Latest from Chris
Using Incident Response for Continuous Testing
Incident response tools offer the ability for organizations to not only implement continuous testing but to also shorten the feedback loop from continuous testing back into planning and development At this point, you should be able to say the word “continuous” to any technical team, drop the mic and leave. Yes, the idea that we […]
Sep 29, 2020 · 3 minAll articles by Chris Riley
Showing 1–24What Is Resilience Engineering?
Admitting things will go wrong isn’t easy for anyone or any team. But modern engineering practices have moved beyond this fear, giving birth to a new practice in DevOps and site reliability engineering (SRE) known as resilience engineering. Resilience engineering today isn’t thought of as a function. However, just as DevOps was a description of […]
Moving from NOC to the SRE Model
Is Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) another case of “Do what Google does”? When viewed with a discerning lens, the practices and tooling high-performing engineering teams deliver to the market can be very beneficial. The SRE model is one of them and stands to benefit DevOps teams substantially. If I could change the name from Site […]
The Difference Between Capacity and Scalability Planning
Not only does the tech industry love terms, we love to make them super nuanced. For example SecOps versus DevSecOps, continuous delivery versus continuous deployment, hybrid cloud versus multi-cloud, etc. These terms may seem similar on the surface, but when you dig in they are quite different. Here are two more: capacity planning versus scalability […]
The Relationship Between Feature Flags and DevOps
From 2017 I’ve started most DevOps conversations with, “DevOps is now boring, and I love it!” What I mean by boring is that we are arguing less and less about why you should embrace DevOps principles and practices and having more and more conversations about how to implement DevOps in the real world. As a […]
How IT Engineers Can Learn DataOps
To seasoned IT engineers, DataOps may not sound very difficult. After all, if you work in IT, you know all about managing databases, provisioning data storage, moving data around and so on. How hard could DataOps be, really? The answer is, “Harder than you might think.” Even if you work frequently with data in the […]
Why Workload Security Is Not Just for IT Anymore
Once upon a time, workload security (which means making sure an application and its environment are configured and deployed securely) was something that developers didn’t have to think much about. Developers’ only real security responsibility was to write secure code. After they passed the code off for building, testing and deploying, it was someone else’s […]
An Even More Modern Continuous Integration
It would be strange for me to tell you that there is an even newer new approach to release automation, as if the processes of continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), continuous deployment and canary releases were not modern enough. And it would be even stranger to say that the open-source tool Jenkins, which dominates […]
Why a Dev/Test Cloud Is Not Optional
How do you create a private Dev/Test cloud to standardize processes, tooling and environments across teams? Recently, I participated in an online panel on the subject of, “Creating an Internal Dev/Test Cloud,” as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about agile, continuous delivery and DevOps. Continuous Discussions is a community initiative […]
PTC: Using DevOps to Transform Applications
Large companies and monolithic applications are not usually associated with DevOps. But I recently discovered that some of the best DevOps operations have come from the largest organizations and most complex applications, and PTC is the latest example. If you are not familiar with PTC, the company has a wide range of offerings for enterprises […]
Booz Allen Helps the GSA Put Your DevOps to Shame
Production Docker, automated workflows, open source projects and microservices are just some of the ways that Booz Allen is helping the General Services Administration (GSA) modernize its IT operations. And frankly, after talking to Nirmal Mehta, the lead architect on its recent project, I became a little embarrassed for you DevOps-born startups. In my circle […]
Defining What DevOps is Not
It’s not often that my emails turn into full-blown conversations on DevOps. But when it happens, it’s a great time to take advantage of the insights. John Purrier of Automic and I recently discussed DevOps sustainability. Both of us think that sustaining a modern delivery chain and adopting it are two very different things. However, […]
How do you measure DevOps? What does that even mean?
What are some of the metrics you should be monitoring to track your DevOps efforts, and which metrics should you abandon? Last Tuesday I participated in an online panel on the subject of Measuring DevOps, as part of Continuous Discussions (#c9d9), a series of community panels about Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps. Watch a recording […]
Virtuoso: Focused on Quality as the First Step in DevOps Innovation
I’ve found that those who have been most successful with DevOps do not actually care for the phrase. What they care about is the ability to automate, respond to, and improve their software delivery chain, as well as the tactics of moving faster and improving application quality. Another common attribute of those committed to DevOps […]
Only DevOps and Taxes
As software eats the world, it’s hard to have a conversation about anything that isn’t directly related to or driven by modern mobile, web and IoT applications. DevOps describes the modern approach to building these applications. But like all new movements, there is a cost. And while some of the costs associated with modern development […]
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, […]
TASC used pipeline orchestration to onboard DevOps
I often talk about how development teams ignore their pipeline. It is easy to focus on specific tools and process, but by and large the pipeline that contains them is not being treated as its own entity. Your entire process is something that should be managed, iterated over, and measured just like the code within […]
Version your infrastructure
Infrastructure is code, and like any code, you need to version it. Notice how that works: If it’s infrastructure, then it’s a fundamental part of the system; nothing’s going to work without it, which makes it valuable. So valuable that in full-stack deployments, it is part of the application. And if it’s code, then it […]
DOES15 – A Focus on DevOps Execution
“I recently attended my second DevOpsDays, and even one year later I noticed that the audience had changed a lot” – says Travis Cunningham a Software Engineer at SmartFile during an interview about their development environment. What Travis is speaking to is the fact that DevOps has matured dramatically in a short amount of time. […]
Does MariaDB replace the “M” in LAMP
If you were starting a new application tomorrow, which backend would you use? Chances are you said MySQL. However post Oracle acquisition MySQL has changed. After Oracle purchased the code they broke the hearts of many. And there is hope that MySQL has re-invented itself in the form of MariaDB The M (MySQL) in the […]
Defining On-Prem
Sometimes, the meaning of a word or a phrase changes so quickly that you don’t even notice that it’s changed; at some point, you just realize that you’ve been using it differently. Take “on-prem,” for example. Not too long ago, if you said that a component of your IT system was on-prem, you meant that […]
Where Oh Where has my Hadoop gone?
Where is Hadoop? Just a few years ago, it was everywhere. Internet heavy hitters such as Facebook and Yahoo boasted about the size of their Hadoop clusters and applications. It was easy to imagine the day when Hadoop would be the one indispensable tool for anyone who dealt in large volumes of data. And now? […]
Bring Your Own Exploit
Here’s a simple question: for each tool that your organization uses, have you (or someone else on your DevOps team) changed the default passwords? That should be a no-brainer, shouldn’t it? Of course you changed them! Or at least you changed them for the tools that looked like they would have default passwords. Well, OK, […]
An Open Letter to DevOps “enthusiast”
Dear DevOps “enthusiast”, You are confused. But I am confused as well. For approximately two years now this DevOps thing has been both exciting and frustrating. And in ways that are totally different for each of us. At the intersection of all the disparate confusion is the “perfect storm”. What that means for now is […]