Look at production incident numbers, most organizations have sufficient data on that and sufficient problems to solve. It ends up being really compelling. Once you show the numbers, generally management just says do it, if that solves the problem just do it. Though you might have to pr...

DevOps has traditionally played important roles in development and IT operations, but the practice is quickly becoming core to other business functions such as customer success, business intelligence, and marketing analytics. Modern marketers today are driven by data and rely on many ...

Now, with more hardware! September 21, 2015, Don MacVittie, Sr. Solutions Architect. The “continuous” trend is continuing (get it..?), and we’ll soon reach the peek of the hype cycle, with continuous everything. At the pinnacle of the hype cycle, do not be surprised to see DDOS attacks...

When I describe Continuous Delivery to people I generally spend a fair amount of time impressing on them that it is not about tools and technicalities. It is not even about the relationship between developers and operations or product owners and testers. Continuous Delivery is about mi...

There’s no shortage of guides and blog posts available to provide you with best practices in architecting microservices. While all this information is helpful, what doesn’t seem to be available in such a great number are hands-on guidelines regarding how microservices can be scaled. Fo...

Yesterday, Dell announced the largest technology M&A in history with a proposed$67B buyout of EMC and VMware (via EMC’s 80% ownership of VMW). The combined company will have over $80B in revenue, employ tens of thousands of people around the world and sell everything from PCs, servers ...

Ten years ago, there may have been only a single application that talked directly to the database and spit out HTML; customer service, sales - most of the organizations I work with have been moving toward a design philosophy more like unix, where each application consists of a series o...

SYS-CON Events announced today the Containers & Microservices Bootcamp, being held November 3-4, 2015, in conjunction with 17th Cloud Expo, @ThingsExpo, and @DevOpsSummit at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. This is your chance to get started with the latest techno...

Containers have changed the mind of IT in DevOps. They enable developers to work with dev, test, stage and production environments identically. Containers provide the right abstraction for microservices and many cloud platforms have integrated them into deployment pipelines. DevOps and...

Containers are all the rage among developers and web companies, but they also represent two very substantial benefits to larger organizations. First, they have the potential to dramatically accelerate the application lifecycle from software builds and testing to deployment and upgrades...

People, process, and technology has become a mantra within the world of DevOps proponents and practitioners, and it can easily be applied to the whole of cloud computing and all that it entails. Our DevOps Summit Chair Andi Mann led a panel discussion on the topic. Meanwhile, I led ...

Achim Weiss is Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of ProfitBricks. In 1995, he broke off his studies to co-found the web hosting company "Schlund+Partner." The company "Schlund+Partner" later became the 1&1 web hosting product line. From 1995 to 2008, he was the technical director ...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Jason Bloomberg, President at Intellyx. When we build services we want them to be lightweight, stateless and scalable while doing one thing really well. In today's cloud world, we're revisiting what to takes to make a good service in the first p...

For it to be SOA – let alone SOA done right – we need to pin down just what "SOA done wrong" might be. First-generation SOA with Web Services and ESBs, perhaps? But then there's second-generation, REST-based SOA. More lightweight and cloud-friendly, but many REST-based SOA practices p...

Opinions on how best to package and deliver applications are legion and, like many other aspects of the software world, are subject to recurring trend cycles. On the server-side, the current favorite is container delivery: a “full stack” approach in which your application and everythin...

If you are new to Python, you might be confused about the different versions that are available. Although Python 3 is the latest generation of the language, many programmers still use Python 2.7, the final update to Python 2, which was released in 2010. There is currently no clear-c...

In a report titled “Forecast Analysis: Enterprise Application Software, Worldwide, 2Q15 Update,” Gartner analysts highlighted the increasing trend of application modernization among enterprises. According to a recent survey, 45% of respondents stated that modernization of i...

Despite all the talk about public cloud services and DevOps, you would think the move to cloud for enterprises is clear and simple. But in a survey of almost 1,600 IT decision makers across the USA and Europe, the state of the cloud in enterprise today is still fraught with considerabl...

One of the great benefits of utilizing a language like Node.js is the wide assortment of 3rd party modules that are at your disposal. From calculating the validity of credit card numbers, to managing network connections, the Node Package Manager (npm) repository has hundreds of thousa...

As we increasingly rely on technology to improve the quality and efficiency of our personal and professional lives, software has become the key business differentiator. Organizations must release software faster, as well as ensure the safety, security, and reliability of their applicat...

