Tailoring Your DevOps Transformation to Organizational Culture – Idexcel DevOps Roundup

devops team work

1. Tailoring Your DevOps Transformation to Organizational Culture

In the ‘2016 State of DevOps Report’ the Westrum Model [1] of organizational culture is proposed. It focuses on information flow, high cooperation and trust as predictive factors of DevOps success in a company. It is a perfect future state design tool which, however, tells little about where your company is at the moment. Moreover, it does not suggest how to influence an organizational culture and in which direction it should change. Read more…

2. How to Set Up a Continuous Delivery Environment

With the increasing popularity of microservices, more and more is being said about Continuous Delivery. There are many interesting books and articles about that subject. There are also many tools and solutions that can help set up a Continuous Delivery environment. Read more…

3. DevOps done right: Why work-life balance matters to digital transformation success

As enterprises in every industry grapple with digital transformation, and fixate on meeting user demands for always-on services, IT departments find themselves under growing pressure to perform and deliver. Read more…

4. Is DevOps security about behavior or process?

One of my main roles is improving the security of the software produced by my employer, and it was in that role that I attended the annual gathering of the security industry in San Francisco last week. The RSA Conference is one of the two global security conferences I attend, the other being Blackhat. While Blackhat has become more corporate, it’s still dominated by hackers and focuses more on vulnerabilities, whereas RSA is very much a corporate event focused on enterprise security and security policy. Read more…

5. Finance industry leading the way in DevOps implementations, research says

Financial services firms are embracing DevOps approaches and best practices more quickly than other industries, according to new research from managed services provider Claranet. Read more…

Why do you need to implement a DevOpsSec team? – Idexcel DevOps Roundup

1. Why do you need to implement a DevOpsSec team?

Just 20 years ago, organizations relied on a single wall of defense to secure their applications and networks. Fast forward to 2015 and that large fence is no longer adequate. With the proliferation of mobile, cloud and SaaS technology adding to the complexity of ever-advancing systems and networks, it becomes much more important that teams across an organization work together as one, toward a common goal. We’ve already seen enterprises adopting new methods of organizing internal structures to increase collaboration through DevOps, but as security continues to be top of mind for organizations, many are looking to further this approach by including the security team in the DevOps conversation. With a DevOpsSec team, organizations can work toward delivering software that is not just reliable, but also secure. [Continue Reading…]

2. OpsClarity tackles the Ops in DevOps

Applications are getting more complicated, and the amount of data surrounding them is beginning to explode. OpsClarity, an operations analytics and monitoring company coming out of stealth mode today, wants to contain that explosion. The company is releasing an advanced operations platform designed to bring intelligence to Web-scale applications. [Continue Reading…]

3. 7 signs you’re doing devops wrong

Devops is a transformative ethos that many companies are putting to their advantage. As with anything that hinges on culture, however, it can be too easy to slap together a few tools, sprinkle in new processes, and call yourself a devops-fueled organization. After all, saying that your company embraces devops and regularly practices devops techniques is popular nowadays, and it can serve as great PR for bringing in great talent to your team. But in truth, many companies — and technical recruiters — that are proclaiming their devotion to devops from the hilltops aren’t really devops organizations. [Continue Reading…]

4. Why over 40% of IT departments are a DevOps nightmare

DevOps is an admirable step forward for operations and development teams, but can the infrastructure guys support it? A survey from infrastructure automation software firm Qualisystems suggests that many firms have significant gaps in their support for DevOps projects.

The company surveyed 643 attendees at VMWorld in the US and Europe, ranging from technical professionals in the trenches through to C-suite staff. Seventeen per cent of the respondents said that it would take more than a month to deploy new infrastructure for development and testing staff. Another quarter said it would take over a week. That’s 43 per cent of firms that are slower than treacle when it comes to provisioning new kit. [Continue Reading…]

Driving Innovation with DevOps – Idexcel DevOps Roundup

1. Driving Innovation with DevOps

DevOps isn’t just about working faster, more effectively, and at a lower cost. A big part DevOps is also about driving business innovation. Sure, DevOps correctly applied is known to cut costs and reduce downtime, but as this Rackspace 2014 survey found, DevOps is also, across many organizations, increasing sales as well as employee and customer engagement.

But DevOps is also enabling organizations to deploy more capabilities more quickly. As the most recent Puppet Labs DevOps report contends, DevOps organizations are deploying updates 30 times more rapidity and with fewer failures. And they’re recovering 168 times faster from failures and have 60 times fewer failures due to code changes. “What we are seeing is the quality and speed has definitely increased. So people are producing changes that are of higher quality and changes that require fewer rollbacks,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO at Puppet Labs. in this interview with Ericka Chickowski. Continue reading…

2. What does #DevOps mean to the roles of Change & Release managers?

One of our team raised this question in our internal #DevOps Slack channel this week and it sparked off an interesting discussion that we thought was worth sharing with a wider audience.

Firstly, let’s start with one of my favourite definitions of DevOps:

“DevOps is just ITIL with 90% of stuff moved to ‘Standard Change’ because we automated the crap out of it” – TheOpsMgr

Now that’s a bit tongue in cheek, obviously, as the scope of DevOps in a CALMS model world is probably wider than just that but it’s not a bad way to start explaining it to someone from a long-term ITIL background. Continue reading…

3. DevOps Isn’t a Job. But It’s Still Important

TRADITIONALLY, COMPANIES HAVE at least two main technical teams. There are the programmers, who code the software that the company sells, or that its employees use internally. And then there are the information technology operations staff, who handle everything from installing network gear to maintaining the servers that run those programmers’ code. The two teams only communicate when it’s time for the operations team to install a new version of the programmers’ software, or when things go wrong.

That’s the way it was at Munder Capital Management when J. Wolfgang Goerlich joined the Midwestern financial services company in 2005. Continue reading…

4. How devops will change the way that you think and work

Devops is exciting for developers, and can also be scary. It will change what you need to know and the skills you need in order to succeed. Doing devops requires that you learn new tools and embrace deep cultural changes to the way that you think and work. You’ll have to adapt to new processes in the shorter term, while also anticipating long-term organizational changes. Adopting devops means you’ll learn to work differently than you have before, alongside other developers and sysadmins who are also making this big shift. Continue reading…

5. A Sneak Peek of DevOps Enterprise Summit 2015

The DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES15) will gather the best practitioners, thinkers, and innovators in the DevOps space. Whether you’re well on your way in your own efforts to adopt DevOps practices, or just beginning to wonder whether DevOps isn’t something you should try, this is the event to accelerate your DevOps journey.

On stage will be leaders from Target, Disney, Nationwide, Nordstrom, Capital One, Raytheon Software, CSG, and many other organizations across a variety of sectors. These are individuals working in large-scale, complex environments who have dealt with the same problems you are struggling with now. Some of them are returning from last year to share their progress. Continue reading…