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Build versus Buy? It’s a question I usually asks candidates during interviews. There is really only one good answer; buy until you can build it better for cheaper. This doesn’t mean outsource everything. This doesn’t mean you won’t be hacking together cool things. It means that you have the business sense to know that you have core competencies that are either still forming, your team is small, or you have enough to manage in-house already. Sure, everyone wants to build everything they use. You get better by building, your team takes pride in building, but at some point, you build yourself into a box. Then what? Then you buy your way out of it at what is likely a higher cost to your business than buying at the beginning. Remember, your technical debt started the second you released code. Free continuous delivery eBook from GoCD This free reference guide will take you back to the basics. You’ll find visuals and definitions on key concepts and questions you need to answer about your teams to determine your readiness for continuous delivery. Download and share with your team. SPONSORED ...

Free continuous delivery eBook from GoCD This free reference guide will take you back to the basics. You’ll find visuals and definitions on key concepts and questions you need to answer about your teams to determine your readiness for continuous delivery. Download and share with your team. SPONSORED All Things Open 2017 October 23 and 24, Raleigh, NC USA 2,500–3,000+ technologists will descend upon the City of Oaks to attend 200+ sessions from nearly as many speakers. Representative from nearly every major technology company in the U.S. will be in attendance as well. To get 20% off enter code DevOpsish20 when registering to attend. Website: https://allthingsopen.org To Register: https://allthingsopen.org/register-now All Day DevOps, Live Online October 24, 2017 When: October 24, 2017 (24 hours) Where: From your desktop, laptop, or mobile device Free Registration: All Day DevOps Registration (http://www.alldaydevops.com) On October 24th, DevOps’ish will be supporting the Live Online All Day DevOps Conference. This is a 24-hour event with 5 simultaneous tracks, delivering 96 sessions and 4 keynotes in 38 time zones. Session tracks include Automated Security, CI/CD, Modern Infrastructure, DevOps in Government, and the Tech Crawl, where companies will take you behind the scenes of their DevOps working environments. ...

This week I finished a project that has been in the works for a quite some time. Back before I moved to Detroit but shortly after taking over Triangle DevOps, I was offered (and accepted) a spot as a DevOpsDays Raleigh organizer. I submitted three talks to the event and one was accepted. Today I opened the event with my talk, “The Dark Side of DevOps” and thoroughly enjoyed it as well as all the other talks at the event. Huge shout out to the other organizers, volunteers, and speakers for all their hard work in making the second DevOpsDays Raleigh better than the first one. It was great to catch up with friends while I was in town. Back to Detroit for me but what a week for news in general and DevOps! GoCD — open source continuous delivery server GoCD is a continuous delivery tool specializing in advanced workflow modeling and dependency management. It lets you track a change from commit to deploy at a glance, providing superior visibility into your workflow. It’s open source, free to use and download. SPONSORED ...

Football is back and I couldn’t be happier about it (despite my Gators losing to Michigan). I know that sports and DevOps-types don’t always go together. However, there are a lot of things we tech folks can learn from football. Systems and process are what great football teams are built on. Take a good look at Nick Saban’s process focus at Alabama for an idea of how to build a perennial championship contender (tl;dr: it’s a one step at a time approach). When you take a look at Bill Belichick’s “Do Your Job” mantra, you realize that is what DevOps is all about; owning your assignments and executing them. Many times in DevOps the things that traditional development and operations teams can’t execute well on are done without question and executed quite well. Then they are iterated upon mightily like it’s second nature. Ownership of the pipeline and process is a big deal in DevOps. It’s a truly worthwhile comparison to explore when you have the time. Football and DevOps go together more than you realize. ...

I began thinking about my talk for DevOpsDays Raleigh here in a couple weeks. It’s based off an already written piece from March. But any time I write something, after a few months I think of ways I could have written the piece better. The sane thing to do is not revisit it but to continue iterating on it. One overarching fact of not only DevOps but also business is, resisting change is stupid, successful businesses find a way to eliminate existential threats. Sometimes the problem with DevOps is that it isn’t close enough to the thing making money; the product (and their teams). Unless you work in highly regulated industries there is a huge incentive to getting things done efficiently. Keep in mind, efficiently does not equate to quickly. Getting things done to meet an arbitrary deadline will usually result in shortcuts being taken, technical debt, and often rework (which is awful at deploy time). There is something incredibly refreshing about being able to identify unforeseen issues and adjust the target date accordingly. But, you have to be careful you’re not always aiming for the moon and consistently failing to get to orbit. ...