The widespread success of cloud computing is driving the DevOps revolution in enterprise IT. Now as never before, development teams must communicate and collaborate in a dynamic, 24/7/365 environment. There is no time to wait for long development cycles that produce software that is obsolete at launch. DevOps may be disruptive, but it is essential.
The DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo--to be held November 4-6 at the Santa Clara Convention Center in the heart of Silicon Valley--will expand the DevOps community, enable a wide sharing of knowledge, and educate delegates and technology providers alike. Recent research has shown that DevOps dramatically reduces development time, the amount of enterprise IT professionals put out fires, and support time generally. Time spent on infrastructure development is significantly increased, and DevOps practitioners report more software releases and higher quality.Sep. 27, 2014 11:15 PM EDT Reads: 2,281
Software is eating the world. Companies that were not previously in the technology space now find themselves competing with Google and Amazon on speed of innovation. As the innovation cycle accelerates, companies must embrace rapid and constant change to both applications and their infrastructure, and find a way to deliver speed and agility of development without sacrificing reliability or efficiency of operations.
In her keynote DevOps Summit, Victoria Livschitz, CEO of Qubell, will discuss how IT organizations can automate just-in-time assembly of application environments – each built for a specific purpose with the right infrastructure, components, service, data and tools – and deliver this automation to developers as a self-service. Victoria’s keynote will include remarks by Kira Makagon, EVP of Innovation at RingCentral, and Ratnakar Lavu, EVP of Digital Technology at Kohl’s.
DevOps Summit at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley announced today a limited time free "Expo Plus" registration option through September. On site registration price of $1,95 will be set to 'free' for delegates who register during special offer. To take advantage of this opportunity, attendees can use the coupon code, and secure their registration to attend all keynotes, DevOps Summit sessions at Cloud Expo, expo floor, and SYS-CON.tv power panels. Registration page is located at the DevOps Summit site. Your DevOps Summit registration will also allow access to @ThingsExpo sessions and exhibits. Register For DevOps Summit "FREE" (limited time) ▸ Here
Despite the fact that majority of developers firmly believe that “it worked on my laptop” is a poor excuse for production failures, most don’t truly understand why it is virtually impossible to make your development environment representative of production.
When asked, the primary reason for the production/development difference everyone mentions is technology stack spec/configuration differences. While it’s true, thanks to the black magic of Cloud (capitalization intended) with a bit of wizardry from Chef, anyone can create a pretty reliable replica of the production environment on demand. The actual main issue with reliable production mirroring is complex, but can be described in one word – data.
SYS-CON Events announced today that AppDynamics will exhibit at DevOps Summit Silicon Valley, which will take place November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Digital businesses like yours need a way to turn data into actual results. AppDynamics is ushering in the next digital age – the age of the software-defined business.
AppDynamics’ mission is to deliver true application intelligence that helps your software-defined business run faster, leaner, and more efficient. You get the visibility and control you need to identify problems, find the root cause, and instantly connect the dots to get applications – and user transactions – on track and running flawlessly. AppDynamics provides the certainty that your most complex, business-critical applications are performing at the highest level and that the data and information generated by these applications can be harnessed for ongoing business advantage and impact.
DevOps Journal: Cloud, Big Data, and the IoT all carry disruption within enterprise IT. The same goes with DevOps. Which of these is the major disruptor, in your opinion?
Andi Mann: It may well be cloud, because it fundamentally enables all the rest. Cloud scale is why we are now considering Big Data; cloud connectivity is a key enabler of IoT; cloud agility has enabled DevOps to take hold.
But in the end, the cloud is “just” a platform, while the results of DevOps speak for themselves--like an average 20+% improvement in areas like revenue, new products, time to market, quality improvement, and more .
DevOps Journal: Cloud has been gaining traction for the longest time in this group, too.
Andi: Yes, it is still early days for DevOps, with a minority yet to adopt DevOps, so its biggest impact is yet to be seen.
This is an incredible opportunity to radically accelerate the pace of change, which in turn will upend all the other disruptions.
This is why I think DevOps...
