Author: Alan Shimel

  • What’s new at devopsy.kinsta.cloud

    What’s new at devopsy.kinsta.cloud

    Things have been very busy at devopsy.kinsta.cloud these past weeks. After a hectic first month, we are trying to execute on some of our ideas around building devopsy.kinsta.cloud into a valuable asset and linchpin of the DevOps community. To that end I wanted to hit on three initiatives that we have kicked off over the past weeks here:

    CampDevOps-logo-align_left1. Camp DevOps @Gluecon 2014 – Our very first conference held in conjunction with the popular Glue Conference.  Camp DevOps will be held Tuesday, May 20th at the beautiful Atlas Building in the University of Colorado.  We have a great lineup of speakers including Sanjeev Sharma of IBM, JP Morgenthal, Rich Mogull and many more. We are also going to do our first Hello World sessions where attendees will get hands on training on some key products. Admission including meals is just $49.99 and you receive a $100 dollar credit for Gluecon. If you are already registered for GlueCon admission is free, but you still have to register. Head over to Campdevopsy.kinsta.cloud for more details and registration information.

    We will be announcing other locations and dates for future Camp DevOps soon.

    directory logo2. devopsy.kinsta.cloud Business Directory – Something we realized in doing our research around devopsy.kinsta.cloud is that there was really no directory of all of the companies that offer DevOps related tools and services.  So we started the devopsy.kinsta.cloud business directory.  Regular listings are free.  If your company is already listed (we listed about 50 companies or so), feel free to go in and claim your listing. Edit, change or upgrade it to make it look the way you want.  The idea is that someone looking for a particular tool or service can find potential solutions in one easy directory. You can view and edit directory listings at https://devopsy.kinsta.cloud/business-directory/.

    3. DevOps Job Board @DevOps.com – Any perusal of Google Alerts on DevOps or even twitter search on #DevOps will make it obvious that there are a lot of DevOps jobs out there.  Whether you are of the belief that DevOps is a real job title or not, there is no denying the need for people with DevOps skills.  We are launching a DevOps job board this week on devopsy.kinsta.cloud.  Right now it is just the functionality and not dressed up with graphics and stuff. But you can see the job listings (we have 3 or so jobs listed) at devopsy.kinsta.cloud/jobs. From the menu on the right of the page, you can add new jobs, search etc.

    We are offering free listings on the job board for the rest of this month, so if you are trying to hire someone with DevOps skils or a DevOps title, feel free to list your job.  The job board is not just for full time positions either. You can list part-time, consulting and other types of jobs as well related to DevOps.

    4. Media sponsorships for MongoDB World and DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo – We will be providing coverage from the show for both of these great events, as well as feature stories leading up to them. They are both in NYC in June. We will have more information on both of these shortly.

    We have other exciting new features and events planned for the coming weeks and months as well.

    Of course we will continue with the great content and blogs on all things DevOps on a daily basis. We are always looking for new writers, so if you feel you have what it takes contact us at editor@devops.com.

  • DevOps killed the developer star

    DevOps killed the developer star

    The DevOps blogosphere is aflame over Jeff Knupp’s post on “How DevOps is killing the Developer”. While I agree with Knupp’s premise that DevOps, Agile and other technology trends are allowing (is forcing more accurate?) developers to do more outside of pure development, even turning into “full stack” developers, I disagree that this is a bad thing.

    I disagree with Knupp’s assertion that developers are the Orcas of the IT world sitting atop the food chain as the top dogs.  I think Knupp consciously or not, degraded the very real, important and hard job that ops people perform, DBAs do every day, as well as everyone else at an organization. Reading this I was reminded on one time I was sitting in an executive meeting and the VP of engineering actually had the stones to say that his developers were smarter than the rest of the people in the organization and worked harder to boot.  Now that is a real team builder right there.

    One thing I have learned in 30 years of business is that when an organization is achieving its goals it is because just about everyone is working as hard as they can. It is usually not one group, whether it be developers or marketing or operations that is pulling the sled alone.  It takes everyone to really succeed. There is no top of the totem pole or rather who is on top is a constantly changing position as bottlenecks come and go, priorities shift and the market changes.

