Perhaps wrongly, “DevOps” has been associated with “new” and “that thing for the cool kids” and the “hipster developers”. This is used both as an excuse and as a source of animosity against the movement. But more subtly, I sometimes observe IT departments that acknowledge DevOps as a thing, but claim it wont work for […]
DevOps storytime: MTTR vs. Goodheart’s Law
I am not a fan of metrics. Wait. That’s not right. Let me try again. I am not a fan of singular metrics that stand by themselves. Nope. That’s still not right. I loathe singular metrics that stand by themselves as if they themselves are solutions to problems. Ok. That works. Let me explain. Last […]
What Cisco’s OpFlex means for DevOps
Some big news in networking land at Interop this year revolved around Cisco’s latest contribution to open source and the Internet, its proposed “OpFlex” control plane protocol. The protocol itself is focused on communicating with network elements and specifies encoding in a variety of formats, including JSON, that are developer-friendly. That’s nice, of course, but […]
Advanced Automation – Getting Your Systems to Work for You
In my previous post I discussed how to take your DevOps to the next level by taking it beyond infrastructure automation, to the automation of your deployments and code pushes, through patches and updates. And then I promised to make it interesting…so here is the next stage – actually using the extracted data to get […]
DevOps adoption – Enterprises (part 2 of 2)
A large enterprise has institutionalized an incredible number of processes. Their fundamental approach to IT has been built over years if not decades of experience. Their leaders may have grown up with these methodologies and approaches. In this article I wanted to continue the thread I started in my last article about how different organizations adopt […]
DevOps adoption can succeed where ITIL failed, if we let it
When I look at the future of DevOps adoption and acceleration I contrast it with what I feel was the failure of ITIL to really move beyond large enterprise IT shops. I am of the firm belief that DevOps has the legs to succeed and soar where ITIL sort of crashed and burned. OK if […]
Nagios is not a monitoring strategy
When I visit clients to talk about DevOps, I usually ask them what their monitoring strategy is. Too often, the answer I hear is “We use Nagios”. I think Nagios is a great tool, but it sure is not a strategy. Nagios does a good job of monitoring infrastructure. It will alert you when you […]
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 […]
Programmability in the Network: Stop a Bleeding Heart…
It is not often the case that a security vulnerability can get the entire Internet talking. And not just the security community on the Internet, but everyone. End-users and IT alike are looking for answers and trying to mitigate Heartbleed. It has its own web site and logo. It’s that big of a deal. Many service providers have […]
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 […]