The fact you’re reading this article on staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud suggests you’re already a DevOps fan. Or maybe you’re visiting this site because you’re considering moving to DevOps in your organization, or you’ve been told you must move to DevOps and are figuring out how on earth to do it. Whatever your view on DevOps, let’s get […]
SRE vs. DevOps — a False Distinction?
Just a few days before he died at the beginning of the 1990s, a wise man taught us that “the show must go on.” Freddie Mercury’s parting words have long provided the guiding light for many, if not all, ops teams. In their eyes, the production environment should be exposed to minimum risk, even at […]
SRE vs. DevOps vs. Cloud Native: The Server Cage Match
This post supports my DevOpsDays Austin Presentation on May 4 I don’t believe in DevOps shaming. Our community seems compelled to correct use of DevOps as an adjective for tools, teams and teapots. The frustration is reasonable: DevOps clearly taps into head space for both devs and operators who see a brighter automated future together. […]
Is Site Reliability Engineering the True ‘Ops’ in DevOps?
I recently had the privilege of attending the SRECon conference in San Francisco. It’s in its third year and 650 attendees gathered to learn and share their experiences, insights and site reliability engineering (SRE) practices. Most SRECon attendees either identified as SREs or were there to learn more about this new role and approach. While […]
Strategies to Build Trust in DevOps
I’ve been a member of the DevOps community a long time (literally since before it was ever even called “DevOps”). I was a pre-publication reviewer for both “The Phoenix Project” and the recently published “The DevOps Handbook,” and I’m always interested in seeing the outcomes successes software teams have and the failures they overcome, including […]
Automation: Achieving Faster Rollouts with Better Accuracy
A changing landscape requires new processes At the recent Symposium/ITxpo, Gartner shared a list of technologies and trends that will be important for organizations to embrace and prepare for in 2017. These trends, which are listed in the report, “Top Strategic Predictions for 2017 and Beyond: Surviving the Storm Winds of Digital Disruption,” reinforce the […]
The Code Doesn’t Lie, and Other Operations Mantras
As engineers, we spend a lot of time talking about things such as release processes, QA environments and deployments. But at the end of the day, most software systems fail because the software itself is faulty. The code doesn’t lie—you can almost always find the solution to your problem within the code itself. Of course, […]
An Operational Approach to Benchmarking Microservices
Benchmarking microservices often falls behind on the engineering team’s to-do list. However, those that aren’t are missing out on a key component. The fundamental goal of benchmarking is to better understand the software, and test out the effects of various optimization techniques for microservices. In this post, I’ll describe an effective approach to benchmarking microservices. […]
Making Performance More Than a Best Practice
Yes, you read that correctly: SRE means that strong application performance—speed, reliability and availability—no longer is simply a best practice. It is a must. Site reliability engineering, or SRE, is a term Google coined several years ago, and while there is no universal definition, SRE can be thought of as a discipline that blends software engineering […]
Keep Applications Running by Testing Early, Continuously
Almost every product we buy or use today goes through some form of extensive testing before it’s released on the market; typically, these tests are designed to replicate the worst-case scenarios that a product may encounter under real-world conditions. Automobiles, for example, go through extensive hot and cold weather testing in remote locations, and are […]