Latest from Todd
State of On-call Survey 2015 – Help Needed!
Last year, we launched the first ever State of On-call Report. We asked about tools, setting up on-call rotations, what team members are involved and what happens after the incident gets resolved…among other things. We got 500 responses and in the process, learned a lot about what people are doing to handle the challenge of […]
Oct 9, 2015 · 3 minAll articles by Todd Vernon
Showing 1–12The Sea Change that is DevOps – DevOps is changing tools and infrastructure as we know it: Part 2
In the first part of this series, I explored the factors that have lead DevOps to where it is today. From a three to six month deployment period to regular weekly (or even daily) deployments, DevOps has certainly changed the IT landscape as we know it. Now, with the growing adoption of a DevOps mindset, […]
The Sea Change that is DevOps – How it all started: Part 1
Over the last 20 years, software has slowly taken over the world. Businesses that historically operated on 8-hour business days are now 24×7, navigating a global economy that never sleeps. The Internet enablement of everything has thrust what was originally an important support role into the lifeline of a business. A decade ago, Agile software […]
Share Your Thoughts about On-Call
We all know that being on-call sucks. What we don’t know is how other people are dealing with the problem. It’s time to dig deep, ask the hard questions and collect data around what it’s really like to be doing the hard job of keeping the machines up & running. That’s why VictorOps needs you! […]
The Push to Make Ops More Social
Given that social coding is a thing, what about the other side? Operations has the same image of lone wolves solving problems in the dark. The culture of on-call is built around the concept that when you’re holding the pager, you’re the one on the front lines, so that everyone else can sleep. Social operations, […]
DevOps makes coding more social, social coding makes better code
One of the main principles of DevOps is to break down silos. What’s more like a silo than the image of a lone developer, shutting himself off from the world in order to code more and interact with people less? “I’m just here to write code and that’s all I do.” There’s nothing collaborative or […]
Why Vertical Collaboration Matters for DevOps
Vertical collaboration is defined by Rick Defour as a team of people working interdependently toward a common goal for which they are all mutually accountable. Now that everyone is clear on the importance of collaboration and the different types, it’s time to delve into the importance of one type of collaboration in particular: vertical. Vertical […]
Not all collaboration types are equal
Talking about collaboration in general terms is easy. I’ve done it and so has everyone else. It’s time now to dig deeper into the specifics of collaboration, meaning the different types – asynchronous vs. synchronous, vertical vs. horizontal – and how different companies fit into the magic collaboration quadrant. And yes, the quadrant is indeed […]
Collaboration – A DevOps Tenet
You can’t turn around in the tech space without hearing about collaboration. Whether it has to do with the new economy being built around collaboration or the platforms designed to improve it or the various strategies one might implement to spur more of it on your team, collaboration is the hot new term, especially when […]
How to laugh at DevOps
Talking about DevOps is all the rage these days. But with that conversation, it’s easy to become inundated with the amount of serious discussion around the topic. I do agree that DevOps is not something we should joke around about, but since humor is an inherent part of our culture at VictorOps, it makes sense […]
The Dawning of Continuous Support
Development teams have a tendency to think that once they push the deploy button, the release is done. But with Devops, it’s quite the opposite now. More software changes, and more deploys, make every production release a new piece of code with unique idiosyncrasies. This has turned what has historically been a more static production […]
Always-on: The New Normal
One of the many challenges of DevOps is finding great team members that can handle the always-on nature of the job. Nearly everyone at VictorOps has been “that person” and has done the weeklong stint of carrying the virtual pager. What we noticed in our years of doing that job is that team member behavior […]