DevOps

Late last summer someone handed me a curious USB device that I popped in my bag and then sat on my shelf until today when I thought it was about time I plugged it into my computer to see what it did.

I'm leaving most of this post to the podcast version as I had a co-host

Not so long ago, Vagrant was the prime tool that attempted to solve that time-immemorial problem of "it works on my machine." Developers could create shareable Vagrant files to allow coworkers to spin up replica machines for testing code and the interconnecting parts of a typical modern project. Vagrant is far from dead, but it suffers from a couple of long-lasting issues, including the resource footprint of virtual machines created, the speed of sharing files between the host and virtual machine, and the speed of making configuration changes to virtual machines.

Recently out of private beta, Docker's new native applications aim to replace the current methods for running Docker on Windows and Mac, creating a better experience for developers using those platforms. For the previous solution, Docker Toolbox used VirtualBox to create a small Linux virtual machine that hosted your images and containers. It worked pretty well but could be unreliable at times and required workarounds that sometimes resulted in unexpected outcomes or not working at all.

This talk with Cloud Foundry's Chip Childers covers the company's history, its tools, and how organizations are using them in production environments.

HashiCorp tools have been around and are a standard for their contributions to continuous integration workflows. Learn the basics here.

Lucan Carlson talks about Automic's campaign to bring DevOps style automation and practices to everyone in a business, regardless of their role.

These graphical user interfaces give you a bunch of different and useful ways to interact with Docker. Read on to learn what each one can do.

Learn about the history and product range of the popular NGINX web server in this interview with its product management director, Liam Crilly.

In this podcast interview, learn how Datical is bringing easy-to-use tools inspired by DevOps practices to the traditionally messy world of enterprise databases.

It’s the morning of February 28, 2017, and vast swathes of the internet are unavailable. From individual sites to services that thousands of others rely on — such as Slack, Quora, GitHub and Trello — many are unavailable. You probably remember the day that ‘human error‘ took down so much of the internet, with broad components of AWS that no longer worked. This isn’t the first time an outage has brought the internet to its knees — but the sheer scale of AWS always means that the impact is felt.

CircleCI is becoming the CI tool of choice for developers who want to spend more time coding than managing infrastructure. Listen to Chris Ward speak with the CTO.

Chef recently introduced the Habitat tool, bringing Chef's advantages to automation and continuous integration. Learn about the suite of tools that make it possible.

Check out this interview with Automic's Lucas Carlson about 2018 predictions for the container and serverless space, especially Docker.

I spoke with the three founders of replex.io who aim to help you identify infrastructure inefficiencies at every level of a stack.

In the race of container orchestrators, Kubernetes is surging ahead. But much like when I wrote my post on Docker hosting, people are often stuck on the step of getting their infrastructure to production. Unlike when I first wrote that, the industry has progressed massively, and as you will see, I found a lot of companies willing to offer you solutions for helping you get Kubernetes into production.

Modern applications are increasingly growing in complexity. Adding a dizzying amount of moving parts, layers of abstraction, reliance on external systems and distribution that all result in a stack that few truly fully understand.

Chris Ward interviews OpenShift's product strategy director Brian Gracely about Red Hat's recent announcement of their acquisition of CoreOS.

Chris Ward interviews OpenShift's product strategy director Brian Gracely about Red Hat's recent announcement of their acquisition of CoreOS.

As a writer/tech writer/sometimes developer who dabbles in the odd bit of illustration and design, I have often wondered how teams of artists collaborate.

The cloud promised to provide us all flexibility. The opportunity to access infinite resources as and when we need them and pay accordingly. We would no longer have to spend time installing, configuring and maintaining servers; we were promised more time to “just code.”

This week brought the release of the latest version of Ubuntu - 18.04 - so read up on the details about the newest LTS release.

Learn how chaos engineering helps you find seemingly random errors in today's modern, increasingly complex applications.

It’s hard to find terms getting more attention in the software world in the last few years than the closely related practices of Continuous Integration(CI) andContinuous Delivery or Continuous Deployment(CD), often referred to in tandem as CI/CD. Organizations across the world, from one-person development shops to multinational corporations, are implementing CI and CD for their software products.

Zone Leader Chris Ward discusses Thoughtworks technology trends and predictions.

What technologies were the most significant in 2018, and which will go to 2019.

New in GitLab 12.8, this dashboard helps to simplify the complex process of compliance tracking, right inside GitLab.

Introduced in GitLab 12.7, Code Review Analytics can help you dig deeper into slow-moving merge requests.

