Why Your Company Needs An Automated Infrastructure
IT teams and software have started to embrace automation across all levels of the development life cycle, from planning and testing to deployment and maintenance. With the advent of DevOps, and the cloud, it’s now entirely possible for technical teams to spin up new environments in a matter of minutes instead of days. The process […]
Top 6 Challenges of API Testing
Testing teams face several unique challenges when testing application programming interface (API) implementations. API testing is part of the integration testing process and concerns the communication between two systems—one of which your staff likely has no control over. Below you’ll find the following six common challenges when testing APIs and our recommended solutions. Initial Setup of API […]
7 Highly Effective Continuous Delivery Principles
If you’re in the IT space and you weren’t born yesterday, then you understand the need for speed. Development and release cycles are now faster than ever as companies implement continuous integration and continuous delivery (CD). Browsers and social media sites, for example, are doing multiple releases a day, and organizations that want to keep […]
ShiftLeft & DevOps: A Narrative Within a Narrative?
I procrastinated watching the season finale of “Westworld” just because I ended up reading a day later how Dolores ended the episode! I don’t know who to blame: my inquisitiveness or that guy who couldn’t hold himself. It kind of feels stale when you know the ending. Finally, I finished weeding through the multiple narratives […]
Avoid Crashes: 5 Best Practices for Load Testing
Demanding customer expectations and the rapid distribution of information across social media have made website and applications crashes an off-limits path for today’s companies and organizations. Crashes resulting from traffic spikes cause immediate and long-term loss of sales, as well as tarnishing the brand name. When servers or websites go down during highly anticipated events […]
Using DevOps to Be an Innovation Champion
Innovation, which increasingly is cited as the competitive advantage businesses need to meet their digital challenges, is widely misunderstood; it’s mistakenly reduced to the sophisticated features of a technology or a service. As a competitive matter, innovation is more than that; it’s primarily the process of translating ideas or inventions into high-value technology features or added-value services. […]
I Can’t Go to That DevOps Conference
Last year, I was able to attend 18 DevOps conferences. I saw some awesome presentations, met incredible people and expanded my knowledge of the latest practices at each conference. While my role as the DevOps Advocate for Sonatype enables me to get out to all of these conferences, not everyone has the time, the budget, […]
Get Ready to Become a Full-Spectrum Engineer
The more things change, the more they stay the same. In software development, change has been a constant. I’ve been a software engineer for more than 25 years and have had to morph, pivot and learn new things to remain current and in demand. Plus, the industry swings like a pendulum between the need for […]
DevOps is a Lifeline to Connected Mainframe ROI
A new IDC white paper sponsored by IBM and CA Technologies reveals the adoption of DevOps is a hallmark of those organizations that are actively modernizing and integrating legacy systems such as a mainframe to support digital transformation. Early adopters are blazing a path for faster innovation and greater ROI. DevOps Delivers Mainframe Modernization and […]
DevOps Chat: BlueOcean Puts CD Pipelines Within Reach of Every Team
Blue Ocean brings easy-to-use continuous delivery for teams to everyone. Years in the making, Blue Ocean is a major project built from the ground up for Jenkins Pipeline. I had a chance to speak with two of the key contributors from CloudBees and the Jenkins community, James Dumay and R. Tyler Croy. Tyler is on […]
CD 101 Podcast: The What, How and Future of Continuous Delivery
Now that we’ve arrived at Episode 4 of our CD 101 Podcast, let’s address some basic concepts—like the what and how of it all and the future. Wait … perhaps we could—or should—have touched on these key topics earlier. Or not. At least not the future part? Anyway … While this (mostly) backwards-looking orientation may […]
Self-Healing Service Management and the Future of DevOps
How can DevOps teams take continuous delivery to the next step? Part of the answer lies in self healing, which could optimize performance management and monitoring and underpin the software delivery pipelines of the future. Self healing means the ability of systems or environments to detect and resolve problems automatically. It eliminates the need for […]
Where Does the Database Fit into Continuous Delivery?
Continuous delivery (CD) is increasingly becoming the norm in software development, with companies releasing updates more and more frequently. Those that aren’t are exploring how they can catch up. But in all of this push to DevOps and CD, it’s vital not to forget the database. Changes to applications or web services often require changes […]
In the Application Economy, Every Company is a Software Company
Recently, I was in New York to attend the Third Annual DevOps Virtual Summit. (Yes, I had to be at a “virtual” summit in person—while it’s virtual for the attendees, it occurs in real life for the speakers, panelists and support staff.) The broadcast took place in a small recording studio that featured a lobby […]
Beware False DevOps Metrics
Metrics are important for any manager seeking to continuously improve critical work processes and the resulting work-product. That’s why DevOps leaders need DevOps metrics. With the right ones, those leaders can guide their organization’s adoption of DevOps best practices—progressively optimizing staff productivity, business agility and customer experience. But, what are the right metrics for DevOps […]
CD 101 Podcast: How to Build the Modern Software Factory with Agile Development and Continuous Delivery
And now, for Episode 3 … you decide if it beats “Star Wars – Revenge of the Sith.” I think we accidentally just set the bar pretty low, but … … here we go. Let’s begin with a prerequisite pithy quote from an objective industry observer: “If agile software development was the opening act to a […]
Digital Transformation and the DevOps Chaos Theory
With the threat from agile startups disrupting markets across the globe, large enterprises are increasingly focused on moving to a more agile approach to business. Most organizations already have begun the digital transformation (DX) journey, but the fact that this transformation is still in its infancy and not completely finalized for many demonstrates the fluid […]
Release Automation: Delivering the Big Quality Payoff
Have you ever gone down the path of testing the latest release of an application only to find out that you had the wrong version? Maybe you accidentally grabbed the wrong build or you didn’t have the correct configuration file for the environment you were testing against—or your database wasn’t updated correctly, or the script […]
Why Financial Companies Love Continuous Delivery
The other day I was on the American Express website paying bills and browsing around the benefits and services afforded me when I ran across a “who we are” section. It read: “We’re a global services company that provides customers with access to products, insights and experiences that enrich lives and build business success.” Surprisingly, […]
The Right Automation Tool for the Job
My father was an antique dealer, and we did a lot of furniture repair in the workshop. All of us kids took turns working for the business as we grew up, and we learned some solid lessons in the process. One day, when I was still pretty young and very new at working on things, […]
Dispelling the Myths Around Continuous Testing
You may have seen the term “continuous testing” and thought it was just the DevOps flavor of the month. Some might even think it isn’t part of DevOps or isn’t for cloud or hybrid cloud applications. Well, think again. As it turns out, there are a few more fallacies around the idea of continuous testing […]
CD 101 Podcast Episode 2: The Agile Enterprise
And we’re back with another episode of the “Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast.” In Episode 1, we covered the three waves of IT disruption—and how these disruptions, combined with the move toward digital transformation, are drastically changing every industry. This, of course, underlined how accelerating speed-to-market is clearly more important than ever before. In this second […]
All Day DevOps: Exploring the New Ordinary
There you were. You heard about Docker, become mesmerized, floated into its new, special world … and then all chaos broke out. Things were not that easy and you scrambled for knowledge. Some folks saw the light and stepped forward, while others are still trying to figure the out the happy path home where containers […]