REP SPOTLIGHT: Omnikron
DevOps Institute: Tell us a little about your organization. Omnikron: With over 30 years of industry experience, we have honed IT and project management training techniques to ensure that course material caters to our clients’ needs. Our training is not just lectures from a book. We offer world-class courses, assessments and simulations in a variety […]
REP SPOTLIGHT: ITSM Academy
DevOps Institute: Tell us a little about your organization. ITSM Academy: Since the early DevOps Days in the U.S., ITSM Academy has been involved in the DevOps community. We are proud to be the first DOI REP in The Americas. We offer DOI’s full line of training, in our open-enrollment public (virtual) classrooms as well […]
State of DevOps Report: Reaping Results
The newly released 2016 State of DevOps Report concludes that DevOps is “no longer a mere fad or buzzword,” but rather an established set of practices and cultural patterns. Yet, a closer look at this year’s findings reveals progress is far more substantial than any matters of perception. The report was conducted and analyzed by […]
DevOps Matchmaking: APM + CI = A Perfect Marriage
As anyone who has ever been set up on blind dates by friends can attest, finding the right match in today’s world is a tricky feat. There’s a lot of evidence suggesting that the frantic pace of life makes such matchmaking more difficult than ever. That said, when the right set of complimentary traits exist […]
Infrastructure-Testing Dominoes
Understanding the artifacts of a given technology component is critical to an enterprise-class DevOps service offering. Second-most critical is understanding the dependencies between given components. Testing helps illuminate those dependencies. For example, let’s assume I have a server running the previous version of the Windows operating system (OS) that I now want to upgrade to […]
Dashboards from Hell
Even organizations with a mature DevOps services model inevitably will hear from executive sponsors about the “need” for a dashboard for DevOps information. Organizations just starting to embrace DevOps won’t have the time to construct one yet, but over time will reach the same conclusion. The need is real, and the value is significant—it is […]
Rep Spotlight: Global Lynx
DevOps Institute: Tell us a little about your organization: Global Lynx: Global Lynx is a leading and fast-growing IT consulting and training company that assists companies and government agencies improve the competence and skills of their IT organization, enhance the maturity of their IT governance and improve the quality and effectiveness of their IT operations, […]
Embedding Predictive Analytics
For an enterprise with a deep DevOps maturity model, the initial “wow” factor of automation has worn off. At this point, the sexier concepts involve proving continuous improvement. As an example, our first baseline of metrics might have taken the pre-DevOps timings of a typical build and deployment of a given application. We can measure […]
Tales of DevOps Discovery Part 2: Definitions Matter
Definitions Matter: Step Two in a DevOps Transformation The first post in this series on DevOps Discovery discussed the importance of asking fundamental questions of stakeholders to facilitate alignment on priorities and establish a mission statement when beginning a DevOps transformation. Part 2, below, reviews definitions of common DevOps-related terms and provides examples of how […]
The Automation of Compliance
Consider how much money your enterprise spends on audits. Smaller firms not subject to external regulation should consider how much money is spent on quality assurance—or the lack of it. A business that suffers from a customer-facing quality incident will, at minimum tarnish the brand of its services or at the high end, lose market […]
The War with Human Nature
What is the difference between “leading” edge and “bleeding” edge? Being the first human being to advocate change. It is a virtual war with human nature to accept change. For all the innovation introduced into our society, most of it is a product of invention over evolution. Don’t get me wrong: Once we find something […]
Dying for Intelligent Calendar Awareness
What would we die for in an integrated DevOps tooling solution—something that would make our operations partners stand up and cheer? Intelligent calendar awareness. The most fundamental construct of any release orchestrations (RO) tooling software is the calendar. RO software, no matter who the vendor is, uses a form of the calendar, to outline what […]
The Beauty of Inheritance Architectures
Spoiler alert: This article is not about inheriting your great-grandparent’s estate. It is rather about how embedding the principles of inheritance into the architecture of your chosen DevOps toolset can yield exponential results. And yes, I realize that you, the customer, have little to do with what a vendor builds its tooling architecture upon. However, […]
Humans in the Machine of Release Orchestration
Let’s face it: Most organizations are still struggling to achieve the Nirvana of full gated automation. At first, we automate the core of our DevOps services, the build and the deployment disciplines. Over time, we realize that a templated or framework (or pick your similar terminology) approach toward automation allows for scale as well as […]
The Nirvana of Gated Progression
A highly functioning enterprise-class DevOps set of services has a fundamental goal of full automation. To be honest, having the right DevOps strategist (or visionary) leading this effort is as important to achieving this goal as the combination of all the challenges and topics that must be addressed. So for the sake of argument, will […]
The Transience or Permanence of Provisioning
I realize the title of this article may conjure up ideas about the impacts of entanglement from quantum computing, but no, we are not there yet. Instead, I am referring to the benefits an organization can achieve from determining which environments in its software development life cycle (SDLC) should remain permanent and which are better […]
DevOps’ Cultural Myths and Logical Fallacies
Remember that guy you knew in college who was working on his fifth or sixth degree with no plans to stop? At some point the idea of real work must have terrified him, and instead what appealed to him was a continual state of learning. If you have the funding to master five or six […]
Funding Failure by Intent
Why is it that when we purchase a lotto ticket, every part of our brain tells us we won’t win, yet some portion of it is able to inspire hope where there shouldn’t be any? Could it be the same part of our brain that inspires hope in the face of nearly certain failure has […]
Continuous Improvement: The Key DevOps Distinguisher
DevOps has become a well-accepted and growing component for delivery success, shown in the State of DevOps Report among other respected publications. But even as it becomes more ubiquitous, it’s naive to think every organization will cease having delivery concerns. Implementations will differ widely, and adherence is essentially self-reported. So what is it, then, that […]
Changing the Culture of Metrics Analysis
You could say the development and operations teams gave birth to the idea of DevOps, as it is believed the chief benefits are garnered in those two functional disciplines. Because of this, metrics nearly always are conducted from the points of view of cost reduction, speed and efficiency. This makes perfect sense when business treats […]
In DevOps, Standardize to Minimize Architectural Debt
I recently reading a great Q&A with the Etsy CTO John Allspaw over on The New Stack, which contained some nuggets of good advice that increasingly are important as we continue the journey toward DevOps adoption. Of particular note were statements on the introduction of “new” things to solve problems. In a nutshell, Allspaw reinforced […]
Building a Business Case for DevOps
You can get your DevOps vehicle as fast and fine-tuned as you like, but until you provide an effective business case to the board it will remain in the garage. To get the thumbs up, you have to prove your model is efficient and makes financial sense for the company as a whole. Do You […]
Top 5 Reasons to Back Up Your OpenStack Environment
I am a big fan of lists. If you recall the movie “High Fidelity,” John Cusack’s character Rob and his co-workers—armed with an encyclopedic knowledge of all things musical—compile “top five” lists for every conceivable occasion, openly mock the tastes of people, and, every so often, sell a few records. In the spirit of a […]