DevOps

This is a brief story about DevOps at Red Hat IT in the near future. It's fiction--all the individual and team names are fabricated--but it's grounded in very real and typical circumstances.The goal is to describe some of the business capabilities one can expect after making some moderate investments in DevOps, and then debrief on what investments were made to be able to tell this success story. It aims to be relatable to anyone working in corporate IT, technical or...

There is only one day left for Red Hat Summit and DevNation, and my brain is about at capacity for what it will be able to remember! I had a most excellent day yesterday (Wednesday) and I am so proud of my teammates. They rocked their presentations! The amusing and frustrating part about the day was that I had 2-3 presentations picked out for each time slot, and it was very hard to make a decision on where to go...

I decided to theme each day of my DevNation conference attendance so that I could achieve some sense of a goal and also help me select which tracks to attend. For Tuesday, I went with the "go to something you love, or something you know nothing about" theme. Here is where I will be: 10:40-11:40 DevAssistant: What's in it for you? with Bohuslav Kabrda If I achieve nothing else in the next two years of my career with Team Inception...

Last time we started on our Journey to Delivery Efficiency with a conversation on The Thing, The Life, and The Who (see the post here). In other words, we need to know what the thing is, that it has a lifecycle during which different people care (the who). These basic elements set us up for being able to care for these things throughout their lifecycle and ultimately be Faster, Better, Stronger, and Wiser in their delivery. I recently heard a...

Not sure how the DevNation team managed to do this without talking to me, but it appears they custom tailored Monday's tracks specifically for me... oh, and probably for everyone else who is going that is interested in DevOps. :) Thanks DevNation; thrilled to be able to go! If you haven't already taken a look at the line-up, now is the time to do it. Here is where I will be on Monday: 8:30-10:00 - Agile architecture and design with...

Today, we’ll share a small victory in our DevOps journey at Red Hat IT. This cross-team collaboration has saved our IT organization some headaches and wasted time. We open-sourced the code, hoping it can help you, too. The Dev problem, from Sam Van Oort: Old, pruned git branches are sometimes re-created by accident, making a mess for our developers. Code repositories are the final resting place for code, acting as equal parts bank vault, museum, and graveyard. Unlike a vault...

The Journey to Delivery Efficiency For as long as I can remember in my career in the Information Technology industry, there’s been talk about faster time-to-market, reduced waste, ideas on how to exceed (or simply meet) customer expectations. You get the picture. This notion of how to do things faster, maintain quality and give the customer what they want is proclaimed in the practices of Lean, Lean Six Sigma, Agile Development (including Scrum, Kanban, and Scrumban), Incremental Development, XP (Extreme...

We've just over a month to go until Red Hat Summit 2014 and the newly rebranded DevNation conference open their doors in San Francisco's Moscone Center South, located in the heart of downtown San Francisco. While we're putting the finishing touches to our great new product releases for developers, we're also really looking forward to attending the conferences ourselves. They present a great opportunity for like-minded developers to come together, see what's new and share ideas - all part of...

Back in December, I shared with you how Red Hat IT was beginning its DevOps transformation. That early post discussed our strategy, team composition, the importance of Open Source, and incremental change. It's been about three months and I'd like to share an update with some early lessons learned. Overall impression so far? This is harder than we thought. To recap, our approach to jump-starting a DevOps transformation in Red Hat IT was to form a small, temporary team inside...

In Part 1, we talked a bit about this DevOps thing and why people won't stop talking about it. In Part 2, we'll talk about the areas where you can change your IT focus today to help benefit from DevOps. A classic mistake is to focus primarily on the tools associated with successful DevOps shops. It's not as if you can bring up your own Deployinator and suddenly become as high-functioning an IT shop as Etsy. The tooling is important...

As our industry continues to adopt lean methodologies in an effort to improve the workflow of product deliverables, it's important that the products developed using these patterns are reliable. When speaking from an application infrastructure perspective, or the Ops side of DevOps , this means that we must continue to improve resiliency, predictability, and consistency, alongside streamlining our development workflows to allow for failing fast, and failing often .When faced with a critical incident, it's dissatisfying to find that the...

"DevOps". If you're like me, you may be suffering a bit of buzzword fatigue, especially relating to how this word is used (or misused) within the IT community. But for those of us who have been a part of the community for a while, it holds deeper meaning than the oft-repeated platitude of "Software Developers and Sysadmins working together, riding unicorns over rainbows". Okay, while I may have gotten slightly carried away, you get the point. What is DevOps to...

