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 […]
Microsoft determined not to get left behind by DevOps
Microsoft is a massive company—a behemoth with a lot of inertia, and a lot of bureaucracy in place that make it difficult to adapt quickly. Under Satya Nadella, however, Microsoft is striving to re-invent itself, and—to the extent that it is possible—become more agile. For evidence of Microsoft’s new philosophy, look at how Microsoft is […]
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, […]
DevOps with Purpose: It’s about your tools!
This is Part Three in a four-part series. In Part One, I focused on the critical first step of defining DevOps with a purpose by thinking about DevOps in the context of your organization’s applications. In Part Two, I provided four tips to fostering a DevOps culture in your organization. By now you’ve hopefully noticed […]
Trolling PuppetConf: Surveying Configuration Management
Troll (Internet) In Internet slang, a troll (/ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is a person who sows discord … by starting arguments or upsetting people,[1] by posting inflammatory,[2] extraneous, or off-topic messages in a… community …with the deliberate intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[3] or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion.[4] -Wikipedia When I stopped by […]
Achieving business agility: a webinar with Chef and Rally Software
We recently hosted our first DevOps.com webinar with Chef and Rally Software. Using DevOps to Achieve Business Agility In today’s digital economy, leading companies are turning to software to deliver new services in response to customer demand and competition. Technology can enable and expedite innovation, but it requires business leaders, software developers and IT operations […]
Four open source tools to help keep you cooking with Chef
If you’re even a little familiar with DevOps concepts, you’ve probably heard of Chef. If you’ve started experimenting with or implementing DevOps, there’s a pretty good chance you’re using Chef. Chef is an awesome platform for managing a DevOps environment, but it isn’t perfect. Thankfully, missing features or gaps in the capabilities of a platform […]
Using DevOps to Achieve Business Agility – A Webinar with Rally Software and Chef
We are kicking off our DevOps.com webinars with a real blockbuster! Join Colin Campbell of Chef and Jonathan Chauncey and Jeff Smith of Rally Software as they discuss: Using DevOps to Achieve Business Agility In today’s digital economy, leading companies are turning to software to deliver new services in response to customer demand and competition. Technology can enable […]
How to Find Your Continuous Delivery Rhythm
This article is a part of a series of pieces on digital innovation, accelerating change and the rise of the coded business from innovators in the Chef community. In this article we present an interview with Jez Humble, Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks, on digital innovation. Focusing on speed and scale allows you to respond more rapidly to […]
Web-scale IT drives Chef momentum
Chef today announced a series of metrics and features showing their support of and success as a result of what they call the shift to Web-Scale IT. As the picture below shows the Web-scale IT era has given rise to an exponentially larger, more scalable IT infrastructure. What is Web-sclae IT? According to Chef: Web-scale […]
Using Docker & Ansible by John Minnihan @Gluecon 2014
Continuing our series of videos from the DevOps track at Gluecon this past year, our next video is “Why Docker + Ansible Make Chef and Puppet 100% Unnecessary by John Minnihan, ModernRepo” Again many thanks to CloudSoft for recording and making these videos available to us to post. Also the picture above is from the […]
Simplify and expedite server management
Deploying, managing, and maintaining servers can be tedious. Deploying, managing, and maintaining thousands, or tens of thousands of server instances is overwhelming—bordering on impossible—without the right tools. Thankfully, the right tools exist. The Pain of Doing Things the Hard Way I know I am dating myself, but when I was an IT admin for a […]
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 […]
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 […]
Delivering Delight At ChefConf 2014
Chef CEO Barry Crist stirs the pot to open ChefConf 2014 The theme from ChefConf 2014 is stirring delight and if you listened to Barry Crist during todays opening keynote, then you would know its more appropriately “F****ing Delight”. Amidst high energy, loud music and a smattering of exciting expletives, Barry Crist called for attendees […]
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 […]
Microsoft’s DevOps Gambit and DevOps.com’s Business Directory
Last week was a big one for Microsoft in DevOps. At the Build conference they unveiled several new features and functionality in both Azure and Visual Studio Online to make give them more DevOps chops and DevOps friendly. At just about the same time they announced partnerships and integrations with both Chef and Puppet Labs […]
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 […]
Is DevOps a Title?
So, I’ve wanted to write on this topic for a while as I think it deserves a little attention! I’ve heard numerous times that you shouldn’t have DevOps in your title or that job reqs shouldn’t be “DevOps Engineers”. This came up again at the DevOps State of the Union event that we hosted in […]
Docker as a framework for your DevOps culture
If you’re like me and spend a lot of time evaluating new technologies with the goal of “doing more faster” with your engineering organization, then you’re certainly aware of the many choices of DevOps tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, Salt, etc. In my opinion each of these tools is amazing at one piece of the […]
Bootstrapping Chef (or Whatever) for Autoscaled EC2 Instances
I realize it is traditional to start writing a new blog with some background and a deep introspection as to the author’s personal motivation for writing said blog, but I’ve never been one for tradition. Thus, for my first official DevOps post, I think I’ll jump write in with a technical tutorial on a problem […]
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 […]
Chef(TM) Growth Soars in 2013
SEATTLE, WA–(Marketwired – Feb 12, 2014) –Chef™, the leader in IT automation, today announced surging adoption of its Chef™ IT automation platform. In 2013, the company’s total sales grew 188 percent year over year, while recurring revenue quadrupled. The number of new customers adopting Chef reached record levels in 2013, with nearly 70 percent of sales […]