Time and complexity; or, Why are some things hard to do?
Why are some things hard to do? If we want to make complicated tasks easier, which is one of the goals of DevOps, we need to have some theory of why they are difficult in the first place. Richard Garfield, a mathematician and game designer, presents two factors that make tasks more difficult: time constraints […]
My Little Operations: DevOps is Magic
Bear with me, it will all make sense in the end. If you aren’t familiar with My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic (because you don’t have a child who watches it over and over and … well, over) let me sum up for you: There’s a pony who knows something horrible is coming. She […]
Provisioning versus Configuration Example
A few weeks back I wrote about the difference between configuration and provisioning noting, primarily, that there are differences between the two tasks. It remains an important distinction to make because it’s really where the rubber meets the road (or the app meets the network) where it becomes important. As the infrastructure/network side of the […]
Enabling Collaboration Across Diverse Cultures
Welcome back to this series, ‘Enterprise DevOps Q&A.’ In my last post, I talked about breaking down the barriers between dev and ops. Now, I want to address another, very typical question from a global enterprise about managing cultural differences in a globally dispersed enterprise. Q. Being part of a large org, our biggest issue […]
Now that you can consolidate, do not implode
The development world is changing in a big way. We all know it. And it usually happens first with the early stage startups, who have the luxury of adopting new approaches from day one. One of those major shifts is consolidation of team members, where automation is taking over previous roles. In the modern development […]
Enterprises, DevOps and Economies of Scale
In infrastructure there are two economies of scale: operational and capital. DevOps should attend to the former, especially in the enterprise. Soon after cloud burst (sorry, pun not intended) onto the scene we all learned about economy of scale because that, primarily, is what cloud computing’s business model is based on. At great volume, standardization […]
DevOps by any other name still gets things done
My version of “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is not nearly as eloquent as Shakespeare’s, but the sentiment is the same. Juliet argues in Romeo and Juliet that the name of a thing such as a rose is irrelevant—it’s still a rose no matter what you call it. The same […]
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 […]
ChatOps: Communicating at the speed of DevOps
DevOps is about knocking down barriers between developers and operations teams, and in doing so reducing organizational frictions wherever possible. And that’s certainly the spirit behind ChatOps – the term for the hyper-collaborative way of running DevOps, including operating aspects of systems and infrastructure, through online chat. Proponents of ChatOps say it streamlines communication in […]
The DevOps value stream is not SOP
#devops #lean Don’t confuse doing something faster with greater efficiency. Much of the focus on DevOps remains at the implementation level – on gaining efficiencies through automation of tasks and orchestration of processes. While this is not a bad thing, such a micro-focus on the moving parts can result in the loss of efficiencies to […]
Five Top Tips for Cloud and DevOps Automation
A while back, I overheard someone asking why many of the ‘cloudy people’ have moved on to DevOps. One reason is certainly that cloud is at the heart of DevOps. Many of the grounding principles of DevOps – rapid iteration, agile development, automated testing, continuous delivery and continuous integration – are barely even possible without […]
An open-source pipeline for trusted images
There are a lot of good reasons to use a trusted image (aka “foundation image”), including reliability, reduced time to launch, secure configuration. [We’ve discussed them previously] In this article we are going to describe a development and quality assurance process for making trusted (aka “foundation” or “golden”) images. First, this is the tool set […]
Avoiding Parrot Processes
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 just about any given application today. […]
Waterfall and Agile, the effect of automation and continuous integration
Agile’s A Silly Idea? I was a young developer working at a large enterprise when I first heard about some of the principles that later became part of the Agile process back in the mid- to late-90s. I was skeptical about what I heard, to say the least. After all, what we today call waterfall […]
Automating code helps businesses adapt to customer demand quickly
This is the first article in a series of pieces on digital innovation, accelerating change and the rise of the coded business from innovators in the Chef (click here) community. How does the need for speed and scale affect businesses today? Let’s start with scale. As a technology company grows, its infrastructure grows – more machines […]
Automation, Operations, DevOps – What We Thought Was Missing
Stackstorm is a new company focused on automation, operations and DevOps. It’s co-founder and CEO Evan Powell has been keeping a running journal as the company made ready to emerge from stealth. Over the next few days we will share Powell’s thoughts and experiences as a new DevOps company comes to market. Over the next […]
Security automation with DevOps: show me the code!
Last week Andrew Storms put up a good post hinting at the promise of security automation in [SecDevOps: Security Automation By Example – The Firewall Change]. He included an example of automating a series of actions when a firewall rule is changed. It’s a good article, although I’m increasingly convinced there’s no such thing as […]
Technology’s effect on religion
Today being Good Friday, with Easter being Sunday and in the midst of Passover; it is a time for reflection. Instead of thinking about DevOps, today I ponder life and religion. What comes to mind is the future of religion in these technological times. The number of Americans with a religious affiliation continues to decline, […]
Microsoft bridges the gap between Azure and DevOps
DevOps can be easy for a startup. Many of the concepts and principles of DevOps come quite naturally to a fresh company just getting started. It’s a different story, however, for large, established enterprises trying to wrap their arms around this DevOps thing. For IT admins working in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, though, things just […]
From here to there: practical first DevOps steps
I’m a bad programmer. There, I got that out of the way. The truth is, I’m a sysadmin that writes code infrequently, on an island, and out of disciplined requirement, release, or QA practices. I need to run an ETL that kicks a file transfer. I’ll write some code. I’ve got a workflow that needs […]
Continuous integration for better security
One of the big advantages to smaller deploys and continuous integration is that it can make it easier to provide more proactive security. In short, continuous integration (and the associated automated testing it enables) makes it easier to focus your security team on analyzing areas where the security risk is higher. If the notion of […]
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 […]
No DevOps Roadmap? No Problem.
I’m a huge fan of The Phoenix Project and I’m honored to count Gene Kim both as one of my professional inspirations and also as a personal friend. There is, however, a dangerous precipice inside of the Phoenix Project that, if misunderstood, could cause many DevOps practitioners and enterprise IT shops a daunting problem in […]