Strategy
Building a business with continuous delivery and Serverless
Hey – I’m back! I’ve been heads-down learning what Cloud teams need to deliver to AWS securely and make IAM usable, and building that into a business delivered via SaaS & infrastructure code libraries: k9 Security. I’d like to share my experience in how continuous delivery and serverless supported that endeavor. I hope this experience
Guide to Tagging Cloud Deployments
Resource tagging is the primary context communication method in the Cloud but many organizations struggle to define the terms and a model to describe and analyze their Cloud deployments. The k9 Security guide to tagging cloud deployments will help you define your tagging standard and explain why it’s important.
Help with big changes
I hope that you and your family are safe and healthy. COVID-19 is forcing many organizations to change long-standing policies and processes very quickly under great uncertainty. I’d like to help you navigate through those changes, especially if you support healthcare services. First, there are resources in the Knowledge Base that you may find helpful
Continuous Delivery with Serverless, CircleCI, and Lambda: The Good, Bad, and the YAML
Our Serverless continuous delivery pipeline lets us achieve Elite levels of Software Delivery Performance.
Minimize your delivery pipeline and platform dependencies
To escape The DevOps Organization Build Trap, I suggested that you minimize the distinct sets of components your organization uses to deliver and operate software. Those components represent a dependency tree and are integrated, enhanced, and worked-around by your team to meet your organization’s requirements on your dime. While all delivery pipelines and deployment platforms
Key practices for achieving large professional goals
My hope is that this post will help you reach your own goals in 2020. I attained several long-term professional goals in 2019 and I’d like to share the key practices for how I did that to help you along your way. We’ll return to Cloud, Security, and DevOps topics in the New Year. I
How technical do you need to be to set strategy for a technical organization?
Joe Contrera is a leadership coach friend of mine and we just had a lively discussion about why so many strategic technology decisions look bad in hindsight and organizational transformations fail. He asked a great question: How technical do you need to be to set strategy for a technical organization? My answer is “not very,”
Review: The Unicorn Project
You can learn a lot from The Unicorn Project about the day-to-day leadership, management, and ‘manage-up’ skills to transform yourself, a team, or an organization using The Five Ideals.
Thanksgiving with the Wardleys
White meat, dark meat, you just can’t lose. Adam Sandler The traditional Thanksgiving feast can be an enjoyable gathering filled with sharing of stories, eating good food, and relaxation. But frequently it’s not — especially for the hosts. Today we’ll explore strategy for hosting a Thanksgiving get-together that everyone enjoys. There will be not-so-thinly-veiled connections
Changing organizations successfully
Organization and process changes are full of challenges. First, the existing structure and process is (probably) a ‘stable state’ that people are comfortable with and whose very position in ‘the machine’ reinforces. Even if no one likes the existing state. Second, there are forces within the organization that will actively oppose the change because people
The DevOps Organization Build Trap
I am learning a lot from Melissa Perri’s ‘Escaping the Build Trap’ in my studies of product management. Perri says in chapter 9 ‘Organizing Your Teams’: You can’t build an organizational structure without a product vision, because the value streams are not apparent. Perri, Melissa. Escaping the Build Trap: How Effective Product Management Creates Real
Improving software delivery processes at the organization level
Today I will share my high-level process and questions for reflecting and improving an organization’s delivery process and outcomes. First, review the Aspects of Software Delivery Performance (DORA) that generate improved business outcomes: Deployment frequency Lead time for changes Time to restore service Change failure rate Second, imagine what the ideal delivery process looks like
Choose Container Orchestrators Strategically
Deciding which of container orchestrator is right for your organization or team now and in the future is an exercise in strategy. This post will help you develop a strategy aligned to your specific customer needs, technological and organizational assets, desired business state, and other information required to build a good strategy.
The Silver Bullets Are Not Evenly Distributed
Reading time: 3.5 minutes Are there any ‘silver bullets’ in software development? Fred Brooks led the IBM’s System/360 development effort and recounted that delivery story and strategies in The Mythical Man-Month (brilliant) said: “There is no single development, in either technology or management technique, which by itself promises even one order-of-magnitude improvement within a decade
State of Application Secret Delivery and Audit Practices – 2019
The State of Application Secret Delivery and Audit Practices should help you explain to others why delivering application secrets is challenging, the risks of unsafe practices, and a general approach for improving your application secret delivery process.
