Sometimes, the meaning of a word or a phrase changes so quickly that you don’t even notice that it’s changed; at some point, you just realize that you’ve been using it differently. Take “on-prem,” for example. Not too long ago, if you said that a component of your IT system was on-prem, you meant that it was physically located at your facility. If it was hardware, the hardware was in the IT room down the hall. If it was software, it was running on a server in the IT room. But today it means something entirely different.
Author: Chris Riley
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Where Oh Where has my Hadoop gone?
Where is Hadoop? Just a few years ago, it was everywhere. Internet heavy hitters such as Facebook and Yahoo boasted about the size of their Hadoop clusters and applications. It was easy to imagine the day when Hadoop would be the one indispensable tool for anyone who dealt in large volumes of data.
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Bring Your Own Exploit
Here’s a simple question: for each tool that your organization uses, have you (or someone else on your DevOps team) changed the default passwords? That should be a no-brainer, shouldn’t it? Of course you changed them! Or at least you changed them for the tools that looked like they would have default passwords. Well, OK, at least the ones that looked like they might present an obvious security risk — and where you noticed that there was a default password. Would those other tools even provide an intruder with a useable exploit?
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An Open Letter to DevOps “enthusiast”
Dear DevOps “enthusiast”,
You are confused. But I am confused as well. For approximately two years now this DevOps thing has been both exciting and frustrating. And in ways that are totally different for each of us. At the intersection of all the disparate confusion is the “perfect storm”. What that means for now is that we are all hunkered down in the basement, reading books on “DevOps” to pass the time, and better understand the thing that is attempting to destroy us.
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Do/Should Developers Own Infrastructure?
In the pre-DevOps era, there wasn’t much question of developers owning infrastructure, if only because for the most part, they didn’t want to own it. They wanted infrastructure to work for them (or at least not get in the way), but they didn’t want to be stuck with the time-consuming and generally thankless task of maintaining and managing it. Add to that senior management’s understandable desire to keep infrastructure in the hands of trained IT personnel, and the IT staff’s equally understandable desire to maintain an orderly network, and the result was a relationship between developers and infrastructure that was cool and somewhat distant.
But with DevOps, we are entering (or have already entered) the era of infrastructure as code, and with it, the developer-infrastructure relationship has changed. If infrastructure is code, then almost by definition, infrastructure becomes to some degree a function of development, or at least so hard to separate from development that the distinction becomes almost irrelevant.
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SQL lovers fear not – NoSQL just got friendlier
Today Couchbase, the creator of an Enterprise NoSQL database server, announces N1QL ( pronounced Nickle) at their user conference. N1QL is designed to ease the pain for SQL developers when considering NoSQL, by creating a new query language to sit on top. It is essentially SQL for JSON documents.
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What is Adaptive Security?
72 days after the fact AdultFriendFinder.com, a “very mature” dating site, realized they had been hacked. The VERY personal information of 3 million registrants has been held hostage. By now, it should be clear that in the modern software development world, old-style static security just won’t work. Of course, there are times when the static security model still applies — for example, on a relatively stable, hardware-based system with traditional, non-continuous deployment and a limited traffic volume. Such environments can easily be routed through a checkpoint with no significant loss in performance.
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Does Microsoft really have a DevOps story?
I normally am not a fan of Microsoft conferences. But i’ve always loved the Build Conference. Not just because there is usually an awesome show giveaway. Like this years HP spectre x360, currently my Windows 10 testing machine. But also because the vibe, format, and topic matter is always interesting. I attended this year for the third time, and I wanted to answer the same question I have every year. What, if anything, does Microsoft have for DevOps?
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Is DevOps on the cusp of Disillusionment?
If you are familiar with, or buy into the idea of the Hype Cycle, you are familiar with the Trough of Disillusionment. When it comes to adoption of pretty much anything, there seems to be a point, just after the peak of enthusiasm, where those in the know are disappointed with the practicality and adoption rate of their thing or cause. Now that DevOps is several years old, and, in the last year enthusiasm has been at an all time high, is DevOps on the cusp of Disillusionment?
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Successful Failure
In software development, success is all about failure.
That may sound as if we are carrying the “fail fast, fail hard” philosophy a little too far, but which would you rather have — a quick, definite failure that you can identify, repeat, and analyze, or a series of semi-failures and partial recoveries that leave your application and your data in a corrupt and unstable state? Anybody who’s spent much time testing or debugging software should know the answer: errors that are masked by near-recovery are almost as hard to trace as intermittent errors — and all too often, there’s no real difference between the two. Slow failures masked by partial recovery show up as on-again, off-again bugs.