Posted by Andrew Phillips at around evening time: May 3rd, 2011
Earlier this year, I was invited to present a talk at Devopsdays Boston about deployment as the new build: how deployments are carried out now, how they will need to adapt in a more virtualized, on-demand application landscape and what fundamental improvements will need to come before deployment matures into the invisible, it just works™ experience build is today.
In this first post, we’ll focus on some of the changes and trends across the industry that have brought such increased business attention to the area of release, deployment and management of applications.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips late at night: December 8th, 2010
A couple of weeks ago, my ever-active colleagues Marco Mulder and Serge Beaumont organised an nlscrum meetup about “Combining Scrum and Operations”, with presentations by Jeroen Bekaert and devopsdays organiser Patrick Debois.
Unfortunately, I was late and only managed to catch the tail end of Patrick’s well-delivered talk explaining how Dev/ops can become Devops. Thankfully, the lively open space discussions that followed provided plenty of interesting insights, comments and general food for thought.
One recurring theme that particularly struck me was the comment, uttered with regret by many in Operations, that they would very much like to help and coordinate with the development teams but inevitably were always too busy keeping the production environment up and running.
In other words, helping prepare for new releases might be desirable, but achieving the five nines, or whatever SLA Operations has committed to1, will always be paramount.
This is a fallacy! Indeed, one of the core realisations of the “Devops mindset”, to me, is that 99.999…% uptime is not an end in itself, but a means to an end: delivering the greatest business value possible. And aiming for the highest possible availability may not be the best way to go about it!2
Posted by Reint Jan Holterman around lunchtime: June 28th, 2010
Virtualization and cloud computing have exploded over the past few years. A recent study shows that 90 percent of businesses have implemented server virtualization at some level and Gartner estimates the current market for cloud services is $46.4 billion and will reach $150.1 billion by 2013. With other estimates saying business applications can be made three to five times less expensive and consumer applications five to ten times cheaper, it’s no wonder it’s taking off.
Among other benefits, virtualization and cloud computing are helping companies remove physical dependencies from network resources, respond faster to changing IT-infrastructure needs, and lower overall costs. While this is all well and good, as companies add more and more virtual resources to their network, they struggle to keep track of them. The reason? Virtual sprawl.
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Posted by Andrew Phillips mid-morning: March 9th, 2010
From Java EE to Google App Engine to GigaSpaces, the idea of developing against a middleware or “infrastructure” API is well established in the Java world.
But these are fixed environments. With the (re-)advent of virtualization, it is now becoming feasible to package and rapidly provision your own environment, custom-designed to meet your application’s needs.
As the big middleware vendors are realizing, it is not just possible to create such Virtual Appliances, but necessary: a production app’s setup inevitably includes more than just a couple of EARs.
Here, we’ll look at the current state of cloud and middleware deployment tooling, examine possible future developments and draw parallels between deployment and related processes.
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