Talking Immutable Infrastructure with Codeship

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.

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.

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 …