The goal of every SaaS provider should be 100% availability – it should be ingrained in their culture. But it’s far more common to see a series of nines. Numerically, these are clearly not the same value and culturally, they are a world apart. When you have an availability target that is less that 100%, […]
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 outage war room primer
One aspect of the DevOps movement I’ve seen adopted at numerous companies is the idea that everyone supports their products by being on-call for any incidents that occur in the production environment. This responsibility often leads to participation in the outage war room. For those of you who may be new to this experience, I’m […]
No DevOps Roadmap? No Problem.
I’m a huge fan of The Phoenix Project and I’m honored to count Gene Kim both as one of my professional inspirations and also as a personal friend. There is, however, a dangerous precipice inside of the Phoenix Project that, if misunderstood, could cause many DevOps practitioners and enterprise IT shops a daunting problem in […]
Are the Milliseconds Worth It?
The pressure to prove one’s coding prowess can make a developer do some very clever and creative things with their source code. Sometimes it’s just a unique approach, but every once in a while this cleverness may shave a few milliseconds off of some performance metrics as well. In the end it’s not worth it. […]
The Importance of the Bus Driver
The topic of DevOps has been a topic for many a debate over recent months years. Without adding fuel to the fire I’d like to present a slightly different take on the DevOps culture. The phrase ‘what if I was hit by a bus?’ can often be heard within the vicinity of software development teams. It […]
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 […]
Systems of Things
What do Chevy V8s and DevOps have in common? They’re both complex systems with many interactions between their moving parts. The first time I did minor surgery on a Chevy engine I learned a lot about systems. The engine was a tired 283 cubic inch V8 in a 1966 Chevy Malibu which my grandfather purchased new […]
My DevOps Bookshelf
Aside from the many technical manuals on our bookshelves, I bet everyone has a few that are more process or philosophically oriented which hold a special place in our hearts. To me, these are the ones we continue to go back to and that have helped develop us as engineers, software, operations, quality assurance or […]
A Critical First Step in Bringing Dev and Ops Together
We all want to deliver excellent software to our customers. We now have a greater awareness than ever before of the interconnectedness of all the activities required to do so. The agile movement started this but it was not until the advent of DevOps that Ops was considered part of the full picture. In this […]