DevOps Articles

DevOps is a set of practices combining software development and information technology operations aiming to continuously deliver higher quality software in a shorter amount of time. It sounds easy. Your ability to do a better job in less time depends on how big or small your organization is and how many variables and constraints you … Read more

I was hanging out with my dad recently when an old question came up yet again: “Tell me again, son, that software you sell, what does it do?” Oh no, I thought. Here we go again. So I launched into my spiel, explaining software development lifecycles and constraints, and how release automation tools and Service Virtualization software work to … Read more

Implementing or evaluating change is an uncertain and, often, scary process. Should I change? What do I change? When do I change? IT systems, departments and staff are no different. Everyone agrees, in principle, that IT should be leading change since computing capabilities have grown exponentially over the past decade, but too often we find … Read more

There are few people more knowledgeable about the meaning and importance of the DevOps moment than Patrick Debois. He practically invented it, and he organized the very first Devops Days event in the development dark ages of 2009. So, naturally, we thought of Patrick when we decided to ask some thought leaders to help us define the … Read more

There are people out there who think the DevOps movement is overhyped, or that it’s some kind of fad. Gene Kim, co-author of “The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Bu…, couldn’t disagree more, but he’s glad those naysayers are out there because more people need to know about the problem that DevOps … Read more

DevOps, at its core, is really about destroying silos, those calcified and insular management systems that make it impossible for people to collaborate across the enterprise. Breaking down silo walls is a chore facing managers in pretty much every industry. Volumes of management books are written on it. When it comes to delivering better apps … Read more

In the buzzword-filled wasteland of enterprise technology, DevOps has to rank somewhere near the top of the hard-to-define list, right up there with “cloud” and “big data” (or its subset, “dark data.”) Describing these things is like soldering Jell-O to a motherboard. DevOps is a different case than the others because, while it certainly has … Read more

If This Then That, IFTTT.com, is a service letting you connect almost anything to anything else. If it is raining – text me. If a blog post is published then email it to me and so on. Well, the backend services running IFTTT failed last night and the monitoring system failed as well. Double whammy. … Read more

What might have appeared to be a fire sale on the website for UK hardware retailer Screwfix early today was instead a massive and totally avoidable screwup. The glitch was an unforeseen error causing all of the items on its website to sell for £34.99 (about $58). All items sold for £34.99, even high-priced riding mowers that … Read more

The 2000 film “The Perfect Storm” was set on a portion of the North Atlantic Ocean known as the Grand Banks. It’s where the cold, southerly flowing Labrador Current meets the warm Gulf Stream. Warm water rises, cold water plunges and plankton flourishes in the oxygen- and nutrient-rich Grand Banks. The entire food chain propagates, … Read more

I attended a recent panel discussion, titled “Constraints to Speed and Agility in Application Delivery,” at a financial services technology summit. I sat among Senior IT leads from sea to shining sea who expressed a range of concerns just as wide. Mike Versace of IDC Research moderated the panel and started with a question: “What … Read more

A couple of weeks ago in a cramped IT office in Santa Clara, Calif., a hundred DevOps practitioners waited for Gene Kim to explain “How Do We Better Sell DevOps.” I had seen a couple of Gene’s presentations online, and we have covered his book, The Phoenix Project, on this blog, but I’d never had the … Read more