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Tag: cloud

  • Microsoft bridges the gap between Azure and DevOps

    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 got a lot easier thanks to the integration of Chef and Puppet Labs.

    Many organizations are heavily invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. IT teams and administrators are familiar with Windows domains, Active Directory, Hyper-V, and Azure. They know how to write scripts and leverage PowerShell to get things done, but they’re much less familiar with the core principles of DevOps, or common DevOps automation tools like Chef and Puppet Labs.

    One of the driving forces of DevOps is the ability—or perhaps necessity—to automate those tasks that can be automated so IT resources are freed up to focus on more important tasks. Deploying and configuring virtual servers and applications is necessary, but it can also be tedious, and it is a task that can be easily automated using DevOps tools.

    The arrangement also works the other way. Smaller companies that are already familiar with, and invested in DevOps may need to scale to a platform like Azure. They should be able to build on what they’ve started, and continue to use the tools they’re familiar with as the company migrates to Microsoft’s Azure.

    One of the main attractions of Microsoft Azure is the degree of flexibility, choice and control it gives customers. Microsoft Azure’s partnership with Puppet and Chef allows customers to choose from an array of existing technologies and communities to easily deploy, configure, automate and manage their VMs.

    According to a Microsoft spokesperson Puppet Labs and Chef complement and extend Microsoft technologies such as Resource Groups and PowerShell Desired State Configuration (DSC) to offer more options for customers to migrate existing or deploy new applications to the cloud. The partnership offers Microsoft the ability to support Linux and UNIX environments, and also alleviates the concerns that organizations already using Puppet or Chef will have about abandoning their investment. Now, they can continue to use their Puppet modules or Chef recipes in Azure.

    Luke Kanies, CEO of Puppet Labs believes the integration of Puppet Labs and Azure will help Microsoft IT admins by making it easier to deploy applications across any platform or cloud environment. Kanies explained in a press release, “Our goal is to help you automate the configuration and ongoing management of your machines and the software running on them, so you spend less of your time firefighting and running simple scripts across a thousand machines, and more time getting great software in front of your users.”

    I spoke with Kanies about the difference in dynamics between a small company and a large enterprise. He told me that in a small company it’s much easier to communicate and coordinate resources, and the cost of failure of any particular project is much lower. For a large, established enterprise, however, there is assumedly a large base of existing customers, and there is more fear and worry about possibly disrupting normal operations.

    I also had a chat with Ken Cheney, VP of business development for Chef. His philosophy mirrors a lot of what Kanies described. Cheney told me that emerging companies have the luxury of starting from ground zero with a clean slate. There aren’t yet any established processes to navigate. The challenge is trying to transform an organization with established processes, and a team of existing developers over to a DevOps mentality. Integrating DevOps into Azure helps organizations to meet that challenge.

    DevOps adds an element of speed and simplicity that makes it easier for larger enterprises to be more agile. Using tools like Puppet Labs and Chef enables IT admins to add speed as a core requirement for infrastructure projects without disrupting or conflicting with other requirements—like security and stability.

    Ultimately, the new alliance illustrates Microsoft’s commitment to empower Azure customers with the best-in-class configuration and automation tools by embracing the technologies, communities and ecosystems that developers know and love. Combining Azure with powerful and popular platforms like Chef and Puppet Labs bridges the gap between traditional IT and DevOps—enabling old school IT admins to embrace DevOps, and DevOps startups to mature and evolve into larger enterprises.

  • Nagios is not a monitoring strategy

    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 are running out of disk, CPU, or memory. I call this reactive monitoring. In other words, Nagios is telling you that your resources are getting maxed out and you are about to have issues. Proactive monitoring focuses more on the behavior of the applications and attempts to detect when metrics are starting to stray away from their normal baseline numbers. Proactive monitoring alerts you that the system is starting to experience symptoms that can lead to a degradation of performance or capacity issues which is more preferable than Nagios telling you are about to be screwed. With reactive monitoring, it is not uncommon that customers start complaining about the same time that the Nagios alerts start going off. The goal of proactive monitoring is to head off issues so that customers don’t even notice.

    The next question I ask is “What things are you monitoring?”  A typical answer usually revolves around various infrastructure assets and databases. That’s a good start but there is much more to consider. But first, let’s talk about why proactive monitoring is so critical. In the pre-cloud days we used to ship software to our customers where they would install the software, perform capacity planning tasks, manage the infrastructure, and operate the day-to-day activities. Once we shipped the code we were done. In today’s world, we are no longer shipping product. Instead we are delivering services that are always on. The customer no longer owns and operates the infrastructure and the software. Instead they pay for a service and expect that service to run reliably all the time. To meet those expectations, we need a more robust monitoring strategy. We need to monitor more than just the infrastructure.

    A good monitoring strategy starts by identifying all of the actors who needs access to data and all of the categories of data that needs to be tracked. Some metrics are monitored in real-time while others are mined from log data. Every good monitoring strategy is accompanied with a sound logging solution. In order to perform analytics to predict trends within the data, one must collect various data points ranging from customer usage activity, security controls, deployment activities, and much more. The following presentation goes into much more detail about the different areas that should be monitored and why different actors need these data points to perform their jobs.

    [slideshare id=33320431&doc=monitoringstrategies-0408014v1-140409081614-phpapp01]


    The bottom line is, before building in the cloud, it pays to invest some time into a sound monitoring strategy. I have seen too often where teams don’t think through how to support these highly distributed, always on SaaS solutions and end up delivering software that does not meet the reliability and quality expectations of  customers. Monitoring provides feedback to developers, product owners, operators, and even customers so that systems can continuously be improved. Nagios is great, but there is no single monitoring solution that can implemented to effectively operate today’s always on services.