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...]
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.
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,
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
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.
“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.