Breaking applications into smaller coupled components like microservices, and running each of those components in containers often go hand in hand. These modern application architecture principles have allowed many businesses and software projects to make regular and rapid changes to running software and scale them to suit changes in demand and approach. In this article, we breakdown what a container is, and the direct benefits they bring to your developer teams and business.

We introduced improvements to pipelines to help scale applications and their repo structures more effectively. Here's how they work.

Orchestrating an application in Kubernetes can be even in a simple setup pretty complex. In this post, you learn how to architect a Kubernetes-native application and create a first deployment using kubectl.

Environment variables are a common way for developers to move application and infrastructure configuration into an external source outside of application code. This post shows you the variety of ways Kuberentes helps you create and manage environment variables within kubernetes.

Continuous delivery helps software development teams get their code changes from development to testing, and into the hands of users more quickly. In this post, Chris Ward looks at the benefits and best practices for implementing this practice into your teams.

Despite sounding similar, continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are subtly different from each other. While they have overlap, they are applicable and useful at different stages of the development process. In this post, we look at what the different terms mean, what benefits they bring to you and your team, and what you need to get started implementing the practice.

In this article, we look at ephemeral testing environments, small, discrete, and short-lived testing environments that reflect only the changes you are interested in testing.

A good developer experience is crucial to keep developer teams productive, happy, and focussed on work important to your business aims. In this first roundtable, we get the opinions and experiences from two experts in the field: Nigel Simpson, Director, Enterprise Tech Strategy at a Fortune 100 company, and Erik Muttersbach, CTO at forto (formerly FreightHub), a Berlin logistics startup.

In this article by Nils Balkow Tychsen, Lead Q&A Engineer at Humanitec, you will learn some use cases for sandboxed environments such as parallel feature development, parallel testing of feature flags, and parallel testing of microservice versions in different combinations.

Your Kubernetes configuration represents environments that are a fundamental part of your application, unyet we generally treat them as less important from our application code. In this post we look at best practices for managing changes to configuration, and how to treat it the way it deserves.

In this article I look mostly at improving the developer experience within a company, and touch upon other aspects where relevant, we have future articles planned to help you improve the DX of the projects you maintain. The goal of this article is to help those in charge of development teams understand what their developers struggle with and complain about and help them do something about it.

An internal developer platform (IDP) is an essential step for rapidly scaling companies to keep their developers working productively and happily. In this roundtable discussion we speak with Jan Löffler who helped build Zalando’s IDP about the problems they were trying to solve and the steps they took.

At the end of September 2020, participants from Humanitec and Polar Squad met for a small hackathon to see how straightforward it was to create a resource driver for the Humanitec platform so that others can connect their custom infrastructure.

A major bug urgently needs fixing in Production, but QA is impossible because Staging is ahead of Prod. This blog post will detail how to clone your Production environment to allow immediate testing before hot-fixing Production.

German broadcaster Sport1 realized they were spending too much time grappling with an outdated deployment process, they decided it was time to build their own flexible Internal Developer Platform. Find out how it changed their development process in our roundtable with Paolo Garri, the director of technology.

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is an essential step for rapidly scaling companies to keep their developers working productively and happily. In this roundtable discussion we speak with Jason Warner, the current CTO of GitHub and previous VP of Engineering for Heroku about how IDPs help teams of that scale build efficiently.

Many of you have probably read countless technical articles about scaling application infrastructure and capacity with Kubernetes. This is not one of those posts. Rather, it looks at how and when to implement Kubernetes when your team or the demands on your team grow rapidly.

GitOps takes familiar tools such as Git and Continuous Delivery pipelines to automate infrastructure. The GitOps approach is vendor-neutral, provides a clear history of changes, and allows you to reproduce or roll back deployments. Yet, we can't ignore the problems with this approach: Proliferation of repositories, no help for secrets management, or simultaneous file writes. Let's explore.

Companies that are built upon or are building software typically want to move fast and not break things. But how can growing teams allow developers to keep building new features and fixing bugs without operations teams slowing them down with complex and arduous processes?

Humanitec provides an API-first way to build your Internal Developer Platform to enable developer environment self-service. This post shows how to use that API with Postman collections to make creating environments even easier.

“DevOps” merges Development and Operations team functions through practices and tooling, all the while making continuous improvements to applications. Teams that adopt DevOps tools, culture and practices perform better and build faster. Let’s walk through each stage of DevOps and the popular DevOps tools you may want to consider in 2022.