DevOps

Most of the world doesn’t think of Capital One as a startup, but the financial giant certainly made its case as one during a keynote at DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco on October 20. Despite being one of the largest credit card companies and banks in the United States, Capital One is only 20 years old while it’s next closest peer, is over 100. Despite its size, Capital One still boasts a relatively small technology organization that is committed...

Monday kicked off the second edition of the DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco. Over the course of the three day event, over 100 speakers will share their experiences on lean principles and continuous delivery to over 1000 attendees from around the world. The first keynote of the day featured Heather Mickman and Ross Clanton from Target, who provided an update from their presentation at the inaugural event last year on the ongoing transformation of IT engineers at the retail...

OpenShift Enterprise by Red Hat was designed to be application architecture agnostic. In addition to running traditional stateful and/or legacy-type workloads, OpenShift Enterprise seamlessly provides support for modern, stateless Twelve-Factor applications. This document provides a guide on how to optimize the architecture and deployment of your Twelve-Factor applications on OpenShift Enterprise. Note: The Twelve-Factor app is a methodology for building apps in modern cloud environments. Read more at http://12factor.net/. Factor Relationship Codebase One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys...

Andrew Block of Red Hat will be speaking on this topic at DevOps Enterprise on 21 October - below is a primer from him on what he'll cover: Although the DevOps movement clearly and correctly centers around culture and the processes that guide or derail our success, the root of this shift often gets overlooked in favor of the symptoms. Sure, we all want our teams better aligned and more consistent, our processes streamlined and automated, our release cycles as...

It still amazes me how, after all the time and effort spent trying to figure out how to manage and execute technology projects, that some fundamental issues still remain. The foremost of these is: did we achieve the business value (when and for how much we said we would). Waterfall wasn’t great at this, Agile got better, now it’s on to DevOps. The problem is that most of us can provide examples where each of these approaches has failed and...

So here's are deal: We've created what we're calling "PaaS-Containers" in our IT production environment. It consists of core technologies like RHEL Atomic Host, Kubernetes, and Docker along with supporting CI/CD components like Jenkins together as part of an offering that supports the end-to-end automated deployments of applications from a code-commit event through automated testing and roll-out through multiple environments (dev, QA, stage, prod). Oh, did I mention that it's also integrated with our enterprise logging and monitoring as well...

EfficiOS is pleased to announce it is now providing LTTng packages for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, available today as part of its Enterprise Packages portal. EfficiOS specialises in the research and development of open source performance analysis tools. As part of its activities, EfficiOS develops the Linux Tracing Toolkit: next generation for which it provides enterprise support, training and consulting services. What is tracing? Tracing is a technique used to understand the behaviour of a software system. In this...

Cheers from Red Hat Summit and DevNation! I enjoyed sharing my experiences last year, and eagerly volunteered for the opportunity to do so again this year. I arrived in Boston yesterday at around lunch time, and didn't have an opportunity to attend many sessions yesterday. Today was somewhat similar, except– I caught one DevNation Session, the Middleware KeyNote and Summit General Session. Joel Tosi - There are No Environments Why I liked it? Right before the talk, I was recruiting...

This blog shows how to implement a relatively simple type safe DSL for the SalesForce Object Query Language (SOQL). SalesForce doesn’t provide much tooling specifically for the Scala world, which got me to writing some support myself. One of the most common ways to interact with the SalesForce API is using the Enterprise or the Partner WSDL. For the purpose of this article, I will be using the Enterprise WSDL. The main difference is that the Enterprise one is type-safe...

One of the most common threads I see when discussing devops with an enterprise is how quickly people forget that it’s supposed to make their lives easier. People may have picked up a book like The Phoenix Project and understood that automation is good. Perhaps engineers also get that businesses need to adapt quickly. What they forget is that devops is supposed to make their jobs easier and less stressful in the long run. I think the reason for this...

Imagine this: deploy an application from code-commit to qa, validate through automated testing, and then push the same image into production with no manual intervention, no outage, no configuration changes, and with full audibility through change records. A month-and-a-half ago, we formed a tiger team and gave them less than 90 days to do it. How? Build an end-to-end CI/CD environment leveraging RHEL Atomic 7.1 as the core platform and integrating with key technologies like git, Jenkins, packer.io, in a...

Red Hat's Arun Gupta, the Java guru, has this great talk at DevNation: Techniques such as automated builds and testing, continuous integration and continuous deployment allow software to be developed to a high standard and easily packaged and deployed to test environments, resulting in the ability to rapidly, reliably and repeatedly push out enhancements and bug fixes to customers at low risk and with minimal manual overhead. What container-agnostic tools are available for testing, continuous integration and deployment of a...

