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A Pragmatic Introduction to Machine Learning for DevOps Engineers

January 23, 2018 | Data Engineering, DevOps

A Pragmatic Introduction to Machine Learning for DevOps Engineers

Machine Learning is a hot topic these days, as can be seen from search trends. It was the success of Deepmind and AlphaGo in 2016 that really brought machine learning to the attention of the wider community and the world at large.

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DevOpsDays Riga 2017 (Video): Technical and Project Management
Agile Eastern Europe 2017 (Video): Delivery Mindsets – From Stone Age To DevOps
Key Takeaways from the DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES16) EU Conference

July 3, 2016 | DevOps

Key Takeaways from the DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES16) EU Conference

Several of us from the OpenCredo team were in attendance at the inaugural EU edition of the DevOps Enterprise Summit conference. We have been big fans of the two previous US versions, and have watched the video recordings of talks (2014, 2015) with keen interest as many of our DevOps transformation clients are very much operating in the ‘enterprise’ space.

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DevOps and IT Operations

January 29, 2016 | DevOps

DevOps and IT Operations

DevOps is 2016’s tech holy grail – unified development and operations, both working to deliver what the business needs, quickly, reliably, and adaptably. Done well, DevOps transforms the way organisations work; it helps break down barriers between tech teams, and between technology and the rest of the business. Good DevOps is the antidote to increasing segmentation and specialisation within companies. With the promised benefits, is it any wonder that senior managers are pushing for it in organisations spanning all sizes and industries?

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The Risk of DevOps Tools: Automated Failure

December 16, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps

The Risk of DevOps Tools: Automated Failure

The Promise of DevOps Tools

In the rush to embrace DevOps, many organisations seek out tools to help them achieve DevOps nirvana; the magical tools that will unify Development and Operations, stop the infighting, and ensure collaboration. This search for tools to solve problems exists in many domains, but seems particularly prevalent in IT (it may be real, or a reflection of my exposure to IT). The temptation to embrace new tools as a panacea is high, because the problems in IT seem so pervasive and persistent.

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Defining DevOps (and Driving the Transformation)

December 1, 2015 | DevOps

Defining DevOps (and Driving the Transformation)

I was privileged to be invited to speak on the topic of “Defining DevOps” by the London Technology Transformation Network, alongside a long-time friend and Devoxx conference contributor Dan Hardiker. I had a great time presenting at the event, and the questions and feedback we received after the main talks was superb – I took away lots to think about, and I believe the audience did too.

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Our Thoughts on DevOps and Cloud at JAX London

October 18, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps

Our Thoughts on DevOps and Cloud at JAX London

DevOps, Cloud and Microservices: “All Hail the Developer King/Queen”

Last week Steve Poole and I were once again back at the always informative JAX London conference talking about DevOps and the Cloud. This presentation built upon our previous DevOps talk that was presented last year, and focused on the experiences that Steve and I had encountered over the last year (the slides for our 2014 “Moving to a DevOps” mode talk can be found on SlideShare, and the video on Parleys).

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DevOps is Transformative

October 12, 2015 | DevOps

DevOps is Transformative

The Pre-DevOps Environment

DevOps is transformative. This (hopefully) won’t be true forever, but it is for now. While the modern management practices of separating development and operations (and to a lesser extent, everyone else) prevail, the tearing down of the walls that separate them will remain transformative. In company after company, management and front-line staff are coming to realise that keeping functions separate, which are inherently interdependent, is a model for blame, shifted responsibility, and acrimony. It’s easy to divvy-up a company up based on function. To many people, it seems the most logical way to do it. Ops does operations, Dev does development, Marketing markets, etc. It seems much harder to do it any other way. So why do it?

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Self-testing infrastructure-as-code

May 31, 2018 | DevOps

Self-testing infrastructure-as-code

As traditional operations has embraced the concept of code, it has benefited from ideas already prevalent in developer circles such as version control. Version control brings the benefit that not only can you see what the infrastructure was, but you can also get reviews of changes by your peers before the change is made live; known to most developers as Pull Request (PR) reviews.

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Heuristics for Identifying Service Boundaries

May 16, 2018 | Microservices

Heuristics for Identifying Service Boundaries

To identify service boundaries, it is not enough to consider (business) domains only. Other forces like organisational communication structures, and – very important – time, strongly suggest that we should include several other criteria in our considerations.

