The Dark Side of Infrastructure as Code
We spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of infrastructure as code. All of it is true. Treating infrastructure as code can add great value in terms of its ability to promote consistent, predictable and repeatable results during the application deployment process. One of the ways in which infrastructure is treated as code is […]
Enterprise DevOps and the Project Management Office
Welcome back to this occasional DevOps.com series on Enterprise DevOps Q&A. Remember, if you have questions about DevOps in the enterprise, let me know and I will try to answer them (or find someone who can). E-mail me at [email protected], tweet me at @AndiMann, or leave a comment below. This week brings a question about […]
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 […]
Enterprising DevOps in Banking sector
“Shift left” is common in project life cycle management where the risks are mitigated early in the cycle by involving QA team early in the planning & development phase. In the IT support systems, shift left empowers support staffs with enough tools, processes & knowledge base so that the issues get resolved at a point […]
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 […]
Provisioning versus Configuration Example
A few weeks back I wrote about the difference between configuration and provisioning noting, primarily, that there are differences between the two tasks. It remains an important distinction to make because it’s really where the rubber meets the road (or the app meets the network) where it becomes important. As the infrastructure/network side of the […]
The DevOps Litmus Test: Is Your Company’s Culture Ready to Get Agile?
New ideas don’t come to those who are afraid of breaking the rules. Improving something usually means you’ll have to push the status quo aside and try something that hasn’t been done before. What may be a standard operating procedure will have to make way for a brand-new approach with its own set of rules […]
Specialists vs. Generalists for Enterprise DevOps
Welcome back to the DevOps.com series, ‘Enterprise DevOps Q&A.’ I have a backlog of Q&A in store, but don’t let that stop you sending in more! If I can’t answer them myself, I will try to find someone who can. For this post, I was recently asked about the challenge that large enterprises are facing […]
Keep Calm and Refactor Operations
Developers have been refactoring forever to gain efficiencies and avoid mistakes. Let’s apply more than just theory to ops to do the same. There’s about a million articles, blogs, tweets and infographics available today that bespeak of DevOps as this or that or the other thing. But one core truth remains: DevOps in part attempts […]
DevOps cuts out the unnecessary middle-man
How many IT people does it take to produce an application? Actually, let me rephrase that. How many IT people does it take to produce an application effectively and efficiently? For many organizations, the answer to the second question is less than the answer to the first because the traditional IT hierarchy includes layers of […]
The DevOps Diet (Getting Lean)
IT has gotten fat – fat silos, fat processes, fat procedures. Adopting DevOps is a great opportunity to look at some of our unhealthy habits and identify where we can eliminate unproductive waste from our process diets. DevOps will ultimately teach IT how to exercise more with less effort, trim the fat and get lean. According to […]
Enabling Collaboration Across Diverse Cultures
Welcome back to this series, ‘Enterprise DevOps Q&A.’ In my last post, I talked about breaking down the barriers between dev and ops. Now, I want to address another, very typical question from a global enterprise about managing cultural differences in a globally dispersed enterprise. Q. Being part of a large org, our biggest issue […]
Microsoft strives to embrace open source culture
In many ways Microsoft is going through the corporate equivalent of a mid-life crisis—it has reached a stage where it longs to drop a few pounds, and turn back the clock a few years. After years of tremendous success, it’s now starting to show its age, and it is struggling to adapt to the new […]
Enterprises, DevOps and Economies of Scale
In infrastructure there are two economies of scale: operational and capital. DevOps should attend to the former, especially in the enterprise. Soon after cloud burst (sorry, pun not intended) onto the scene we all learned about economy of scale because that, primarily, is what cloud computing’s business model is based on. At great volume, standardization […]
Removing the Wall Between Dev and Ops
Welcome to the new DevOps.com Q&A series on Enterprise DevOps. In the first post in this series, I answered five key concerns for adopting a DevOps approach in a large enterprise. Now, I want to address a more specific question from an admin at a large enterprise about the silos and barriers between dev and […]
DevOps by any other name still gets things done
My version of “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is not nearly as eloquent as Shakespeare’s, but the sentiment is the same. Juliet argues in Romeo and Juliet that the name of a thing such as a rose is irrelevant—it’s still a rose no matter what you call it. The same […]
Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale
Since I published my blog explaining the topic of ‘Big DevOps’ late last year, the concept of Enterprise DevOps has exploded, with commentary, experience, and advice (some good, some awful) popping up from many different quarters. Fortunately, many pundits have now come to agree that application delivery in a traditional enterprise is very different from […]
ChatOps: Communicating at the speed of DevOps
DevOps is about knocking down barriers between developers and operations teams, and in doing so reducing organizational frictions wherever possible. And that’s certainly the spirit behind ChatOps – the term for the hyper-collaborative way of running DevOps, including operating aspects of systems and infrastructure, through online chat. Proponents of ChatOps say it streamlines communication in […]
Provisioning versus Configuration
There’s a ton of hype and excitement surrounding containers, a la Docker, today, much in the same way virtualization took the data center by storm. In both cases, the excitement for operations focuses on the ease with which infrastructure might be deployed and managed via such technology. Whether container or hypervisor, however, there remains a […]
Coaching DevOps Baseball
Coaching DevOps Baseball Every technology gets surrounded by hype during its maturation, and DevOps is certainly not immune to that phenomenon. If you’ve spent more than five minutes looking into it, you know that, because the current discussion sounds something like this: “All right, there’s other stuff, but it’s just support, so I want you […]
Building Security and Compliance into the SDLC
As the concept of DevOps has become more popular in recent years, there are some common themes that always seem to come up in discussions about it. For example, how often do we talk about ways to speed up the software development life cycle (SDLC) in order to bring innovative applications to market faster and […]
DevOps, Growth Hacking & other ways to rule the world
DevOps will disrupt management styles, speed the end to ancient IT practices, and flatten away processes that don’t focus on doing more with less. But DevOps is not the only dev-led movement that will impact and reshape the High-Tech industry. So called “growth hacking” will also disrupt organizational charts by bringing development tools, methods and […]