Continuous delivery pipeline transforms hotel chain’s IT ops

Source:-searchitoperations.techtarget.com As Choice Hotels moved away from homegrown scripting tools for continuous delivery, it fundamentally shifted the daily duties of its IT ops teams. The terms continuous integration and continuous delivery are often used together and combined into one tool set, but one enterprise discovered that they affect different parts of IT as teams adopt new practices. Choice Hotels began its DevOps transition more than four years ago and established continuous integration testing of application code through the open source

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5 ways to lose data on Kubernetes—and how to avoid them

Source:-techbeacon.com If your critical databases and stateful applications are migrating to Kubernetes, the sorrows of accidental data loss aren’t far behind. And data is the lifeblood of modern applications. For database people, “data” means any persistent state that the database depends on to function properly. Think tables in MySQL, znodes in Zookeeper, or column storage in a data warehouse. If the bits are gone, applications that depend on them stop working. “Loss” means the data is gone or at least

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OpenStack remains essential: How to get your private cloud builds right

Source:-techbeacon.com When SUSE announced in October that it was pulling out of the OpenStack market, it renewed industry speculation that the once massively hyped technology is sliding toward irrelevance. Nothing could be further from the truth. OpenStack’s alleged decline has become one of tech’s favorite tropes. The infrastructure-as-a-service model of hosting private clouds was all the rage in the early and mid-2010s, touted (unfairly) by some as an alternative to public clouds. That early excitement faded when OpenStack gained a

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The Meaning of DevOps Has Changed a Lot in the Last Decade

Source:-itprotoday.com Determining the future meaning of DevOps requires a look at the model’s past. DevOps is now more than a decade old, and the concepts, practices and strategies associated with the model have evolved significantly during the past 10 years. Indeed, when people talk about DevOps today, they often mean something very different from DevOps in an earlier era. To understand what DevOps has become, it’s worth surveying the evolutionary phases through which DevOps has passed since folks began speaking

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From One-Size-Fits-All to Custom-Fit for IT Ops

Source – devops.com Here is how enterprise IT Ops used to work: you would make your choice among the Big Four vendors and buy in (quite literally!) to their strategy. This meant a suite of products that came preintegrated (more or less) out of the box, and—at least on the sales proposal—covered all of an IT organization’s needs across a huge spectrum of activities. Broadly speaking, each of the Big Four’s suites included some flavor of the following: monitoring, ticketing, configuration

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It’s critical to create the correct DevOps team structure

Source – techtarget.com DevOps is all about breaking down barriers. That’s great, up to a point. But what happens when you break down too many barriers? How do you find a balanced DevOps team structure without going too far? These are important questions for any DevOps shop to ask itself. There is such a thing as too much DevOps. Here’s how to tell you’re approaching this natural limit. DevOps versus structure DevOps doesn’t advocate for the total erasure of structure. It

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IT ops pros predict routes to DevOps efficiency in 2018

Source – techtarget.com IT operations is a fast-moving river of change. It might bend or fork as it travels, you might go over a Waterfall, but it never doubles back. Expert IT professionals and analysts –– many of whom write tips on the tools and technologies you use every day — lay out their predictions for where IT operations is heading in 2018. Everyone expects a heavier emphasis on DevOps efficiency through smarter adoption and evolved tools and practices. Another broad

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How to build DevOps characteristics: It takes more than money

Source – techtarget.com How do you keep software engineers happy and productive? The key lies in understanding how they think and what they expect from a cultural perspective. Engineers who have adopted the DevOps mindset don’t necessarily think like other employees. They’re working for more than just a paycheck. Yes, the usual perks and DevOps characteristics — a good salary, a nice working environment, incentive-based bonuses and the like — will help you to attract and motivate these professionals. But on their own, they

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DevOps and SecOps began as separate efforts

Source – csoonline.com Until today, anti-fraud, security and authentication activities in organizations have operated as largely-separate domains, with IT Ops even more separated, in most cases. This is due, in part, to the “silo mentality” in enterprises, where it’s more convenient to have a bunch of teams running their own disciplines. After all, collaboration and synchronization increase the degree of difficulty. Politics, momentum, status quo, and decentralized operations that use third-party providers are also contributing to the current operational division. Given

