Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from 2015

Stagnation Leads to Death

"Pró-gress must pro-gréss" - Unknown Nowhere more than in the world of technology is the notion of velocity and acceleration more evident in terms of its ability to contribute to the success of a business.  It is imperative for companies to evolve if they intend on staying in business.  In fact, Gartner said in 2014: What is your weakest link? "In 2014, CEOs must focus on leading their organizations to think like and become more like 'tech' companies, because within a few years, digital business capabilities will dominate every industry. Urgent action is needed because first-mover advantage is common in digital business, and fast followers must be very fast." ( CEO Resolutions for 2014 - Time to Act on Digital Business , published by Gartner in March 2014 .) Contrast this with the Fortune 500.  Established in 1955, it chronicled the evolution of the top 500 global companies.  But in spite of the implied size of the companies on this list, less th

Provisioning For What Purpose? (Part 2)

In part 1 , we discussed how provisioning is part of the overall process of releasing an application, and how application release is a specific case of process automation.  In this part, we are going to look at the general capabilities of an automation platform with the overall view of applying those capabilities to application release, service orchestration / provisioning, and workload / job scheduling. The earliest use of automation can be traced back to IT Operations where Run Books were used heavily to "begin, stop, supervise and debug the system(s)" ( from Wikipedia ) in the Network Operation Center (NOC).  Run Books were initially index cards containing a set of instructions to accomplish a certain task; these were then listed on 8.5" x 11" paper; and ultimately moved to huge three ring binders due to the complexity of the underlying systems with which the operator interacted. At some point, companies such as Opsware, RealOps, and Opalis recognized that we

Provisioning For What Purpose? (Part 1)

In the early part of the last decade, I ran a global education program at a mid-sized company called Softwatch.  In this role, my responsibilities required that I provide education to our partners around the world.  One such occasion had me traveling to Paris to teach a class with 20 students from various parts of Europe, and so my partner Matt Grob and I flew out on Saturday to spend the weekend creating a complete education lab from scratch. Granted, it's not incredibly taxing when you're building a lab in Paris of all places.  The process, which was fairly straightforward, took us both days and then we had the nights to explore the Champs-Élysées, La Concorde, etc. not to mention eat and drink amazing culinary delights. However, I digress.  The point I am trying to make is that it took us an entire weekend to build 20 computers in an identical manner.  It cost the company several hundred dollars to provide accommodations (hotel and meals) that would have been unnecessar

Application Defects are a Real Problem

This past weekend was my high school's 30th year reunion get together in my hometown in Beaufort, SC, which is home to Parris Island and the awesome Marine Corps Air Station across town.  My companion purchased the tickets for us both using reward miles on her airline of choice via that airline's website.  She is a frequent flier on that airline for professional reasons so her profile contained her rewards program number and her TSA pre-check number.  I, on the other hand, don't fly on this particular airline much so I don't belong to their rewards program.  In fact, I don't fly often at all, since my job typically keeps me in the greater NYC metro area where I can drive everywhere that I need to go so I never filed for a TSA pre-check number either. Imagine my dismay, then, when browsing our boarding passes revealed that my boarding pass said "TSA pre" on it.  "That's odd," we thought, and were sure that some other system would flag that a

Is Docker the End of Traditional Application Release Management?

Ever since its release in 2013, Docker has quickly catapulted into the enviable position of being the darling of every (operations manager's) eye.  If you've been vacationing on Mars since then or simply haven't been staying on top of the news releases such as the one that has heralded Microsoft's intention to support Docker on Windows (a cause célèbre for sure since Docker is originally a Linux specific platform), here is what you've missed. Docker is a partitioning capability within the address space of an operating environment.  By allowing the partition to use the host OS directly even though that OS resides outside of the partition (known as a container ), the start up time is substantially reduced as is the resource requirements for the management of the container.  (I hope my z/OS readers find this concept to be somewhat familiar.) Typical Virtual Machine layout (from www.docker.com) Financial people love this because the cost of acquiring licenses