Steve Leung

Steve Leung is Director of Cloud Product Marketing at TIBCO Software. He has over 15 years of experience in the enterprise middleware with a focus on financial services. Prior to joining TIBCO Software, Steve has been with companies such as Oracle, BEA and webMethods helping global organizations design and build complex enterprise architectures. Steve is a business technologist that has held multiple roles as a consultant to business development helping customers achieve business value from technology. Steve holds a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science from Binghamton University.


Key to Better Cloud Development is More Communication

We recently hosted a thought-provoking discussion about continuous delivery for DevOps with author Gene Kim; Senior Director of Engineering, John Skovron; and Tooling Chief Architect with HP, Steven Witkop.

Companies need this kind of collaboration and coming together in their IT departments so development and operations teams can make processes more efficient. Everyone thinks they have the answers, but it takes balance and listening to different viewpoints to make DevOps a great solution that will add value to an organization.

Ops is a constraint

When it comes to starting an IT project, there can be some large roadblocks to development and constraints to the value stream. People often think any improvement not made at the constraint is an illusion — not an actual solution to the problem. If a company fixes something before the constraint, they only create more work piled up before the actual constraint. If something is fixed after the constraint, the company will be starved for work. [Read more...]

Five Things You Need to Know About DevOps from Author Gene Kim

I asked Gene Kim, researcher and co-author of The Phoenix Project, five thought-provoking, high-level questions about how DevOps and Platform as a Service (PaaS) can benefit 21st-century enterprises right now and in the long term.

Steve Leung – What are some of the most common challenges for Development & Operations teams today?

Gene Kim – There is a downward spiral that will occur in almost every IT organization if left unchecked. It is so powerful that it pre-ordains horrible outcomes, if not abject failure. It happens in both large and small organizations, for-profit and non-profit, across every type of industry.

The story almost always starts in IT Operations when we have to support fragile infrastructure. Why do we call it fragile? Because every time anyone touches it, it breaks horrifically, causing an epic amount of unplanned work for everyone.

All this unplanned work makes it impossible to get our planned work done, and because what is fragile are some of the most important applications, the organization becomes unable to achieve the commitments that they promised the outside world, whether it’s customers, analysts or Wall Street. [Read more...]

Five Key DevOps Questions Answered by an HP Chief Architect

Continuing this series of five key questions on the topic of DevOps (see yesterday’s answers by a Director of Engineering), today I asked Steve Witkop, Tooling Chief Architect with HP, five thought-provoking questions.

Steve Leung – What are some of the most common challenges for Development & Operations teams today?

Steve Witkop – Balance is the most common challenge, with change management on one side and continuous delivery on the other.

In this context, the objective of change management is to ensure standardized methods and procedures are used for efficient and prompt handling of all changes to control IT infrastructure to minimize the number and impact of related incidents upon service. Changes in IT infrastructure may arise reactively in response to problems or externally imposed requirements, e.g. legislative changes, or proactively from seeking improved efficiency and effectiveness, or to enable or reflect business initiatives, or from programs, projects or service improvement initiatives.

Change Management can ensure standardized methods, processes and procedures which are used for all changes, facilitate efficient and prompt handling of all changes, and maintain the proper balance between the need for change and the potential detrimental impact of changes. Keeping up with the pace of change both business and IT and more importantly significant shifts (regulatory, economic, etc.). [Read more...]

Five Things You Need to Know About DevOps from a Director of Engineering

I asked John Skovron, Senior Director of Engineering at TIBCO, five thought-provoking, high-level questions about how DevOps and Platform as a Service (PaaS) can benefit 21st-century enterprises right now and in the long term.

Steve Leung – What are some of the most common challenges for Development & Operations teams today?

John Skovron – The common challenge is definitely the accelerating pace of software development and deployment. Agile methods have made it possible to design and implement better software much faster. With an “as-a-service” approach, whether for private or public consumption, delivery of new features and versions can accelerate from once-a-quarter to once-a-week, once-a-day, and even multiple deployments a day, utilizing A/B testing or other rapid validation techniques.

Steve Leung – Who should be driving the changes needed, business or IT? What is the role of the CIO in this transformation?

John Skovron – IT should drive the changes – first of all, by aligning IT as closely as possible with the business. And certainly, the CIO should be leading the charge – any CIO who is satisfied with a status quo of sludgy, slow deployments should be brushing up his resume, because he’s going to be looking for a new job soon. [Read more...]

