The Pitfalls of Feature Branching

Working with feature branching reminds me of building a house. You don’t see general contractors insisting on making copies of their own houses when remodeling. Working in the house at the same time forces them to talk to each other and come to an agreement over a conflict. Imagine …

HTTP Monitor: What It Is and Why You Need It

One day, one of our main web APIs was down, and the first person that knew it was my boss. We were so worried about bringing the API up that we never paid attention to how he was able to be one step ahead of us. There were times when …

The Top 5 Use Cases for Feature Flags

The concept of feature flags is really simple: it’s a conditional block of code that you strategically put somewhere to enable or disable features of your app easily. But knowing the top use cases for feature flags helps you to plan ahead and be more deliberate with their implementation …

Sexy But Useless DevOps Trends

What’s sexy but useless? A Ferrari in a traffic jam. It’s beautiful, but all that power means nothing. When trapped in traffic, it can’t live up to its full potential.

Same with DevOps. While there are some critical DevOps functions that you absolutely need, there are some …

5 Critical DevOps Practices

DevOps is like pizza. We can’t think of pizza without considering critical ingredients: dough, sauce, cheese, and your preferred choice for vegetables and proteins. Everyone likes different toppings. In my case, I can’t think about pizza without extra cheese and meat. You might choose differently, but I think …

Is DevOps Possible in Government Agencies?

Let’s not beat around the bush. Yes, it’s possible.

And before you close this tab because you’re not working for the government, let me say that what you’ll read in this post will provide a good example of how big organizations could implement DevOps—organizations where …

Why IT and Software Delivery Service Cycles Are Getting So Much Faster?

I had the opportunity to attend Amazon's AWS re:Invent conference this year. The number of new services they launched was amazing. And in November, Microsoft held the virtual conference called Connect(). They, too, announced plenty of new initiatives. But what does this have to do with delivery service cycles …

How Does DevOps Handle Change Management?

Tools today are wonderful. They help ease your task load, letting you get things done with only a few clicks. I remember reading a potential horror story about a developer promoting a change in the database to a production environment. He was trying to add a column to a table …

Integrated Security: DevSecOps 101

Everyone at some time or another has received an email from a service saying their password has been reset because data was compromised. Security has always been a big topic in IT, and it’s sad that some companies don’t take security as seriously as others. New vulnerabilities are …

The Business Case for Container Technology

When you see the word “containers”, you probably immediately think of Docker. But containers are not a new concept. It dates back to Linux-VServer, initially released in 2001. Then in 2008, containers improved with the release of the Linux Container Project (LXC). Docker came along in 2013, making things easier …