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Secure DevOps lengthens IT ops to-do list

Source – techtarget.com Secure DevOps is a recent trend that has primarily involved collaboration between application developers and security experts so far — the IT ops role in the new collaboration between app developers and security pros hasn’t been fleshed out yet. But as developers and security professionals “shift security left” in the app delivery process, IT ops will need to respond accordingly, and preferably proactively. IT pros must collaborate with the security team as well as application developers. Following high-profile

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Windows PowerShell programming empowers IT ops toolmakers

Source – techtarget.com I’ve been in IT operations for nearly two decades, a job where I could answer help desk calls, fix computers, rack servers, spin up VMs and crawl through ceilings pulling CAT5 behind me. To succeed in IT ops takes a figurative utility belt of tools for management and monitoring tasks. Each tool an IT operations professional has aids them tremendously — Angry IP Scanner keeps an eye on the network, TreeSize ensures server storage consumption stays on spec

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New practices spring from DevOps competency shortage

Source – techtarget.com Once you establish DevOps competency, employee retention is an even bigger challenge in a highly competitive seller’s market for technical skills. “High tech has a lot to learn about culture from the manufacturing business,” E3’s Rheem said. Companies eager to retain employees often find themselves in a “perk race,” but perks quickly become entitlements, Rheem said. Most companies don’t have a great sense of what makes people want to come to work, which is predictability, consistency and the

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Is the future of Agile actually BizDevOps?

Source – searchsoftwarequality.techtarget.com It’s easy to think every organization has DevOps on the corporate brain but in reality, interest in — and commitment to — Agile remains high, particularly in the enterprise space. Of course, that doesn’t necessarily make it easy to do. And it doesn’t mean DevOps isn’t having an impact. With Agile2017 less than a month away I interviewed AgileCraft CEO Steve Elliott about the company’s 10X product release and the ongoing efforts enterprises are making to be more

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The 4 Phases of DevOps With Atlassian

Source – dzone.com Fresh Ideas, Announcements, and Inspiration for Your Team, Delivered Weekly As Development and IT Ops teams look to be more efficient, decreasing their time to market and increasing product support, DevOps has become the predominant industry solution. There are many resources that paint a picture of Development and Operations working in perfect harmony, but how do we actually get there? Where should we start? We need to begin with the end goal in mind. As technology companies, our

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5 lessons: How DevOps, cloud reinvented IT Ops at Hiscox

Source – techbeacon.com As a global business insurer, Hiscox faces two significant challenges. The first is that, while we are growing at up to 30% per year in some markets, we don’t want our IT staff to balloon at the same pace. We also must stay nimble enough to fend off behemoths such as Amazon and Google that could use their stockpiles of customer data (and their ability to quickly roll out new services) to move into our industry by using

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How IT Ops can avoid the DevOps capacity crunch

Source – techbeacon.com DevOps and digital transformations have brought an unprecedented increase in the pace and volume of daily change in IT. While this may sound like great news to development and product groups, IT operations management is often alarmed by the potential risk that its already overloaded workforce will be squeezed beyond the breaking point. IT Ops finds itself squeezed between the “go-go-go, deploy-deploy-deploy” demands of DevOps and digital transformations and the “Don’t be the next hack! Don’t be the next outage! Slow

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IT ops paves the way for agile

Source – itweb.co.za DevOps and agility requirements are putting immense pressure on the IT ops team. There is an incredible amount of noise around software development these days, and quite rightly – without it, there is no application economy. But, another major question that should be asked is: “Is IT ops just about keeping the lights on?” Well, to answer this question, I must tackle the enemy of IT, which is complexity, and it comes in a variety of shapes and

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10 commandments of IT Ops in the DevOps era

Source – techbeacon.com You might think that IT operations is becoming irrelevant these days, as orchestration and DevOps tools now supposedly do the job for you. I’m sorry to break it to you, but that’s just a myth. Throw it in the pile with other busted myths, such as the ability to see the Great Wall of China from space, bulls’ hatred of red (they’re actually colorblind), and vitamin C’s effectiveness in curing colds. But according to this growing meme,

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