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Get your -aas in gear: Privatelink and PaaS democratisation on AWS

February 6, 2018 | Cloud

Get your -aas in gear: Privatelink and PaaS democratisation on AWS

Among the many announcements made at Re:Invent 2017 was the release of AWS Privatelink for Customer and Partner services. We believe that the opportunity signalled by this modest announcement may have an impact far broader than first impressions suggest.

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muCon 2017 (Video): Testing Programmable Infrastructure
Terraform Provider Development

August 9, 2017 | Cloud, DevOps, Terraform Provider

Terraform Provider Development

The recent 0.10.0 release of HashiCorp Terraform, saw a significant change to the way Providers are managed. Specifically, the single open source code repository for Terraform has been divided into core and multiple provider repositories.

 

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Microservices (Redux)

January 8, 2016 | Microservices

The Seven Deadly Sins of Microservices (Redux)

Many of our clients are in the process of investigating or implementing ‘microservices’, and a popular question we often get asked is “what’s the most common mistake you see when moving towards a microservice architecture?”. We’ve seen plenty of good things with this architectural pattern, but we have also seen a few recurring issues and anti-patterns, which I’m keen to share here.

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JavaOne: Debugging Java Applications Running in Docker

November 3, 2015 | Software Consultancy

JavaOne: Debugging Java Applications Running in Docker

My JavaOne experience was rather busy this year, what with three talks presented in a single day! The first of these talks “Debugging Java Apps in Containers: No Heavy Welding Gear Required” was delivered with my regular co-presenter Steve Poole, from IBM, and we shared our combined experiences of working with Java and Docker over the past year.

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JavaOne: Building a Microservice Development Ecosystem (Video)

October 31, 2015 | Microservices

JavaOne: Building a Microservice Development Ecosystem (Video)

Microservices: Some Assembly Required

Over the past few weeks I’ve been writing an OpenCredo blog series on the topic of “Building a Microservice Development Ecosystem”, but my JavaOne talk of the same title crept up on me before I managed to finish the remaining posts. I’m still planning to finish the full blog series, but in the meantime I thought it would be beneficial to share the video and slides associated with the talk, alongside some of my related thinking. I’ve been fortunate to work on several interesting microservice projects at OpenCredo, and we’re always keen to share our knowledge or offer advice, and so please do get in touch if we can help you or your organisation.

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OpenCredo and Container Solutions Partner to Deliver Emerging Technologies

November 19, 2014 | Microservices

The 7 Deadly Sins of Microservices

Undeniably, there is a growing interest in microservices as we see more organisations, big and small, evaluating and implementing this emerging approach. Despite its apparent novelty, most concepts and principles underpinning microservices are not exactly new – they are simply proven and commonsense software development practices that now need to be applied holistically and at a wider scale, rather than at the scale of a single program or machine. These principles include separation of concerns, loose coupling, scalability and fault-tolerance.

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The factors pushing many organisations towards Continuous Delivery with Infrastructure as Code and what’s next…

January 7, 2013 | Software Consultancy

The factors pushing many organisations towards Continuous Delivery with Infrastructure as Code and what’s next…

The practice of continuous integration in which build servers are used to build and perform testing of code is now widespread and mainstream.

While not all teams have adopted continuous integration effectively, its increasing adoption has led many to start to look for additional opportunities to improve the cost, quality and speed of delivery with which software targeted to meet business needs can be released into production environments.

Traditionally Continuous Integration addresses the question of “does the software build and pass our unit and integration test suites?”. This is often insufficient.

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The Why’s, What’s and How’s of Kubernetes Operators

September 27, 2023 | Blog, Kubernetes

The Why’s, What’s and How’s of Kubernetes Operators

Learn to create your first Kubernetes operator by checking out our Senior Consultant Michal Tusnio’s latest blog, “Kubernetes Operators – Whys, Hows and Whats” where he takes you on a journey from zero to operator.

