Latest from Chris
Practical Approaches to Long-Term Cloud-Native Security
There is no shortage of advice out there about how to secure modern, cloud-native workloads. By now, most developers and IT engineers who work with cloud-native deployments have heard all of the mantras about DevSecOps, shift-left security, multi-layer defenses and dynamic baselining (to name just some of the key concepts that are driving IT security […]
Dec 5, 2019 · 3 minAll articles by Chris Tozzi
Showing 1–24Why AWS Cost Optimization Is About More than Saving Money
Why is it important to track and monitor cloud costs? The obvious answer is it helps you save money—and everyone wants to save money. Yet, cost plays a much larger role in your cloud journey. If you think about cost only in terms of how much you are paying and what you are getting in […]
Optimizing AWS Performance Over the Long Term
Ask most folks how to optimize performance on AWS, and they’ll talk about things such as autoscaling and rightsizing. Those tools are certainly part of an effective AWS performance optimization strategy. On their own, however, they are not enough to guarantee performance and reliability over the long haul. That’s because tools and processes such as […]
Why Integrated Infrastructure Is the Key to IT Success
At first glance, your IT infrastructure might seem like your house’s basement. It supports everything, but you don’t pay much attention to it or spend much time or energy trying to make it beautiful. Instead, you treat it as a generic component and lavish your attention on other parts of your IT landscape (or your […]
Operational Excellence and the Success of Software Deployments
When we talk about best practices for software reliability, the conversation tends to focus on optimizing the applications themselves and the infrastructure that hosts them. The driving idea is reliability must be baked into system architectures and infrastructure from the beginning. That’s certainly true. But by focusing too much on the design and implementation of […]
What It Really Takes to Build a Reliable App
What makes an app reliable? If you ask most IT professionals that question, their minds immediately go to uptime. That’s not surprising; after all, it’s fashionable for software and infrastructure vendors these days to boast about how many nines of uptime they guarantee. To be sure, uptime is one component of delivering a reliable application […]
To Build a Healthy DevOps Culture, Look to Your Ecosystem
How do you do DevOps? Here’s a hint: Don’t fixate on finding the right tools or implementing the right processes. Instead, think about the broader ecosystem in which you operate, the culture that prevails in that ecosystem and which parts of the culture you can borrow to help enable your DevOps transformation. This is true […]
Why and How to Collect KPIs for Z DevOps
It can sometimes feel frustrating to try to figure out how to do DevOps. That’s because DevOps is not about tools—there are lots of different tools that can help you succeed at DevOps. Nor is it about any really specific set of practices; although DevOps prioritizes things like automation and communication, it does not prescribe […]
Shift-Left Testing, Continuous Integration and the Mainframe
“Mainframe” is one of the oldest terms in tech. “Shift-left” is much newer. You may not think, then, that mainframes and shift-left testing have much in common. But you’d be wrong. Shifting testing to the left can deliver tremendous benefits, even in the context of mainframe applications. Let us explain. What Is Shift-Left Testing? Shift-left […]
Why Did DevOps Become So Popular? 3 Theories
DevOps has now been a thing for a solid decade. As we look back at the history of DevOps, it’s worth asking: Where did DevOps come from, and why did it take off when it did? In honor of the 10-year anniversary of DevOps, I’d like to explore these questions. A Brief History of DevOps […]
3 Reasons Why DevOps Is More Popular Than Ever
How popular is DevOps? More popular than ever, if Google Trends is to be believed. Here’s a look at how the popularity of DevOps has increased over time, and what has driven the change. The Spiking Popularity of DevOps Here’s what Google Trends tells us about interest over time of the term “DevOps” over the […]
DevOps Is Killing the ITOps Engineer (and That’s Bad)
In theory, DevOps is about bridging the gap between developers and ITOps teams. In practice, however, DevOps often can feel as though its real goal is to turn ITOps engineers into developers, without really requiring developers to dive head-first into ITOps work. In this article, we’ll explain why DevOps gives more glory to development work […]
Tips for Migrating and Managing Data Workloads in the Cloud
Unless you are an alien life form who just beamed down from space, you’ve heard all about the why of moving data workloads to the cloud. The cloud is a more scalable, more flexible, more available and possibly less expensive solution for storing and processing data. What is not always obvious is the how of […]
Doing DevOps in an Interconnected World
Doing DevOps would be simple if you had total control over the tools, code and infrastructure that your company used. But the fact is, you don’t. Instead, we live in a world where most CI/CD chains connect in some way to third-party resources or processes. In other words, doing DevOps effectively means integrating with entities […]
How DevOps Teams Can Skill Up on DataOps
If you’re a DevOps engineer, you probably don’t think of data operations as a key part of your job. You help to write code and deploy and manage applications, while someone else handles data management and analytics, right? Probably not. Although it might be comforting to imagine that every company has a dedicated team of […]
The Taxonomy of DataOps
Data Operations, or DataOps for short, is one of those IT buzzwords that lots of people use, yet few can define precisely. Like the cloud or DevOps, DataOps doesn’t make sense until you sit down and really think through what it entails. To that end, let’s take a look in this article at the taxonomy […]
4 Things Developers Should Know About Security in the Age of DevSecOps
If you’re a developer, most of your experience when it comes to security probably centers on designing and writing secure code. You know how to prevent buffer overflows, architect your microservices in a way that helps mitigate the impact of a breach and otherwise churn out secure application code. But the fact is that today, […]
Can DevOps and MSPs Work Together?
DevOps and the adoption of MSP-based IT operations are both surging trends in the IT industry today. They are also trends that contradict each other in some key respects. Here’s a look at what MSPs mean for DevOps, and vice versa. DevOps and MSPs: A Primer MSPs, or managed service providers, are companies that provide […]
Which Desktop OS Is Best for DevOps?
Which operating system (OS) is best for DevOps engineers to use on their workstations? That’s a weighty question. Talk about which OS is “best” for any purpose is always controversial. I’m not going to stick my neck out by saying that one OS is definitively better than others when it comes to doing DevOps work. […]
Textbook DevOps vs. Real-World DevOps
DevOps is one of those things—like Marxism or baking macarons—that is easy to understand in theory, but much messier to implement in practice. Real-world DevOps rarely aligns with textbook DevOps or the DevOps practices that organizations should follow in theory. That is true for a number of reasons. Let’s walk through some of the biggest […]
5 DevOps Terms That We All Use, Yet No One Can Define
I’m all for DevOps. Sometimes, however, I have a hard time talking about DevOps. The reason is because many of the key terms related to DevOps lack clear and precise definitions. Let me explain … DevOps is such a big deal that it has bred its very own lexicon. Search Google for “DevOps terms,” and […]
How Important Is Open Source for DevOps, Really?
Depending on your perspective, you might believe that DevOps and open source go hand in hand. Or you may think that, quite to the contrary, the two have little to do with each other. There are good arguments to be made for both interpretations. Let’s explore these two ways of thinking about the relationship between […]
What Comes after DevOps? Two Possibilities
People have been talking about the “post-DevOps” world since at least 2014. But have we actually arrived in the post-DevOps era? If so, what comes after DevOps? Let’s explore those questions. The DevOps concept is more than a decade old. DevOps has seen widespread adoption across companies large and small. “DevOps engineer” is now a […]
For DevOps, (Organizational) Size Matters
When it comes to DevOps, size matters. The number of people in your organization, as well as the size of its infrastructure, play a huge role in shaping how and why you adopt DevOps. The importance of company size may come as a surprise. Few conversations about DevOps mention the role of organizational size in […]