Why DevOps is like fitness or religion
What is DevOps? I noted in a blog post last summer that limiting DevOps to a single definition is challenging. The Wikipedia entry for DevOps contains a variety of possible explanations that seem to disagree in some ways: It’s a “software development method that stresses communication, collaboration and integration between software developers and information technology […]
Top Skills for Enterprise DevOps
There is one question I hear almost every time I talk with my large enterprise customers about DevOps: What skills do my people need to be successful with DevOps? Talk of DevOps almost immediately focuses on culture – like having empathy for fellow workers, being flexible and adaptable, seeking continuous improvement, building relationships, etc. However, […]
Waterfall to Agile to DevOps: The State of Stagnant Evolution
DevOps is all the rage. The hot IT buzzword intended to heal the expanding divide between development and IT operations is being used to sell a range of services and solutions to struggling development shops and enterprises, even though DevOps can’t be sold – it’s a cultural shift that nurtures under a strong leadership. Prior […]
The DevOps Scorecard
Mid-last year our team switched from doing Agile to doing DevOps. As we forayed into the journey trying to learn about DevOps and practice it at the same time, a lot of questions arose in the team. How was this different from agile and most importantly How were we going to be successful? That’s when we […]
The Dark Side of Infrastructure as Code
We spend a lot of time extolling the virtues of infrastructure as code. All of it is true. Treating infrastructure as code can add great value in terms of its ability to promote consistent, predictable and repeatable results during the application deployment process. One of the ways in which infrastructure is treated as code is […]
Microsoft strives to embrace open source culture
In many ways Microsoft is going through the corporate equivalent of a mid-life crisis—it has reached a stage where it longs to drop a few pounds, and turn back the clock a few years. After years of tremendous success, it’s now starting to show its age, and it is struggling to adapt to the new […]
Five Top Tips for DevOps At Scale
Since I published my blog explaining the topic of ‘Big DevOps’ late last year, the concept of Enterprise DevOps has exploded, with commentary, experience, and advice (some good, some awful) popping up from many different quarters. Fortunately, many pundits have now come to agree that application delivery in a traditional enterprise is very different from […]
ChatOps: Communicating at the speed of DevOps
DevOps is about knocking down barriers between developers and operations teams, and in doing so reducing organizational frictions wherever possible. And that’s certainly the spirit behind ChatOps – the term for the hyper-collaborative way of running DevOps, including operating aspects of systems and infrastructure, through online chat. Proponents of ChatOps say it streamlines communication in […]
The Double-Edged DevOps Job Title
Last month at GWO in Atlanta I met Nathen Harvey with Chef. I liked his DevOps presentation, “DevOp With Me!”, especially how he used “Walk This Way” by Run DMC and Aerosmith as an example for how collaboration in a DevOps environment often ends up playing out. They literally break down walls in the music […]
Meet Infrastructure as Code
Maybe you have already heard the terms “Programmable Infrastructure” and “Infrastructure as code”. But even if you have not, if you are interested in DevOps it’s something you need to know. Most new lingo causes me to roll my eyes. But in this case, it’s not just new lingo, it’s an entirely new concept. Besides making […]
An open letter to Jeff Knupp
Dear Jeff, First off, nice recovery. I commend your gesture to return to positivity and make what to my eyes, looks like a kind and altruistic offer to an underserved class of engineers. I personally sent your offer to all the female engineers on my team and got very good feedback from several of them. […]
Automation versus Orchestration
Yes, Virginia, there is a difference. One of the things devops practitioners are tasked with is the provisioning and configuration of all sorts of infrastructure. Application servers, web servers, load balancers, proxies and database servers are among the lengthy (and no doubt growing) list of “boxes” devops needs to get up and running to support […]
DevOps Needs a Tsunami To Jump The Chasm
All start up business endeavors must go through the phase of crossing the chasm. Most of those business endeavors usually fall prey to the chasm. The chasm is this black hole that everyone claims to understand but no one truly does. We have all seen businesses cross the chasm or fail to cross the chasm […]
Hacking Your Auditor
No, not that kind of hacking, give me a little credit… Recently I was having a conversation with a consulting friend about DevOps, and he found himself in a bit of a tough situation. The organization he was working with was a pure cloud/DevOps shop, but one that was stepping into having the meet compliance […]
Don’t let automation be the tail wagging the dog
There is quite a bit of talk right now about DevOps and how important automation is. This could be compared to GM in the 1980s when the company tried to transform the way they built cars through automation and robot. In the early 1980’s GM spent $90B dollars in an attempt to speed up the […]
Why Baking Security Into the DevOps Framework is Vital to Its Success
I attended my first official DevOps conference in Israel in September 2013. But I was initially introduced to DevOps by my customers – firewall and network managers who, through their efforts to automate security policy management, found themselves dealing with a new and like-minded set of IT stakeholders – DevOps teams. They said DevOps was […]
The State of DevOps: Accelerating Adoption
By James Turnbull (@kartar), VP of Technology Operations, Puppet Labs Inc. A sysadmin’s time is too valuable to waste resolving conflicts between operations and development teams, working through problems that stronger collaboration would solve, or performing routine tasks that can – and should – be automated. Working more collaboratively and freed from repetitive tasks, IT […]