These days, implementing automatic deployment for .NET web projects is easier than ever. Drastic improvements started in Visual Studio 2010 when basic deployment strategies and tools were incorporated into VS itself. Yet, documentation was quite poor at that time, so you had to scour the Internet to find good tutorials in blogs or conference videos. Things have been constantly improving since then; now, we have even more functionality available out-of-the-box and documentation provided in a way that allows you to get started from zero understanding of the process to working deployment in less than two days. Some good places to start are this tutorial for an end-to-end guide on configuration and MSDN’s overview. 
Having just joined a large technology company with 20 years of history, it would be suicidal to believe that I can immediately move the entire organization to the DevOps mindset and model. For those not familiar with the term, “Eventual Consistency” is a model used in distributed computing to ensure high availability. In this context, it’s a model for replicating best practices and automation across IT teams and business units.
The logical place to start with automation is the on-boarding of a new employee. That process should be as seamless and streamlined as possible, with a pristine source of truth. The goal is to populate a list of attributes and replicate them out to the various systems, and that’s applicable to either a new employee or an existing one who changes roles. Core infrastructure deployment is also at the base of the DevOps stack. Automate the provisioning of compute, network, and storage, and provide continuous insight into the utilization.
Founded in 1997, ActiveState is a global leader providing software application development and management solutions. The Company's products include: Stackato, a commercially supported Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that harnesses open source technologies such as Cloud Foundry and Docker; dynamic language distributions ActivePerl, ActivePython and ActiveTcl; and developer tools such as the popular Komodo Edit and Komodo IDE. Headquartered in Vancouver, Canada, ActiveState is trusted by customers and partners worldwide, across many industries including telecommunications, aerospace, software, financial services and CPG. ActiveState is proven for the enterprise: More than two million developers and 97% of Fortune 1000 companies use ActiveState's solutions to develop, distribute, and manage their software applications. Global customers like Bank of America, CA, Cisco, HP, Lockheed Martin and Siemens rely on ActiveState for faster development, ensuring IT governance and compliance, and accele...
In today's application economy, enterprise organizations realize that it's their applications that are the heart and soul of their business. If their application users have a bad experience, their revenue and reputation are at stake.
In his session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anand Akela, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Application Performance Management at CA Technologies, will discuss how a user-centric Application Performance Management solution can help inspire your users with every application transaction. 
SYS-CON Events announced today that Serena Software will exhibit at DevOps Summit Silicon Valley, which will take place on November 4–6, 2014, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA. Serena Software supports DevOps and Continuous Delivery by providing application deployment automation and software release management solutions to replace slow and error-prone manual processes. 2,500 enterprises around the world trust Serena to help them develop and deploy better software. 
Qubell, an innovator in application deployment and configuration management, empowers online companies to do what they have never been able to do before: put into consumers' hands innovative new features and services, almost as fast as they can conceive them, without sacrificing control, reliability or uptime. Qubell emerged from stealth in the summer of 2013 (see related press release) and announced that Kohl's completed its initial implementation (see press release). Founded by pioneers in enterprise cloud applications and services, Qubell has its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. For more information, visit qubell.com.
Enthusiasm for the Internet of Things has reached an all-time high. In 2013 alone, venture capitalists spent more than $1 billion dollars investing in the IoT space. With “smart” appliances and devices, IoT covers wearable smart devices, cloud services to hardware companies. Nest, a Google company, detects temperatures inside homes and automatically adjusts it by tracking its user’s habit. These technologies are quickly developing and with it come challenges such as bridging infrastructure gaps, abiding by privacy concerns and making the concept a reality. These challenges can’t be addressed without the kinds of agile software development and infrastructure approaches pioneered by the DevOps movement.
AppDynamics is the next-generation application performance management solution that simplifies the management of complex, business-critical apps. No one can stand slow applications - not IT operations and development teams, not the Chief Information Officer, and definitely not end users. With AppDynamics, no one has to tolerate slow performing apps ever again. AppDynamics customers include TiVo, AMICA Insurance, Expedia and StubHub.
This technical, but easy-reading story will likely become required reading for everyone here at Skytap. 
