Continuous Delivery

Two of the biggest Strategy buzzwords surrounding Technology rattling around in boardrooms and technical meeting rooms across the length and breadth of Europe are Multi-Cloud, and Hybrid-Cloud; these, together with the associated benefits, potential risks, issues, and constraints that any adoption could bring. What is confusing about these terms is that, ostensibly, they mean the same thing; you house your resources and data in a most performant or economic location for the service; that may...

Often, companies who migrate their applications to the cloud focus heavily on the technical aspects. Due to the fact that the technical issues can be immense, they might ignore or underestimate the organizational challenges. Translating the vision to concrete projects and actions heavily depend on the organizational power to change. It's vital to understand which hurdles need to be addressed to make a smooth transition. These organizational challenges hamper your Cloud migration efforts. No management...

There is no organization that can escape the transforming IT landscape we see today. Change from static Virtual Machines to Containers to serverless infrastructure. Transform the traditional data-center-oriented organization and adopt a "cloud first" approach. And last but not least, everything is code: from infrastructure scripts to security guidelines and policies to business-driven dashboards that constantly flash to spit out new metrics. Changes are everywhere and all departments constantly pinpoint their focus. All of...

In our first article, we introduced Terraform Cloud, explained the functions and features of the free tier, and went through the initial process of creating an account and connecting your new environment to your VSC of choice.  In this article, we will start to build out your newly created Organisation with a workspace to fill out your Organisation, which will provide an environment to deploy your code into your environment. But first, a little history...

Terraform is one of the most used Infrastructure as Code products today; people can use it to deploy Virtual Machines, Container deployments, Functions, and Network and Storage constructs across all the major cloud providers, AWS, Azure, GCP and OCI.  VMware-based clouds build on Cloud Director, traditional On-Premises Infrastructure, running on VMware ESXi, and Nutanix; Terraform can even be used to instantiate bare-metal servers when coupled with a lifecycle management tool like RackN Digital Rebar. ...

The one thing that has become clear as more organizations look to digitally transform is that best DevOps practices in general, and continuous delivery especially, are essential ingredients for success. Digital business processes are wholly dependent on the rate at which the applications are regularly updated to improve the overall customer experience. Organizations that are unable to digitally delight their customers are inevitably going to fall by the wayside as more agile rivals gain...

Software supply chain security has largely remained an afterthought until the disastrous SolarWinds hack in 2020. The incident didn’t just affect thousands of private agencies but also several government agencies. In brief, the hack was due to a basic error of not changing the admin password regularly, which gave attackers an opening to inject malicious code into the supply chain. Further, the code remained undetected through the development cycle and was included in the...

Every company that builds or maintains software should have an incident response plan at hand. If you do not have one, it's best to create it before an attacker compromises your system. A response plan is needed to fight incidents in the best possible way using a structured approach. It helps to make sure your business is up and running in a timely manner. Your core business requires it so it helps you with...

Getting started with deployment automation can be overwhelming. The sheer number of choices and decisions can stall even the most avid DevOps enthusiasts. This is precisely why many organizations are doing CI (continuous integration) but aren’t going all the way to automating deployments. To help you understand how to get started with automated deployments, we offer a practical approach by discussing the steps required to get there. Deployment automation - an outline Deployment automation is the...

Are you killing the goose that lays golden eggs? Yes, maybe. The metaphoric goose we’re talking about here is your CI/CD pipeline. CI/CD has slowly become the primary way of delivering software today. And as the software development world has moved away from monoliths to microservices and containers, the complexity of production has exponentially increased. You need a CI/CD pipeline to make DevOps work. Although a majority of developers are currently utilizing some kind...