Why Transformational Leadership Is Needed in Every DevOps Initiative

Every DevOps initiative needs support from leadership. Without DevOps leadership support, teams won’t be able to move forward smoothly. Leaders have a significant impact on results—not just with DevOps, but with every change initiative in an organization.

This time we won’t talk about DevOps as a tool …

Pitfalls with DevOps at Scale

Let's get started by defining what DevOps is.

I know, I know; there are tons of definitions. But the one I like most is from Gene Kim:

DevOps is those set of cultural norms and technology practices that enable the fast flow of planned work from, among others, development, through …

Deployment Smells: The 5 Most Common Deployment Mistakes

Deployment shouldn't be the most nerve-racking task for sysadmins when releasing software, but many times it is.

If we’re deploying application changes to a beta system, we don’t care that much if the system goes down. Neither will your users—they know that beta means “expect problems from …

A Detailed Guide to Canary Deployments

Every time we need to deploy to production, we worry about how changes will affect the user experience. No matter what technique or strategy you use to make deployments, there are going to be times when the things that can go wrong will go wrong. It’s Murphy’s law …

Amplify Feedback with Continuous Performance

As cloud becomes the norm, we’re letting others manage much of our infrastructures for us. Cloud providers offer common metrics like CPU, memory, storage, and networking so that you can stay up to date on the health of your system. And we worry less and less about those metrics …

Why You Need an Error Budget and How to Make It Work

How many times have you seen Google go down? Not many, I bet. You might not even notice it if it happened. If you did, you’d probably assume it’s an internet connection problem.

But Google isn’t perfect. As Werner Vogels says, “Everything fails, all the time.” If …

Choosing a Deployment Strategy: A Manager’s Guide

Some time ago, I was in charge of deploying to the main system in the company I was working at. Back in those days, I had the bad habit of doing deployments manually by copying/pasting assemblies and then RDPing into the servers to update it with the latest changes …

Which DevOps Metrics Matter?

Some time ago, I decided to start dieting for the millionth time. All previous tries were a complete failure. But this last time was different.

It was different because not only was I going to a nutritionist, but also every time I visited her, she took my measurements. That way …

Introducing Different Testing Strategies Into Your Delivery Pipeline

With the rise of DevOps, everyone’s talking about delivering quickly. But while speed is important, so is confidence. Testing will help you increase confidence, and without tests, you can’t trust the deployment pipeline. Just like divers won’t explore the ocean without oxygen tanks they can trust, ops …

How Does DevOps Help You Make Database Changes?

Databases have always been treated with a certain level of respect---sometimes to the point that when we want to make a change to the database, we have to create scripts that contain all the commands that need to be executed in the destination environment. Of course, these sets of commands …