BLOGS

08 OCTOBER, 2019 by Michiel Mulders Preamble You’ve probably seen some recent articles asserting that the world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil—it’s data. New internet titans like Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft look unstoppable. In fact,...

25 SEPTEMBER, 2019 by Mark Henke DevOps is overall a healthy practice for most development teams, but it doesn’t come for free. Enterprises are eager to adopt the practice but their tools often lag behind DevOps practices. This is a bit like walking out into the...

25 AUGUST, 2019 by Jane Temov Data security, The problem is scale & a lack of bees One of the biggest challenges of securing one’s enterprise data is the sheer volume. Think about it. Hundred (perhaps Thousands) of Applications, Thousands (perhaps Tens of Thousands)...

13 AUGUST, 2019 by Jane Temov So, you’ve been asked to write a “Test Environment Management Plan”? Or perhaps you just want to write a plan to baseline your current non-production processes, outline future test environment strategy and/or educate those around you. *...

02 AUGUST, 2019 by Eric Olsson Preamble Software is buggy. It's a bold claim, I know. Sarcasm aside, the battle to keep your applications up and running is ongoing. Wouldn't it be nice if you had a way to eliminate an entire class of bugs from your application?...

15 JULY, 2019 by Peter Morlion Martin Fowler AntiPattern "An antipattern is a solution that initially looks like an attractive road lined with flowers... but further on leads you into a maze filled with monsters."   Since the dawn of computers, we’ve always had to...

26 June, 2019 by Justin Reynolds Gone are the days of monolithic software applications. In today’s microservices-and-continuous-integration driven world, where apps run in hybrid cloud environments and users engage with them on any device and on any underlying...

03 JULY, 2019 by Justin Reynolds Even since the agile manifesto was published in 2001, software development has never been the same. In a pre-agile world, software was released in monolithic packages every year or every two years. The agile approach to development...

20 MAY, 2019 by Mark Henke It’s a great step when teams deliberately manage their deployments instead of treating them as second-class citizens to writing code. But there are many pitfalls to managing deployments effectively. Many things lurk, waiting to trip us up....

08 MAY, 2019 by Mark Henke Taking enterprise release management seriously is a great step toward helping our organization flourish. Embracing release management will allow us to make the invisible visible. We’ll be able to effectively manage how work flows through our...

04 MAY, 2019 by Rodney Smith If you work in an organization that uses the scaled agile framework (SAFe), chances are it's not a small company. It's enterprise-y. It's probably gone through some growing pains, which is a good problem to have in the business sense. The...

29 APRIL, 2019 by Carlos "Kami" Maldonado "DevOps at scale" is what we call the process of implementing DevOps culture at big, structured companies. Although the DevOps term was coined almost 10 years ago, even in 2018 most organizations still haven't completely...

24 APRIL, 2019 by Mark Robinson It’s the normal case with software buzzwords that people focus so much on what something is that they forget what it is not. DevOps is no exception. To truly embrace DevOps and cherish what it is, it’s important to comprehend what it...

16 April, 2019 by Eric Goebelbecker Your organization is in the midst of an agile transformation. You know that agile is the way to go, and you're looking forward to, or maybe already reaping, some of the benefits. Who can argue with what agile brings to the table?...

28 March, 2019 by Christian Meléndez Even though containers are different from virtual machines (VMs), most of the metrics you get from a container are pretty similar to the ones you get from a VM or a physical server. What’s different is the meaning a metric has in a...

21 MARCH, 2019 by Mark Henke Preamble These days, deploying our services to the cloud just makes sense. Deploying to the cloud means you’re letting someone else handle low-level infrastructure costs, which gives us incredible flexibility. And with such flexibility...

15 March, 2019 by Vlad Georgescu Bimodal Explained *From a Release Management Perspective “The Hare and the Tortoise” is Aesop’s most famous fable. In it, we find two characters: one fast (the hare), and one slow (the tortoise). They run a race against each other,...

11 March, 2019 by Sylvia Froncza An IT and Test Environment Perspective Traditionally, test environments have been difficult to manage. For one, data exists in unpredictable or unknown states. Additionally, various applications and services contain unknown versions or...

    04   March, 2019 by Eric Goebelbecker Preamble “IT & Test Environments are a changing!” The days off Physical Servers has transitioned to Virtual, Which is transitioning to Containers, and now we have "Serverless". It is all getting very complicated … Or is it?  ...

03 February, 2019 By Christian Meléndez. Preamble: Following on from our previous blog on Enterprise Release Management bench-marking, Christian talks about the “sister disciple” of deployment management and more specifically the top 5 metrics one could use to better...

29 JANUARY, 2019 By Sylvia Fronczak.   Anti-patterns often arise when developers find creative or outside-the-box uses for a technology - or when they find workarounds for limitations that were specifically put in place by the creators of the technology to prevent...

08 JANUARY, 2019 By Eric Goebelbecker. New technologies and new ways of doing things are continually impacting the way our IT Environments evolve and how we do things. One area of growing popularity is Microservices.   Why Use Microservices? Why should you start using...

09 DECEMBER, 2018 by Sylvia Fronczak DevOps promises greater innovation, speed, and automation—along with a more engaged and motivated team. With this list of benefits, many organizations are working to bring DevOps to their teams. However, with all the companies...

22 OCTOBER, 2018 by Eric Goebelbecker Containers are nothing new. Depending on how you look at it, you can make a case for them being around at least since 1982. But since the introduction of Docker in 2013, they’ve enjoyed a surge of popularity. Why? In just a few...

15 OCTOBER, 2018 by Christian Meléndez Preamble A key part of Enterprise IT Intelligence is understanding you Cloud Resources. And where better to start than using the "elegant" concept of Tagging. A concept used across the various cloud and infrastructure management...

26 SEPTEMBER, 2018 by Niall Crawford World Quality Report 2018-19 The results from the 10th anniversary edition of the World Quality Report are conclusive: 99% of respondents are now using DevOps practices in their organizations. It appears the focus is no longer on...

14 September, 2018 by Sylvia Fronczak Incorporating DevOps into your organization is not a zero-sum game. It is a journey. And like most journeys, it can be measured. When measuring your DevOps journey, you need to show progress as well as setbacks. Additionally, it's...

03 SEPTEMBER, 2018 by Niall Crawford Preamble All too often we see companies embracing agile by breaking up their teams up into tribes and letting them go for it. An approach which has the “early benefits” of appearing like your teams are doing the right-thing...

25 August, 2018 by Niall Crawford A short article by our CIO on why Environment Mapping (or call it "good" Configuration Management if you wish) is so essential to controlling an organizations IT delivery capability and cost optimization.   Why Map your IT...

26 JULY, 2018 by Niall Crawford Deploying an instance in AWS, Azure or Google is typically a straightforward process. However, architecting, managing and optimizing your end-to-end platforms that consist of application tiers, data tiers, integration points and...