Econocom DevOps Summit’s Lessons: Severe Disconnect Between Expectations and Delivery
On March 15, I gave four keynote speeches on DevOps in Toulouse, France. As the main speaker of Econocom Club MEP 2018, an annual think tank summit organized by the European business-to-business digital services provider, I shared the day with 15 firms in industries as prestigious as financial services, energy, aerospace, aviation, and telecommunications and heard all […]
IBM: DevOps Begins and Ends with Culture
Making the transition to DevOps requires as much a shift in cultural mindset as it does new platforms for building, deploying and managing applications. Between the two, however, it’s often the extent of the cultural challenges needed to be overcome that gets most underestimated. Michael Elder, a IBM Distinguished Engineer, said one of the most […]
Is DevOps Really Necessary?
I spend my days discussing DevOps and digital transformations with companies of all sizes, from startups to some of the world’s largest enterprises. I’ve found that many teams are still at a very early stage in modernizing their technology, culture and practices. However, I’m surprised at the number of the organizations that don’t believe in […]
DevOps: Bringing People, Process and Technology Together for Digital Transformation
DevOps principles are built on an effective, continuous cycle of improvements—key factors that help drive digital transformation for companies large and small. Inserting this agile mindset into culture and operations, however, can be challenging, as the approach sometimes conflicts with the more the methodical ways of IT. So how can people, process and technology be […]
Inclusion, Collaboration and DevOps: Seeing the Bigger Picture
The last half of 2017 was pretty amazing. I wrote a brief post about the Inclusive Collaboration Summit I attended in London last July. Sallyann Freudenberg and Katherine Kirk started this campaign to raise awareness around neuro-diversity in tech. With respect toward the silence experiments I kept my original post very short. It was great […]
Can Agile and DevOps Get Along?
There is a common misconception that Agile and DevOps cannot work together, which does a disservice to everyone in the software development and delivery field. In fact, both approaches can significantly add to the Scrum pillars of transparency, inspection and adaption to better enable product teams to develop, deliver and sustain complex products. Both Agile […]
5 Principles for Building Teams to Evolve Your Entire Organization
A transformation can’t come from simply changing some tools or tweaking some antiquated processes to create improved collaboration. This is ultimately setting yourself up to fail. The magic comes from creating a universal change. You want to just improve your DevOps teams? Why not improve your entire organization? Be dramatic—organizational opposed to departmental. It sounds […]
Digital Business Revolution: Why DevOps is the New Enterprise Value Chain
Ongoing industry disruptions are forcing businesses to change their operational model; that’s the only way to avoid and survive digital bankruptcies. In North America, Sears Canada filed for bankruptcy, while Toys R Us and Weight Watchers were on the verge of it. In Europe, particularly, in France, banks including Societe Generale and leading retailers including […]
What Can Conway’s Law Teach Us About DevOps?
I first heard about Conway’s Law from reading the “DevOps Handbook” (an excellent read, by the way, if you want to dive head-first into DevOps). I was intrigued by how this idea came from slightly left field, yet seemed to have big implications for businesses on their journey to increased efficiency. In this blog, I […]
DevOps Gets More Exciting in 2018
As 2017 winds down and the IT industry prepares for 2018, there are a number of DevOps trends that everyone should be keeping their eyes on. It’s not so much that something incredible and explosive is expected in the new year. Rather, 2018 will be a time when DevOps starts to mature alongside other trends […]
Cuba Embraces DevOps, Despite Infrastructure Challenges
A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of speaking at the second DevOpsDays event in Cuba alongside some great technologists from across the United States, Europe and Latin America. The conference was held in a beautiful hotel in Varadero overlooking a marina right by the beach. Varadero is approximately two hours by car from […]
Barriers to DevOps Culture Change
In the quest for DevOps, there are two paths organizations can take. One is to start with automation and attempt to get as much as possible out of automation tools. The other is to start with culture change and use tools to address what increased communications uncovers. Both scenarios are happening in the wild, and […]
Understanding is Key to Achieving DevOps Culture
Historically speaking, IT has been composed of silos. This has worked out rather well over the last half century or so, as one team developed systems, another kept them running, another handled security and yet another managed the infrastructure. But it was never nirvana. Working well is not the same as cannot be improved. The […]
Creatures of Habit, Snowflakes and Integration Tax
Donovan Brown of Microsoft, in conversation with Matt Hilbert of Redgate Software, discusses database DevOps’ biggest challenges When DevOps was first talked about in Flickr’s seminal “10 deploys per day” Velocity presentation in 2009, it was regarded by some as strange and alien to corporate culture. It was the antithesis to the accepted way of […]
Go Big or Go Home: Total DevOps Guarantees Results
As revealed by a recent survey, only enterprises that implement an “all-in” approach to DevOps achieve the results of best-in-class enterprises seen in the “2017 State of DevOps Report.” Total DevOps approaches DevOps transformations holistically, integrating the full breadth of your DevOps value chain as well as the many stakeholders across your organization that must […]
Patrick McClory on Building Successful DevOps Organizations
Patrick McClory has been writing code, managing DevOps and designing scalable application infrastructures for more than 10 years. Most recently, as COO and CTO of DualSpark, he served as an expert Amazon Web Services consultant, helping clients capitalize on the benefits of cloud architecture and design with modern and innovative software, infrastructure and automation strategies […]
In DevOps, Figure Out Why Before Considering How
It has been fairly well-established that DevOps is primarily a function of the underlying culture—about breaking down barriers and shifting roles so that teams and individuals are empowered to come up with innovative ideas and execute them without the burden of traditional corporate bureaucracy. It is also understood that there are a variety of tools […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Be Here Now – Agile and DevOps in the Current State of Synergy
If there’s one thing that our culture does not lack, it’s a litany of pithy catch-quotes meant to remind us to focus on the task at hand; yet, this often runs counter to our tendency to fixate on matters of the past and future. While we are so often encouraged to “live in the moment” […]