What IT expects from SDN is DevOps
There was much excitement in the air when the announcement that Docker had acquired SocketPlane. Not the least of which was emanating from my corner of the world, where DevOps for network (the whole network) is something you’ve noticed I pretty much live and breathe. The announcement was couched as an SDN (Software-Defined Networking) play […]
A Three Step Roadmap for Enterprise DevOps
The extremes of application release velocity are converging in the enterprise. Whereas Fortune 500 enterprises may have historically taken months to years for each release cycle, they are exploring new approaches from new age Internet technology firms that release new versions of an application several times in a day. According to a recent report on […]
Continuous Testing – Accelerated !
Except for cases where test duration is the point of the test, as indicated in my prior blog “Isn’t Continuous Testing a Longevity Test Anti-pattern?”, faster continuous testing cycles are preferred because failing early and often is a DevOps goal. There are multiple reasons for this, but it should be evident that faster tests reduce […]
Webinar: Application Release Automation at Scale
Organizations of all shapes and sizes depend on feature-packed application releases to keep end users productive and happy. As application complexity grows, managing deployments manually becomes more difficult and slows down the pace of business. Join Amy DeMartine, Sr. Analyst at Forrester research and Mike Hamrick, Software Configuration Management Lead at Lockheed Martin, servicing CMS […]
Building software quality into your Continuous Delivery pipeline
The modern software development landscape places a premium on speed. It’s good to be first to market. If you’re going to fail then you should fail fast. A rapidly evolving product can be shaped according to customer feedback, and fast turnaround allows you to stamp out defects and hone the software for your audience. A […]
Isn’t Continuous Testing a Longevity Test Anti-pattern?
Accordingly to Jim Coplien: “an anti-pattern is something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied. “ In DevOps context, continuous testing is an attractive solution for the narrow context of testing specific software components quickly (in cycles measured in minutes or hours) but may be “bad” if the system that […]
DevOps & Continuous Change
A remark by a colleague while waiting for the coffee machine to complete its cycle started my train of thought. “Should we have multiple minor releases or just do a few major ones in a year?” In large organizations, due to many factors, the turnaround time for a single successful release is quite extensive; but […]
From QA to Continuous Testing
My prior blog “DevOps – It’s All About Continuous Testing” posits that QA testers don’t need to fear DevOps because continuous testing QA is a central part of DevOps infrastructures that are implemented according to best practices. That is not to say however that continuous testing is precisely the same as traditional QA testing or […]
Measure Twice. Automate Once.
“Shipping” code may start with the completion of development but it doesn’t end until after the operational delivery process ends. Just like any fulfillment process, shipping is actually just the kick off of an often arduous journey that ultimately delivers the app to the end user. Ship It Back in the old days (when they […]
Crowdsourced Software Testing
As a developer or technical architect, there is no better feeling than taking pride in giving a quality product or service result to your customers. Now, with computer trends going rapidly towards cloud services and mobile devices, regular company IT development teams are finding their testing capabilities more and more limiting. They are faced with […]
Security Should Be the Top Driver for DevOps
I’ve often said that the driving factor for many companies in adopting a comprehensive information security program are the dreaded “F” and “A” words – FUD and Audit. Technically FUD is an acronym for fear, uncertainty and doubt. And it might be better said that audit is the action used to hopefully demonstrate compliance and […]
Does DevOps drive agility, or does agility result in DevOps?
DevOps is a hot topic. Hell, I’m writing this on a site dedicated specifically to DevOps and you’re reading it, so it seems safe to assume we agree on the general premise that DevOps is an important trend for both business and IT. I question however, giving all of the credit for cost cutting, or […]
DevOps needs infrastructure multi-tenancy
DevOps will, under whatever moniker you want to give it – NetOps, DevOps for Networks, operationalization – continue to make inroads into the network infrastructure because ultimately it’s part of the application deployment lifecycle. While DevOps folks call it “application delivery” the reality is that an application is not ready to deliver to a user […]
Why DevOps is like fitness or religion
What is DevOps? I noted in a blog post last summer that limiting DevOps to a single definition is challenging. The Wikipedia entry for DevOps contains a variety of possible explanations that seem to disagree in some ways: It’s a “software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology […]
Webinar: How to Achieve Continuous Delivery Without Downtime
Today’s businesses demand quick access to new technology, which means they need shorter release cycles and centralized control of both your on and off premise resources. Integrating cloud resources into your traditional datacenter management can prove challenging and time consuming at best. What if you could increase your organization’s ability to innovate utilizing business automation to […]
Awkward questions for those getting started with automation
This blog asking awkward questions for folks jumping on the microservices bandwagon was enlightening from the perspective that many of the same questions are applicable to operations as they begin to tackle operationalizing all the things in an application lifecycle. For example: “What is your deployable unit?” Great question, isn’t it? What is your deployable […]
Infrastructure Automation and API Taxes
That automation is one of the critical components of DevOps is apparent in numerous surveys and studies that focus on the benefits organizations have realized from implementing the approach across operational groups. Automation itself starts with (or should start with) a comprehensive API. That means infrastructure – network and application focused – needs to expose […]
Automating Away the Regulatory Compliance Myth
At the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit, we had a chance to sit down with Justin Arbuckle and discuss his concept of “compliance as code” and why it’s so important that security and compliance tests be built into DevOps practices at large enterprises. Recently, Arbuckle was chief architect at GE Capital where he introduced and sponsored […]
How to Enhance DevOps by Supporting the Work of the Build-Release Engineer
Support Through Freedom As we’ll see, supporting the work of the build-release engineer enhances DevOps by adding consistency, easing minds, and freeing DevOps teams to do more. To support the work of the release engineer, the enterprise must set them free as well, by letting them automate everything, treat manual interventions as process failures, and […]
Scripts or Machine Images, What is the Best Way to bootstrap
Between the advent of handy tools, like Chef and Puppet, and virtual machine infrastructures, like VMWare and AWS, I feel like there has been a great debate about how to bootstrap machines. It seems like there are two extremes. On one side is heavy reliance on machine images (AMIs, in AWS speak) or scripting (recipes, […]
Cloud-Based Documentation at the Speed of DevOps
Welcome back to this (semi-)regular column where I attempt to answer questions about DevOps, especially in larger enterprises. This time I address a vexing issue facing many large enterprises – how to make sure downstream processes move as fast as development and operations: Q. In my enterprise we are getting faster at releasing code, but […]
Consumer Web Automation for DevOps?
These days event-based automation is everywhere from IFTTT recipes used by non-technical folks to cross post automatically to Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to email alerts for free iTunes downloads. And don’t forget the tech savvy that create even more complex sequences from Zapier and now Stamplay to track workloads and simple business processes or automate […]
The Dark Side of Infrastructure as Code
We spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of infrastructure as code. All of it is true. Treating infrastructure as code can add great value in terms of its ability to promote consistent, predictable and repeatable results during the application deployment process. One of the ways in which infrastructure is treated as code is […]