The Butterfly Effect of Uncontrolled Cloud Operations Change

The Butterfly Effect of Uncontrolled Cloud Operations Change

The rapid development of SaaS applications in the cloud means more and more people, features and open source applications are combining together into one huge platform. Due to the immediacy of software development, a major challenge for software vendors is to audit changes in their application environments, such as system configurations. The problem is that any `change performed at any stage of an operation can impact other areas of an application. This digital butterfly effect can be very detrimental in today’s fast-paced, on-demand environment. It becomes even more destructive when these changes can’t be found, due to inadequate tracking. Failure to track changes, can greatly affect a company’s revenues and success.

A Real-Life Story

A company with a large scale SaaS platform that provides to large e-commerce, quality buyers started seeing that their revenues dropped about 12% from the previous day. The DevOps team started checking all of the platform components and logs to check for malfunctions. After 12 exhausting hours, they started searching for changes that were made over the past 36 hours and roll back these changes. Eventually, they found out that one of the analyst experts made a change to one of the campaigns.
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Why DevOps Is a Role (and Not just a Concept)

Why DevOps Is a Role (and Not just a Concept)

Over the past five years, DevOps has evolved into an integral movement in the fields of software development and delivery. The agile manifesto has become increasingly popular in the tech world due to the business need for fast response times. This pushes IT to streamline development, integration and delivery into one smooth process. While this outlook on DevOps describes the concept, after much debating, I am here to explain why DevOps is in fact not just an important concept but a significant role in the tech world.

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Modern IT Monitoring: API-Based and the Human Touch

Screenshot_1011Monitoring is what allows you to generate complete transparency of the online service that you’re responsible for, including cloud infrastructure, application functionality and SLA. Modern IT monitoring seems to be composed of two layers: an infrastructure layer and an application layer. On the infrastructure layer, VMs, network, and storage are monitored, revealing memory consumption, CPU utilization, and network connection metrics. On the application layer, database performance, browsing latency, and actual application functionalities, such as users registration, login and cart are monitored. For mega sites like eBay and PayPal, even the slightest latency can lead to a loss of millions of dollars. If your online service isn’t monitored closely, the trust and confidence of your users can be significantly compromised. In this post, I would like to touch on several points that describe the current state of the market, how essential it is to monitor your resources, and what monitoring is built on.
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DevOps – Offices Discouraged

devops[G u e s t   P o s t] Every company, technological ones in particular, is faced with a long list of challenges concerning productive work environments. For starters, traditional concepts of hiring local talents, which may or may not exist, and having all employees work together in the same office space have proven, over the years, to bring about a number of interruptions and fairly unproductive work environments. What is lacking is focus.

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DevOps and Continuous Delivery Symbiosis

devops[G u e s t   P o s t]   The term “DevOps” has been floating around the IT industry since 2009, yet a very select number of people seem to actually understand what it means. Companies make efforts to create DevOps teams, appoint DevOps managers, and even seek outside consulting, but the main point that is missing is that there is no one person, or small group of people within a company that can “do” DevOps. It is a culture that needs to be accepted and practiced by the company as a whole. Only then can it effectively contribute to the ultimate goal of customer satisfaction.
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#devopsdays TLV and TDD = Test Driven Dev

devopsdays logoLast two days were extremely interesting at the Devops Days Conference in Tel Aviv. It was impressive to see the amount of professionals that attend and the amazing energies that supported a great open space sessions and networking. The successful conference was initiated by the great Gigaspaces team led by the honorable (and a very good friend) Mr. Nati Shalom, CTO at Gigaspaces. You can also check these recorded sessions.
Following is just a quick taste of a great presentation done by @aviranm discussing Continuous Delivery at @wix

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My View on CloudConnect 2012

cloud-connectLast week I attended one of the most popular cloud technology conferences in the world – CloudConnect. The CloudConnect conference started about four years ago. Attending the event gave me a clear understanding of the market maturity and evolution rhythm. Check out the following sections for the main points on what I heard and learned:

Cloud Performance

The underlying infrastructure performance, round trip time, bandwidth, caching and rendering are to be counted as the major features of an online service performance. In an interesting presentation by @joeweinman (known by his famous “Cloudonomics” theory), it was claimed that latency holds the greatest weight among these faetures. I encourage you to check out his new research – As Time Goes By: The Law of Cloud Response Time presents some good formulas, methods and considerations with regards to online services’ performance and latency (including simple facts, for example, that people tend to prefer selecting from fewer options on an online page –  so you can have less content on a page and achieve a better browsing performance).

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