Latest from Kristian
DevOps and the Identity Conundrum
“Who am I?” It is perhaps the most basic question of consciousness. The answer could be subdivided by aspects of my life story … my career, my family, my beliefs, my education … the list could continue. But since I am unique, the challenge in this digital age is for me to somehow remain unique, […]
Sep 26, 2016 · 3 minAll articles by Kristian Nelson
Showing 1–24DevOps and Automation Abstraction?
Similarity breeds consistency, giving way to predictability and, thereby, dropping costs of operations and quality from a lower number of incidents and a shorter duration to resolve them. But at the heart of this chain of events is the recognition that we tend to do certain tasks the same way, over and over again, for […]
Putting Ops Back in DevOps
What Agile means to your typical operations staff member is, “More junk coming faster that I will get blamed for when it breaks.” There always is tension between development and operations when something goes south. Developers are sure the code worked on their machine; therefore, if it does not work in some other environment, operations […]
DevOps: The Glue of Workflow
The best tool in the DevOps continuum is the sticky wrapper that holds it all together. It is the workflow that binds it and makes sense out of the term “continuous.” CIOs often are enamored with a build or deploy tool, but it is the workflow tool in every DevOps strategy encapsulating more than one […]
DevOps: Commoditizing Infrastructure
Hardware vendors face a quandary. How do you distinguish yourself as superior from your competitors if you are unable to continue to grow a distinct architecture as your competitive advantage? But this dilemma does not begin and end with only hardware vendors; operating system vendors and virtual machine vendors are on the same horizon. In […]
Integrating ARA into traditional RM
Application Release Automation (ARA) is terminology that includes several DevOps constructs from a singular, application-centric point of view. In essence, ARA implies the automation of a single app from build through deployment (even if that deployment is to production). Of course, embedded or implied in that automation terminology is build automation or construction; deployment automation, […]
Engaging Adoption of DevOps
Executive mandate does not immediately translate into a change in behavior. Organizations inherently grasp the value of embracing DevOps, but the timing of exactly when it begins and is completed is another matter. The devil truly is in the details—or rather, in the ability and willingness of the organization to adopt a change in thinking […]
Baselining Metrics to Measure DevOps ROI
Assessing the ROI of DevOps normally is done against a company’s baseline cost. The problem is, most organizations do not collect or evaluate the cost of “automating and delivering” innovation; they usually are more focused on the innovation product itself. As an example, if a company creates an application hosted on the web that offers […]
Training & Certification Implications
Changing culture does not happen by osmosis, it happens through incessant education. The DevOps continuum of services your organization originally intends to create and implement is a journey more than a concrete destination. It will evolve over time no matter what your original plans were, no matter what your vendor of choice tells you, and […]
Mobility and Quantum Adaptation
As you look at the preponderance of DevOps tooling solutions available today, you notice similarities in deployment automation and how they work. DevOps is purported to be the most significant catalyst for change in how we innovate in the last two decades. Yet, as you examine the tooling and the strengths and weaknesses of each, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Changing Compensation Before it Kills Success
Have you ever seen the sign, “Will work for food”? If you deconstruct the premise a bit, we all work for the rewards systems that interests us. We “trade” our labor (ideally, focus our passion), for a set of acknowledgements that range from survival to pride. And ultimately it is our employer (whether the boss […]
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 […]
Integrated Testing Without Integrated Migraines
I am always amazed at how many practitioners (or, rather, managers of) tout the benefits of test-driven development (TDD). This inherently changes the role of the traditional developer to one of developer and tester. But it would appear that as long as I am able to construct a test for the innovation I wish to […]
Resurrecting the CMDB Through a Singular Path to Production
Change consistency (or the predictability of how change is deployed) followed by change transparency (or the visibility into the state of change at any stage in the software development life cycle [SDLC]) are two key benefits of embracing a highly functioning enterprise-class DevOps set of services. Most organizations are attempting to transform themselves from a […]