4 Top Tips for Developing a New Feature
As a backend developer at CA BlazeMeter, I recently had the chance to work on a big feature for our web app. The feature required a massive change on our backend code, a big change on our frontend and multiple migrations. You know what I’m talking about—it was one of those projects that developers fear. […]
A Six-Step Approach to Enterprise DevOps Transformation
Agility of businesses to transform and adjust to market conditions is perhaps the most important aspect of managing today’s enterprise. With digitization of almost all facets of running an enterprise, it is safe to say that IT agility translates to either the success or failure of such adaptation. Smaller and new-age businesses are better able […]
Infographic: DevOps Lessons from Lean Auto Manufacturing
Lean principles are as relevant to software delivery today as they were to auto manufacturing in the 20th century. And when you apply lean practices to software delivery, you get the same great results — lower costs, faster cycle times and higher quality. See the below infographic from Puppet to explore what software can learn […]
The Perfect Combination: Imperative Orchestration, Declarative Automation
There are two fundamental approaches of how to design automation processes, declarative (also often known as model) and imperative (also often known as workflow or procedural). The purpose of this article is to explain the principles of each, explore a little of how they work, try to highlight some of the strengths and weaknesses and […]
Digital Business: Paving the Way for DevOps’ Second Act
DevOps is the buzzword of the moment. It’s at the heart of every strategy—not just CIOs’ IT transformation strategies but also IT vendors’ sales and marketing strategies. The question business unit leaders always ask is, “Is DevOps to improve IT or to boost the business?” The disconnect is so big between the concerns of today’s DevOps practitioners […]
Culture Comes First in Bringing DevOps to the Mainframe
One of the most difficult challenges in engineering, oddly enough, isn’t technical: the challenge is culture transition management. In my 20-plus years of managing engineering teams worldwide, I’ve led teams through countless organizational adjustments and process improvements toward high-performance and quality, beginning with QA segregation to CMMI to ITIL, AGILE and SAFe. Today, mainframe organizations […]
Automation Killed QA – It’s Time to Deal With It
Quality assurance (QA) had a good run. From the time it was considered an afterthought by organizations and software vendors alike to the era of massive outsourcing contracts, followed by significant vendor investments in related tooling, and, finally, its recognition as a critical success factor among high-performing organizations, quality has evolved to become even more […]
AppDynamics Buy Expands Cisco’s DevOps Agenda
AppDynamics’ $3.7 billion acquisition by Cisco Systems has two major implications for the DevOps space. On a tactical level, Cisco has committed to distributing AppDynamics’ agent software everywhere from the public cloud to individual devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and in between. On a more strategic level, the company is positioning itself […]
Strategies to Build Trust in DevOps
I’ve been a member of the DevOps community a long time (literally since before it was ever even called “DevOps”). I was a pre-publication reviewer for both “The Phoenix Project” and the recently published “The DevOps Handbook,” and I’m always interested in seeing the outcomes successes software teams have and the failures they overcome, including […]
Increasing Your ‘Bionic Footprint’ with DevOps
“The Six Million Dollar Man” was a 1970s TV series. In the show, NASA astronaut Colonel Steve Austin is severely injured in a crash and is “rebuilt” with bionic features that enhance his strength, speed and vision beyond normal human capabilities. The main tagline was, “We can rebuild him, we have the technology.” I recently […]
How I Bet on DevOps – and Won
One evening in late 2015, after the kids were in bed, I sat down next to my wife and said, “I’d like to do something irresponsible. I want to gamble some of our savings on DevOps. I’d like to buy some stock.” Nicole Forsgren’s 2014 presentation, “DevOps and the Bottom Line,” opened my eyes to […]
Defining DevOps: Not Theory, nor Implementation
Ask a dozen engineers, developers, testers or their managers what their definition of DevOps is and you will get likely very different answers from each of them. Some may say it’s primarily about culture, others may say it’s about accelerating or automating the release of software and infrastructure changes and some may use the mantra, […]
Automation, ChatBots Can Improve DevOps
At its heart, the goal of DevOps is to foster better communication between the development team and operations team at an organization. When these two teams are systematically connected, they can easily stay in sync on most issues and there is strong coordination in building and delivering the product to customers. Automation and ChatBots can […]
5 Ways DevOps Can Help Improve IT Security
You already know DevOps can make software delivery faster and more efficient. But did you know it can help to keep software more secure, too? Here’s how. DevOps refers to a set of practices and cultural priorities related to the way software is designed, produced and deployed. It emphasizes collaboration between developers (the people who […]
F5 Networks’s State of Application Delivery, 2017
For the last three years, F5 Networks has surveyed its users and presented the “State of Application Delivery” report. This year’s report is already a couple of weeks old, and I’ve had the opportunity to read through it. There is good information in there for “NetOps” people—those who are focused on the network but want […]
Relevant Continuous Testing: The Primary Key to DevOps
My recent blog, “7 Pillars of DevOps,” identified seven essential best practices areas that make up successful DevOps and explained that the pillars are not silos, but rather foundations that need to be kept in balance. One of the pillars is continuous testing (CT). For well-balanced DevOps, CT performs tests that are fast enough to […]
Welcome to the Continuous Delivery 101 Podcast
No matter what industry you’re in or how old your business is, your software often determines your success in today’s application economy. Applications are the face of your business—both the way it performs and the speed with which you can incorporate new ideas and innovations, driven by the efficiency of your software development life cycle—determines […]
VMs, Containers, Cloud, Cluster: Scheduling Differences
Scheduling is a large part of making the data center go, and more to the point of making the virtualized (be it VMs, cloud, containers, or clustering) portion of the data center work. While there are a lot of variables to virtualization performance, scheduling impacts performance all of the time. And yet we only really […]
Everything Ops: Are DevOps Principles Being Applied Too Broadly?
From big data to storage to security, the DevOps concept is being applied to every field of IT operations under the sun today. This “Everything Ops” movement reflects the popularity of DevOps—but is it also diluting DevOps’s significance? DevOps itself focuses on software delivery. It’s about designing, building, testing, deploying and managing software applications. If […]
Predictable Progress: Tracking DevOps Maturity Metrics
As DevOps methodologies continue to evolve, we’re naturally seeing an increased emphasis on the cultivation of related maturity metrics. For instance, in the 2016 State of DevOps Report, researchers with DORA took an initial stab at creating relevant ROI measurements. Similarly, a new report issued by researchers Coleman Parkes, sponsored by CA Technologies, offers additional […]
35+ Tools Every DevOps Expert Must Know
List of DevOps tools and resources: Here is the set of tools and resources that help every DevOps enthusiast must know. Learn coding: Code academy: Learn to code interactively, for free. Code school: Interactive programming courses and guided projects. Treehouse: Learn Web Design, Coding & Much More. Lynda: Technology and Creative Skills taught by industry experts. Tuts+: Thousands of free tutorials […]
Forecasting Culture: Sunny with Accumulating Collaboration
Bryson Koehler believes the most important enabling factor for DevOps success is culture. Koehler is CTO of IBM’s newly formed Watson and Cloud Platform group. Prior to this role, he served as executive vice president, distinguished engineer and CIO/CTO of The Weather Company (TWC), an IBM business since 2016. He has a record of successfully […]
DevOps is More Than Just Automation
DevOps is a lot of things. What DevOps is, what DevOps does and how an organization adopts and implements DevOps tools and practices are largely subjective, but there are some foundational elements that are fairly ubiquitous. One of which is automation. As pervasive as it is, though, DevOps is not automation and automation is not […]