    In any organization whether it be startup or enterprise, we all have to do what we need to do to accomplish the mission.  There you have it.  Working in the Federal market all of those years taught me something. In the DoD and armed forces it is all about the mission. We have missions as individuals. Those missions can be writing code, deploying or monitoring (heck even support and sales), but ultimately those missions all fold into the greater mission of the organization.  If developers doing full stack work helps the organization better accomplish its mission and goals, than it is good. No man is too big for the army.

    At its core that is what DevOps is too don’t forget. Empowering IT to better serve and meet the organizations goals. Not about letting developers do what they love to do or what floats their boat or what they consider the “top of the totem pole”.  Enterprises are here for one thing, the bottom line. It is something we should all never lose sight of.

    DevOps is changing the mission of developers. It is a change in the environment if you will. Species are faced with changing environments all of the time.  Those that adapt to change succeed and even flourish. Those that fail to adapt fall into the extinction bin.  Generally species that are generalists adapt and thrive much better than species that are too specialized. This is basic evolution theory.

    I think to Mr. Knupp’s point we are going to see a form of DevOps Darwinism play out. Developers who insist they only develop and don’t do full stack or other DevOps type of tasks will find shrinking habitats and less opportunity. They will exist on the margins. Developers who embrace this new environment will find abundant “target rich” environments with rewarding (both monetarily and stimulating) career opportunities.

    I am all for doing something you love for your work. Otherwise I would be practicing law somewhere. I stared working in the technology world because playing with computers was the most fun I was having. I am sure many of you had the same experience. Messing around with code or scripting moved from fun and something you did because you liked it to something you also do to earn a living.

    Earning your livelihood doing something you love is a great blessing by the way. There are untold numbers of people who trudge off to work every day and have to do something they dislike, are not passionate about and do just for a paycheck. I can’t imagine having to live life like that.

    I think that is what Knupp is talking about too. That developers code because they love to, they need to, and it is what they do. Forcing them to do other tasks takes away from their focus and stunts their growth, which in turns comes back to hurt the organization as a whole.

    I don’t think developers will ever stop coding. Mr. Knupp is right, developers code because they want to. That is what they love to do and it is why they became developers.  I think however they will have even more opportunity to code, not less as software continues to gobble up the world. It may be a different kind of development, with coding as infrastructure as software dominates, but developers are still going to code no matter what.

    We may be seeing the rise of the coding generalist versus the pure application developer as the lines between developer, ops, QA and yes even security continue to blur and overlap. But I don’t think it is a bad thing for developers, enterprises or anyone else. It is just part of the constant change in our environment.

    I don’t think this change is bad at all. In fact to paraphrase the great Gordon Gekko, “Change is good, change is what made America great.”

  • DevOps Frequent Friday Follow on Twitter

    DevOps Frequent Friday Follow on Twitter

    Continuing our Friday practice of highlighting people to follow in the DevOps space, here are this weeks entries:

    @jpmorgenthal @lmacvittie @AndiMann  @mongodbinc @kevinbehr @devopscloud @amyl_bishop @kristiancarter

    Already on the list:

     @patrickdebois , @realgenekim  @botchagalupe  @jezhumble  @garethr 

    @kartar  @krisbuytaert  @jordansissel  @agentdero  @allspaw  @monkchips 

    @devops_borat @lnxchk  @damonedwards   @lusis  @obfuscurity @shanley 

     @adrianco  @scriptrock @jumpcloud  @sd_architect  @govictorops @softlayer 

    @docker @chef  @hullsean @champagnie @planetdevops @krishnan 

    @tarunbhatti @wickett @nathenharvey @andimann @byron_miller

    You can find all of these people on a Twitter list I have started at: https://twitter.com/devopsdotcom/lists/devops-twitters-to-folow

    If you think you should be on the list, drop me a line here.  Have a good weekend and change those passwords if you haven’t already thanks to Heartbleed

     

  • Camp DevOps @ GlueCon 2014

    Camp DevOps @ GlueCon 2014

    campdetailsdevopsy.kinsta.cloud is very pleased to announce that in conjunction with Eric Norlin and Glue Conference 2014,  we will be presenting our inaugural Camp DevOps @ Gluecon on May 20th, one day before Gluecon 2014. Camp DevOps will take place from 8:30 am until 4:30 pm. The event will be held at the Atlas Institute Building at the scenic University of Colorado/Boulder campus. Here is a link to a flyer with more information here.  You can go also get more information by going to Campdevopsy.kinsta.cloud (site is still going up, so be patient if there is a problem) or our Eventbrite page.

