A cautionary tale Faced with limited financing and a high burn rate, many startups focus on product development and application coding at the expense of back of operations engineering. The reasons for this focus are understandable to some extent. Companies need to develop product and unseasoned CEOs don’t always see the value in investing in … Continued
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The Great Wall of China began construction in 7 B.C. to protect the Chinese kingdom from Eurasian warriors. Chinese soldiers would marshal forces to protect the Great Wall from enemy attack by using smoke signals to send alerts from tower to tower. This method of alerting enabled messages to be sent to garrisons hundreds of miles … Continued
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On Beyond Tools A conversation I recently had with the DevOps manager of a major online retailer really made me think about DevOps monitoring tools. The manager and I discussed how several DevOps shops seem to define themselves based on the number of tools they have monitoring their build and IT stack. The point he … Continued
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How to Win the Alert Fatigue Battle IT engineers and DevOps teams cannot help but experience alert fatigue when they receive after-hour alerts lacking context or relevance. Messages come in, for example, telling the engineer on-call that disk space is used up. Does this mean 60% used up or 100% used up? Or an after-hours … Continued
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Seven steps to failure and greatness The more I read and learn about how to succeed in DevOps the more I realize how important failure is to the process. You need to fail to be great at DevOps. Netflix, for example, even takes it a step further by introducing failure into their testing process. In … Continued
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Tools going Rogue – a story for Halloween We have all heard stories of DevOps woe. Some tales are sad. Some tales describe true misfortune. And some tales just leave you thinking what the heck were developers thinking? This story is a tale of the later. This story will tell the tale of how some … Continued
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What to avoid when you start DevOps While there are many ways to do DevOps correctly, there are specific cardinal sins that will put you afoul of the Church of DevOps. In order to achieve excellence, it is key for executives to avoid committing the cardinal sins of DevOps that are discussed below. DevOps sin … Continued
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DevOps as the road to profitability Netflix released a great earnings report earlier this week. According to the Wall Street Journal’s page one article on October 18th, “Netflix Inc. blew through its forecast for the subscriber additions in the September quarter…sending its shares soaring 20% in after-hours trading. … The better-than-expected performance came mainly in … Continued
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Why serverless computing doesn’t end the need for security or alerts Serverless computing provides the advantage of taking away the problem of managing servers. For many small start-ups, this is a huge advantage as the cost of purchasing, maintaining and scaling servers is a real pain point. Serverless also holds forth the prospect of ending … Continued
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The importance of monitoring and alerting in the continuous delivery cycle In the 2016 State of DevOps report, Puppet reported that the top DevOps shops like Amazon or Etsy deploy new software releases multiple times per day. The next tier of companies deploy on a weekly or monthly basis. What is the difference between High … Continued
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