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 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...]

Forecast for Business is Cloudy: Whether You’re Ready or Not

Cloud computing is rapidly pushing companies for new models to virtualize physical resources, allow for more efficient use of servers and networks, and provide an ability to scale resources based on demand. Gone are the days of building infrastructure for the moments of highest demand, which then sits unused at off-peak times. We’re moving into the age of elastic computing that can happen on-premise as private cloud, off-premise as public cloud, or as a hybrid cloud mixture of the two.

Once the buzz for the bright, shiny object wears off (as it always does), we’re left with the reality that any new way of managing information technology comes with a different set of challenges we’ve ever faced before. With cloud computing, the challenge is squarely centered around integration.

It has to be faster and better

The world doesn’t stand still, and simply integrating to stay abreast of new deployment models won’t cut the mustard. There needs to be a way of integrating that takes into account increased and more complex connectivity, big data’s volume, velocity and variety, complex event processing, and driving it all, real-time analytics that are business-user friendly. Each of those requirements is a sizable challenge unless companies find cleaner, faster, streamlined, and flexible ways to integrate. [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...]

Federated Cloud – What does it mean?

This is a confusing term. And, to complicate it further, it’s changing quite a lot.

Originally you have Public, Private and Hybrid clouds. Hybrid clouds were those that spanned  private and public environments. Essentially, the scale out scenario or cloud burst scenario was often used to describe peak load expansion to a public cloud environment (think holiday sales promotion requiring more horsepower).

Federated cloud usually describes joining up and managing multiple public cloud environments – but there is nothing to prohibit joining multiple public clouds to a private one (so some overlap with Hybrid).

The central idea is that you have multiple IaaS and PaaS environments in the cloud. An application or a set of services may require the joining up and managing multiple PaaS and IaaS environments.

Now there are two classic scenarios: [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.

 

Closing the Big Data Loop

It has been two weeks since TUCON 2012, the TIBCO user conference held annually in Las Vegas, Nevada. TIBCO is well-known as an integration company but used the event to demonstrate its broad platform approach to the biggest challenges of today, like digital customer experience, loyalty, and the topic of this article, Big Data.

The TIBCO CTO, Matt Quinn spoke about the patterns hiding within the rapidly increasing amounts of data flowing across the enterprise. Quinn made an important distinction between data at rest, information sitting in databases or flat files waiting to be queried, and data in motion, which includes streaming data and data stored in-memory (also known as cache).

Quinn made the point that it takes analytics like those offered within TIBCO’s Spotfire product to be able to see what would be invisible to people trying to keep up with the increasing deluge of information. To Quinn, the smart enterprise finds patterns in historical and machine data (log files that up until recently weren’t mined for patterns) that provide insight that can be applied to data that’s coming at today’s “full speed.” [Read more...]

Day Two of TUCON 2012: Going Deeper into “Everything is Different”

Raj Verma, TIBCO CMO

Day Two of TUCON 2012 continued to be a showcase of the technology that responds to the conference theme, “Everything is Different.” The day started with a recap of Day One by Chief Marketing Officer Raj Verma before moving to the first of the day’s themes, social media and collaboration.

But before the video rolled, James Murren, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of MGM Resorts International made an appearance. He talked about how proud he was to host the event and how pleased he is to have TIBCO as his technology platform and partner in business.

Scary Statistics

Next, John Shewell, Director, Product Management at McKesson Provider Technologies took the audience through the “scary statistics” of healthcare cost and delivery. He pointed out that 75% of healthcare dollars are spent on patients with one or more chronic conditions, many of which can be prevented. Shewell also noted that half of healthcare spending is used to treat just 5% of the population. [Read more...]