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Kafka vs RabbitMQ: The Consumer-Driven Choice

July 20, 2021 | Blog, Data Engineering, Kafka

Kafka vs RabbitMQ: The Consumer-Driven Choice

Message and event-driven systems provide an array of benefits to organisations of all shapes and sizes. At their core, they help decouple producers and consumers so that each can work at their own pace without having to wait for the other – asynchronous processing at its best.

In fact, such systems enable a whole range of messaging patterns, offering varying levels of guarantees surrounding the processing and consumption options for clients. Take for example the publish/subscribe pattern, which enables one message to be broadcast and consumed by multiple consumers; or the competing consumer pattern, which enables a message to be processed once but with multiple concurrent consumers vying for the honour—essentially providing a way to distribute the load. The manner in which these patterns are actually realised however, depends a lot on the technology used, as each has its own approach and unique tradeoffs. 

In this article we will explore how this all applies to RabbitMQ and Apache Kafka, and how these two technologies differ, specifically from a message consumer’s perspective.

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Machine Learning at scale: first impressions of Kubeflow

April 20, 2021 | Data Engineering, Machine Learning, Software Consultancy

Machine Learning at scale: first impressions of Kubeflow

Our recent client was a Fintech who had ambitions to build a Machine Learning platform for real-time decision making. The client had significant Kubernetes proficiency, ran on the cloud, and had a strong preference for using free, open-source software over cloud-native offerings that come with lock-in. Several components were spiked with success (feature preparation with Apache Beam and Seldon for model serving performed particularly strongly). Kubeflow was one of the next technologies on our list of spikes, showing significant promise at the research stage and seemingly a good match for our client’s priorities and skills.

That platform slipped down the client’s priority list before completing the research for Kubeflow, so I wanted to see how that project might have turned out. Would Kubeflow have made the cut?

 

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Anthos – A Holistic Approach to your Hybrid Cloud initiative

February 17, 2021 | Blog, Cloud, Cloud Native, GCP, Open Source

Anthos – A Holistic Approach to your Hybrid Cloud initiative

Multi-cloud is rapidly becoming the cloud strategy of choice for enterprises looking to modernise their applications.

And the reason is simple – it gives them much more flexibility to host their workloads and data where it suits them best.

In this post, we focus on Google’s application modernisation solution Google Anthos and the role it can play in your cloud transformation strategy.

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What is Continuous Verification?

October 15, 2020

What is Continuous Verification?

Continuous Verification is a term that is starting to pop up from time-to-time… but what does it mean? Well… according to Nora Jones and Casey Rosenthal, authors of O’Reilly’s Chaos Engineering books,

 

“Continuous verification (CV) is a discipline of proactive experimentation, implemented as tooling that verifies system behaviors. This stands in contrast to prior common practices in software quality assurance, which favor reactive testing, implemented as methodologies that validate known properties of software. This isn’t to say that prior common practices are invalid or should be deprecated. Alerting, testing, code reviews, monitoring, SRE practices, and the like—these are all great practices and should be encouraged”

 

Over the course of this post, we will unpack this statement: to understand what is behind it and what it might mean for your development process.

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Automation of complex IT systems

May 14, 2020 | Blog, DevOps

Automation of complex IT systems

At the time of this post, the UK is making steps to exit from an unprecedented lockdown measures for the Coronavirus. Much of the UK workforce are still making efforts to work-from-home with mainly key workers operating – at risk – in public. Many industries have shut down completely. Consequently, many businesses are reflecting on what happens next and how do we better mitigate future pandemic events?

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Three Highlights from CloudNative London Conference Day 3

October 8, 2019 | Cloud, Cloud Native, Culture

Three Highlights from CloudNative London Conference Day 3

Following on from the last two blogs by Stuart (who shared highlights for day 1) and Trent (who shared highlights from day 2), I will conclude with mine on CloudNative London 2019 Day 3.

The Cloud Native landscape can be bewildering, and not only for newcomers. As a traveller on the Cloud-native journey, I have sometimes been overwhelmed by the number of products and projects. This is why I took hold of the opportunity to go to Day 3 of the Cloud Native London Conference last month hosted by Skills Matter.

Here are my top highlights from Day 3 of the CloudNative London 2019.

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3 Highlights from CloudNative London 2019 (Day 2)

October 3, 2019

3 Highlights from CloudNative London 2019 (Day 2)

Continuing on from Stuart’s previous blog which covered highlights from CloudNative London conference day 1, I have put together a summary for day 2. 

