My version of “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet” is not nearly as eloquent as Shakespeare’s, but the sentiment is the same. Juliet argues in Romeo and Juliet that the name of a thing such as a rose is irrelevant—it’s still a rose no matter what you call it. The same […]
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 DevOps value stream is not SOP
#devops #lean Don’t confuse doing something faster with greater efficiency. Much of the focus on DevOps remains at the implementation level – on gaining efficiencies through automation of tasks and orchestration of processes. While this is not a bad thing, such a micro-focus on the moving parts can result in the loss of efficiencies to […]
Five Top Tips for Cloud and DevOps Automation
A while back, I overheard someone asking why many of the ‘cloudy people’ have moved on to DevOps. One reason is certainly that cloud is at the heart of DevOps. Many of the grounding principles of DevOps – rapid iteration, agile development, automated testing, continuous delivery and continuous integration – are barely even possible without […]
An open-source pipeline for trusted images
There are a lot of good reasons to use a trusted image (aka “foundation image”), including reliability, reduced time to launch, secure configuration. [We’ve discussed them previously] In this article we are going to describe a development and quality assurance process for making trusted (aka “foundation” or “golden”) images. First, this is the tool set […]
Avoiding Parrot Processes
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 just about any given application today. […]
Waterfall and Agile, the effect of automation and continuous integration
Agile’s A Silly Idea? I was a young developer working at a large enterprise when I first heard about some of the principles that later became part of the Agile process back in the mid- to late-90s. I was skeptical about what I heard, to say the least. After all, what we today call waterfall […]
Automating code helps businesses adapt to customer demand quickly
This is the first article in a series of pieces on digital innovation, accelerating change and the rise of the coded business from innovators in the Chef (click here) community. How does the need for speed and scale affect businesses today? Let’s start with scale. As a technology company grows, its infrastructure grows – more machines […]
Automation, Operations, DevOps – What We Thought Was Missing
Stackstorm is a new company focused on automation, operations and DevOps. It’s co-founder and CEO Evan Powell has been keeping a running journal as the company made ready to emerge from stealth. Over the next few days we will share Powell’s thoughts and experiences as a new DevOps company comes to market. Over the next […]