In the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” the magnetic containment field prevents contact of antimatter with normal matter in a warp core. If the field were to collapse or fall below 15% of its maximum integrity, the starship would be destroyed. This containment field was a very important safety system for starships (reference Wikia). Read More
Building an Operationally Successful Component – Part 3: Robustness My previous two posts discussed building components that are “operationally successful.” To me, a component cannot be considered successful unless it actually operates as expected when released into the wild. Something that, “works on my machine,” cannot be considered a success unless it also works on Read More
From an engineering and development standpoint, one of the most important aspects of cloud infrastructure is the concept of unlimited resources. The idea of being able to get a new server to experiment with, or being able to spin up more servers on the fly to handle a traffic spike is a foundational benefit of Read More
Building an Operationally Successful Component – Part 2: Self-correction In my last post I talked about building components that are “operationally successful,” by which I mean that the software functions correctly when it is deployed into production. I suggested that there are three things that a software component must have, to some degree, in order Read More
I recently came across this article on the INTUIT QuickBase blog and was intrigued by the premise. It asserts that inside any team or organization, you will have a bell curve of talent and intelligence – which most would agree to. It’s not a bad thing, it just happens. Regardless of how well staffed you Read More
On our team at Ancestry.com, we spend much of our time focusing on the operational success of the code that we write. An amazing feature that no one can use because the servers are constantly down is of little use to anyone and can be deemed a failure, even if the code worked from a Read More
We’ve been working with Chef (formerly OpsCode) for a couple years now. I can safely say that I’ve spent more time crawling through forums and reviewing code documentation than I care to admit. In all that time, I’ve never seen anyone clearly document how to use Chef dynamically. I hope that I can share some Read More
Over the past few years Ancestry.com, has undergone a significant transformation within many aspects of its business. Steady growth combined with Agile adoption, continuous delivery, and improvements in technology and infrastructure, has created an organization focused on delivering value. In November, Ancestry.com CEO, Tim Sullivan presented at DevOps conference, FlowCon about the organizations shift to Read More
Starting with the adoption of Agile development practices, Ancestry.com has progressed to a continuous delivery model to enable code release whenever the business requires it. Transitioning from large, weekly or bi-weekly software rollouts to smaller, incremental updates has allowed Ancestry.com to increase responsiveness and deliver new features to customers more quickly. Ancestry.com has come a Read More
One of the most frequent questions I get when speaking at conferences or with other industry folks is, “How do I get DevOps going at my company?” Always a great question, but not always easy to answer. Obviously, there are a lot of factors and issues to consider. So a lot of the time I Read More