Being an OCer (OpenCredo employee) has given me the opportunity to fully embed myself in the London technology scene. Alongside our direct engagements with clients, it is a chance to understand and evaluate the trends and lessons that have emerged over the past year.  

For conferences and technical content, London is a very crowded location. Every day it seems like a new conference is being announced and I know I cannot attend them all, no matter how much I want too!  Alongside some of my other colleagues, I was given the option to attend the Skillsmatter CloudNative London conference and with the increase of organisations embracing the dynamic and transformative benefits offered by an ever-growing choice of cloud providers, it seemed like a good fit. 

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Why Upgrading to Terraform 0.12+ Should be a Priority

October 3, 2019 | Cloud, DevOps, Hashicorp, Open Source

Why Upgrading to Terraform 0.12+ Should be a Priority

Terraform 0.12 in recent years has emerged as the de facto standard with regards to defining and managing cloud infrastructure. It is one of four primary tools offered by HashiCorp, (Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad) and underpins the workflows that make up their Cloud Operating Model.

Since its first release in 2014, the wider Terraform community has embraced frequent releases and this past year has been no exception. HashiCorp announced the release of Terraform 0.12 in May 2019 and as of writing this post the official release is 0.12.9.

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Evolving Your Architecture Whilst Still Keeping The Lights On

September 12, 2019 | Cloud Native, Microservices, Software Consultancy

Evolving Your Architecture Whilst Still Keeping The Lights On

As a technology leader, you’ll be aware that competitive pressures and shifting business requirements are driving changes in the technical architectures of many organisations. This means you need a new strategic approach based on the ability to continually evolve elements of your systems and architectures.

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Data Science on Steroids: Productionised Machine Learning as a Value Driver for Business

July 31, 2018 | Machine Learning

Data Science on Steroids: Productionised Machine Learning as a Value Driver for Business

Machine Learning, alongside a mature Data Science, will help to bring IT and business closer together. By leveraging data for actionable insights, IT will increasingly drive business value. Agile and DevOps practices enable the continuous delivery of business value through productionised machine learning models and software delivery.

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Just Cloud It: leading digital business innovation companies team up in cloud consulting joint venture
Programmable Infrastructure Needs Testing Too

March 20, 2017 | DevOps

Programmable Infrastructure Needs Testing Too

DevOps has swept the tech landscape. Now, many are discovering the benefits of programmable infrastructure. I have been lucky to work on many projects where we’ve taken advantage of tools such as Terraform, Ansible, or Chef.

 

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OpenCredo joins the HashiCorp Channel Partner program
OpenCredo is Heading North; New Office Opening in Manchester!
Is it Time for Your ‘Microservices Checkup’?

March 2, 2016 | DevOps, Microservices

Is it Time for Your ‘Microservices Checkup’?

Many of our clients are currently implementing applications using a ‘microservice’-based architecture. Increasingly we are hearing from organisations that are part way through a migration to microservices, and they want our help with validating and improving their current solution. These ‘microservices checkup’ projects have revealed some interesting patterns, and because we have experience of working in a wide-range of industries (and also have ‘fresh eyes’ when looking at a project), we are often able to work alongside teams to make significant improvements and create a strategic roadmap for future improvements.

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Join the OpenCredo Team at the OOP Conference in Germany

January 30, 2016 | Microservices

Join the OpenCredo Team at the OOP Conference in Germany

The OpenCredo team will be presenting two sessions on our recent learnings with implementing microservices at the OOP Conference, which will be running from the 1st – 5th February. We will also be running a booth, and so if you are interested in learning more about our recent projects, are keen to see if we can help you with your latest technical or organisational challenges, or want to join our team, then stop by and say hello!

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(Spring) Booting Hazelcast

December 1, 2015 | Software Consultancy

(Spring) Booting Hazelcast

This post introduce some of the basic features of Hazelcast, some of its limitations, how to embed it in a Spring Boot application and write integration testings. This post is intended to be the first of a series about Hazelcast and its integration with Spring (Boot). Let’s start from the basics.

