Systems automation and orchestration

Network capacity planning in the age of unpredictable workloads

When you manage network spaces carefully and make informed choices, the flexible, easily scaled workloads of distributed public and hybrid cloud applications become manageable. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Adopt these continuous delivery principles organization-wide

Follow these principles to advocate for, adopt and adapt continuous delivery. The work won't always be easy, but well-conceived continuous delivery pays off for everyone involved. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Application performance tuning tips and tricks

Tune hardware, resource allocations and prioritizations to make applications perform their best. Just don't do it without tracking the results. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Write cloud-config automation scripts into the configuration file

Bypass the need for excess infrastructure, and put off the automation languages seminar -- you need to configure the cloud now. Fortunately, you can still do that. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Enterprise IT struggles with DevOps for mainframe

Mainframe automation tools are nascent, and many mainframe experts are reluctant to embrace DevOps. But large enterprises must address legacy platforms to realize app delivery goals. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Words to go: Incident management KPI categories

Because incident management is a vital task for IT operations departments, admins need a way to measure its success. This list of KPIs offers a good place to start. Continue Reading

By

• Emily Mell, Former Site Editor

Top continuous delivery benefits and how to get them

Continuous delivery doesn't come without challenges -- like getting every disparate IT team on board -- but its list of perks makes the entire process worthwhile. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Google Cloud Build puts GCP spin on cloud CI/CD

Enterprise DevOps shops have yet another cloud CI/CD choice, as well as additional options for managed Kubernetes, function as a service and service mesh. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Climb the five steps of a continuous delivery maturity model

The continuous delivery maturity model lays out the five increasingly intense -- and capable -- levels of the process. Know where to start and when to progress. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

Insurer accelerates DevOps test data refreshes with Actifio

Data-intensive applications can hobble DevOps velocity, but one IT team makes fresh test data available to its developers with a tool that makes rapid copies of large data stores. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Troubleshooting application performance: Issues and answers

Workflow congestion, sluggish switches, pointless parameter settings -- application flaws don't come from a single source, but they're easier to solve when you know where to look first. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Why is Docker's container approach so important?

The name has become synonymous with containers, but there are other container management tools available. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Follow a Kubernetes and Go tutorial in your home lab

Learn how to use the Kubernetes Go client, dep for dependency management and other capabilities for Kubernetes and Go in this home lab exercise on Minikube. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

Heuristic automation prevents unmitigated IT disasters

IT automation isn't about doing everything faster -- although that's how it started. Heuristics make automation smarter and responsive to changes in the IT environment. Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

Perform this Octopus Deploy tutorial in under 60 minutes

Octopus Deploy extends a variety of agents called Tentacles that manage a wide swath of tasks. In just one hour, create an Octopus Deploy instance in a simple home lab. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Modern service management, DevOps streamline app administration

DevOps and service management are synonymous in modern IT, insofar as their guidelines match. Regardless of the term, ensure organizational practices are built for today's reqs. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

How infrastructure as code benefits and eases provisioning

Being able to provision services with code means a simplification to sometimes complicated processes. Plus, you won't need to worry about the platform that service will run on. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

IT pursues zero-touch automation for application support

The best and most efficient approach to IT automation features as little human intervention and interaction as possible. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Use HashiCorp's Terraform tool and companions for production IaC

Developers want isolated systems for prototyping. Testers want mimicry of production. And IT operations wants to configure this infrastructure for them without reinventing the wheel. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Database DevOps tools bring stateful apps up to modern speed

Database DevOps is no longer a contradiction in terms, as enterprises roll out database management and persistent storage software that makes stateful apps more flexible. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

IT infrastructure management software learns analytics tricks

Not every enterprise IT shop is ready to take the AIOps plunge, but IT ops automation is increasingly data-driven -- even at mainstream companies. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

These Go code examples showcase its main features

Google's golang uses many of the same functions as older code languages, such as key-value pairs and compiling, but is better fitted to modern systems development requirements. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

Cloud applications demand a new IT operations strategy

Business and software development trends are putting more pressure on IT operations staff and changing the way teams deploy applications. Continue Reading