Asciidoctor encompasses and builds an ecosystem around Asciidoc for writing documentation, and well, writing anything. If you want to host your own blog, documentation site, book, ect.., Asciidoctor would be an excellent choice. If you want to do that in OpenShift, that is what I'm going to help you with. Getting Started Create a Sinatra ruby gear or on the command line. rhc app create mydocs sinatra ruby-2.0 The current sinatra-example is geared for ruby 1.9 current, https://github.com/openshift/. It could...

Just as with any transformational and disruptive movement, DevOps can be misunderstood or mischaracterized. Here are some of the top DevOps myths. DevOps replaces Agile DevOps is absolutely compatible with Agile. In fact, DevOps is the logical continuation of the Agile journey that was started in 2001, because we now know that the real definition of “done” is not when development is done coding. Instead, code is only “done” when it has been fully tested and is operating in production...

Deeper In the Engine Room Fundamentally changing how people work isn’t easy. When you’re midstream on a large strategic integration initiative, it’s even more difficult. (See here to get up to speed on how far we've come). Due to these challenges, there are a couple of things we kept in mind as we progressed as well as learning a few additional things. So we wanted to dive a bit deeper in the engine room and share with you two of...

In the current world of DevOps, Continuous Delivery, Microservices, and PaaS many organizations want to know how Software Governance practices and requirements fit. Some of this comes from a regulatory perspective, ensuring compliance (e.g HIPAA/PHI, SOX, PCI) and auditing requirements are met. Another perspective focuses on existing technology standards, design practices, and application architecture. At the same time developers and teams are being told to be more agile, adaptable, and self-directed. How do we achieve the latter while mitigating the...

Chapter 3 - In the Engine Room The old idiom “the devil’s in the details” couldn’t apply more to our initiative. We have six global development teams that were executing in waterfall that we’ve essentially restructured and told them to do agile. To catch up on how we got here see Chapter 1 and Chapter 2. Sound like a recipe for disaster? It could very well be, but seeing that we’re at a position where we can only improve, the...

In many organizations development teams are split up from systems administrators. Both teams focus mainly on their roles and responsibilities, but this can lead to problems. Tensions between the groups can hinder your organization's efforts in getting the best product to the consumers in the shortest amount of time. Below are quotes which are commonly come up between developers and systems administrators. “Why doesn't the development team have to be on call? It's their code that breaks the system.” “Why...

Containerizing things is particularly popular these days. Today we'll talk about the idioms we can use for containerization, and specifically play with apache spark and cassandra in our use case for creating easily deployed, immutable microservices. Note: This post is done using centos7 as a base for the containers, but these same recipes will apply with RHEL and Fedora base images. There are a few different ways to build a container. For example, for beginners, you can build a container...

Chapter 2 - Turning on a Dime Being able to respond quickly to a changing environment is what businesses aspire to but also something that is ingrained in our humanity. Having a large program that needs to adjust course in order to avoid disaster is easier said than done. Last time we fixed the radar and realized that without changing course, we were likely headed for just that disaster. Of course, knowing you need to do something and actually doing...

Chapter 1 Typically, the two biggest impediments to scaled agile and DevOps are over planning (including over thinking) and dogmatism. Which projects should we “pilot” for scaled agile, how long should the pilot run, what are the details of how we will implement, etc., etc. Of course, this over-thinking ultimately impedes the type of progress that scaled agile hopes to achieve in driving business results. But what if you don't over think and intentionally decide to be agile about being...

Things on my plate have finally settled down so I can complete the second part of this blog. See Using STOMP for testing Red Hat Message Servers (Part 1 – HornetQ). From downloading and starting the server I felt very confident in getting this to work quickly. I mean I had done the hard part already; writing the python script to produce/consume messages using STOMP. I was mistaken. Prior to working on this, I did several labs creating topics publishing/consuming...

Here are some quick references to see and learn from the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit hosted by Electric Cloud and Gene Kim's IT Revolution. First, a summary from the former. "What a great week we had at the DevOps Enterprise Summit! "The conference was completely sold out, and it was standing room only most of the time. We had many excellent examples of enterprises applying DevOps practices in the real-world, from the likes of Disney, GE and Nordstrom – just...

Traveling to San Francisco for the DevOps Enterprise conference has been a transformational event for me. Even though I had been aware of the success stories of companies like Target, Disney, Raytheon, it was quite a different matter to experience their stories in person. The most critical lesson from day one for me was to focus on the community to help you remain positive, motivated, educated and most importantly accelerate the adoption of the DevOps movement in your organization. Critical...