The many meanings of "DevOps," legacy software, & adulthood - Coté Memo #22

I’m in New York today for a quick meeting, ostensibly on DevOps, but as ever on how organizations can do software better. “DevOps” has increasingly become the term people use when they mean “doing all that new stuff, in new ways.” Vendors, like Pivotal, have tried to use the phrase “cloud native” to describe it, but that hasn’t stuck too much outside of the vendoring and chattering class. The key phrases, I’d say, are:

1.  “Cloud” as in “we’re putting together a "cloud strategy” and want the benefits of cloud technologies (automation, self-service, cost, bursting), private or public.
2. “Agile” as the loose identifier for “what developers do” which isn’t used as much as it should be: I’m overly fond of pointing out that most people don’t really do enough of “agile.”
3. “DevOps” as a catch phrase what the IT department does a whole to support all this and how its processes changes.

Occasionally, I’ll hear that someone is doing a “continuous delivery project” as the overall initiative that’s driving change.

All of that is why I’ve snarkily been calling my talks “Not actually a DevOps talk” because, really, DevOps has been up-leveled to anhttps://www.flickr.com/photos/cote/30513730244/in/datetaken-public/ all purpose wrapper for “the new shit.”

Legacy Software Sucks

Deal with Legacy Before it Deals with You

If you’re successful, you likely have legacy software that’s slowing down your ability to innovate. This software, by definition, is high risk and scary to change. Check out some coping tactics here. 

An excerpt from my work in progress cloud strategy toolkit book thing.

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Coté Content

Software Defined Talk Episode #80: The case for flying Southwest and Oracle buying Dyn, and containers

With all those domestic, direct flights, the gang lays out the case for Southwest. Coté salivates at the prospect but is worried about sitting next to chicken cages, but there’s plenty of $500 shoe sales people on board. We also discuss Oracle buying Dyn, AWS’s power, the looming cloud success of Microsoft, and, of course, containers.

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Book Review: New Books for Understanding DevOps - The New Stack

I started a book review column at TheNewStack. This month, I look at several DevOps books like The DevOps Handbook, Effective DevOps, and Start and Scaling DevOps in the Enterprise.

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Links!

SUSE to Acquire HPE’s OpenStack, Cloud Foundry Portfolio, Boost Kubernetes Investment - The New Stack

It’s a bit unclear what this means for staff, but the verbiage is essentially that the products will hew closer to a SUSE vision of cloud and still exist. It’ll be interesting to see how these three overlapping stacks get mixed, or not: “After the transaction is complete, we will define our SUSE Cloud Foundry PaaS roadmap based on the market opportunities we see and, most importantly, our customer and partner needs.”

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The Container Landscape: Docker Alternatives, Orchestration, and Implications for Microservices

We’re at apex fragmentation, meaning many of the options now will evolve out over time. Therefore, be architecturally safe: “Do not focus on developing code for the container under the hood. Care instead about the business logic. Implement your microservices in a vendor agnostic way.”

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OpenStack: vendor updates and enterprise adoption roundup

A collection of OpenStack momentum across the various customer sectors, plus some special attention to adoption in China. On Wal-mart: “now running 98% of its e-commerce workloads on its DIY OpenStack private cloud control plane in containers.” AT&T: “Its OpenStack-based NFV solution is expected to be rolled out to 30% of the network by end of 2016, with a target of 75% of its network being software-controlled over time.” Also, notes on Santander Bank and BBVA usage.

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Donald Trump lost most of the American economy in this election

“The divide is economic, and it is massive. According to the Brookings analysis, the less-than-500 counties that Clinton won nationwide combined to generate 64 percent of America’s economic activity in 2015. The more-than-2,600 counties that Trump won combined to generate 36 percent of the country’s economic activity last year.”

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Work/Life Balance

I like his recent album.