Yesterday I had a chat with the folks at Codeship, a continuous integration and continuous deployment platform. The topic of immutable infrastructure came up and was intriguing to me, so I thought I would write about it. So what is immutable infrastructure? The concept of immutable infrastructure is to never change your existing production servers. Instead, build new automated servers and destroy the old. This concept falls in line with the “fail forward” belief system of many modern-day DevOps evangelists who believe that tweaking servers or rolling back code from servers in highly distributed systems is too risky and causes more problems than it is worth.
Mike is a VP/Principal Architect for Cloud Technology Partners. Mike has served in numerous technical roles such as CTO, Chief Architect, and VP positions with over 25 years of experience in software development and architecture. A pioneer in cloud computing, Mike led a team that built the world’s first high speed transaction network in Amazon’s public cloud and won the 2010 AWS Global Startup Challenge. An expert in cloud security, Mike is currently writing a book for Wiley Publishing called “Architecting the Cloud: Design Decisions for Cloud Computing Service Models (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS)” which is expected to be released in late 2013.
Barriers for DevOps Adoption
Companies that embrace the DevOps movement and implement the proper processes, tools, and culture change can greatly increase business agility and achieve higher levels of performance. What does high performance look like?
Agile without Ops Is Not Really Agile
Many companies use some flavor of an agile methodology today with mixed results. I have written about agile fail patterns in the past, but some companies do an excellent job of applying agile best practices yet still suffer from missed dates, botched deployments, and low quality. Why is that, you may ask? Because most agile methodologies only address the development side of the house and clearly ignore the operations side of the house. The two need to work in tandem to produce the desired results, which is the goal of DevOps.
Lessons Learned from Transforming a Company
Several years ago I was working at a company that had a ton of legacy silo applications that collectively represented the entire process flow that supported the core business. The process flow was made up of years and years of legacy technologies and legacy business processes.
DevOps: Are We Finally Buying Into Governance?
Many IT and DevOps shops always look at governance as a dirty word because it sounds too much like government, which sounds too much like bureaucracy and waste. The problem with governance is not with governance itself, but with how organizations have tried to implement (or not implement) it.
Moving Past the OpenStack API Debate
There has been a great deal of passionate debate over the last few months within the OpenStack community. There is one camp that is advocating for building APIs that are compatible with Amazon Web Services (AWS) APIs, while the other camp argues for augmenting the existing OpenStack APIs. Those in favor of making the APIs …