Last month, my partners in crime – Carmen DeArdo from Nationwide, Lee Reid, my colleague from IBM and I wrote a 3-part series of blog posts on DevOps.com. We titled our posts the Simple Math, Calculus and Art of DevOps. I would venture to say these are must-reads for any organization a...

There once was a time when testers operated on their own, in isolation. They’d huddle as a group around the harsh glow of dozens of CRT monitors, clicking through GUIs and recording results. Anxiously, they’d wait for the developers in the other room to fix the bugs they found, yet the...

It is with great pleasure that I am able to announce that Jesse Proudman, Blue Box CTO, has been appointed to the position of IBM Distinguished Engineer. Jesse is the first employee at Blue Box to receive this honor, and I’m quite confident there will be more to follow given the ama...

All we need to do is have our teams self-organize, and behold! Emergent design and/or architecture springs up out of the nothingness! If only it were that easy, right? I follow in the footsteps of so many people who have long wondered at the meanings of such simple words, as though ...

Somebody call the buzzword police: we have a serious case of microservices-washing in progress. The term “microservices-washing” is derived from “whitewashing,” meaning to hide some inconvenient truth with bluster and nonsense. We saw plenty of cloudwashing a few years ago, as vendors...

Application availability is not just the measure of “being up”. Many apps can claim that status. Technically they are running and responding to requests, but at a rate which users would certainly interpret as being down. That’s because excessive load times can (and will be) interpreted...

At DevOps Summit NY there’s been a whole lot of talk about not just DevOps, but containers, IoT, and microservices. Sessions focused not just on the cultural shift needed to grow at scale with a DevOps approach, but also made sure to include the network ”plumbing” needed to ensure succ...

Several years ago, I was a developer in a travel reservation aggregator. Our mission was to pull flight and hotel data from a bunch of cryptic reservation platforms, and provide it to other companies via an API library - for a fee. That was before companies like Expedia standardized su...

Information overload has infiltrated our lives. From the amount of news available and at our fingertips 24/7, to the endless choices we have when making a simple purchase, to the quantity of emails we receive on a given day, it’s increasingly difficult to sift out the details that real...

I’ve been thinking a bit about microservices (μServices) recently. My immediate reaction is to think: “Isn’t this just yet another new term for the same stuff, Web Services->SOA->APIs->Microservices?” Followed shortly by the thought, “well yes it is, but there are some important differ...

In the past, application deployment meant moving lots of components - provided by developers to lots of servers, databases etc. managed by Operation. With Docker and containers, we often hear statements like: "That all goes away now - developers simply have to delver a ready-to-go Dock...

Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE once said - “If the rate of change on the outside is happening faster than the rate of change on the inside, the end is in sight.” This rings truer than ever – especially because business success is inextricably associated with those organizations who’v...

Even though you are running an agile development process, that doesn’t necessarily mean that your performance testing is being conducted in a truly agile way. Saving performance testing for a “final sprint” before release still treats it like a waterfall development step, with all the ...

Go ahead. Name a cloud environment that doesn't include load balancing as the key enabler of elastic scalability. I've got coffee... so it's good, take your time... Exactly. Load balancing - whether implemented as traditional high availability pairs or clustering - provides the mean...

In the last blog we started the conversation on our findings from @Cloud Expo 2015 and @ThingsExpo 2015 as the industry came together to explore the impact of Cloud and Internet of Things (IoT) on business models as we know them. While often the focus of IoT are consumer services and t...

Our guest on the podcast this week is Paul Duvall, Chairman and CTO at Stelligent, and author of “Continuous Integration” and “DevOps in AWS”. We discuss continuous integration and the cultural changes that must occur for an organization to make the switch to continuous delivery and in...

I love all this digital hullaballoo, really I do. I love all these different trends and disruptions and turmoil. I especially love the confusion – it gives me something to write about. But sometimes, I’ve just had enough. Especially when the digital disruption story starts repeating...

Large organizations engaged in enterprise release management seldom have a single "enterprise release manager." Instead of a single, "enterprise-wide" responsibility, most large, decentralized organizations assign responsibility for more strategic, release management functions to seve...

The New Data Center has arrived. Over the past decade we have seen the migration from physical servers to virtual machines and now to public cloud, private cloud and hybrid cloud. Each of these migrations has taken a similar path. Test, dev and non-critical workloads are the first to m...

In order to deliver on the promise of DevOps and hit continuous release targets for even the largest, most complex and integrated applications, companies need solutions that provide the same flexibility for data as for code bases, the same automation and repeatability for data as for c...