps and Low-Code/No-Code Tools
Helping out a friend, I had reason to revisit low-code/no-code solutions and poke around a bit. The industry has been relatively quiet on the topic, but changes in systems and marketing made me feel the need to offer an update on the relation of current solutions to DevOps. Low-code/no-code solutions have been a panacea in […]
DevOps: What a Wonderful World it Would Be
The promises of DevOps are clear. They offer faster iterations, allowing ops to keep up with agile development and make an IT organization more responsive to business needs. DevOps doesn’t make less code. It doesn’t reduce configuration files. It doesn’t eliminate deployment issues (though it might reduce them). It doesn’t eliminate testing; indeed, it creates […]
Defects: Pay More Attention to What, Less to Who
Software defects have been with us forever, and while DevOps and agile can reduce the number of defects generated, it is unlikely this number will ever get to zero for a given organization—and even if it does, it won’t likely stay there. Simply put, we’re developing increasingly complex systems on increasingly short timelines. The reduction […]
Can Agile and DevOps Get Along?
There is a common misconception that Agile and DevOps cannot work together, which does a disservice to everyone in the software development and delivery field. In fact, both approaches can significantly add to the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection and adaption to better enable product teams to develop, deliver and sustain complex products. Both Agile […]
‘Let the Developer Choose the Language’: Too Much of a Good Thing
As more and more enterprises drive into the DevOps space, this is less of an issue, but you still hear stories that make one cringe. The idea of DevOps (and, by extension, agile) is to get products to market faster and spend less time managing/fixing. Some take the idea to be freedom to choose—and it […]
Digital Transformation: How DevOps Could Have Revamped Toys R Us
The story you’re about to read and its recommendations are real; they contrast with what you have heard so far about digital transformation and DevOps implementation. Its objective is to convince you about that the time to go digital is now; it’s about transforming your business, not only IT; and to do it you’ll have […]
No-Ops: It’s Been 5 Years
As I hinted in this post, the state of no-ops is not anywhere near no-ops for most use cases. The closest we have today would be software as a service (SaaS), which handles the majority of operations for us, but still requires some interaction by operations staff. The next closest I can think of is […]
Gene Kim, DOES17 Speakers Discuss the Deployment Age
In a special episode of Electric Cloud’s Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), Gene Kim and speakers from the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit San Francisco (DOES17) discussed the deployment age, and how DevOps practices and automation can unburden teams and boost productivity. The panel included: Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop; Robin Yeman, fellow at Lockheed Martin; Courtney Kissler, […]
How to Succeed with DevOps by Outsourcing Software Development
The DevOps journey can be successful when you use offshore outsourcing software partners, but it requires careful attention from your IT leaders. The old saying, “The only constant is change,” has never been more true for software development, whether your company is a SaaS provider or a manufacturer of discrete products that rely heavily on […]
DevOps in the Age of Digital Transformation
Digital transformation is one of the hottest buzzwords in the technology industry today. While it tends to be overused, the term does represent a widespread, ongoing movement that will set a standard for the next generation of enterprises. Digital transformation is all about keeping up with the pace of innovation and using technology to achieve […]
The 7C Holistic Approach to DevOps
The DevOps methodology was first adopted in 2007 with a bigger purpose of improving organizational efficiency by bridging the gap between software release and IT operations teams. This started as the core practice of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) with a prime focus on better quality of releases and more frequent releases. Now, […]
Break the Rules and Win at Digital Transformation
The rules of the game have changed. In today’s digital world, it’s not about the big eating the small. It’s the fast that beat the slow and the nimble that outmaneuver companies constrained by old systems and business models. What’s more, the finish line is always moving. The rapid pace of innovation and disruption means […]
Speaking for the Dead: Are ‘Agile’ and ‘Monolithic’ Actually Good?
What if Agile is the product of getting bored at work, microservices are the result of us needing a challenge and scrums are the result of an obsessive project manager? Do we all think waterfall development is a dinosaur whose extinction is deserved because of what we have been told and not because of reality? […]
Don’t Let Cultural Debt Bring Down Your Business
Businesses today are faced with myriad challenges to innovate and optimize. In doing so, we often need to make decisions that borrow against the future. This can come in a tangible form, such as taking money from investors to fund growth, or in more inconspicuous forms, such as making tradeoffs in technical decisions. When we […]
Incorporating Performance Engineering into DevOps
Performance testing historically has been a challenge for most IT organizations. It is highly misunderstood, from executives down to the few resources allocated to perform an extremely difficult task. Most companies consider performance testing expensive and unnecessary and simply refuse to acknowledge it is a critical component of the software development life cycle. Have we […]
Yahoo7 Uses DevOps to Speed Website Redevelopment
Yahoo7 is a joint venture between Yahoo and Australian entertainment and TV company Seven West Media. Seven is one of Australia’s three major TV networks. The company has completely replaced its technology stack and is in the process of revamping its seven consumer sites to take advantage of the new platform. The first cab off […]
Continuous Delivery vs. Continuous Deployment
I am often asked, “if we are using a continuous integration (CI) server and adopting a continuous delivery pipeline, where does continuous deployment fit in?” Good question. In a nutshell, continuous delivery engines such as CloudBees or Blue Ocean are designed to trigger the execution of CI workflows across the dev, test and prod environments. […]