    Moving devopsy.kinsta.cloud beyond the 4 walls of the website has always been part of our business plan. Camp DevOps is our own conference brand. Martin Logan, devopsy.kinsta.cloud co-founder has held Camp DevOps before, but this will be the first event since our commercial launch.  Over time what Camp DevOps is and what to expect we hope will be better understood. But since this is the first, let me quickly give some background.

    We recognize there are no shortages of conferences around DevOps. Camp DevOps is not meant to compete with DevOps Days and similar conferences. We think DevOps Days are great events and we will be working with local Meetup groups to help them with DevOps Days in the future.  Camp DevOps are also not meant to compete with Velocity or other enterprise events.  Instead Camp DevOps like devopsy.kinsta.cloud itself is meant to pitch a big tent. We will have content and activities for the different constituents of the growing DevOps community.

    CampDevOps @ Gluecon 2014 will feature keynote presentations (Sanjeev Sharma of IBM and author of “DevOps for Dummies”, Rajat Bhargava, CEO JumpCloud and Howard Diamond, CEO of MobileDay already confirmed), multi-track presentations with one geared for technical audiences and another aimed at business and cultural topics, panel discussions and what we are calling “Hello World”. Hello World will feature hands on learning with DevOps tools. Attendees will need their own computing device to follow along.

    There will also be table top displays, Continental breakfast and lunch served. We are hoping to have a sponsor for dinner as well. The cost to attend Camp DevOps is just $49.99. If you are already registered for Gluecon, you can attend for free. If you are not registered for Gluecon and register for Camp DevOps you will receive a $100 dollar credit towards Gluecon registration. There will also be complimentary shuttle service from the Gluecon hotel, The Omni to the Atlas building at CU/Boulder.

    Attendance is limited so please don’t wait to register!

    Besides the keynote speakers, we also will have presentations from AppDynamics, MongoDB, VictorOps and others. We will be updating the agenda and presenters daily.  We still have room for more track speakers, keynotes, panel and Hello World presenters. If you are interested contact us at CampDevOps@DevOps.com.

    Sponsorship packages are also still available. There are sponsorship opportunities in conjunction with Gluecon and CampDevOps or just Camp DevOps. Contact us at CampDevOps@DevOps.com for details.

  • Microsoft’s DevOps Gambit and devopsy.kinsta.cloud’s Business Directory

    Microsoft’s DevOps Gambit and devopsy.kinsta.cloud’s Business Directory

    Last week was a big one for Microsoft in DevOps. At the Build conference they unveiled several new features and functionality in both Azure and Visual Studio Online to make give them more DevOps chops and DevOps friendly.

    At just about the same time they announced partnerships and integrations with both Chef and Puppet Labs to bring even more DevOps to Azure.  That is an awful lot of DevOps functionality in a short period of time.

    Frankly it is to be expected though. In doing my research for devopsy.kinsta.cloud prior to launch, I had a chance to speak to some folks at Microsoft about DevOps. Frankly they were frustrated. They thought they had a great story around DevOps and had not been able to attract the DevOps community to what they had available.  Microsoft, much like IBM at one time owned the developer market.  In fact the sheer number of developers who still develop in Visual Studio and code for .Net and other Microsoft platforms, is pretty amazing.

    Now you don’t just have .net folks on Azure anymore.  The platform now supports Node.js. Java. PHP and more. It blends both IaaS and PaaS, allowing users to slide between them almost seamlessly.

    In the meantime DBMaestro announced it was bringing DevOps for database to MS SQL server. This is the same teamwork functionality that DBMaestro already delivered to Oracle users.

    In addition to these announcements Microsoft also released some metrics that show just how scalable and quick the uptake has been on Azure and Visual Studio Online.  Ultimately the answer will be do enough developers think Microsoft gives them what they need to build great applications on a great platform. This will determine whether Microsoft becomes a competitor to Amazon and Open Stack in the public Cloud.

