Latest from JP
The Executive’s Guide to Microservices Chapter 3: Choosing A Starting Point
In the previous chapter, Steve had been asked to provide a comparison of costs and resources needed to migrate to a commercial system versus modernize the current system. He works with Stacey, head of development, who comes up with a modernization plan that includes certain changes that the team will implement to limit downtime. Steve […]
Feb 16, 2018 · 3 minAll articles by JP Morgenthal
Showing 1–24The Executive’s Guide to Microservices Chapter 2: The Business Challenge
Steve and team have been working diligently to analyze the intricate web of code that has been organically developed over the past 12 years to design a program to modernize the application. Application is actually a poor name for all that Steve and his team manages. Steve’s team manages a complex custom supply-chain system that […]
The Executive’s Guide to Microservices: Chapter 1
Meet Steve. Steve is responsible for a mission-critical application for a very large enterprise. He has a problem: It takes Steve and his team a very long time to make changes to this application and release it to production. Steve has been talking to vendors, consultants and peers about agile software development techniques and DevOps, […]
Welcome to Microservices Journal
Welcome to Microservices Journal, a community dedicated to the design of microservices-based applications and related technologies. The introduction of microservices into the digital application landscape enables a new level of agility for businesses that adopt this model of design. As with any architectural construct, there are no absolutes; hence, no wrong or right way to […]
Microservices Days coming to a city near you
Microservices is rapidly becoming a design paradigm for developing software. While there are many benefits to microservices designs, it is more complex than traditional application design. For this reason we are formulating a new community around microservices architecture. This community will explore design issues and the intersection with Mobile/IoT, Containers, Cloud, DevOps and APIs. Microservices […]
SOA vs Microservices
Some say microservices architecture is proof that SOA is still alive. I contend that microservices architecture replaces SOA due to deficiencies in how SOA has been implemented as well as the original intent. In the mid-1990s there was a surge of investment for implementing enterprise applications to replace the aging homegrown legacy applications. These new […]
The Big DevOps Question: How Do We Get Started?
Every conversation I have with clients regarding DevOps eventually reaches a point where the client wants to know my recommendations for getting started with a DevOps program. Some have already embarked on a DevOps program, but want me to critique their approach against what I see others doing. Others simply don’t have a clue how […]
Leveraging DevOps to Expose The Entire IT Iceberg
On September 16th I attended and spoke at a CIO Magazine event in Chicago. These are some of the best events to attend as the audience is typically CIO or senior IT leadership. One of the speakers on the day, Martha Heller, Author of “The CIO Paradox”, presenting on new competencies for the modern CIO, […]
DevOps and Bi-Modal IT
Can a business have two competing approaches to delivery and operations of their information infrastructure and be successful? If you follow Gartner recommendations, it would seem that bi-modal IT is the way to go. Bi-modal IT has been explained many different ways, but, ultimately, comes down a failure in leadership; allowing a subset of IT […]
DevOps is a Symptom, Not a Diagnosis, and Continuous Delivery is the Cure
You wake up and you have a sore throat and nasal congestion. Is it the common cold? Perhaps the flu? Is it bacterial? Viral? Any good physician will tell you that diagnosing disease purely from symptoms is a fool’s errand (or maybe malpractice). A diagnosis identifies disease which leads to prescribing a treatment plan for […]
DevOps and Organizational Debt
I recently published a blog on the Perficient Digital Transformation blog entitled “Is Cloud & DevOps Factored Into Your Digital Transformation?” In that blog I discuss the concept of organizational debt and its impact on your DevOps adoption. Here’s what I had to say in that blog: If technical debt addresses too little investment in […]
The Trouble With Enterprise DevOps
The literary world and beyond has been up in arms as of late regarding the use of the word ‘literally’. It seems that many are using the word literally when they mean figuratively. For example, if you say, “I literally split my pants laughing,” it would be plausible for one to look at your pants […]
Containers Are Designed For an Antiquated Application Architecture
In his most recent GigaOm article, “We’re finally headed towards autonomous, self-migrating containers for cloud-application automation“, David Linthicum discusses the value that containers, such as Docker and CoreOS Rocket, are bringing to DevOps and cloud systems management. For the record nothing Dave states in the article is incorrect with regard to the expressed value that […]
DevOps Sometimes Means Kill It Before Fixing It
The public attention for DevOps is having a very positive effect on many areas of IT with regard to improving their ability to deliver for the business. Yet, I see little attention being paid to an integral part of this desire to change, which is to assess and baseline the current approach and then strategically […]
The Conundrum of Adopting DevOps within Organizational Constraints
I wish I had a dollar for each time I’ve now heard, “we’re adopting DevOps, but we have to operate within the constraints of what the business is ready to accept.” Basically, this is becoming the battle cry of many enterprise IT professionals that are DevOps believers, but are stuck with the limitations of operating […]
Time-Sharing to Unicorns: The DevOps Problem Facing Enterprise IT
How did we in Enterprise IT get to this point? There’s a lot of talking and writing about the value of adopting DevOps but very little analyzing the problem domain we’re trying to correct. There are some schools that will say we can move forward without looking back, but I believe a key element of […]
The Divisiveness Of The Term “DevOps Culture”
If the term DevOps has caught your ear of late and its caused you to start researching what it is and how it can benefit you, you’ve probably come across a number of dissenting pieces on the term “DevOps culture.” A recent tweet by Lori Macvittie of F5 (@lmacvittie) reiterated my thinking, “wow, this issue […]
Being Agile is all about controlling the flow
For businesses, Agile is the new fashionable initiative as was E-business was in the 2000’s, Six Sigma was in the 90’s and Total Quality Management (TQM) was in the 80’s. If we look back across the spectrum of these initiatives, we need to examine how many of these initiatives met the goals the business was […]
Reconciling DevOps Messages: Notes From DevOps Days Minneapolis
Last week Minneapolis was host to Major League Baseball’s All-Star game, but when they were done cleaning up after the game a group of IT professionals got together to exchange ideas and share experiences about DevOps. It was DevOps Days Minneapolis. The crowd was a highly diverse group of individuals including management and engineers, uncharacteristically […]
Infrastructure-as-code, new rules for the old game
There’s been a lot of discussion regarding DevOps and its role in fostering quality and continuous improvement through increased levels of automation. In turn, this automation is fostered through emerging infrastructure and software architectures that are exposing control plane and management programming interfaces, which has been dubbed in many circles as Infrastructure-as-Code. This movement allows […]
Lean versus the bandwagon, lean wins
I’ve just finished reading “The Phoenix Project,” by Kim, Behr and Spafford. To be honest, it was on my reading list but had I not picked up a copy at Camp DevOps I don’t know that I would have ever read the book. My main issue with books of this ilk, such as “Who Moved […]
The DevOps master process: design
In speaking, counseling and talking to people with regard to DevOps, I often frame the discussion in terms of the DevOps master process. While all of the parts of the master process are important, one aspect very often is overlooked. I call this often overlooked aspect the design stage. The design stage includes the gathering […]
Services As A Model For DevOps Communications
DevOps is an interesting movement. As with any effort of this magnitude, there will be many opinions on what is entailed in adoption and implementation. The issue is that businesses are so diverse and varied in culture that no single method for adoption is guaranteed to fit all businesses. In large IT organizations, this issue […]
DevOps Is Free? Sure I’ll Support It
One of the biggest misnomers about DevOps is that since it’s all about process and communications there aren’t any costs associated with adoption. Sure, you can probably gain some improvement by simply modifying your current methods for delivering IT services in your organization, however, DevOps is about more than just modest improvements. Let’s explore why […]