Anybody in operations that wants to gain more control and understanding of their environment has heard of the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL). This set of concepts and techniques introduced by the UK's Office of Government Commerce in 1980s heavily borrows from the ideas outlined in IBM's "Yellow Books" by Edward A. Van Schaik (and later … Continue reading Visible Ops : 4 Agile Steps to ITIL Compliance
Author: Dan Ackerson
Kicking The Last of the Departmental Blues
Given proper coaching, teams must be empowered to decide and execute decisions on their own. This means that a team must have the proper make-up including designers and architects, application and database developers. Once a team commits to the story backlog, they must work together to ensure that all stories are delivered by the end … Continue reading Kicking The Last of the Departmental Blues
Successful Teams Are Small And Dedicated
From the dawn of time, humans have always worked together as a team to overcome hardship and danger, and make the community stronger. Specialization naturally grouped people together to form hunting parties or food gatherers and later on governing councils and religious groups. This grouping together of dedicated, like-minded people forms the core of our … Continue reading Successful Teams Are Small And Dedicated
How Your IT Department Learned About Outsourcing
They say you can't teach an old dog new tricks and this adage applies doubly to system administrators. After all, you pay these same people to protect your data and systems with tooth and claw, right? The problem is that sometimes they protect it too well. Ever needed quick access to data in order to … Continue reading How Your IT Department Learned About Outsourcing
Visible Ops: Rolling Out Change Management
Last week, I introduced you to "The Visible Ops Handbook" and their 4 Agile Steps to ITIL Compliance. While there is no silver bullet for your particular problems, these steps should serve as a good starting point. Today, I'd like to go into a bit more detail regarding what the Visible Ops folks call "Phase … Continue reading Visible Ops: Rolling Out Change Management
Configuration Management: Introduction to Puppet
After years spent working with Cfengine, Luke Kanies decided to form the company Reductive Labs in 2005 and Puppet, a long time idea and quickly stabilizing prototype, was born. He describes it as an open-source, next-generation server automation tool. Configuration files (called manifests) are written declaratively, and there is a client/server model for distribution handling. … Continue reading Configuration Management: Introduction to Puppet
Configuration Management: Introduction to Cfengine
As promised in my last post about configuration management, I want to introduce you to one of the key Open Source configuration management players on the scene today - Cfengine. Embarked upon in 1993 by Mark Burgess, Cfengine has helped system administrators configuring and maintaining their servers in the data center for over a decade … Continue reading Configuration Management: Introduction to Cfengine
Configuration Management: Scaling The Data Center and Growing Your Business
The Velocity 2008 Conference hosted many excellent presentations and discussions concerning web performance and operations. Adam Jacob, of HJK Solutions, presented how his company goes about "Building An Automated Infrastructure". To briefly explain what an automated infrastructure is, let's think of servers and data as office buildings and automobiles. Would it make sense to begin … Continue reading Configuration Management: Scaling The Data Center and Growing Your Business
Don’t get Discouraged – Get Agile
The bigger a ship, the longer it takes to turn around. This old adage certainly applies to today's businesses, and if you're fighting to spin the steering wheel of a large vessel (by trying to change the work habits of hundreds of employees), you're in for a long battle. But don't let yourself get discouraged, … Continue reading Don’t get Discouraged – Get Agile
Avoiding Code Inventory with Staged Releases
Have you ever found yourself in Sprint 4 or 5 without a single release under your belt? Is it because the new functionality involves a big database upgrade or depends upon coordinating three or four different departments? Not only does this kill motivation, but it's extremely risky to push out this mountain of code and … Continue reading Avoiding Code Inventory with Staged Releases