    But they are making their play. Whether you love them or hate them, it is never smart to bet against Microsoft. The numbers they announced last week show they can gain critical mass pretty quickly.

    There are some good background stories on this at Redmond Mag, eWeek and TechWeek Europe. We will have a full feature story here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud shortly.

    On another note, here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud we have put up our DevOps business directory in beta. Over the next few weeks we will pretty it up, but right now we are testing the functionality. We have populated the directory with some companies, but need more. Listing a company is free and if you list your company this week, we will upgrade you to the deluxe listing free ($99 value).

    You can add long and short descriptions, logos, files to download, contact info and more. The directory over time will we hope become the source for finding DevOps related companies.

    Look for more devopsy.kinsta.cloud features and events over the coming days and weeks.

  • Logentries Exceeds 500% Growth with 25,000+ Users of Log Management and Analytics Service

    New Referral Program Strengthens Comprehensive Free Service for DevOps

    BOSTON, April 8, 2014 /PRNewswire/ — Logentries, a leading SaaS service for log management and log analytics, today announced the introduction of a new referral program to strengthen its rapidly growing DevOps user community.  With over 500% growth, the Logentries community has increased to more than 25,000 users.  The new referral program extends the current, free service that includes custom tagging, real-time alerting, LiveTail, visualized search and unlimited users, to now include up to five free gigabytes (GB) of data processing.

    The free Logentries service was developed to provide DevOps teams, IT operations and customer support groups, with a complete, easy-to-use set of log management and analytics capabilities that enable troubleshooting in development, real-time performance monitoring and alerting of production systems, user behavior analytics, and assuring security compliance. The new Logentries referral program offers existing users one additional free GB of data for every referral they make who also starts using the service.

    “We have received amazing value from the free Logentries service,” said Rhian Lewis, co-developer, Count My Crypto.  “As we start to scale our current projects, we know that we can easily expand our needs with Logentries by adding more storage, and getting access to the vast features they offer for log management and analytics.”

    “The tremendous growth we have seen this year demonstrates the demand for deep insights that can only be provided by log data,” said Andrew Burton, President & CEO, Logentries. “There are hundreds of monitoring tools available, but they often don’t tell you exactly what occurred, when it occurred, and why. Logentries provides this visibility with a complete picture of your system, your users, and your overall performance.”

    The new Logentries referral program automatically adds one free GB of data processing to existing user accounts for every referral they make who signs up and sends log data to the Logentries service. The referral will be notified by email that they were referred to use the service and be prompted to create a free Logentries account. In addition to the free data, new Logentries users have access to the premier log management and analytics features, including:

    • Custom tagging & real-time alerts: Easily highlight errors, warnings, exceptions, or business events
    • Detailed visualization & easy click navigation: Interactive graphs, visualizations, and quick drill-down into system logs to immediately pinpoint log events in days, weeks, or months.
    • Live Tail: View streaming logs in real-time and see important events highlighted within the live data.
    • Log correlation: Dynamically group and correlate logs into a single dashboard, or aggregate logs from a particular system to give an end-to-end view.

    The Logentries service is available for free today at http://www.logentries.com.

    About Logentries

    Logentries is a leading SaaS-delivered log management and log analytics service, developed to make machine-generated log data and insights simply accessible to developers, operations, and business analytics customers. While traditional log management and analytics solutions require advanced technical skills to use, and are costly to set-up, Logentries provides an accessible alternative for managing huge amounts of data, visualizing insights that matter, and sharing that information across the business. With more than 25,000 users in over 100 countries, Logentries is processing billions of events everyday. To sign up for the free Logentries service, visit www.logentries.com.

  • MongoDB 2.6: Most Significant Release of Mongo Yet?

    MongoDB announced the latest version of the popular NoSQL database yesterday, version 2.6.  I had a chance to speak with Kelly Stirman, Director of Product at Mongo about the release.  The release is chocked full of goodies for Mongo users.  For me chief among them was the new security features highlighted in the press release below. Also the MMS features make it much easier to run Mongo at scale.  One of the things Kelly spoke to me about was to make it easier for first time users to get MongoDB up and running. This is another thing addressed in 2.6.  You can see the full details below.

