Enterprise Cassandra Deployments
Successful Cassandra deployment in the cloud takes a certain amount of skill and knowledge. In this blog I will share best practices for a successful Cassandra deployment in the cloud such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP). I will also discuss how you can protect and recover the data in your Cassandra […]
Q&A: Sematext’s Thies on Docker Monitoring, Part 2
In part one of my conversation with Stefan Thies, Sematext DevOps expert. we spoke about Docker’s use of Sematext Logsene logging, anomaly detecting and alerting software and SPM monitoring software. Let’s continue the conversation. David Geer: What makes Logsene centralized? Where is it centralized a typical deployment? What are the advantages of it being centralized? […]
Q&A: Sematext’s Thies on Docker Monitoring, Part 1
Stefan Thies is DevOps evangelist Sematext Group. I recently spoke with him about Docker’s use of Sematext Logsene logging, anomaly detecting and alerting software and SPM monitoring software. Read on for part one of our conversation. David Geer: Technically speaking, for the purposes of this article, what is logging? Thies: Logging means to store the […]
Culture Change: Metrics, Tools Make a Difference
Change is in the wind. This time of the year, as winter weather gives way to springtime renewal, this concept isn’t a cliché but rather a concrete, visceral experience. You go outside, smell the earth defrosting and know for certain that change is happening all around you. You can feel it. Such is the case […]
Flash Mob Inflection: Rugged DevOps Revolution
Truthfully, I was never a huge fan of the HBO series “The Sopranos.” It’s not that it wasn’t entertaining; I just didn’t agree with the “best ever” label that so many espoused during the show’s halcyon days. This had something to do with living in Hoboken, N.J., at the time and feeling the show was […]
OpsClarity Introduces Monitoring for Data-First Applications
SUNNYVALE, Calif.–(Business Wire)–OpsClarity, the intelligent web-scale applications monitoring company, today announced that its Intelligent Monitoring solution now provides monitoring for the growing and popular suite of open source data processing frameworks. OpsClarity understands the extremely complex and distributed runtime characteristics of modern data processing frameworks like Apache Kafka, Apache Storm, Apache Spark as well as […]
Wix requires visibility, and insights are the key
One of the key tenants of the DevOps principle is that your environment has to be prepared for anything. If your shiny modern delivery chain does not support the adoption of new DevOps tools, or does not help you learn, and iterate, then it will ultimately fall into the same category of solutions as Waterfall, […]
Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment
As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept. Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change. In the domain […]
APM on-premises or SaaS: What’s the best fit?
Today’s DevOps teams need in-depth monitoring that offers insights into every aspect of the application-delivery chain. When you decide for an application performance monitoring (APM) solution, you can choose between an on-premises approach or SaaS-based solutions (“Monitoring as a Service”). Every deployment option brings its pros and cons or has advantages for special use cases. An […]
Ancestry.com Brings BlazeMeter into the Fold
In order to gather and organize your lineage and the branches in your family tree, Ancestry has spent more than a generation (the company was born in 1983) wading through the 16B+ images and records buried in historical society data, government archives, and information caches of like organizations, groups, and communities the world over. Data […]
Digital Disrupters – Building a DevOps Leadership Profile
While the advancement of DevOps methodology remains fairly nascent for many organizations, an ever-expanding class of leading practitioners are evolving a wide range of related best practices. Beyond the well-worn concept of “unicorns” – the scant few organizations that stand as mythical examples of DevOps nirvana – this broader set of early adopters have begun […]
Native Integration of APM Driving DevOps Maturity
With applications performance monitoring established as one of the fundamental cornerstones of today’s DevOps methodologies, it’s easy to overlook the reality that effective instrumentation of such tools remains extremely difficult. Specifically, the biggest challenge remains creating performance metrics that address both IT and larger business initiatives. There’s no question that APM is one of the […]
Continuous test monitoring DevOps ”health-beat”
In my prior blog Test Results Analysis at the Speed of DevOps I discussed ways that test analysis features and practices can be optimized to ensure that test results for each CI/CT cycle keep pace with accelerated continuous testing. Beyond optimizing continuous test analysis for each cycle, longer term continuous test monitoring is necessary to […]
Librato Seeks to Unlock DevOps Application Monitoring
As wider adoption of DevOps methodologies continues to foster demand for new tooling to help streamline evolving workflows, at least one vendor is attempting to address the growing need for related monitoring capabilities. Librato, a San Francisco-based provider of Amazon AWS applications performance monitoring (APM) services, claims that it is finding favor among the rapidly […]
Proactive Monitoring
I think, most of the DevOps discussions are centered around testing the code change, packaging and deploying it in production in an automated fashion. However, stinging site-down issues would eventually force any nascent production engineering team to make monitoring a high priority down the road. If functional, integration and acceptance tests are run to verify […]
IT Asset Management: How to Find Out if Your Database is Causing Performance Problems
As your IT infrastructure grows, it becomes increasingly important to be able to identify where bottlenecks, performance problems, or outages are occurring so that you can quickly act to fix any issues. Identifying the source of a problem can be a bit tricky once you have grown into having multiple apps, servers, and databases—but there […]
SDN has a lot to offer to DevOps
When discussing DevOps it’s natural to focus the attention on the one operations team that focuses on application infrastructure. But when you start digging in to DevOps and its applicability to all four operations groups you’ll find that technological shifts in the network – like software-defined networks (SDN) – are just as important to the overall […]
5 ways APM can solve your DevOps worries
This week at the InterOp conference in New York I had the chance to talk to a lot of IT managers transforming their organizations to adopt a DevOps culture. One of the key questions I heard repeatedly was – are there some best practices to break down the wall between Dev and Ops? How do […]
Change your thinking about Change Management
Change Management, let’s face it, it’s usually a checklist item and a CYA tool. But in the world of DevOps where change is part of the culture and processes. Change Management needs to be more than a cost center, and really a way to improve what you are doing. And there is no excuse not […]
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 […]
DevOps doesn’t end at deployment
If you ask five IT admins the question “What is DevOps?” you maybe get eight different answers. We’ve attempted to define and explain the term DevOps here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud a few different ways, but a precise definition is still elusive. One thing is certain, though, DevOps is about more than just automating virtual server deployment […]
Releasing your team from Release Thinking
How much time do you spend optimizing your delivery pipeline? My guess is none. Many teams have figured out great ways to automate their releases, and some even automate testing and monitoring. But they don’t often take the next step and learn from those results to refine the delivery processes. Automated load testing and application […]
Security in the operational relay race
If you’ve ever seen people run a relay race, you’ll notice that most of the risk happens when the baton is handed from one runner to the next. In IT processes, there is also dramatically increased risk during handoffs. Whether you’ve moving from one process phase to another, one “owner” to another, or one environment […]