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The Business Behind Microservices (Redux)

November 24, 2015 | DevOps, Microservices

The Business Behind Microservices (Redux)

It was once again a privilege to present at the annual ‘muCon 2015‘ microservices conference held in London (at the shiny new Skillsmatter CodeNode venue). Based on feedback fro talks I gave earlier in the year, I presented a completely new version of my ‘The Business Behind Microservices‘ talk, which focuses on the organisational and people side of implementing a microservice-based application.

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OpenCredo joins the HashiCorp Channel Partner program
Microservice Platforms: Some Assembly [Still] Required. Part Two

September 20, 2015 | Microservices

Microservice Platforms: Some Assembly [Still] Required. Part Two

Working Locally with Microservices

Over the past five years I have worked within several projects that used a ‘microservice’-based architecture, and one constant issue I have encountered is the absence of standardised patterns for local development and ‘off the shelf’ development tooling that support this. When working with monoliths we have become quite adept at streamlining the development, build, test and deploy cycles. Development tooling to help with these processes is also readily available (and often integrated with our IDEs). For example, many platforms provide ‘hot reloading’ for viewing the effects of code changes in near-real time, automated execution of tests, regular local feedback from continuous integration servers, and tooling to enable the creation of a local environment that mimics the production stack.

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“The Business Behind Microservices” – Upcoming Webinar

September 18, 2015 | Microservices

“The Business Behind Microservices” – Upcoming Webinar

Microservices: Organisation, Architectural and Operational Challenges

We’re pleased to begin our series of OpenCredo webinars with “The Business Behind Microservices”, which takes a look at the some of the business and organisational challenges that come along with the decision to implement microservices.

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SaltStack – Using Consul as an External Pillar Source

September 14, 2015 | DevOps, Hashicorp, Open Source

SaltStack – Using Consul as an External Pillar Source

Recently I was working on a project that was using SaltStack for configuration management and Consul for service discovery. It occurred to me that using Consul’s key/value store would be great place to store data needed for my Salt runs, but unfortunately Consul was not supported in SaltStack as an official data store at that point in time. Being an open source project however, this provided an excellent opportunity to contribute back and this blog post looks to provide some details on how this works, as well as a practical demo on how you can take advantage of Consul as an external data store.

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GOTO London 2015 “Agile, Lean and Rugged”
Embracing Disruptive Innovation: OpenCredo Partners with Google

August 5, 2015 | Cloud, GCP, Kubernetes

Embracing Disruptive Innovation: OpenCredo Partners with Google

Why OpenCredo partnered with Google

Recently OpenCredo chose to partner with Google in order to share knowledge and resources around the Google Cloud Platform offerings. Our clients come in many shapes and sizes, but typically all of them realise three disruptive truths of the modern IT industry: the (economic) value of cloud; the competitive advantage of continuous delivery; and the potential of hypothesis and data-driven product development to increase innovation (as popularised by the Lean Startup / Lean Enterprise motto of ‘build, measure, learn’).

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The business behind microservices: Exploring the organisational, architectural and operational challenges
Spring Data Hadoop – Contextual Analysis

July 4, 2013 | Software Consultancy

Spring Data Hadoop – Contextual Analysis

In which situations Spring Data Hadoop (SDH) can add value, and in which situations would it be a poor choice? This article follows on from an objective summary of the features of SDH.

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Spring Data Hadoop – Objective Overview

June 30, 2013 | Software Consultancy

Spring Data Hadoop – Objective Overview

Spring Data Hadoop (SDH) is a Spring offshoot project that allows the invocation and configuration of Hadoop tasks within a Spring application context. It offers support for Hadoop jobs, HBase, Pig, Hive, Cascading and additionally JSR-223 scripting for job preparation and tidy-up.

It is most suited for use in organisations with existing Spring applications or investment in Spring expertise. Some SDH features replicate functionality of tools in the Hadoop ecosystem that DevOps engineers who maintain a Hadoop cluster will be more familiar with.

 

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A dive into saltstack

January 10, 2013 | DevOps

A dive into saltstack

Recently I have started looking into SaltStack as a solution that does both config management and orchestration. It is a relatively new project started in 2011, but it has a growing fanbase among Sys Admins and DevOps Engineers. In this blog post I will look into Salt as a promising alternative, and comparing it to Puppet as a way of exploring its basic set of features.

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