    Announcing MongoDB 2.6: A Quantum Leap for the World’s Fastest Growing Database

    MongoDB’s Most Significant Release to Date Brings Simplicity and Reliability to Operations, Complete Re-Architecting of Major Server Components and Enterprise-Grade Security

    NEW YORK and PALO ALTO, Calif.—April 8, 2014 – MongoDB today announced the general availability of MongoDB 2.6, the newest release of the database that defines the standard in modern application development. The release builds on five years of innovation and hundreds of thousands of deployments to simplify provisioning and operating MongoDB deployments, making the database developers love for building apps, the database organizations love to run.

    MongoDB makes building applications natural and intuitive – and this release makes it just as natural to run these apps, freeing up the most valuable assets of any organization to innovate and move the world forward, one app at a time.

    “The core of MongoDB has served the community well for the past five years,” said Eliot Horowitz, co-founder and CTO of MongoDB. “In 2007, we set out to prove that a new data model could fundamentally improve the way developers build and run applications. Now we move the industry forward with a management service that improves the way we run apps, allowing organizations to focus on what they do best. We have the opportunity to engineer the primary data management system used for decades. This is a massive task, but we have the community, the engineering talent and the funding necessary to deliver on the promise of what is before us.”

    “This release moves the way we build and run apps an enormous step forward. We are introducing automation features to MMS, now in testing with select users. Over the past two years more than 35,000 members of the community have come to rely on MMS. Users can now provision, upgrade and manage their systems through a simple yet sophisticated interface. Operating MongoDB is now more reliable and effortless than ever before. We have improved the scalability of several critical areas of the database, and completed fundamental changes to the core that will allow us to improve concurrency in MongoDB 2.8 and beyond. We reduced the effort to add some classes of new features by 100x, built a sophisticated query planner with immense potential for further innovation, redesigned write operations and dramatically simplified the maintenance of MongoDB. This is our biggest release ever.”

    With text search, enterprise-grade security and best-in-class analytical capabilities, MongoDB 2.6 enables new classes of use cases. Key features of the release include:

    MMS – MongoDB Management Service simplifies how organizations run MongoDB systems at scale. MMS now includes continuous, incremental backup; point-in-time recovery; monitoring, visualization and alerts on 100+ parameters; on-prem deployments for MongoDB subscribers and a fully-managed solution in the cloud. Alpha features include simple, single-click provisioning and hot upgrades.

    Index Intersection – Index intersection provides more flexible, adaptive analytical capabilities, making it easier to run ad-hoc analyses to answer evolving business questions. Developers no longer need to predict all data access patterns in advance as more than one index can be used to optimize a query.

    Improved Scalability & Performance – Organizations can scale more easily and at lower cost. MongoDB 2.6 provides more efficient use of network resources; oplog processing is 75% faster; classes of scan, sort, $in and $all performance are significantly improved; and bulk operators for writes improve updates by as much as 5x.

    Text Search – Users have come to expect search as a primary means of accessing data in apps. Developers can now deliver search as a feature without the added complexity of a separate, dedicated search engine. MongoDB 2.6 integrates text search into the MongoDB Query Language and the Aggregation Framework, and provides powerful search for 15 languages.

    Enterprise Security – Securing data is a top priority for many organizations, and MongoDB 2.6 provides best-in-class security functionality. Building on the support in MongoDB Enterprise 2.4 for roles, Kerberos authentication and SSL encryption, MongoDB Enterprise 2.6 adds field-level redaction, customizable auditing, LDAP and x509 authentication, collection-level authorization and user-defined roles.

    Bulk Update Operators – Organizations can now manipulate large data volumes more efficiently than ever before. New bulk operations make it simple and efficient to load, update and delete large volumes of data in MongoDB. Bulk operations automatically parallelize updates across the system, and return a report of failed operations that can be retried by the application.

    Pipelined Data Transformations – Data can be summarized, enhanced, aggregated and refined to better serve users from within the database. MongoDB 2.6 provides multi-step data enrichment and transformations natively in the database using a simple declarative interface. With the new $out stage, results sets from the aggregation pipeline can be written to a named collection with no limit to the output size.