By

• Nick Martin, Senior Director of Content Strategy and Member Engagement

How the three phases of automation dictate human employment

Automation might end human employment as we know it. The final result is in question, but we can draw clues from the relationship between automation and employment. Continue Reading

By

• Bob Reselman, CogArtTech

Cloud applications demand a new IT operations strategy

 Continue Reading

Three tools enable DevOps for Windows shops

DevOps isn't just the domain of open source Linux experts. These three tool options tailor DevOps to how Windows applications and systems operate. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Kubernetes books put container deployments on the right track

Whether you're tasked to set up and manage or deploy applications with Kubernetes, these books offer guidance and support. Co-author Brendan Burns shares insights from the texts. Continue Reading

By

• Meredith Courtemanche, Director of Editorial Training

Reflect adds color to Puppet DevOps tools

Puppet plans to add data visualization and analysis to spruce up its DevOps tools now that it has acquired Reflect, but it's still playing catch-up in a crowded, noisy market. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

DevOps shops weigh risks of Microsoft-GitHub acquisition

An online outcry about Microsoft's GitHub acquisition seems overblown to enterprise DevOps pros, but that doesn't mean there's no cause for concerns. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau and Darryl K. Taft

Microsoft-GitHub acquisition shakes up DevOps market

Microsoft's $7.5 billion blockbuster deal for GitHub is a sea change for the IT market, as an enterprise software bellwether with legacy baggage snaps up an open source DevOps darling. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau and Ed Scannell

Use load tests to balance IT capacity management and QoE

Simply throwing more resources at an application won't solve scaling issues. IT ops pros must take the time to chart the relationship between IT capacity and software performance. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Chef InSpec users wrestle with compliance as code

Learning the ins and outs of the Chef InSpec product is only half the battle for compliance as code. The thornier task for some enterprises is to bridge the gap between compliance expertise and DevOps execution. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Chef Automate 2.0 renews appeal to DevOps shops

Chef Automate 2.0 lays the groundwork for tighter integration between the IT automation software and third-party tools, as Chef stakes its claim in the DevOps gold rush. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Self-service automation gives WLA maximum power

Users don't want to wait for an admin to run a report. Admins don't want to drop their work to do it. Set parameters on self-service options and let workers help themselves. Continue Reading

By

• Emily Mell, Former Site Editor

A Go programming language tutorial for IT ops

Go is a diversely applicable programming language that ops admins can use on distributed systems without the complications of traditional languages such as C or Java. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

Which IT security roles fall to the ops team?

To help secure data and applications, an IT ops team needs to do much more than put up firewalls and apply other traditional security measures. Here's where to begin. Continue Reading

By

• Chris Moyer, ACI Information Group

Blue/green deployment on the cloud makes updates easier

App deployment in the cloud operates differently than it does on physical infrastructure. The blue/green deployment model has a couple variations, each of which can save on time and errors. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

Get started with AIOps tools

Instead of admins doing all the tedious work to resolve issues reactively, AIOps tools promise predictive analytics, health assessments and preventative action suggestions. Continue Reading

By

• Muddu Sudhakar, Startup companies

A proper DevOps feedback loop includes business leaders

What the modern IT organization needs isn't DevOps -- it's BizDevOps. IT exists to serve the business, but that relationship must be fully reciprocal. Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

Is IT workload management easier on software-defined infrastructure?

Our IT organization uses deployment automation, monitoring tools and virtualized resources. What do we need to do to manage IT workloads? Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Cloud Foundry PaaS shops hone software delivery process

Enterprises that have deployed Cloud Foundry platform as a service found it catalyzed new thinking about the application delivery process and other organizational practices. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Who put the AI in software?

With artificial intelligence, anything seems possible. And that leaves a whole lot of room for the imagination to wonder about how the use of AI in software tools can change how the work gets done -- and who does it.

The anxiety is understandable. The hyperbole is harder to sort out because, well, when it comes to AI, no one knows quite where to put the line between rational and irrational worries. Will AI at some point control every aspect of your life? Probably not. Will AI push you out of a job? Quite possibly.

Using AI in software development is one way to make your IT resources more intelligent and more automated. If AI can test software faster and better, shouldn't you be doing it that way? That's a question we take up in this first issue of Modern Stack. Also included are articles and columns delving into multi-cloud management, serverless computing and how operations teams can hold up their end of the DevOps bargain.

