Tag: devops

Where’s the heat in DevOps? – Idexcel DevOps Roundup

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

1. Analyst View: Where’s the heat in DevOps?

Consumers, empowered by rich software interactions with access to Internet resources, have never had more power or choices.

DevOps provides a set of practices and cultural changes—supported by complementary tools—that automates the software delivery pipeline, enabling organizations to win, serve, and retain these consumers better and faster than ever before.

Yet not everyone is ready for application delivery rates measured in minutes rather than hours, days or weeks. To understand DevOps adoption trends by industry and application type, Forrester looked at data from three distinct sources. [Continue Reading…]

2. Are You Ready for Your DevOps Transformation?

You’re done with missed release deadlines, long release cycles and risky releases. If your objectives are continuous application delivery to achieve fast feedback loops and reduced waste, DevOps practices provide the means to reach them.

DevOps is all about agile transformation, which reaches beyond agile development into production to achieve continuous delivery. DevOps practices provide help for the necessary next step after agile development to leverage the full potential of agile and avoid massive post-delivery changes through the development teams, but before they are ready to go into production. [Continue Reading…]

3. 2016 DevOps Predictions – Part 1

In the tradition of APMdigest’s annual list of APM predictions (link is external), DEVOPSdigest is hosting its first annual list of DevOps Predictions. DevOps experts — analysts and consultants, and the top vendors — offer thoughtful, insightful, often controversial and sometimes contradictory predictions on how DevOps and related technologies will evolve and impact business in 2016.

The predictions cover topics ranging from the evolving roles of dev and ops; to relationships within IT and with the business side; to the changing processes; to the innovative technologies that support them all. This is a vibrant list that reflects a growing movement with almost limitless possibilities.

Some of these predictions may actually come true in 2016, while others may be just as valid but take several years to be realized. Still others may be wishful thinking. But taken collectively, this list of predictions offers an insider’s look at what the DevOps experts are thinking about, planning, expecting and hoping for next year. [Continue Reading…]

4. 9 hidden Talents of Devops Ninjas

Devops is all about culture, with groups of teams working in concert toward a common goal. But as opposed to some workplace cultures, there are certain traits and talents all devops team members must have in common. You could be the best software developer or system administrator in the world, but if you don’t possess “devops talents” you’ll soon find that you stick out like a sore thumb and any devops shop worth its salt will likely give you the boot. [Continue Reading…]

5. Improve, automate, rinse and repeat: All aboard the starship DevOps

Steve Ballmer once famously ran around on stage screaming “developers, developers!” You never hear anyone jumping about shouting “sysadmins!” or “quality controllers!”. That’s because code conventional wisdom dictates that code trickles down from the ivory tower, while the boys in the engine room make like Scotty in Star Trek, doing their best to make it work.

That’s not going to fly any more, though.

As applications move online, people expect them to evolve at the same pace as consumer ones, putting development cycles under pressure. Phrases such as “continual improvement” are becoming commonplace. And one term more than any other underpins this movement: DevOps. [Continue Reading…]

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

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

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

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

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…

DevOps – A Collaborative Approach

Posted on by Idexcel Technologies

There are lots of different opinions about what encompasses the definition of DevOps. Speaking in very broad terms, born to improve the IT service delivery agility, DevOps facilitates collaboration, communication and integration between IT operations and software developers. DevOps environment consists of a team with cross-functional team members including QA, developers, business analysts, DBAs, operations engineers and so on. Incorporating DevOps helps companies get done more, and deploy code more frequently.

Businesses these days are facing some common problems. After application delivery, businesses are sceptical to change. The reason usually is the vulnerable and brittle software, and the platform which it sits on. Software is risky, prone to errors, and is unpredictable. Introducing new features or fixing application problems takes long time mainly due to bureaucratic change-management system. There is also risky deployment where no one is completely confident if the software will actually work in the live environment, if code will cope with the load, or if code will work as expected. The product is usually pushed out, and teams just hope to see if everything works. More often than not, the problem start manifesting after the project goes live. The developers use a system to develop the code, which is tested in completed different system, and deployed on entirely different machines, causing incompatibility issues due to different properties files. If the business units are siloed, the issues get passed between different teams. There can be siloisation within teams as well. If the silos are not in the same office, or city, this leads to “them vs us” mentality, making people more sceptical.

DevOps approach believes in handling businesses in a more productive and profitable manner by building teams and software to resolve these issues. The above mentioned problems can be addressed by DevOps approach where people with multidisciplinary skill set are happy to roll up their sleeves for multidimensional role. They make connections and bridge gaps, tremendously impacting the businesses. This builds cross-disciplinary approach within the teams with maximum reliability across different departments, leading to faster time to market, happier clients, better availability and reliability and more focussed team energy. The goals of DevOps approach are spread across complete delivery pipeline, improving the deployment frequency. DevOps promotes sets of methods and processes for collaboration and communication between product development, quality assurance and IT operations. It encourages understanding the domain for which software is being written, develop communication skills, and there is a conscious passion and sensitivity to ensure that the business succeeds.

In the non-DevOps environment, the operations team’s performance is measured based on the stability of the system, whereas the development team is gauged based on the delivered features. In the DevOps environment, a single whole team is responsible for the system stability and delivering new features. There is continuous integration, shared code, automated deploys, and test-driven techniques. The problems get exposed earlier in the application code, configuration or infrastructure mainly because software is not just thrown to the Operations once the coding is over. The change sets are smaller, making the problems less complex and as the team members do not have to wait for other team to find and fix the problem, resolution times are much faster.

Additionally, in a typical IT environment, people need to wait for other machines, other people, or updated software. Employees often get stuck in resolving the same issues over and over again, and this can become quite frustrating, leading to job frustration. It becomes essential for the organisations to remove the ungratifying part of their employees’ jobs so that they can add more value to the organisation, making it more productive and profitable. Standardized production environments and automated deployments are the main aspects of DevOps that make the deployments predictable, and this frees up the resources from the mundane tasks. This software development method acknowledges and utilizes the interdependence of IT operations, software development and quality assurance to help companies create new products faster, while improving the operations performance.

There are several technical and business benefits of this collaboration across different roles. This includes continuous software delivery, faster problem resolution, reduced complexity of the problems, more stable operating environments, faster feature delivery and more time to provide value addition rather than fixing or maintaining. The DevOps movement is yet to reach its full potential, and the statistics have shown that this is not just a fleeting fad. It promises a paradigm shift, a significant revolution in the software industry to blur the boundaries.