A recent column in the Wall Street Journal’s CIO Journal argued that while DevOps is gaining inroads in small and mid-sized businesses, it’s facing a much less rosy future in large enterprises. The story cited organizational challenges, many of which we covered, such as large siloes, regulatory compliance, and resistance to change as great impediments […]
DevOps developers; don’t be a DevGoof
There was a lot of brush back last week over Jeff Knupp’s post about how DevOps is killing the developer. Frankly I wasn’t shocked by Knupp’s opinion that developers “are the dentists in the dental office”. In my 30+ years of involvement in the IT industry my experience is that developers often think of themselves […]
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, […]
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 […]
DevOps Needs a Tsunami To Jump The Chasm
All start up business endeavors must go through the phase of crossing the chasm. Most of those business endeavors usually fall prey to the chasm. The chasm is this black hole that everyone claims to understand but no one truly does. We have all seen businesses cross the chasm or fail to cross the chasm […]
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 […]
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 […]
THOUGHT LEADERS OR NAVEL GAZERS?
I get tired of hearing what is DevOps? It just tells me that no one really has got it exactly right, but everyone longs to be the authority on the topic. Everyone writes their perceived answers ad nauseam. Reading all the different definitions is kinda like listening to infomercials. An individual puts themselves out there […]