 Continue Reading

Resolve issues between Python and Linux with virtualenv

While Linux OSes favor Python 2, Python 3 is the widely preferred version. Install virtualenv to isolate Python 2 and 3 and prevent IT issues. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

Try these Salt commands to master the config management tool

The command line is an IT administrator's best friend. Salt users should try these commands to understand how the configuration management tool works. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

SaltStack Enterprise GUI features outreach Salt Open territory

For enterprise IT shops that require a mix of reports on systems, and audit compliance, SaltStack Enterprise offers more than the pure open source version of Salt. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

CloudBees Jenkins Enterprise snags raise roadmap questions

CloudBees' Jenkins software is slated for major updates after strong revenue growth in 2017, but customers and partners report struggles with upgrades, pricing and support. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Automated continuous deployment tools produce successful code

Continuous deployment skips the operations oversight step in software production. So, automated tools must ensure code success in administrators' stead -- before mistakes go live. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Three steps to plan a self-service IT portal that actually works

There's no point to a self-service IT portal if the offerings are out of touch with how its users conduct business or the instant builds are on hold while additional capacity spins up. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Assess Salt configuration management's capabilities and limitations

Salt's benefits for IT operations include fast configuration and flexible, responsive functioning. Get a handle on the basics of Salt, then install it to explore the tool's capabilities. Continue Reading

By

• Walker Rowe

Data center and cloud computing products that make an impact

The Modern Infrastructure Impact Awards recognize the best IT infrastructure and cloud computing products in seven categories, from cloud to DevOps to converged infrastructure. Continue Reading

By

• Modern Infrastructure staff

Terraform best practices that aid DevOps infrastructure builds

Create the right configuration for any DevOps setup, and then, fluidly replicate and scale as necessary with infrastructure-as-code tools and strong management policies. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Chef InSpec widens the compliance-as-code possibilities with v2.0

Chef InSpec 2.0 adds infrastructure tests for compliance policy enforcement, and the tool's expansion into more areas of the DevOps workflow won't stop there. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

SaaS support challenges IT ops admins to shift gears

SaaS means no more app support, right? In practice, IT ops teams enter a new realm of upgrade management and capacity planning when their user base migrates to a SaaS offering. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Enterprises identify 10 essential DevOps tools

Products branded with DevOps are everywhere, and the list of options grows every day, but the best DevOps tools are already well-known among enterprise IT pros. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Cloud ops doesn't solve your problems, it creates new ones

There are many reasons to consider a cloud migration, but if you expect to cut costs or dramatically ease management, you'll be disappointed. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Automation and orchestration elevate scripts from helpful to essential

Did you automate a server update, only to realize another script for configuration compliance has to run first? Orchestration tidies up the messy piles of automation that grow out of IT scripting. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Explore Ansible for DevOps configuration management

The configuration management tool is adept at managing workloads across different infrastructure environments. This Ansible overview preps admins to automate apps and infrastructure. Continue Reading

Create a self-signed certificate to control PowerShell scripts

Signing code ensures that every change is official and approved. This helps to prevent errors and security breaches. Write a PowerShell self-signed certificate for code testing. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Kubernetes hybrid cloud emerges from Google-Cisco partnership

A Kubernetes partnership from Cisco and Google widens IT pros' container orchestration options in hybrid cloud deployments, but its advantages depend on future software integrations. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Kubernetes storage projects dominate CNCF docket

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation will host the Rook distributed container storage project -- the first move in a pivotal year for Kubernetes stateful app support. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Chef (software)

Chef is an open source systems management and cloud infrastructure automation platform. Continue Reading

By

• David Carty, Site Editor

ServiceNow Kingston troubleshoots IT tasks with AI, machine learning

ServiceNow delivers AI and machine learning capabilities to its core platform to eliminate time-consuming manual help desk tasks. Continue Reading

By

• Ed Scannell, Freelancer

An IT automation strategy wilts under cloud's shadow

Organizations have been striving to keep abreast of IT automation trends, but with the ongoing cloud takeover, operations must consider new skill requirements instead. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Learn YAML through a personal example