    Simplified Operations – MongoDB 2.6 simplifies and lowers the cost of operating MongoDB at scale. Indexing can beperformed in the background, yielding to foreground operations and auto-resumes after restart; with MaxTimeMS operators and developers can specify auto-cancellation of queries, providing better control of resource utilization; mixed SSLconnections; expanded SNMP support; more efficient repair operations; and a new default space allocation configuration provides more predictable performance.

    “In five short years, the MongoDB community has transformed the data management landscape, creating the first compelling alternative to 40 years of relational databases,” said Max Schireson, CEO of MongoDB. “We have created a new and liberating data model, demonstrated mass appeal, significantly improved how engineers build and run modern applications, and secured funding to ensure MongoDB continues for decades to come. With this release we have made massive investments in the database to ensure a strong foundation for continued innovation.”

    MongoDB has a thriving global community with more than 7 million downloads of its open-source database, 1,000 customers, 150,000 online education registrations, 30,000 user group members and 20,000 MongoDB Days attendees.

    Register today for MongoDB World and join developers, ops professionals and executives from all over the world at the largest MongoDB event ever, June 23-25 in New York City.

    Supporting Quotes
    “Release 2.6 is an important milestone. It is packed with many new features and incremental improvements across the board. It removes the 16MB output limit in the Aggregation Framework for querying Big Data. We can now build efficient, complex data processing workflows as 2.6 allows the result of an aggregation pipeline to be stored in another collection directly, without sending it all the way to the client. Additionally, the new wire format and batch APIs enable more efficient client driver implementations, including a more streamlined async API that improves client-side throughput. We are looking forward to continuing innovation and steady execution at MongoDB.” – Yuri Finkelstein, Enterprise Architect, eBay

    “MMS is like a heartbeat, you simply can’t live without it. It is easy to get started with – the installation is really logical and the overall learning curve is quite minimal. If you are playing with sharded clusters in production, you really need MMS.” – Janne Keskitalo, Senior System Manager at Polar

    “MMS is an essential component in our MongoDB tool chain. Monitoring gives us all the insights into MongoDB that we need to make sure all our customers’ systems are healthy. It also helps us to see upcoming issues so that we then can proactively reach out to our users. The backup features integrate seamlessly with the monitoring. We love the great flexibility it gives us with custom snapshots, point-in-time recoveries and most of all, consistent backups across sharded systems.” – Johannes Brandstetter, Chef de Cuisine, MongoSoup

    Resources
    – Register today for MongoDB CTO Eliot Horowitz’s ‘What’s New in MongoDB’ webinar
    – Run MongoDB with confidence, set up your free MMS account today
    – View a demo of MMS’ automation features
    – Download the ‘What’s New in MongoDB 2.6’ whitepaper
    – Release Notes for MongoDB 2.6
    – Sign up for MongoDB University’s free online courses

    About MongoDB, Inc.
    MongoDB makes development simple and beautiful. For tens of thousands of organizations, MongoDB provides agility and the freedom to scale. Fortune 500 enterprises, startups, hospitals, governments and organizations of all kinds use MongoDB because it is the best database for modern applications. Through simplicity, MongoDB changes what it means to build. Through openness, MongoDB elevates what it means to work with a software company.

  • Mobile Apps and Big Data Megatrends Drive Application Performance Management

    Mobile Apps and Big Data Megatrends Drive Application Performance Management

    As the megatrends of Big Data, mobility and cloud continue to reshape the IT landscape many companies are responding by refocusing their solutions to provide better visibility and support for these technologies.  Case in point is AppDynamics new Spring 2014 release announced yesterday (full disclosure, AppDynamics is a sponsor on devopsy.kinsta.cloud but that sponsorship has nothing to do with editorial content, just banners).

    Jyoti Final_1I had a chance to catch up with Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of AppDynamics yesterday. Jyoti made it very plain that mobile applications are quickly tipping the bar in terms of what types of applications his customers are asking for support on. That along with enhanced NoSQL support and support of some for some of the hottest languages being used in development today (Node.js and Scala) lead the way in his company’s latest release.

