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…
Impressions from DevOpsDays Moscow 2017
The Russian Link I’m on my way back from the first ever DevOpsDays event in Russia where I had the privilege to share the stage with shockingly gifted and knowledgeable speakers. This may sound like just another DevOpsDays to you, but for me it was a big deal. As some of you may know I was born in Russia and lived in St.Petersburg until the age of 15. I am a native russian speaker, and though I’ve spent almost two thirds of my life in Israel – the link to russian culture has never been broken. So when I saw the event planned on the official DevOpsDays community site – I applied to give a talk and was happy to get accepted. During my 17 years in the industry I never had a chance to work with russian software engineers (not counting the Israeli Russians – these I’ve seen…
Thank you Intel Sports!
Mission completed! We’ve done a full month of getting the #Intel Sports developers up to speed with git. It’s always fun to train bright folks – and the engineers at Intel are certainly among the brighthest we ‘ve had the privilege to preach git to. While providing the training we’ve also developed a few ideas regarding git subtree and the plan is to share these ideas in a follow-up post to this one (which compares submodules to repo) Have a great weekend!
CI/CD for Microservices – Challenges and Best Practices
Introduction: Microservice Software Architecture is a software system architecture pattern whereas an application or a system is composed of a number of smaller interconnected services. This is in opposite to the previously popular monolith architectures in which, even if having a logically modular, component-based structure the application is packaged and deployed as a monolith. The Microservice architectural pattern while having many benefits (which we’ll briefly outline in the following paragraph) also presents new challenges all along our software delivery pipeline. This whitepaper strives to map out these challenges and define the best practices for tackling them to ensure a streamlined and quality-oriented delivery process. Microservice Architecture Benefits: Smaller Application Footprint (per Service) The ‘Micro’ notion of the concept has been getting some justified critic – as it’s not really about the size of the codebase, but more about correct logical separation of concerns. Still once we do split our existing…
DevOps Flow Metrics – http://devopsflowmetrics.org
DevOps transformation goals can be defined as: Heightened Release Agility Improved Software Quality Or simply: Delivering Better Software Faster Therefore measurable DevOps success criteria would be: Being able to release versions faster and more often. Having less defects and failures. Measurement is one of the cornerstones of DevOps. But how do we measure flow? In order to track the flow (the amount of change getting pushed through our pipeline in a given unit of time) we’ve developed the 12 DevOps Flow Metrics. They are based on our industry experience and ideas from other DevOps practitioners and are a result of 10 years of implementing DevOps and CI/CD in large organisations. The metrics were initially publicly presented by Anton Weiss at a DevOpsDays TLV 2016 ignite talk. The talk got a lot of people interested and that’s why we decided to share the metrics with the community. We’ve created a github pages based…
Continuous Delivery as a Necessity – Anton Weiss interviewed for JAXenter.com
“The codebase is a minefield —there will be casualties” – JAXenter https://jaxenter.com/continuous-delivery-interview-anton-weiss-128491.html
Jenkins and the Future of Software Delivery
Are you optimistic when you look into the future and try to see what it brings? Do you believe in robot apocalypse or the utopia of singularity? Do you think the world will change to the better or to the worse? Or are you just too busy fixing bugs in production and making sure all your systems are running smoothly? Ant Weiss of Otomato describing the bright future of software delivery at Jenkins User Conference Israel 2016.
How OpenStack is Built – the Video now Online
Watch Ant Weiss of Otomato provide an overview of the OpenStack CI – probably one of the most advanced Jenkins-based CI infrastructures in the world.
The Number One Symptom Of not Actually ‘Doing Devops’
So I recently talked to a release engineering team leader at a very well-known american software+hardware company located in California. They contacted me looking for top-notch build infrastructure engineers and we spent a very interesting hour discussing their technological stack and people processes. On the surface – they are moving in the right direction – automating all the things, using Chef for config management, codifying the infrastructure, using Artifactory for binaries… But one thing struck me in our conversation. The team leader (clearly a very smart and talented guy) said : “I’ve been trying to hire for two years. Good professionals are so hard to find…” I agreed at first – we all know the market is starving for technical talent. But reflecting on our conversation afterwards I realized that he in fact showed me the number one symptom of how far their team is from ‘doing devops’. Yes –…
Custom deploy process at Utab
Hi! I’m Ilya Sher. This guest post will describe the deploy process at Utab, one of my clients. Background – system architecture summary Utab uses the services architecture. Some services are written in Java, others in NodeJS. Each server has either one Java application or one NodeJS application. The production environment uses (with the exception of load balancing configuration) the immutable server approach. Requirements for the deploy process The client specified the following requirements: Support for staging and production environments Manually triggered deploy for each of the environments Health check before adding a server to load balancing in production environment Option to easily and quickly rollback to previous version in production environment Simple custom tools are to be used ( no Chef/Puppet/… ) Solution background The Utab’s deploy and other scripts were made specifically for the client. Such custom scripts are usually simpler than any ready-made solution. It means they…