Some code languages take countless hours of formal training and practice. YAML strikes out in the opposite direction. To comprehend its hierarchical format, follow this coding example. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

AI apps demand DevOps infrastructure automation

Businesses look to AI apps to gain a competitive edge, but IT teams must make rapid application changes through a DevOps process and embrace infrastructure automation. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

Catch the IT automation technology wave

IT automation is taking over in operations as tasks get bigger and more complex, handling distributed systems. Stay current with these five big trends. Continue Reading

By

• Emily Mell, Former Site Editor

SaltStack

SaltStack, often referred to as simply "Salt," is an open source configuration management and orchestration tool for automating repeated system administrative and code deployment tasks. Continue Reading

By

• TechTarget Contributor

Jenkins pipeline as code example demonstrates DevOps coordination

Ellucian, which makes software for colleges and universities, offers a pipeline as code example that unifies the release process for multiple generations of apps and brings IT security into the DevOps fold. Continue Reading

By

• Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer

The ITIL 2018 update better catch up to modern IT

When ITIL last updated, DevOps was in its infancy. In the face of rapidly evolving IT practices and technologies, ITIL 2018 must be powerful and usable for diverse IT organizations. Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

Application support best practices involve all teams

There's more to app support than making sure the bits and bytes are in order; the user's experience is vital to uphold. Creating a smooth process takes more than just operations. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Error budget instills reckless IT project management mindset

Just how many errors is the IT operations team allowed to make? Trendy organizations are answering this question with a budget, but it possesses some admins to push the envelope. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

Unleash application dependency mapping tools to combat outages

Create a detailed map of application dependencies from the CMDB and cloud resources and help prevent unexpected outages. Continue Reading

By

• Tim Warner

Embark upon ITSM asset management with systematic tagging

The journey to an organized data center begins with a single tag. Start using IT tags today to apply updates, control access and help automate management. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Know when to implement serverless vs. containers

Containers save resources and reduce deploy times. So does serverless. Containers are a great host for microservices. So is serverless. But the deployment options are more different than they are alike. Continue Reading

By

• Tom Nolle, Andover Intel

A good IT orchestration system saves time for users and admins

Rather than fight with business workers about runaway IT resource consumption and complex demands on tight deadlines, let an orchestration platform control the process. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Two Ansible playbook examples illustrate config management

Configuration management enables automation for many operations tasks. Ansible uses a simple structure and a dynamic language to enable admins to easily complete jobs, once they get the hang of a playbook. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

Centralize Ubuntu server management on Landscape

Canonical Landscape brings centralized server management to Ubuntu on physical and virtual machines, as well as cloud systems. See how it works, and explore features such as tagging. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Get serious about patch validation and deployment -- fast

Zero-day exploits are more dangerous than ever, but so is applying an untested patch to live systems. Without a strategy to quickly validate patches -- outside of production -- you're playing with fire. Continue Reading

By

• Tim Warner

What you'll build with software-defined architecture

It's been two years since Gartner declared that the future of the data center was software-defined. And while we're still a ways from that reality, there's plenty of reason to think IT is indeed moving toward the software-defined architecture.

The ability to compose your infrastructure puts components where they're needed -- but only for as long as they're needed there. Then those resources become available again for another task. IT professionals aren't crazy to look at the speed and efficiency advantages of that type of software-defined architecture and think, "We need that."

To reap those rewards, however, means orienting the data center around software. That's a big shift both in strategy and execution. And it's not easily achievable.

The cover story of this issue of Modern Infrastructure digs into these possibilities and challenges. TechTarget's Erica Mixon talks with experts about the software-defined architecture, what it can achieve and what an organization will want to take into account before heading down that road.

With a truly composable infrastructure and products with cloud-like capabilities, an organization can pool its data center resources and put them to work with utmost efficiency. If that's the future, maybe it's time to start figuring out how you'll get there.

