DevOps

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...

Interested in DevOps but not sure where to start? How about getting started in 3 steps? Check out this insightful Dr. Dobb's article by Langdon White, co-blogger and developer evangelist, and Robyn Bergeron, Fedora Project Leader. "DevOps need not be a top-down mandate to succeed. With these steps, developers and operations staff can lead the way implementing DevOps techniques and later show the organizational benefits to management." Enjoy the article - read it here ! We're beginning to assemble some...