Deployment and Monitoring Automation with glu
glu is a free/open source deployment and monitoring automation platform. glu is a project that was started at LinkedIn mid-2009 to address the exponentially growing needs of deploying the set of applications and services that make up the LinkedIn experience. Although some projects like Chef and Puppet existed at the time, they were mostly good […]
Don’t Let the (April Fools Day) Joke Be on You
As much as seasonal increases in demand for on-line resources are discussed, the one day that’s often overlooked is April Fools Day. It’s the day the Internet loses its mind and your best bet is take everything not just with a grain of salt, but with the entire shaker. The use of April Fools’ Day […]
From Simple Automation to DevOps Like a Boss
Automation as We Know It Today If you haven’t been hiding in a cave in the last year or two, you’ve probably heard the terms DevOps and infrastructure automation more than once… But even today, infrastructure automation is mostly focused on setup and deployment of complex systems. For example, if you’d like to deploy your […]
The Automation Continuum
The speed of innovation these days is often influenced by the speed of adoption of new and exciting tools, and specifically open source tools. Open source projects have been growing at an exponential speed over the course of the past few years; however the process for exploring, testing, configuring, and ultimately integrating these in production […]
Config Management & F***ing Shell Scripts
Joke tech projects pop up all the time. Some, like the lamentable titstare, should never have seen the light of day. Others, like Mark Zuckerberg’s Facemash start out as a joke and grow into something that is anything but. Most come and go without anyone really noticing. Whilst their lives are typically short we often […]
What “Programmable” Means
One of the most often used words these days to describe emerging architectures and technology is (drum roll please) “programmable.” Now, from my used-to-be-a-developer-and-architect-turned-infrastructure-geek perspective, I know what that means. It means I get to write code. But to what purpose that code is put to is a question that’s rarely answered. So today we’re […]
Don’t let automation be the tail wagging the dog
There is quite a bit of talk right now about DevOps and how important automation is. This could be compared to GM in the 1980s when the company tried to transform the way they built cars through automation and robot. In the early 1980’s GM spent $90B dollars in an attempt to speed up the […]
Survey Says: Positives and Negatives of DevOps are Two Sides of the Same Coin
Isn’t that the way it always works? A person’s strength can also be their weakness. A company’s killer product becomes their Achilles heel as the market shifts. As more and more companies make the shift to DevOps, it’s interesting to learn what’s working, what the opportunities are, and what the impediments are. As many of […]
Let the Code do the Heavy Lifting
One of the first jobs I had when I started in IT was as the IT administrator for a dot.com startup. IT admin at a smaller company like that was typically an umbrella term used to describe a one-man IT department, which is essentially what I was. The company was growing exponentially—both in terms of […]
Step One Of DevOps Ignores Technology
I’ve spent a bunch of time talking with Adrian Cockcroft, former cloud tzar at Neflix, and listening to his various talks and presentations. I’ve also spent a bunch of time looking around the various rooms within which he presents and seen the dazed look of attendees who have rightly assumed that just seen a picture […]
Ops is dead, long live DevOps
Yes, that’s a bold statement, but if the vibe at the recent AWS re:Invent conference was any indication there are a number of methodologies, technologies, and companies working to make that a reality. This article isn’t focused on whether this is a good or bad thing (my personal belief is that ops will always be […]
Why Baking Security Into the DevOps Framework is Vital to Its Success
I attended my first official DevOps conference in Israel in September 2013. But I was initially introduced to DevOps by my customers – firewall and network managers who, through their efforts to automate security policy management, found themselves dealing with a new and like-minded set of IT stakeholders – DevOps teams. They said DevOps was […]