Last week Andrew Storms put up a good post hinting at the promise of security automation in [SecDevOps: Security Automation By Example – The Firewall Change]. He included an example of automating a series of actions when a firewall rule is changed. It’s a good article, although I’m increasingly convinced there’s no such thing as […]
Technology’s effect on religion
Today being Good Friday, with Easter being Sunday and in the midst of Passover; it is a time for reflection. Instead of thinking about DevOps, today I ponder life and religion. What comes to mind is the future of religion in these technological times. The number of Americans with a religious affiliation continues to decline, […]
Microsoft bridges the gap between Azure and DevOps
DevOps can be easy for a startup. Many of the concepts and principles of DevOps come quite naturally to a fresh company just getting started. It’s a different story, however, for large, established enterprises trying to wrap their arms around this DevOps thing. For IT admins working in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform, though, things just […]
From here to there: practical first DevOps steps
I’m a bad programmer. There, I got that out of the way. The truth is, I’m a sysadmin that writes code infrequently, on an island, and out of disciplined requirement, release, or QA practices. I need to run an ETL that kicks a file transfer. I’ll write some code. I’ve got a workflow that needs […]
Continuous integration for better security
One of the big advantages to smaller deploys and continuous integration is that it can make it easier to provide more proactive security. In short, continuous integration (and the associated automated testing it enables) makes it easier to focus your security team on analyzing areas where the security risk is higher. If the notion of […]
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 […]
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 […]
DevOps Is Free? Sure I’ll Support It
One of the biggest misnomers about DevOps is that since it’s all about process and communications there aren’t any costs associated with adoption. Sure, you can probably gain some improvement by simply modifying your current methods for delivering IT services in your organization, however, DevOps is about more than just modest improvements. Let’s explore why […]
Deployment and Monitoring Automation with glu
glu is a free/open source deployment and monitoring automation platform. glu is a project that was started at LinkedIn mid-2009 to address the exponentially growing needs of deploying the set of applications and services that make up the LinkedIn experience. Although some projects like Chef and Puppet existed at the time, they were mostly good […]
Don’t Let the (April Fools Day) Joke Be on You
As much as seasonal increases in demand for on-line resources are discussed, the one day that’s often overlooked is April Fools Day. It’s the day the Internet loses its mind and your best bet is take everything not just with a grain of salt, but with the entire shaker. The use of April Fools’ Day […]