Some of our friends at PuppetLabs mentioned this DevOps survey to me this week and I thought I would share. What's interesting about this survey (plus the prizes are not too shabby!) was it was created with the help of Gene Kim and Jez Humble. If you're interested in DevOps, learn about the questions and see the results (and know you're not alone). "This survey should take about 10 minutes. If you complete the survey and choose to provide your...

This is part 2 of a 2-part article about Advanced Integration with RHEV-M. The first part is available here. In the last part you learned how to perform different operations on the engine from the outside using the API/SDK. In this part you'll learn how you can influence the engine from the inside, using extension APIs Extension APIs In this section we will describe the following APIs: UI plugins API (also covered in http://ovedou.blogspot.com and http://www.ovirt.org/Features/UIPlugins) - an API that...

Hey all, I'm Jen Krieger and I am Team Inception's Product Owner and Scrum Master/Agile Coach. Hopefully, you have read Bill Montgomery's blog post last week about Red Hat IT's DevOps' journey. He referred to Underpants Gnomes strategy and how to get from point A to point C if there is a big question mark in the middle. You could say my job on the team is to clarify that question mark. I'm going to share my method... but first...

Came across this post on the Red Hat Services blog about some solid practices for "doing" DevOps. I liked Mr. Hoffman's simple explanation of what DevOps is. I also liked that he points out how just using a tool (or a set of tools) does not equal "doing DevOps." Check it out and make sure you leave some comments here or there about what you think.

This is part 1 of a 2-part article about Advanced Integration with RHEV-M. Background At CloudOpen Europe 2013, in Edinburgh, I presented a talk about advanced integration with the oVirt engine. This technical article is covering the contents of this session. RHEV-M is a Large scale, centralized management for server and desktop virtualization. It is based on leading performance, scalability and security infrastructure technologies, focusing on KVM for best integration/performance. It provides an alternative to Center/vSphere, providing end-to-end IaaS platform...

DevOps is all about culture, right? Yeah, it's developers and operators working more closely, but it's more than that. DevOps is a culture that exudes the principles of Agile, Lean, and Open Source, to deliver higher quality products and services faster, more continuously, and more predictably. So, if we accept DevOps is a culture, and your CIO gives you a mandate to transform his or her organization to a DevOps organization, you're now effectively responsible for an organizational culture change...

Photo by seeweb Countless products uses XML files, whether it is for data persistence, serialization or mere configuration. This is even more true when it comes to the Red Hat middleware portfolio, the JBoss projects having always been keen on using this format for configuration files - on top of the ones specified by JEE such as the famous (or infamous ?) web.xml. While the XML format has some definitive qualities, it is not the easiest format to parse, and...

Introduction Hi, I'm Steve, a member of the Inception team at Red Hat. The Inception team was pulled from different parts of IT to foster DevOps culture in Red Hat. Though we've only been a team for a little over a month, we've been trying to do some early projects to make everyone's lives easier.l We spent quite a bit of time in our early meetings identifying pain points in the current processes. We talked with a few developers, ops...

In an earlier post we looked into using the Performance Co-Pilot toolkit to explore performance characteristics of complex systems. While surprisingly rewarding, and often unexpectedly insightful, this kind of analysis can be rightly criticized for being "hit and miss". When a system has many thousands of metric values it is not feasible to manually explore the entire metric search space in a short amount of time. Or the problem may be less obvious than the example shown - perhaps we...

Investigating performance in a complex system is a fascinating undertaking. When that system spans multiple, closely-cooperating machines and has open-ended input sources (shared storage, or faces the Internet, etc) then the degree of difficulty of such investigations ratchets up quickly. There are often many confounding factors, with many things going on all at the same time. The observable behaviour of the system as a whole can be frequently changing even while at a micro level things may appear the same...

A few short months ago, I was managing an operations team at another firm. There had been a sea change in executive leadership over the summer, and the DevOps transformation that I'd helped to kick off was quickly being unraveled by the sorts of executive shenanigans that can ensue when a C level departs and leaves an opening. I was open minded to a change in scenery and got the call of a lifetime from a Red Hat recruiter. You...

Background At JUDCon 2013 in Boston, Scott Cranton and I presented a talk entitled Resilient Enterprise Messaging with Fuse & Red Hat Enterprise Linux. This technical article is the follow-up work from that presentation. JBoss A-MQ is built on ActiveMQ which is a robust messaging platform that supports STOMP, JMS, AMQP and modern principals in Message Oriented Middleware (MOM). It's built from the ground up to be loosely coupled and asynchronous in nature. This provides ActiveMQ with native high availability...