Test Data Management and Its Role in DevOps

In my career, there've been many times when I've experienced the false joy of my code change being ready to be released to production. I say false joy because everything worked as expected on my computer, in dev, in testing and also staging. But in production, my recent code changes …

Growing a High-Performance DevOps Culture

Culture is one of those things where we all know what it is but can’t explain it. Well, according to Wikipedia, culture is “the social behavior and norms found in human societies.” But in simple words, it’s all about people: how they interact, how they behave, how they …

But I’m a Dev, Not a DevOps!

My experience with DevOps began before I even knew there was a name for the approach, when my boss asked me for some help in operations. The company I worked for was small at that time, so I always had the opportunity to get my hands dirty in the release …

Deploy to Production: 5 Tips to Make It Smoother

Who hasn’t had issues when deploying a software change to production? No one.

I once accidentally deleted a bin folder from a .NET application in one of four servers when deploying a change. The site was working intermittently as a consequence, so I had to check all the servers …

Agile and DevOps: Why Are You Keeping Them Separate?

I first heard about agile many years ago. I learned then that the movement started in 2001 when a group of professionals met and created the Agile Manifesto. The manifesto describes a way of developing software faster by focusing more on how to provide value than anything else.

Personally, when …

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 …