Back in the early 80’s, dumb terminal networks ruled enterprise IT. Mammoth mainframe IT infrastructures worked as centralized corporate computing platforms feeding a vast nexus of thin clients performing mundane IT operations as intended. Perhaps that was all what end-users longed for.
Author: Chris Riley
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Acorns Turns Sluggish FiServ on its Head with DevOps
Modern investment tools are popping up all over the place. Not only are they shifting the power from large institutions to the consumer, they are applying modern technology to a red-tape laden world.
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The Human Factor in DevOps
DevOps is about pinpointing and eliminating bottlenecks in order to deploy code often—shortening the time-to-market and increasing quality and effectiveness. One of the most common bottlenecks in the release process is the interaction between the developers and the integration services/operations group.
Development (Dev) is entrusted with producing innovative software quickly while Operations (Ops) knows that service failures are often attributed to changes. This means Ops feels that if fewer changes are executed, fewer failures will occur and the system will be more stable and responsive. The natural conflict and opposing priorities between the two groups can create a productive equilibrium, but often results in communication difficulties, animosity and a financial loss for the company.
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DevOps + IoT
The Internet of Things (IoT) is part marketing hype and partly a real movement. After low power WiFi chips have allowed small devices to connect to the web for a long time. Remember Eye-Fi founded in 2005?
But there is no denying it is BIG. Service revenues rooted in micro-controller-based IoT are expected to reach a whopping $7.3 trillion by the year 2017 according to a recent IDC report, with the radical new paradigm shift of DevOps leading to the perfect storm of IoT adoption.
IoT is set to be a disruption those building and connecting things. It forces a transformation that is largely driven by the integration of development, IT operations and quality assurance practices delivered for IoT under a single automated umbrella in the DevOps-oriented world.
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Consumer Web Automation for DevOps?
These days event-based automation is everywhere from IFTTT recipes used by non-technical folks to cross post automatically to Twitter, Google+ and Facebook to email alerts for free iTunes downloads. And don’t forget the tech savvy that create even more complex sequences from Zapier and now Stamplay to track workloads and simple business processes or automate developer tools.
But this automation is not limited to consumer uses—it can also be the answer to DevOps challenges. Simple DevOps processes implemented with services such as IFTTT and Zapier improve the workflow and boost work performance.
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Walgreens reminds us to keep our database healthy
It’s clear that the super app you developed with your team, is really something, and it has high chance to be the “Bread and butter 3.0”, but are you prepared for the worst? There is a good chance that some combination of data, events and circumstances out of your control will eventually collude against you, to cause a failure or a software defect. You can try to anticipate and reason about all of the things that can go wrong with your application to prepare, but in a complex system it’s impossible to predict everything.
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DevOps the movement, or the function?
All the ISVs and Enterprises are having the same question, who/what is DevOps. We get in a virtual room and talk about it, but we are often all scratching our heads at the same time. We are not confused from a technology or definition standpoint. There is so much chatter about this thing, it’s just hard to find the person or group that is doing it.
My response to when I’m asked about DevOps is always the same. Are you are talking about DevOps the movement, or the function? The movement is what we are all hot and bothered about, but the function is where it really comes together and problems are solved. And even if you hate the movement, I guarantee your dev and operations team are inching in that direction, and some portion of the work already being done is in the DevOps spirit. (more…)
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Now that you can consolidate, do not implode
The development world is changing in a big way. We all know it. And it usually happens first with the early stage startups, who have the luxury of adopting new approaches from day one. One of those major shifts is consolidation of team members, where automation is taking over previous roles. In the modern development shop for example you are not just a front-end developer, you are a data scientist, a tester, a orchestration master, and a release manager. There are a lot of upsides to this consolidation, but a lot of downsides as well.
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Change your thinking about Change Management
Change Management, let’s face it, it’s usually a checklist item and a CYA tool. But in the world of DevOps where change is part of the culture and processes. Change Management needs to be more than a cost center, and really a way to improve what you are doing. And there is no excuse not to.
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Think the Developer Tool Market Is Annoying? Just Wait…
I recently attended the Velocity Conference and DevOps Days in the Bay Area. While I usually pride myself in being “in the know” of what is available and possible. It never fails that every time I do a search on some aspect of the development process, or attend events like these, I’m shocked to discover at least three new tools I have not heard of. “What’s this… yet another functional testing tool? Let me guess, you do performance monitoring? System alerts by carrier pigeon? Cool, configuration management that also repairs your TV.” There are so many tools and their competitive advantages are usually so specific you really have to work for the company to understand them. So how do you possibly make sense of this space? And what is next?