I’m often asked why I dislike the job title, “DevOps Engineer” so much. It’s not that I begrudge anyone a great title, which that clearly is (if you’re a nerd). It’s that applying DevOps to a job title can be a red herring, and make companies think they’re “doing” DevOps,Read More

We’ve recently released a new, free eBook entitled?DevOps: The Ops Perspective.?So much of the DevOps conversation centers around software development – Agile methodologies and so on – that we wanted to step back and take a look at what IT Operations needs to bring to the table. DevOps, after all,Read More

Nor is any technology or product. I should remind a famous quote: ?The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.? Bill GatesRead More

Nell Shamrell-Harrington, a Software Development Engineer at Chef, gave a wonderful talk on the history of DevOps at a recent conference, and was kind enough to?share her deck. Some of the highlights: While DevOps has recently become just another marketing buzzword in many circles, it had a much more meaningfulRead More

The basic needs when it comes to infrastructure configuration is for it to be?predictable,?scalable?and allow for?easy recovery?in case of failure. Things will break eventually, for sure, so we have to keep the risk of failure and recovery time low (to reach high?MTBF?and low?MTTR). Without looking at infrastructure design patterns thatRead More

I’ve been struggling with something recently, and in that struggle – which I’ll share in a minute – I’ve had some realizations that I wanted to put before you. Whether you’re a fan of Apple or not, the company has done something pretty important to the IT industry: they’ve taughtRead More

The purpose of this post is to really share an observation and something that I’ve been thinking about as a consultant. I interact with a lot of customers, folks in the different communities and other consultants both internally at Microsoft and in partner organisations, something I find interesting is seeingRead More

Whenever luminaries speak of DevOps, they often use the phrase?Infrastructure as Code?to sum up some of DevOps’ major goals. However, I’ll argue that it’s both semantically and syntactically incorrect and undesirable.