So exactly how do you kick start a DevOps strategy? For example, say your organization is tied down to a very sequential, but cumbersome Waterfall approach to software development that is wasting precious dollars and hindering productivity? In the following we’ve outlined some strategy tips that every business leader will need to consider as they start down the path of DevOps adoption.
Whatever steps your organization takes on the DevOps path of rolling out software faster and more effectively and deployment will require the support of your senior level management team. Explain the advantages of DevOps to the executive team in terms that they can easily understand. Provide an outline of how DevOps and cloud computing can save on ROI and get your new mobile application into the hands of th...
“DevOps” is one of those buzzwords that means everything and nothing at the same time. It is like the words “cloud,” “architecture,” and “Internet of Things”—terms so vague they lead to endless debates between IT people. DevOps seems to take this verbal sparring to a new level. On top of arguing over what it means, people also debate the proper method for delivering DevOps.
We (as in the industry at large) don't talk enough about applying architectural best practices with respect to emerging API and software-defined models of networking. But we should. That's because as we continue down the path that continues to software-define the network, using APIs and software development methodologies to simplify and speed the provisioning of network services, the more we run into if not rules, then best practices, that should be considered before we willy nilly start integrating all the network things.
This post is the first in a multi-part series of posts on the many options for collecting and forwarding log data from different platforms and the pros and cons of each. In this first post we will focus on Syslog, and will provide background on the protocol.
Syslog has been around for a number of decades and provides a protocol used for transporting event messages between computer systems and software applications. The protocol utilizes a layered architecture, which allows the use of any number of transport protocols for transmission of syslog messages. It also provides a message format that allows vendor-specific extensions to be provided in a structured way. Syslog is now standardized by the IETF in RFC 5424 (since 2009), but has been around since the 80's and for many years served as t...
One funny thing about DevOps is that it is often touted that constant, on-the-fly changes are the way of the future in operations, and DevOps enables those changes. While this sounds really good, and some organizations are actually doing this type of DevOps, I think it is time that, for the enterprise, we strongly question that premise.
While it is really very cool to think about moving an entire web server from a farm to the cloud with just a script, upgrading a system while it’s hot, or spinning up more instances of a server without having to configure anything, I propose that, for the average enterprise, it is simply not necessary.
Skytap recently announced the availability of a Docker template in the Skytap Cloud Public Template Library. Docker is an open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications. This new template allows you to easily experiment with or deploy Docker-based containers within Skytap Cloud.
A funny thing has happened in the technology world, the hype cycle has become far more than a cycle that you watch and smile at. It has become a sales frenzy, while people try to make a name and/or sell you stuff before the idea or product category has even solidified. You can see it all around you, and as has been going on for years, the trend seems to be worsening. I call it a funny thing because the truly revolutionary technologies – like server virtualization – really didn’t need a full-on hype cycle at all. Virtualization just kept growing year after year. People would declare “the year of virtualization!” and the year would pass, with more servers virtualized but no mass shift from one paradigm to the other.
Picking up where we last left off, Yung Chou and Keith Mayer continue our Accelerate DevOps with the Cloud series as they welcome Andrew Weiss from Microsoft Consulting Services as they show us how we can manage Docker containers using PowerShell DSC...(
In today’s software-defined business era, uptime and availability are key to the business survival. The application is the business. However, ensuring proper application performance remains a daunting task for their production environments, where do you start?
Enter Business Transactions.
By starting to focus on the end-user experience and measuring application performance based on their interactions, we can correctly gauge how the entire environment is performing. We follow each individual user request as it flows through the application architecture, comparing the response time to its optimal performance. This inside-out strategy allows AppDynamics to instantly identify performance bottlenecks and allows application owners to get to the root-cause of issues that much faster.
Elasticity is hailed as one of the biggest benefits of cloud and software-defined architectures. It's more efficient than traditional scalability models that only went one direction: up. It's based on the premise that wasting money and resources all the time just to ensure capacity on a seasonal or periodic basis is not only unappealing, but unnecessary in the age of software-defined everything.
