APM Prepares Prep Sportswear for Promising Growth
Prep Sportswear kicked off in 2003 and appeared either in the Inc. 500 or Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing private U.S. companies six years in a row, from 2009- 2014, according to online data from Inc. Magazine. The custom sportswear vendor has achieved 130-percent growth over the past three years, says Mike Jones, Director of […]
Survey says network agility is still immature
At least that’s the word from SDx Central’s Cloud Management, Orchestration and DevOps 2015 Report in which 76% of respondents said the network was the most immature component in the cloud management stack. Now to be fair, the network is one of the last components (I’m looking at you, security) to get on board the “automate […]
Microservices, Hyper-Complexity, and Automation
Imagine building a human being one DNA codon at a time. Sure, you might be able to build a pretty awesome individual. But it would take a long, long time. And you’d only be able to build one. Worse yet, if you didn’t get your person exactly right on your first try, it would take […]
Continuous Deployment is king of the DevOps hill
One of the promises of DevOps is continuous deployment. DevOps is, first and foremost, a matter of shifting the traditional business culture more than the tools and technologies that enable it. Once that culture exists, though, one of the defining aspects of DevOps is automation and continuity. Earlier this year I wrote about the seeming […]
Digital Disrupters – Building a DevOps Leadership Profile
While the advancement of DevOps methodology remains fairly nascent for many organizations, an ever-expanding class of leading practitioners are evolving a wide range of related best practices. Beyond the well-worn concept of “unicorns” – the scant few organizations that stand as mythical examples of DevOps nirvana – this broader set of early adopters have begun […]
Re-thinking DevOps tools for Continuous Deployment success
Gartner predicts that 25% of Global 2000 companies will be actively implementing DevOps methodologies in their organizations by 2016. As DevOps goes mainstream, it may be time to re-think some of the implementation techniques that have worked in small companies and in non-production uses. The common assumptions that are often applied to make a continuous […]
The business benefits of DevOps
As DevOps has become more of a mainstream concept it seems like there’s less need to define what it is or explain what it does. As prevalent as DevOps is for those of us who work in the world of DevOps or organizations that have already embraced DevOps there are still many businesses out there […]
DevOps Leadership Series: Boston Common
DevOps is coming, DevOps is coming! You could hear the rallying cry around the city of Boston on September 15th and 16th. This is when the DevOps Leadership Series crew headed up north to attend DevOps Days Boston. We first caught up with Beno Chapman (@BenoChapman), release engineering leader at Constant Contact. Beno shared, […]
4 big challenges of microservices
The rise of microservices as a means of developing and delivering software value faster is clearly on the rise. Containers have skyrocketed from a fringe technology to a mainstream imperative and organizations are scrambling to jump on the microservices bandwagon. Before you rush out to embrace microservices, though, there are a few things you should […]
Are we really back to “just reboot it”?
The server infrastructure management style of pets vs cattle was originally coined by Bill Baker of Microsoft though Randy Bias of CloudScaling further popularized it in 2012 and revised and clarified in this presentation. Essentially the original “pets” style of server management has mainly hand-built, named, and configured servers that are heavily cared for as […]
Where will DevOps be in 10 years’ time?
What will the DevOps landscape look like in 10 years’ time? Ten years ago, Agile was seen as new and different. Now it’s part of everyday life of most developers. Will it be the same with DevOps? It’s time to clasp the crystal ball and unravel where the future is headed. First things first. DevOps […]
Librato Seeks to Unlock DevOps Application Monitoring
As wider adoption of DevOps methodologies continues to foster demand for new tooling to help streamline evolving workflows, at least one vendor is attempting to address the growing need for related monitoring capabilities. Librato, a San Francisco-based provider of Amazon AWS applications performance monitoring (APM) services, claims that it is finding favor among the rapidly […]
Five mistakes enterprises make while implementing automation
Automation, if done right, can add a ton of value to an IT organization. Benefits include speed, quality, and improved productivity. But only a few IT organizations have been able to truly reap the benefits of it. Why is that? What is it that these successful companies do differently while others continue to struggle? Here […]
DevOps fast food: Chef on the AWS marketplace,
News from the AWS Summit in NYC today is that Chef is now available as a one click install on AWS via the AWS marketplace. While the ability to use Chef on AWS is not new (it is the leading configuration management tool on AWS), being on the marketplace makes both install and billing a […]
Choosing a Mobile Test Automation Solution: What You Need to Know
Organizations today rely more and more heavily on mobile apps to drive their business. In fact, many companies are already seeing more than half of their web traffic coming in via mobile devices. In some cases, their mobile app is the only way customers interact with their products. It’s no surprise, then, that developing, testing, […]
Testing Will Never Be Automated
“Come to think of it, no one speaks of automated programming or manual programming. There is programming, and there is lots of other stuff done by tools. Once a tool is created to do that stuff, it is never called programming again.” – James Bach and Michael Bolton, “Testing and Checking Refined That’s one of […]
Imperative or Declarative? The question of DevOps in the network.
A significant amount of bandwidth is spent discussing automation and praising the value of APIs within the broader DevOps umbrella. These concepts are particularly important in the context of CI/CD and the evolution of application architectures toward decoupled, service-oriented systems. Automation is used for build and test, to drive the workflow that moves an app […]
On beginning software delivery acceleration
Time and time again, we hear of companies achieving rapid acceleration with DevOps. Companies are touting success with the metric of deploys/day, sharing new baselines of 10, 50 or even 100 deploys/day. In more mature organizations the likes of LinkedIn, Netflix, Etsy, Facebook and others, this number is a startling 1,000+ number. But, what does […]
API Discovery and Search with APIs.JSON
If that sounds vaguely like UDDI (which dealt with discovery and search of WSDL then you’re on the right track. Glue is this week, and preceding the conference was the 2015 API Strategy and Practice Tech Un-Workshops. One of the lightning talks (and they were lightning fast, let me tell you) was all about APIs.JSON […]
The Great Legacy Code Crisis Of 2016
Over the next few years, I believe that legacy software is going to become a key factor which will start impacting organisations in fundamental ways, having a sudden and significant impact on their profitability. Those constrained by legacy platforms will be operating with a ball and chain, holding back their ability to get new features […]
George Jetson Automation: Chasing the Dream
“His job was one simple thing—press a button. That’s all he had to do; press one button and sit back.” – Joe Barbera I wanted to be George Jetson when I grew up. Back in the days when watching Saturday morning cartoons in footed pajamas was the high point of my week, George’s life looked […]
Enterprise DevOps: Standardize for Security
Etsy is a shining example of the success that can be achieved with continuous delivery (CD). By 2014 Etsy had doubled its deployment rate, deploying more than 50 times a day. Today the site deploys API changes in 18 seconds and launches a new website every 150 seconds. That’s speed, to be sure. Speed that […]
Automation, Provisioning and Configuration Management with PUPPET
This is 3rd part of the multi-part series covering Automation, provisioning and Configuration Management. In this follow up article best practices for Puppet shall be covered. Why Puppet? While every system administrator comes up with more progressive systems to be managed, the automation of every mundane task is increasingly significant. Instead of achieving in-house developed scripts, […]