Last week I was in Austin attending my second DevOpsDays event of the year and it had a very different feel to DevOpsDays London.  It was the biggest DevOpsDays event yet with over 300 attendees and a reasonable amount of sponsors, Serena being one of them.

DevOpsDays Austin focused very much on culture, much to the frustration of some but I believe it is the right choice.  Unless you are fortunate enough to be in an environment that has a culture perfectly suited to DevOps, then focusing on technology alone will

Last week I was able to get the most out of my trip to Austin by attending Puppet Camp and then DevOpsDays.  Puppet Camp was a high quality event with great sessions.  The content was quite varied and really resonated with me.  I’ve noticed that the Puppet community is undergoing phenomenal growth and I’m impressed with the level of community engagement.  Initiatives such as ask.puppetlabs.com and Puppet Forge make community involvement easier than ever.  A couple of highlights from the event…

@GrandmaHenri, a technical writer at Puppet Labs, presented a session on how to document modules on the Puppet Forge.  This should keep the quality of

I just got back from attending a few back-to-back events.  One of which was ChefConf 2013. It was my first ChefConf and it was a really high energy event with a wide variety of speakers and attendees.  I chose to focus on the sessions covering culture, but there were many great sessions.

The first memorable session was “Scaling systems configuration at Facebook,” presented by Phil Dibowitz from Facebook.  A larger-than-life rock and roll guy if ever I saw one, Phil did an awesome session on why Chef was the appropriate tool for use at Facebook.  I think Phil probably made Chef support staff cringe when he discussed “tweaking” the Chef libraries to meet his needs, but he did add a

Have you heard the news?  Serena just launched a raft of new capabilities that help our customers embrace DevOps.  Release automation targets now include VMware ESX and ESXi, plus Microsoft’s cloud platform Azure, to go along with an expansive existing set that includes Windows, Unix, Linux, Mainframe and Amazon’s cloud platform EC2.  Developers have great new self-service capabilities, now including

I was inspired to write this article when I kept seeing organizations do exactly the opposite of what they should be doing to develop and deliver applications efficiently.  Essentially, they weren’t practicing DevOps principles that would provide value to customers faster and more reliably.  Check out the list of Eight Mistakes that Prevent DevOps Success, published on CM Crossroads, and make sure you haven’t overlooked any.  As

Get your ticket to the next feature presentation of Serena’s DevOps Drive-In webcast series, “How to Achieve DevOps Nirvana” on April 25.  Along with release management expert Eric Kunkel from MMA Technologies, we’ll share our experiences designing and implementing release management processes and solutions for several different organizations.  Many of the companies that Eric has worked with have already

DevOps is about flawless execution, which is what comes to mind when I think of Ninjas.  DevOps Angle just published my article, “Secrets of a DevOps Ninja: Four Techniques to Overcome Deployment Roadblocks.”  It outlines ways to overcome deployment roadblocks.  The key takeaway is that it is extremely important to

I recently attended DevOps Days in London.  It was an amazing event with lots of great discussions and presentations.  Some of the solutions and ideas presented were extremely creative. I spent time mingling with people who, undoubtedly, really know what they are doing.

On Saturday morning I had the pleasure of meeting Gene Kim, renowned DevOps researcher and author, and John Clapham, development lead for Nokia.  Over breakfast we discussed the current state of DevOps and what could be done to help speed up DevOps adoption.  My opinion

Ladies and Gentlemen, we have a winner.  The top #DevOpsLove letter is

You had me at Release Management.

Congrats to its creator, @jdnorthwest, who wins a $150 US AmEx gift card, a bottle of California Champagne and a box of Ghirardelli chocolates to go with the bubbly.

The first runner-up #DevOpsLove letter is

Dev seeks Ops – Lean and agile, partnership of equals, merging makes life worthwhile.

Congrats to

While the Agile revolution isn’t done yet, the methodology is rather widely adopted now in development organizations.  This is especially true when what are being developed are Revenue Applications, apps that are directly used by customers in the course of business.

The game changer for winning the RevApp race has thus moved downstream to Change & Release Management.  Efficiently capturing Change Requests, triaging those CRs, routing and fulfilling them are part of the solution.  So is automating  deployments of both application and operational changes.  Fail at this and