The plan is to produce some more guides/write-ups over the coming weeks… but for now, here’s the latest Continuous X and DevOps related noise:

Source CY14 W39–44

• Business Agility without Compromising Governance (Collabnet Whitepaper)
• Microservices (Martin Fowler) *
  • Software development practices continue to evolve and vary and this post provides a good description of microservice-based design practices.  Amongst many other things, this type of application architecture plays well with hyperscale cloud infrastructure offerings inc. charging models as individual instances tend to be very small vs. monolithic ‘3-tier’ application architecture which instead scales ‘up’ by having more resources applied to instances/VMs/PMs.  Microservice even allows some orgs to run on a ‘Free Tier’ offered by Public Cloud providers.  There is also a reference to Conway’s Law.
    “In short, the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often a HTTP resource API.   These services are built around business capabilities…”
    • A nice complementary bullet point list to describe the nature and pros: Scaling with Microservices and Vertical Decomposition (Otto)
• Getting Granular With Microservices, PaaS, Twelve Factor Apps and Docker (ActiveState) *
  • The pros of Microservice architecture and the new complexities to manage before and during runtime followed by a good overview of the infrastructure + app services platform (PaaS) evolution and requirements underneath
• PuppetConf 2014 Session Recordings
  • PuppetConf 2014 Recap: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3
  • Notable:
    • The Phoenix Project: Lessons Learned – Gene Kim, IT Revolution Press
    • Case Study: Developing a Vblock Systems Based Private Cloud Platform with Puppet and VMware vCloud Suite – Peng Liu & Paul Harb, VCE
    • From Development to Testing to Deployment with Puppet Enterprise and Microsoft Azure – Ross Gardler, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc.
    • Exploring the Final Frontier of Data Center Orchestration: Network Elements – Jason Pfeifer, Cisco
    • Fully Automate Application Delivery with Puppet and F5 – Colin Walker, F5
    • Infrastructure as Software – Dustin J. Mitchell, Mozilla, Inc.
• Leveraging Cisco NX-API with Ansible to Make Your Life Easier (jedelman.com)
  • More on this subject: Spine/Leaf Topology Explorer with Ansible (Keeping it classless)
    • A ‘DevOps against a Cisco network’ technical walk-through that leverages Ansible for config management and NX-API as the programmable interface on Nexus switches.
• The new building blocks for IT: OpenStack, Continuous Delivery, and DevOps (Gigaom Pro)
  • “The key building blocks of a modern IT organization include a highly flexible infrastructure, an automated software delivery life cycle, and a devops-driven IT organisation. These capabilities are essential to ensuring that IT remains relevant in an era of continuous change to customer-facing services and automated business operations.
    This report focuses in particular on OpenStack as an underlying cloud platform to support this new type of organization. In addition, it examines a handful of ecommerce and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers and the challenges these companies seek to solve by adopting a more agile software development and deployment process using OpenStack.”
• Scrum for Operations: Just Add DevOps (the agile admin)
  • A diary-like account of an organisation’s experiences of applying Scrum and DevOps practices
• Microsoft partners with Docker to bring containers to Windows Server (devops.com)
• HealthCare.gov: Lessons From Continuous Software Delivery
• DevOps Culture Clash: Think Process (InformationWeek)
  • A more pragmatic view of ‘just do the culture that we need will ya’
• DevOps: A Software Architect’s Perspective book excerpts
• 6 Challenges Facing DevOps and Operations Teams in 2015 (Smartbear)
  • “Networking, not servers, is often the immutable object that is not easy to make agile. Even when working with vLans there is a spider web of IPs, Ports, Routers, routing tables, perimeter networks etc who’s interdependency can’t simply be changed, broken, moved, or replicated.”
• How “Shifting Left” in Software Development Can Help Fuel Your Company’s Growth Engine (siliconAngle)
  • “A long talked about theory in software development is the idea of “shifting left,” where software development and testing teams work to bring higher degrees of quality – usually through testing – earlier in the software development life cycle. The problem is that the majority of testing is not done until the service is completed—after integration and user acceptance testing—making it nearly impossible to test quality into a system”
• 8 Characteristics of our DevOps Organization *
  • DevOps in a large enterprise.  Comments on org structure that works etc.  “I now work at a ~$20 billion company with 40,000+ people. If DevOps can work here, it can work anywhere.”  There’s a mention of Slack for collaboration between sites.
• DevOps4Networks summary by Nathan Sowatskey who presented at the event
  • Youtube videos can be found here
• How to talk to your CFO about DevOps (devops.com) *
  • How do you explain the benefits of DevOps to your CFO in order to justify any associated cost?
• Spiderman and Azure (DevOps in the Enterprise)
  • Anecdotal information on Azure
• Why Rejecting ‘Enterprise DevOps’ Hurts The Movement (Contino – Benjamin Wootton) *
  • Why Is DevOps Different In The Enterprise? -> People, Process and Technology broken down.  “There are many books and degree courses on organisational change and transformation.  People can make careers out of it. It’s a complex area full of best practice, insight and accumulated experience.  We need to bring that thinking into DevOps”
• Companies Focused on Software and Development Outperform Peers (CA Technologies) *
• Infrastructure automation by example (practicingruby)
  • Down a level to an example of the process of setting up something in-line with Infrastructure-as-code.  Find yourself an Ubuntu machine…
• DevOps.com Examines DevOps-as-a-Service
  • Yep, you guessed it… ‘as-a-service’ has been bolted on to DevOps… a comment on buying in ‘DevOps’: “If DevOps is a growth engine for your company, then outsourcing it is like building a car with the motor located elsewhere”
• Gene Kim: Learn about DevOps directly from the pros (The Enterprisers Project)
  • An interview with the author of “The Phoenix Project”
    • Another interview: DevOps: From Unicorns to Horses
• Mesos, Docker – The Next Disruptive Wave? (Strand Weaving)
  • Apache Mesos: “In terms of your datacenter or cloud provider think of this as a layer between your applications and the hardware”
• Batman & Robin: How DevOps pairings can succeed (Gigaom)
• Is DevOps Killing Some Types of Jobs? (IBM Developer Site)
• IT deployment standards: why now?
• DevOps for CEOs (Ranger4 ThoughtPaper)
• The New Software Imperative: Fast Delivery With Quality: Eight DevOps Practices Are The Key To Success (Forrester Consultative Paper commissioned by IBM)
• Paying Down Technical Debt (devops.com) *
• Right-Picking the First Project to Go DevOps On and Counterpoint: Right-Picking the First Project to Go DevOps On