DevOps

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...

If you ask three people what they think DevOps is, you’ll get three answers: “a way of running an IT department”, “a culture”, “something to do with Phoenix”. Ask a fourth person and you might hear “You can use OpenShift for that”. To see what DevOps has to do with the world’s favourite PaaS, I went along to the “OpenShift By Red Hat: The PaaS for DevOps” technical deep dive in Brisbane that was given as part of a road...

Donnie and I had a chance to catch up at PuppetConf last month (where Donnie introduced me to sour beer - let's just say it's good to try new things.) :) As usual, Donnie does a great job distinguishing between the DevOps and cloud universes - it's definitely worth the read. Donnie Berkholz's Story of Data: The parallel universes of DevOps and cloud developers When I think about people who live in that foggy world between development and operations, I...

Red Hat is a co-sponsor at the Gene Kim conference, DevOps Enterprise | The Agile, Continuous Delivery and DevOps Transformation Summit, and Red Hat's Bill Montgomery will be talking Red Hat's own DevOps experiences in the session Red Hat IT’s DevOps Journey: Year One Retrospective. Session Abstract: Red Hat is the world’s leading provider of open source enterprise IT products and services, with over 6,000 associates globally and annual revenues exceeding $1.5B. As of October 2014, Red Hat IT will...

From Barry Manilow to Kiss, to Mary J. Blige and everyone in-between, people have been singing Talk to me for decades. And is it any wonder? Often we don't feel heard or feel that we don't understand what people are trying to say or do. In the fast pace of today's business, effective communication to get everyone on the same page quickly is essential. Needless to say, this isn't always easy. Given that we have to communicate effectively and the...

Our infrastructure and how we continuously integrate and deliver (CI/CD) our code changes with each piece of work we finish. We fully expect that it will change even more as we bring up A|B functionality & enhance our testing process. However, we thought it would be fun to give a closer look into the team's pipeline from checking out code to integration testing. Check out code We use a combination of github.com and an internal installation of gitolite, depending on...

ABSTRACT: The promise of DevOps is to quickly deliver robust features and new value to the marketplace. To realize this, organizations must do more than simply improve configuration management processes and coordination between development and operations teams. They must also test application changes in a realistic, repeated manner. Without testing, quality problems will quickly undermine any productivity gains. Learn how continuous integration and in-container testing—as well as testing applications in an environment that closely mimics a production environment—can ensure high...

abstract: The world is moving fast. Is your IT team keeping up? Are you able to deliver the new applications and services that the business and your customers are demanding? The old ways of doing application development and deliver are falling behind as the world zooms by. Waterfall development and departmental silos are rapidly becoming boat anchors for IT. In this webinar, you will learn about three exciting new game-changers for IT that can help meet these new challenges: Agile...

Abstract: Netflix designs our systems and deployment processes to help the service survive both catastrophic events like zone and regional outages and less catastrophic events like network latency and random instance death. This system has previously been described as "dream devops". In our data centers we had monolithic systems and centralized operations. When we moved to the cloud we fully embraced the distributed services and the devops model. Now, with experience, we've uncovered real-world challenges with the devops model and...

Hey, Boston! DevOpsDays will be in town next week and is sold out (good news, but bad if you're missing it). Red Hat is a sponsor, so we'll see you there (We've got schwag.) Here's the event home page and their program agenda.

As we have discussed in the past, Team Inception has been working on a release engine to automate RPM code deployments within Red Hat IT. On July 8 we passed a significant milestone by successfully using Release Engine in our QA environment. This was an incredible achievement which included a number of feature requests, defect fixes, and collaboration between multiple teams to produce an open source application that will a ddress growing needs internally in Red Hat IT . We...

The JBoss team, with backing from the OpenShift team, are presenting a series of webinars focused on bringing DevOps practices to Java EE focused organizations. The first webinar is next Thursday, July 31. Sign up to discover how DevOps and Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform can accelerate your ability to bring features to the market. DevOps for your Java EE organization webinar series The DevOps approach is compelling. It promises organizations the agility to seize opportunities and rapidly deliver...

Continued from part 1. The test web service The test web service implements a simple file cache storing up to 10 copies of any given named file. Uploading copies beyond the 10th one causes the oldest version to be discarded. The server supports a variety of requests allowing a new version of a file to be uploaded an existing file version to be downloaded listing of the name and version counts of all files in the cache deletion of all...

Is Java really greedy for memory? Java is often blamed for being an over-hungry consumer of physical memory. Indeed, until recently our OpenShift team were tempted to draw this same conclusion. OpenShift is Red Hat's open source Platform as a Service (PaaS) product. You can access it via public Cloud infrastructure managed by Red Hat (OpenShift Online) or even deploy it to your own data centre/private cloud (OpenShift Enterprise). OpenShift Online provides simple and manageable scalability to anyone developing and...

Part four of a four-part series on DevOps with Gene Kim and Red Hat IT. Part 1: Getting DevOps Off the Ground Part 2: The Importance of Partnership in DevOps Part 3: A DevOps Implementation Strategy Part 4: DevOps Successes and Failures Panelists: Bill Montgomery: Manager, Red Hat IT Steve Milner: Engineer, Red Hat IT Jen Krieger: Product Owner, Red Hat IT Tim Bielawa: Engineer, Red Hat IT Chris Murphy: Engineer, Red Hat IT Introduction: Gene Kim, award-winning CTO and...

If you're "dipping a toe" into DevOps, a very helpful article by Red Hat's Diane Mueller, OpenShift Community Manager. How to Bring DevOps to your Enterprise with PaaS | Openshift Blog.

Part three of a four-part series on DevOps with Gene Kim and Red Hat IT. Part 1: Getting DevOps Off the Ground Part 2: The Importance of Partnership in DevOps Part 3: A DevOps Implementation Strategy Part 4: DevOps Successes and Failures Panelists: Bill Montgomery: Manager, Red Hat IT Steve Milner: Engineer, Red Hat IT Jen Krieger: Product Owner, Red Hat IT Tim Bielawa: Engineer, Red Hat IT Chris Murphy: Engineer, Red Hat IT Introduction: Gene Kim, award-winning CTO and...

This is part two of a four-part series on DevOps with Gene Kim and Red Hat IT's Inception Team. Part 1: Getting DevOps Off the Ground Part 2: The Importance of Partnership in DevOps Part 3: A DevOps Implementation Strategy Part 4: DevOps Successes and Failures Panelists: Bill Montgomery: Manager, Red Hat IT Steve Milner: Engineer, Red Hat IT Jen Krieger: Product Owner, Red Hat IT Tim Bielawa: Engineer, Red Hat IT Chris Murphy: Engineer, Red Hat IT Introduction...