Book Review: “DevOps Paradox” by Viktor Farcic
I just finished reading the new book by Viktor Farcic called DevOps Paradox. It’s a departure from Victor’s previous writing which was mostly focused on DevOps tooling. In a way this book can be seen as an extension of his DevOps Paradox podcast.
Viktor is a notorious conference speaker and an all-round great communicator. And ‘DevOps Paradox’ is basically the outcome of him traveling around the world, catching the industry’s leading speakers, writers and thinkers, getting them into the corner and attacking them with uncomfortable questions.
With his main question being: “What the hell is DevOps?!”
Continuous Collaboration with Codefresh
About a week ago, I wrote about Kosta Klevensky (the DevOps architect for Codefresh) joining forces with Otomato.
This has caused some misunderstanding, which I’d like to clear up. Our collaboration with Codefresh goes back a long way.
Codefresh were one of my first customers when I went independent and I always enjoyed working with them.
How Service Meshes May Save Continuous Delivery
The Truth
There is a truth about continuous delivery that gets lost behind all the buzz. And the truth is that it is a lot like sex when you’re a teen – everybody talks about it, everybody thinks about it, everybody is preparing for it, but very few actually do it.
Dumb Services in Smart Nets
I’m happy to announce that I’ll be speaking about service meshes and demoing Istio usage for smart deployment techniques at https://devoops.ru/ in St.Petersburg, Russia – the city I was born and grew up in! The conference will take place on 14.10.2018 and will feature such great speakers as John Willis and Liz Rice among others. And here’s the link to the talk.
Understanding Feedback Loops in DevOps
Icon made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com is licensed by CC 3.0 BY Today I want to talk about what is probably the most misunderstood concept in DevOps terminology : the feedback loops. As defined originally in “The Phoenix Project” and further detailed in “The DevOps Handbook” – amplifying feedback loops is “the second way of DevOps”. Gene Kim explains in this post that “The Second Way is about creating the right to left feedback loops. The goal of almost any process improvement initiative is to shorten and amplify feedback loops so necessary corrections can be continually made.” Process improvement is exactly what I’ve been doing for the last decade of my career. And what I’ve noticed is that whenever I start talking to teams about feedback loops I get 4 types of misunderstanding: Alert and notification systems are mistaken for feedback loops The importance of feedback loops is completely…
Speed or Quality? What is more important? Lessons from Japan.
We Don’t Do DevOps. In most of my encounters with new customers I take the time to explain that I don’t “do DevOps”. Yes, DevOps a convenient name tag. It provides an easy to present packaging that has been feeding me and my colleagues well for the last 5+ years. On the other hand – it definitely looks like the original meaning of the word (as originally coined by Patrick Debois) is continuously eroding. More and more folks in the industry are using it to refer to modern practices of system administration. Those that involve cloud, automation and – in the best case – also continuous delivery. That’s why I almost never relate to what I’m doing as ‘DevOps’. I rather use the term “Software Delivery Optimization”. We’re optimizing the time it takes to deliver software and the quality of the resulting product. By applying systemic analysis. By measuring and…
DevOps Transformation Plan
A few customers have been asking us for a simple, visual, down-to-earth plan for their DevOps Transformation process. We’ve created this infographic. Feel free to share and comment!
The System Of Continuous Migration
Introduction We live in a world where a commercial organization has to be in a state of constant flux. That is – if it wants to survive and prosper. This statement is even more accurate for IT companies. (And – as the popular saying goes – every company is an IT company today) One could of course argue that I’m suffering from a consultant worldview bias. After all – consultants are mostly brought in to help with organizational and technological changes. In the last couple of years we at Otomato have been involved in dozens of projects that all had ‘migration’ or ‘transformation’ in their title. So yes, definitely – change is all we see. But I’ve spent more than 15 years in IT companies small and large prior to becoming a consultant – and it’s always been like this. With ever accelerating speed. We’ve been changing languages, frameworks, architectural…
Dynamically spinning up Jenkins slaves on Docker clusters
Introduction: Being able to dynamically spin up slave containers is great. But if we want to support significant build volumes we need more than a few Docker hosts. Defining a separate Docker cloud instance for each new host is definitely not something we want to do – especially as we’d need to redefine the slave templates for each new host. A much nicer solution is combining our Docker hosts into a cluster managed by a so-called container orchestrator (or scheduler) and then define that whole cluster as one cloud instance in Jenkins.This way we can easily expand the cluster by adding new nodes into it without needing to update anything in Jenkins configuration. There are 4 leading container orchestration platforms today and they are: Kubernetes (open-sourced and maintained by Google) Docker Swarm (from Docker Inc. – the company behind Docker) Marathon (a part of the Mesos project) Nomad (from Hashicorp)…
DevOps is a Myth
(Practitioner’s Reflections on The DevOps Handbook) The Holy Wars of DevOps Yet another argument explodes online around the ‘true nature of DevOps’, around ‘what DevOps really means’ or around ‘what DevOps is not’. At each conference I attend we talk about DevOps culture, DevOps mindset and DevOps ways. All confirming one single truth – DevOps is a myth. Now don’t get me wrong – in no way is this a negation of its validity or importance. As Y.N.Harrari shows so eloquently in his book ‘Sapiens’ – myths were the forming power in the development of humankind. It is in fact our ability to collectively believe in these non-objective, imagined realities that allows us to collaborate at large scale, to coordinate our actions, to build pyramids, temples, cities and roads. There’s a Handbook! I am writing this while finishing the exceptionally well written “DevOps Handbook”. If you really want to know…