 Continue Reading

Follow a PXE boot tutorial to increase OS configuration automation

PXE boot servers are simple to set up and can aid in IT operations' goals toward high-level efficiency and automation. This tutorial runs through setup and optimal settings. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

IT capacity planning takes new shape in the cloud

Migrating applications off premises to the cloud requires a new capacity planning approach: Develop a detailed cloud strategy, and carefully track upgrade schedules. Continue Reading

By

• Brian Kirsch, Milwaukee Area Technical College

Infrastructure as code benefits range from audits to ops

When an auditor asks to see how the entire application stack is configured, you'll recognize the benefits of an infrastructure-as-code implementation. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

The application runtime environment is as important as the app

To avoid cascading failures and never-ending troubleshooting, take the time to understand the software and hardware -- the runtime environment -- that keeps an app ticking. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

A Red Hat Satellite tutorial to install an update server

With Red Hat Satellite, IT ops can deploy an update server to simplify patching. Follow this step-by-step tutorial to install the server, attach subscriptions and devise a sync plan. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Use Azure availability sets for patching to achieve the best uptime

Ops' responsibility doesn't end once in a public cloud; in fact, it can get more confounding. Learn the best route to update Azure cloud instances and what mistakes to avoid. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Standardize configuration management software for smoother DevOps

If your organization uses different configuration management software for development and operations, you're not alone. Even better, it's no engineering feat to migrate to one main tool. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

PowerShell scripts enable automated cloud deployments

This step-by-step tutorial walks through the process to automate an Azure deployment; start with launching the virtual server, and finish with the deletion process. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Configuration management processes take down GRC challenges

Configuration management processes speed deployments, but tools that know effective licenses and data storage details aid in another area that businesses are keen to get right. Continue Reading

By

• Clive Longbottom

Build a DevOps version control process for IT infrastructure

Infrastructure admins can turn to the DevOps version control process for all IaC updates. Learn the basics, then follow along with an example in Git. Continue Reading

By

• Mike Pfeiffer, CloudSkills.io

Ansible variables give structure to playbook execution

Ansible playbooks tell the IT automation system how to complete a task. Use variables in a playbook to tell Ansible how to interact with the available resources. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

A deployment pipeline keeps infrastructure ducks in their rows

IT infrastructure is difficult to get right. Whether to stand up a test/dev server or deploy a new app to production, infrastructure developers turn to a deployment pipeline to build IT. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Bertram

Come to grips with immutable infrastructure in production

Immutable infrastructure is a developer approach to application hosting that's made its way into the IT ops lexicon. It's time to understand the changes it brings to application support. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

Chef Habitat offers a different take on configuration management

Chef Habitat's strategy focuses on the dynamic application environment instead of static servers, approaching configuration management with a new focus. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

IT automation software: Top five common mistakes

IT automation software projects can involve a great deal of risk, but avoid these common mistakes and it will increase the chances for automation success. Continue Reading

By

• Mark Brunelli

Simple steps to improve the IT incident management process

No one notices when there's a solid IT incident management response process in place, but everyone notices when there's not. Improve how you handle issues in three steps. Continue Reading

By

• Adam Fowler

Agentless Ansible structure opens up configuration management potential

Ansible is easy to use for IT ops pros, and it supports multicloud functionality within its automation structure. This simple walkthrough gets sys admins started with the tool. Continue Reading

By

• Sander van Vugt

Server OS patching doesn't have to be as painful as you fear

OS patching is like a mechanic's job -- you need different tools for different makes and models. SCCM, Satellite and Landscape provide upkeep for IT's sports cars and SUVs. Continue Reading

By

• Stuart Burns

Three DevOps toolchain options refine IT automation

DevOps tools that don't interconnect form a bottleneck that teams can easily avoid -- or retroactively remedy -- if the CI/CD workflow merits the time commitment. Continue Reading

By

• Kurt Marko, MarkoInsights

IT asset tracking informs better capacity, management decisions

Detailed IT asset inventories are a result of granular asset tracking and lead to better server and storage management -- among other benefits. Continue Reading

By

• Stephen J. Bigelow, Senior Technology Editor

ServiceNow roadmap extends ITSM technology with AI, machine learning

A leader in the IT systems management market, ServiceNow looks to expand into new applications markets. Farrell Hough, in charge of ServiceNow's product operations, lays out the roadmap. Continue Reading

By

• Ed Scannell, Freelancer