IT Can’t Evolve Until They See the Forest for the Trees

DevOps is more than just a hot IT buzzword. Unlike other “flash in the pan” tech trends, DevOps is a real chance for companies to evolve their IT departments. In his book, The Phoenix Project, Gene Kim explains how to help overcome a glaring issue in IT that many are not addressing.

IT operations are necessarily a fundamental component of any modern-day business and must be integrated seamlessly with business processes. This includes reorganizing traditional IT for increased agility, enabling companies to easily leverage continuous delivery. As quintessential as IT is to modern businesses, there is a fundamental problem that companies are merely perpetuating, rather than trying to fix.

Stop and Smell the IT Roses

As companies reorganize themselves, each unit tries to fix its own issues in isolation, which limits growth to a small part of an overarching problem. For instance, compliance teams deal with compliance challenges, process teams want more visibility, and everyday firefights with complex systems are only understood by a few key people. This contributes to larger IT problems, as their main goal is to be responsive to the business. With this day-to-day, quarter-to-quarter mentality, no one has the opportunity to step back and take a strategic look at the larger picture. [Read more...]

Avoid the Noid: Unfreeze Your Code and Prevent a DevOps Meltdown

Freeze! With that phrase, a criminal just got apprehended, a child stopped behaving badly, and programmers stopped coding. For the coders, they aren’t about to face punishment like the other two, provided the code works. When it comes to a continuous deployment model for cloud-based projects, it’s the developers’ job to implement and push out changes to the operations team as quickly as possible. In the event of a “code freeze,” operation teams sync all the code from each individual, place it in a repository and test to see if it works. If everything integrated together doesn’t work, it’s back to square one of the software development cycle.

Continuous development needs to be just that: continuous. It can’t be a game of red light/green light, which only proves to be a waste of time and money. Virtualization, configuration management, and other tools are components of a larger, more agile, development and operations (DevOps) solution– a solution that can update and synchronize changes to production on the fly.

Code FrostBite

If not handled effectively, the software development cycle can be very costly. After a “code freeze,” code must progress through several phases in an organization’s application platforms before the deployment stage. These steps are integration testing to flush out the code, user acceptance testing to flush out functionality, performance testing, staging and disaster recovery to see if what is built can withstand production, and finally production. [Read more...]

Stop Using “Cloud” Wrong and Find Out What it Really Means

cloud question“The Cloud” sounds like a mysterious and mystical place beyond reach and for that reason, and like so much business jargon, it is an overused term. People throw the term around without actually specifying what they mean. There are actually many types of clouds, in the sky and in computing. For private cloud computing, people need start defining exactly what service they are talking about. Even within the private cloud, there are different categories and Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one such sub-cloud. No longer will anyone look to the sky and see white fluffy cotton floating around.

The PaaS layer of the private cloud provides an agile, self-service, consumption-based resource which allows for sharing on an internal customer data center. This platform provides templates and tools which companies use to automate many processes that are usually done manually. Development and operations (DevOps) and administrators are then able to move quickly and more efficiently with fewer errors in creating custom applications or making changes. As previous methods have only resulted in wasted resources and a lack of centrality, DevOps is in need of a fresh approach. [Read more...]

Simplifying Operations – The “How” Matters

I just got off with the phone with a customer discussing how TIBCO Silver® Fabric could impact their environment. The discussion started like most, where there was interest in cloud enabling their operations. They stated the reason they were looking at cloud computing was because they are under continued pressures to examine new avenues of simplification and streamlining tasks. They shared some details about the alternatives they are looking at. While I was explaining the TIBCO approach, I discovered a simple truth about vendor solutions. All too often, DNA of the vendor dictates how solutions are designed. At TIBCO, we have many years delivering sophisticated middleware and complex architectures in heterogeneous environments. In other words, TIBCO is highly accustomed to adding value while not being able to control the rest of the ecosystem.

When it comes to delivering value through streamlining operations, the question is: “Whose perspective are you streamlining?” Infrastructure operators? Middleware operators? Developer operators? The TIBCO solution, Silver Fabric, looks at streamlining from the perspective of middleware operations. As a middleware operator, there are a number of things to consider: What is the runtime architecture of the platform I am supporting? How does it scale? How does it restart? How do I deploy application code to the platform? How do I determine if the platform is healthy? The combination of these details creates a number of challenges toward streamlining operations across a heterogeneous middleware environment. This is a key differentiator for Silver Fabric, where we effectively allow operations manage vastly different middleware architectures in a consistent streamlined framework. By doing this, we’ve created the ability for middleware operations to create greater value for the organization such as: delivering a developer self-service portal, create multi-purpose environments and create a foundation to become a Cloud Service Broker.