Can you handle 10x or 100x more application components?
Reading Time: 2 minutes Many organizations are making fundamental changes to the way their applications are structured and operated. These changes are intended to address real problems. Structurally, monolithic applications can severely hamper change delivery rate as the regression test process comes to dominate change delivery time or changes from many teams being held up
A 6 Minute Step Towards Better Strategy, Mapping Templates
You probably just spent a week working on something and it’s time for a bit of reflection and improvement. How about checking-up on your strategy? Watch this video and use these templates to take make your first strategy improvement pass in an hour.
ADRs are not the only doc in an Architecture process
A successful architecture decision-making and recording process depends on creating and socializing a design doc on the matter.
Scaling Architectural Processes with Guilds
Reading Time: 2 minutes Comcast published a detailed description of how they use Architecture ‘Guilds’ to scale investigation, review, and decision making: https://www.infoq.com/articles/architecture-guild-800-friends Scaling decision making is a hard problem because you want to: gather input from interested and knowledgeable creators and users focus on the most important parts of the problem and solution, avoiding
The Future of Information Security is Simpler (I Hope)
We can improve the world’s software by transforming ‘complicated’ and ‘complex’ into something simper, even boring. This transformation isn’t easy but there is a way to commoditize security and other specialty practices that make your system safer and more reliable.
Like nails on a chalkboard: ‘We haven’t shipped’
Recently, the Hertz car rental company sued Accenture for $32M in damages. The suit (pdf) alleges breach of contract in Accenture’s agreement to build and deliver a new website. This new site was supposed to: support the Hertz, Thrifty, and Dollar brands, starting with Hertz, North America be a ‘responsive’ site that works across phone,
It’s a Trap: Optimizing process flow instead of evolutionary flow
Yesterday, Simon Wardley highlighted one of the biggest problems organizations face in transformations and improvement efforts: getting ‘trapped’ by their existing context. Once an organization develops a solution that works, the solution establishes momentum. This momentum keeps the process in motion and delivering outputs that supports outcomes (good) as well as creating inertia to change
Cloud lock in and the cost of portability
All systems have dependencies and you’re always “locked-in” to something. Evaluate dependencies in the full context of the delivery problem and business goals. Base your strategy on this wide context and resume the task of delivering value to customers.
Cloud Service Delivery Models
Learn about the Cloud has three main service delivery models: infrastructure, platform, and software as a service and when you’d want to use each.
What is a Cloud?
The Cloud changes the economics of application deployments by shifting to pay-for-what-you-use consumption based model. You can and should use the Cloud’s resource provisioning APIs to allocate resources when you need them and release them when you’re finished to create an economical deployemnt.
Upgrade your testing process for Continuous Delivery
If you are thinking of adopting continuous delivery, now is the time to evaluate the effectiveness of your verification process and identify opportunities for improvement in safety, efficiency, and throughput.
Cooking Something Good with DevOps
This is the final piece of a three-part series introducing the Principles and Value of DevOps. I am excited and relieved that after 15 years of trying to discover, learn, apply, and teach these practices, that we have matured so that it’s clear: what principles we should apply how to guide the application of those
The Value of DevOps to Your Organization
DevOps provides value to organizations by enabling them to change quickly and safely.
Mapping a Safer, Faster IAM Development and Review Process
I used Wardley mapping this morning to explore ideas I have for improving the development and review of AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) policy changes. I’d like to share the internals of that mapping process with you to give you an illustrated example. The purpose of this process improvement effort is to help people
Learning to evolve strategy with Wardley mapping
I think Wardley Mapping is a fascinating and effective way to describe a system and develop a strategy to evolve it. Wardley Mapping has a growing community of practice with many ways to learn and participate. Here are the ones I know about (and I’d love to hear about more): Online Simon Wardley’s tweets about
Identifying Undifferentiated, Heavy Lifting
In The Promise of Clouds and Optionality, I said: Cloud providers are competing to offer high quality services that meet their customers’ needs at decreasing cost and increasing scale. They want you to offload whatever you consider undifferentiated heavy lifting to them. But what the heck is ‘undifferentiated, heavy lifting’ and where do I find