Big Room Planning: Getting Everyone on the Same Page
Many organizations—or even teams within organizations—are attempting to embrace DevOps. The operational and strategic advantages of DevOps over traditional business methodologies make it a virtual business imperative. One of the prevailing ideas about DevOps is that it’s about a culture shift more than tools and principles—and a big part of that culture shift is making […]
Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment
As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept. Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change. In the domain […]
Can We Stop Talking About DevOps?
I first heard the term DevOps from a friend in the software business when I was working at Dell HQ in Round Rock, TX. He recommended that I read The Phoenix Project, by Gene Kim, Kevin Behr and George Spafford. I did read it and I found it a fascinating story, but as a long-time […]
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 […]
Native Integration of APM Driving DevOps Maturity
With applications performance monitoring established as one of the fundamental cornerstones of today’s DevOps methodologies, it’s easy to overlook the reality that effective instrumentation of such tools remains extremely difficult. Specifically, the biggest challenge remains creating performance metrics that address both IT and larger business initiatives. There’s no question that APM is one of the […]
Steer SAFely – Driving collaboration across multi-disciplinary teams
This is the second blog in the DevOps – Scaled Agile series. In the first blog, Scaling Lean and Agile for the enterprise: All hands on keyboard!!!, we discussed the characteristics of a successful enterprise agile transformation and described why engagement and commitment across all disciplines in the organization is not just optional, but required, […]
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 […]
Surprise! Broad Agreement on the Definition of DevOps
For the past few years, the conventional wisdom has been that DevOps has no agreed upon definition. Instead, everyone has their own interpretation. However, the conventional wisdom is wrong. While everyone supplies slightly different words, the same working understanding of DevOps is nearly universal. Our understanding of DevOps goes back to a handful of common touch-points. There is the “CAMS” […]
The Last One That Transformed the Future
The headline made her yelp for joy. A year into the future of D-Chip, on a crisp August morning, Phoebe opened the newspaper and swiped to the technology section on her iPad. What she saw was riveting: D-Chip reborn as a star in wearable computing. She immediately thought of the article Marc Andreessen wrote on […]
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 […]
Four strategies for supporting DevOps collaboration
As we’ve discussed before, the ever elusive DevOps culture doesn’t form magically. Rather, it is fostered by building a collaborative environment. While there are many ways to skin the cat in terms of what kind of tools organizations use to start collaborating more effectively, the tool set and the process they enable should revolve around […]
Detours Ahead: Overcoming DevOps Challenges
Saying that you’re interested in DevOps is another way of saying you’re interested in change. That’s what DevOps promises any organization. No matter the problems a company is trying to solve or the goals it’s trying to reach, DevOps depends on a willingness to embrace some big changes. Sure, it can help you streamline software […]
Collaborate more effectively with AppDynamics DevOps Virtual War Room
DevOps enables companies to move faster—but moving faster is not a worthy goal in and of itself. Organizations have to be able to develop and deploy solutions that are effective as well as expedient. It’s important to be able to monitor and respond to events in real time to ensure everything is running optimally, and […]
SDN has a lot to offer to DevOps
When discussing DevOps it’s natural to focus the attention on the one operations team that focuses on application infrastructure. But when you start digging in to DevOps and its applicability to all four operations groups you’ll find that technological shifts in the network – like software-defined networks (SDN) – are just as important to the overall […]
Moving Security To the Left In a DevOps World
Moving security to the left has become a coined phrase meant to describe the process of getting the security team involved earlier in a process. Most typically, the phrase is used in conjunction with IT or software development projects. One of the top suggestions for ensuring security in a DevOps world is to move security […]
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 […]
Collaboration in Progress: Making DevOps a Reality
Everything on your company’s DevOps checklist is accounted for. It’s got the vision and the talent. It’s identified the problems and mapped out a solution. It’s got a culture that allows the flexibility that such a plan requires. Now’s the time to put the plan into action and let the benefits begin. The truth is […]
DevOps makes coding more social, social coding makes better code
One of the main principles of DevOps is to break down silos. What’s more like a silo than the image of a lone developer, shutting himself off from the world in order to code more and interact with people less? “I’m just here to write code and that’s all I do.” There’s nothing collaborative or […]
DevOps developers; don’t be a DevGoof
There was a lot of brush back last week over Jeff Knupp’s post about how DevOps is killing the developer. Frankly I wasn’t shocked by Knupp’s opinion that developers “are the dentists in the dental office”. In my 30+ years of involvement in the IT industry my experience is that developers often think of themselves […]
Merging creation with operations: facilitated collaboration enables continuous delivery
So much has been written lately about the challenge of improving IT agility in the enterprise. The best sources of insight on why this challenge is so difficult are the CIOs, application owners, ecommerce and release engineering executives, and VPs of I&O, grappling to change their organizations right now. At a conference I attended recently, […]
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, […]
Why Vertical Collaboration Matters for DevOps
Vertical collaboration is defined by Rick Defour as a team of people working interdependently toward a common goal for which they are all mutually accountable. Now that everyone is clear on the importance of collaboration and the different types, it’s time to delve into the importance of one type of collaboration in particular: vertical. Vertical […]
Not all collaboration types are equal
Talking about collaboration in general terms is easy. I’ve done it and so has everyone else. It’s time now to dig deeper into the specifics of collaboration, meaning the different types – asynchronous vs. synchronous, vertical vs. horizontal – and how different companies fit into the magic collaboration quadrant. And yes, the quadrant is indeed […]