DevOps
Within an ops team you should have 3 primary types of governance enablers: controls, policies and processes. A control is a guiding principle, which is implemented as a one or more policies (which are just rules), which are in turn standardized in a set of procedures. Its important to have all 3, because controls are very vague, policies are often general and broad in nature, which means to provide consistent quality results we require ...
I've been invited to speak at DevOps LA on Monday, Aug 27th. The title I've chosen is "The DevOps Transformation" but it will not be the talk I gave at LISA. Partly because I've already given that talk, and partly because I only have a 20-30 minute speaking slot. I'll be looking beyond those fundamental principles and considering some new material, including work flow, routing, and conversion with the LEAN world at large. I will not ...
Kanban has become an increasingly popular "agile" technique which is consider as similar to Scrum and Extreme Programming. David Anderson created the agile form of Kanban from his experience in Japan. In his book he tells the story of his visit to the Imperial Palace Gardens where there is no admission cost, but the flow of visitors is constrained by a stack of kanban (cards), people can enter until the kanban are exhausted, then as people ...
I'm highly introspective... far more than I would actually like to be. I'm one of those strange individuals to whom if you said "Do you realize your being a jerk right now?" I'd actually admit "Yes, I'm sorry about that, I'm trying to find a way to rectify it unsuccessfully." Despite that obsessive level of awareness, nothing can tell you more about who you are then your children. In particular, by observing things your children do that ...
Last week I was given the incredible opportunity to not only speak at LISA but to deliver the opening keynote. I hadn't expected to even go, but when I learned the topic was DevOps I made a last minute plea on the eve of the submission deadline for a slot to deliver a talk I was calling "The 60 Minute MBA", a history of Operations Management. My hope is that I could get some obscure timeslot so a handful of people could geek out with me on ...
In a previous entry I described Graphite and gave an overly simplistic example of integrating it with DTrace... lets get a little more serious and see what fun we can have. For a years a problem nagged at me. I wanted to get really fine grained latency information from an NFS server to track user experience. This isn't an easy thing to do, especially for hundreds of exports. First off, you have to use DTrace to get that kind of data, ...
8 All things are full of weariness; a man cannot utter it; the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. 9 What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun. 10 Is there a thing of which it is said, “See, this is new”? It has been already in the ages before us. 11 There is no remembrance of former things, nor will there be any remembra...
Cloud. DevOps. Both are in the fad category, but both are very popular and everyone is grasping at what they really are. There is a subtle difference however. "Cloud" is ambiguous, this leads to the never ending line of questions "What is Cloud?" and yet more as the concept evolves such as "If cloud means in the cloud, then isn't private cloud an oximoron?" DevOps on the other hand seems deceptively intuitive. This has caused ...
There are a lot of interesting SaaS offerings available today but not many that get me all excited. I recently blogged about Duo Security, they get me excited. Another of my favorites is Mint. The most recent has been PagerDuty. I met the PagerDuty team at Velocity & DevOps Days this week and they are a really awesome bunch of folks and so I thought I'd give them a little love to show my support. (This isn't sponsored, in all my ...
Ars gratia artis: Art for the sake of art. It goes to bad places... you end up here with this famous piece: If you don't know the story, the picture is of a famous art piece named The Fountain by Marcel Duchamp. If you are an artist or great lover of art, it is an important work that has a bold place in arts history. However, if you are outside that circle the piece simply reminds you of why you hate artists. (You can have fun ...