5 Things You Should Know About Continuous Deployment…by the Man Who Coined the Term

5 Things You Should Know About Continuous Deployment…by the Man Who Coined the Term

contiunoTech Guru Timothy Fitz on making the jump to Continuous Deployment, the buzz around DevOps, and why GitHub has set back Software Departments by 5-10 years…
BlazeMeter invited me to ask 5 key questions to Timothy Fitz – the man who coined and popularized Continuous Deployment. Here are the results:

How would you define continuous deployment and how is it different to continuous delivery?

Timothy Fitz: This is a great question that isn’t frequently asked, since it is often assumed that they both mean the same thing. Usually, when people refer to continuous delivery, they actually mean continuous deployment.
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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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Software Load Testing: A Perfect Match for the Cloud

Typhoon.jpgThe cloud has allowed modern, web-scale IT companies, like Airbnb and Netflix, to grow and flourish into booming enterprises all over the web. With its flexibility and efficiency, it supports the demand of an organization’s growth from zero to millions of users, allowing them to prepare for this potential growth, as well. Before the cloud, simulating millions of concurrent users and running scalability, stress, or stability tests was very hard to implement, if not impossible. Cloud technology has brought software testing, especially performance testing, to a whole new playing field.

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ClickSoftware – Great Case of an AWS Cloud Adoption: Part 1, Operations

imageOver the last year I had endless conversations with companies that strive to adopt the cloud – specifically the Amazon cloud. Of those I met, I can say that ClickSoftware is one of the leading traditional ISVs that managed to adopt the cloud. The Amazon cloud is with no doubt the most advanced cloud computing facility, leading the market. In my previous job I was involved in the ClickSoftware cloud initiative, from decision making with regards to Amazon cloud all the way to taking the initial steps to educate and support the company’s different parties in providing an On-Demand SaaS offering.
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Consumption, Utilization and Elasticity: Cloud Basics

newvem cloud utilization heatmap
Cloud Utilization Heatmap by Newvem

Lets start with a basic scenario where there is a sudden peak in the demand for an application service as the amount of clients’ requests increase. This event leads to a direct and immediate impact on the load placed on the web servers that host the service. In the traditional world, the number of servers is fixed, therefore an overload adversely affects the application performance and the service may slow down or even be terminated. The IT team would want to restore the environment functionality and bring the service up as soon as possible. The immediate impact  of such an event on the business can be devastating. Starting with this simple understanding, we can move into the world of cloud computing use including resources consumption, while relating to the key differences between the traditional data center and today’s cloud technologies.
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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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