The problem is that scaling down is much, much harder than scaling up. Oh, not from the perspective of automation and orchestration. That is, as the kids say these days, easy peasy lemon squeezy. APIs have made the ability to add and remove resources simplicity itself. There isn't a load balancing service available today without this capability - at least not one that's worth having.
The Internet of Things is only going to make that even more challenging as businesses turn to new business models and services fueled by a converging digital-physical world. Applications, whether focused on licensing, provisioning, managing or storing data for these "things" will increase the already significant burden on IT as a whole. The inability to scale from an operational perspective is really what software-defined architectures are attempting to solve by operationalizing the network to shift the burden of provisioning and management from people to technology.
In my first post, I discussed how software and various tools are dramatically changing the Ops department. This post centers on the automation process.
When I was younger, you actually had to build a server from scratch, buy power and connectivity in a data center, and manually plug a machine into the network. After wearing the operations hat for a few years, I have learned many operations tasks are mundane, manual, and often have to be done at two in the morning once something has gone wrong. DevOps is predicated on the idea that all elements of technology infrastructure can be controlled through code and automated. With the rise of the cloud it can all be done in real-time via a web service.
Infrastructure automation + virtualization solves the problem of having to be physically presen...
When Instagram was sold to Facebook in 2012, it employed only 13 people and maintained over 4 billion photos shared by its 80 million registered users.
Internally, Instagram was a small business. Externally, it was a web monster. Filling the gap between those two contradictory perspectives is DevOps.
Now to be fair, Instagram (like many other web monster properties today) has it easier than most other businesses because it supported only one application. One. That's in stark contrast to large enterprises which are, by most analyst firms, said to manage not one but one hundred and even one thousand applications - at the same time. Our own data indicates an average of 312 applications per customer, many of which are certainly integrated and interacting with one another.
Kirk Byers at SDN Central writes frequently on the topic of DevOps as it relates (and applies) to the network and recently introduced a list of seven DevOps principles that are applicable in an article entitled, "DevOps and the Chaos Monkey. " On this list is the notion of reducing variation. This caught my eye because reducing variation is a key goal of Six Sigma and in fact its entire formula is based on measuring the impact of variation in results. The thought is that by measuring deviation from a desired outcome, you can immediately recognize whether changes to a process improve the consistency of the outcome.Quality is achieved by reducing variation, or so the methodology goes. 
The epic changes brought about by mobile and cloud computing over the past 5 years have completely transformed the way organizations do business today. We now live in an age where mobile devices are the PCs of choice and mobile apps are the ubiquitous software of choice in this digital era. IT is shifting completely to the cloud and this new paradigm is leading organizations to adopt quicker and more agile frameworks for managing that software.
As a lifelong word junkie, I can honestly say that I’ve never seen more debate, argument, and failure to reach an agreed upon definition of a word than we’re seeing over the word “DevOps.” And while it can be frustrating to find a definition that works for you, and not be swayed by the next essay or cute video that gives a new interpretation—for nerds like me, the ever-changing, wildly different beliefs of DevOps’ meaning, and even its origin are an absolute blast to pour over.
Executives charged with building business-driven applications have an extremely challenging task ahead of them. However, the cavalry has arrived with useful tools and strategies built specifically to keep modern applications working efficiently.
We partnered with Gigaom Research to carefully grasp, and articulate, how these modern methodologies are improving the lives of IT professionals in today’s software-driven businesses. Typically, this knowledge has been so fragmented it’s been hard to find all this helpful knowledge in one cohesive area. Several blogs and research reports touch on various aspects, but what we learned from our research has been astounding.
Inarguably, the pressure is on "the network" to get in gear, so to speak, and address how fast its services can be up and running. Software-defined architectures like cloud and SDN have arisen in response to this pressure, attempting to provide the means by which critical network services can be provisioned in hours instead of days.
Much of the blame for the time it takes to provision network services winds up landed squarely on the fact that much of the network is comprised of hardware. Not just any hardware, mind you, but special hardware. Such devices take time to procure, time to unbox, time to rack and time to cable. It's a manually intensive process that, when not anticipated, can take weeks to acquire and get into place.
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