No DevOps Roadmap? No Problem.
I’m a huge fan of The Phoenix Project and I’m honored to count Gene Kim both as one of my professional inspirations and also as a personal friend. There is, however, a dangerous precipice inside of the Phoenix Project that, if misunderstood, could cause many DevOps practitioners and enterprise IT shops a daunting problem in […]
Parallel Evolution of DevOps Enterprise Patterns
The DevOps evolution (Revolution!) has a great story; a story of winning the hearts and minds of people of all experiences who all anxiously strive to achieve their goals in amazing new and opportunistic ways. This story isn’t that of throwing everything away and starting over, nor is it a story of always having to […]
An Introduction to DevOps
What is DevOps You can ask 10 people for a definition of DevOps and likely get 10 different answers. If you want to find a definition of your own, your research will probably begin by asking Google, “what is DevOps”. Naturally, Wikipedia is one of the first result so that is where we will begin. […]
A Critical First Step in Bringing Dev and Ops Together
We all want to deliver excellent software to our customers. We now have a greater awareness than ever before of the interconnectedness of all the activities required to do so. The agile movement started this but it was not until the advent of DevOps that Ops was considered part of the full picture. In this […]
Enough with the DevOps already
Ever say a word 10 times in a row and feel it start to lose its meaning? Try it, say the word “boat” ten times out loud and watch what happens – be sure you are a alone when you try this or you will get funny looks. When your done try it with the […]
THOUGHT LEADERS OR NAVEL GAZERS?
I get tired of hearing what is DevOps? It just tells me that no one really has got it exactly right, but everyone longs to be the authority on the topic. Everyone writes their perceived answers ad nauseam. Reading all the different definitions is kinda like listening to infomercials. An individual puts themselves out there […]
Don’t Let the (April Fools Day) Joke Be on You
As much as seasonal increases in demand for on-line resources are discussed, the one day that’s often overlooked is April Fools Day. It’s the day the Internet loses its mind and your best bet is take everything not just with a grain of salt, but with the entire shaker. The use of April Fools’ Day […]
My Journey to the Land of DevOps
Welcome to my first installment in a series where I talk about my long transition as an engineer, first from a very traditional waterfall development methodology into a more Agile process, and finally into a true DevOps organization at my current gig at JumpCloud. Who Am I? First, a little background on me. I’m (almost) […]
DevOps.com Official Media Sponsor for Sys-Con’s DevOps Summit 2014
We are very happy to report that DevOps.com was selected as an official media sponsor for the upcoming DevOps Summit 2014 at the Javits Center in NYC on June 10-12. The 2nd International DevOps Summit is part of the Cloud Expo, the leading conference on all things Cloud. The lineup of speakers for the DevOps […]
DevOps Adoption – Startups
This is part 1 of a 2 part article DevOps is somewhat unique in that it has applications to both large enterprises and to startups. The way DevOps is adopted in startups is incredibly different than how it happens in large organizations. The profile of how DevOps is adopted in each of these cases is the […]
DevOps Lessons Learned – The “DevOps Engineer”
Back in 2008 I was part of a startup that had success and sold to large company three years later. During the startup years, there was three of us in IT plus an offshore team that did our web development. The three core resources owned everything from the API down while the offshore team owned […]
Operational Overhead – or why hubris is bad.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A guy walks into a meeting and says “We need a system that does something”, and the engineer in the room replies “Oh, we can totally build that”. Most of the punchlines to this joke go “we can totally build it, and now we have to own its […]
My Journey into DevOps
Like many developers, I started my career in a waterfall-based development environment. I was at a very large telecom, working on a product that had been around literally for decades. We’d spend weeks or months in the requirements phase before any code was written. We’d throw the code over the wall after our development period, […]
The Automation Continuum
The speed of innovation these days is often influenced by the speed of adoption of new and exciting tools, and specifically open source tools. Open source projects have been growing at an exponential speed over the course of the past few years; however the process for exploring, testing, configuring, and ultimately integrating these in production […]
DevOps Contrarian
I admire and appreciate the ideas of DevOps as a result of living through two decades of working in IT and experiencing the pain of what I would call the “failed state of IT”. The failed state of IT being something inherently broken, something that couldn’t survive on its own, something that eats its budget […]
DevOps Dirty Little Secrets
By all outward appearances DevOps is gaining real velocity within IT shops worldwide, Duh tell you something you don’t know. I have read much on this topic as I am sure you have, but I never seem to read much with hard data results, other than we are doing great with some very broad metrics. […]
Hacking Your Auditor
No, not that kind of hacking, give me a little credit… Recently I was having a conversation with a consulting friend about DevOps, and he found himself in a bit of a tough situation. The organization he was working with was a pure cloud/DevOps shop, but one that was stepping into having the meet compliance […]
Logging Wins for Devops and Security
Its always great when companies can invest in tools that serve multiple groups and purposes. Ensuring proper setup and use of logs is one toolset that can serve both DevOps and Security. Why logs are important to DevOps DevOps use logs primarily to understand what’s going on inside an application server, database system or the […]
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 […]
What “Programmable” Means
One of the most often used words these days to describe emerging architectures and technology is (drum roll please) “programmable.” Now, from my used-to-be-a-developer-and-architect-turned-infrastructure-geek perspective, I know what that means. It means I get to write code. But to what purpose that code is put to is a question that’s rarely answered. So today we’re […]
Follow Friday, DevOps Twitter Accounts to Follow
As part of doing my research for this blog I have been looking around for a good list of DevOps people to follow. I have found a small list here and there, but unlike in the infosec community where we had the @securitytwits, there is no analogue to that in DevOps. So with a tip […]
Don’t let automation be the tail wagging the dog
There is quite a bit of talk right now about DevOps and how important automation is. This could be compared to GM in the 1980s when the company tried to transform the way they built cars through automation and robot. In the early 1980’s GM spent $90B dollars in an attempt to speed up the […]
Can you appreciate DevOps, if you can’t exactly say what it is?
I recently had a conversation with some SOX IT auditors and was asked what I meant when I said we were a DevOps shop. I stumbled a little, torn somewhere between an overly simplistic answer and a desire to baptize the unholy. I started by talking about collaboration between the developers and the admins. Mentioning […]