    Gartner has weighed in on the increasing importance of monitoring mobile app performance.  Jonah Kowall, research vice president at Gartner, in a recent report states, “driven by the increasing significance of mobile application endpoints and increasingly dynamic Web technologies, end-user-experience monitoring will become even more important to enterprises. In fact, it is likely to shift its center of gravity from monitoring the end-user experience of individual applications to monitoring and analyzing end-user behaviors across the entire portfolio of applications available to an end-user at any given endpoint.”

    Personally I don’t think any of us need Gartner to tell us that there is an app for just about anything and many of them are mobile. Mobility is changing the way so many of us work. Mobile apps are poised to overtake web browsing sometime this year says Jyoti.

    If anything is bigger than mobile though it may be Big Data. It seems that Big Data is everywhere. I saw an interesting stat the other day, something along the lines of 90% of all the data stored in the world is less than two years old. I guess that explains why we didn’t hear as much about Big Data before that.  In any event there is big money being poured into Big Data solutions. Evidence of this is Intel’s Cloudera investment, $740m for 18% of the company. Cloudera is a Hadoop distributor of course and part of the AppDynamics new Big Data support is for enhanced Hadoop features.

    NoSQL companies have also been a big beneficiary of the Big Data megatrend  and VC investment of course. One of the biggest beneficiaries is MongoDB (again in full disclosure, devopsy.kinsta.cloud is a media sponsor of MongoDB World).  Matt Asay who has written here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud and is also the VP of Marketing and Business Development had this to say about AppDynamics new NoSQL support. “Together with AppDynamics and MongoDB, organizations can now leverage application performance management solutions to gain further insight into their MongoDB-based applications. This partnership allows users end-to-end visibility for optimal performance in production, an important feature for companies as they scale their MongoDB deployments.”

    To be accurate all of these new features in the Spring 2014 release of AppDynamics have actually been available already for at least a few weeks or months. In my conversation with Bansal I asked him that if he didn’t see a little irony in the fact that a DevOps enabler like AppDynamics still did somewhat traditional software releases instead of some sort of continuous delivery.  Bansal said that these once a quarter releases are really just packaging up features that are released in a continuous fashion over the preceding quarter.  These quarterly releases serve as a checkpoint, version control if you will.  In actuality though AppDynamic customers have been getting this functionality as it comes out.

    Application Performance Management seems to be a very hot area. In large part because of the mega trends of Big Data, mobility and cloud. It remains to be seen if these solutions will become part of (by acquisition or partnership) the bigger Application Development Lifecycle Management (ALM) market.

  • Episode 2 of devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast

    Episode 2 of devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast

    Mitchell Ashley and I are joined this week by Stephen Wilson of Compuware. Stephen is a regular blogger here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, but is also the technical evangelist at Compuware.  Steve gives us his background and a brief description of what Compuware does.  Then we all talk a bit about Steve’s last article here on devopsy.kinsta.cloud,  Don’t worry testing team, DevOps is here!. While some say that testing is a big loser in DevOps and many testing/QA teams feel a threat to their job security, Stephen says not true.  In fact DevOps makes the testing team superstars. Tes.com ting teams should embrace DevOps as it will make their job easier and more powerful, but not less important.  Steve talks about the concept of “continuous testing”.  All of this in just about 13 minutes.

    Enjoy!

    [soundcloud url=”https://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/142563047″ params=”color=ff5500&auto_play=false&hide_related=false&show_artwork=true” width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

    Also if you would like to be a guest on a future devopsy.kinsta.cloud podcast write us at podcast@devops.com

  • devopsy.kinsta.cloud is Now an Official Media Sponsor of MongoDB World

    mongodbworlddevopsy.kinsta.cloud, the place where the world meets DevOps is happy to report that we will be an official media sponsor of the upcoming MongoDB World conference. The event is in NYC at the Sheraton New York Times Square, 811 7th Ave, New York, NY 10019 on June 23-25, 2014.

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be providing live coverage of the event throughout the conference. We will also have some interviews with speakers leading up to the event. Some of the headliners for MongoDB World are:

    mongoworldspeakers

     

    MongoDB World promises to be the best and biggest MongoDB event yet. devopsy.kinsta.cloud will be there to give you a bird’s eye view.