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59 items found: Search results for "change management" in all categories x

DevOpsDays Riga 2017 (Video): Technical and Project Management
Reusing ansible roles with private git repos and dependency management

November 4, 2015 | Software Consultancy

Reusing ansible roles with private git repos and dependency management

Writing reusable roles for Ansible is not an easy task but one that’s worth doing. This post should walk you through the basics of writing reusable roles with dependencies backed by public and private git repositories.

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[Past event] Infracoders London

Join us for Infracoders London on the 21st of June to hear talks from our Lead Consultant, Bart Spaans and Thoughtwork’s Cloud Specialist, Kief Morris!

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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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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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The Business Behind Microservices Webinar (Video and Slides)

September 24, 2015 | Microservices

The Business Behind Microservices Webinar (Video and Slides)

Unless you’ve been living under a (COBOL-based) rock for the last few years, you will have no doubt heard of the emerging trend of microservices. This approach to developing ‘loosely coupled service-oriented architecture with bounded contexts’ has captured the hearts and minds of many developers. The promise of easier enforcement of good architectural and design principles, such as encapsulation and interface segregation, combined with the availability to experiment with different languages and platforms for each service, is a (developer) match made in heaven.

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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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The business behind microservices: Exploring the organisational, architectural and operational challenges
Deploying Neo4j Graph Database Server across AWS regions with Puppet

August 16, 2012 | Neo4j

Deploying Neo4j Graph Database Server across AWS regions with Puppet

neo4jIt’s been more than a year now since I rolled out Neo4j Graph Database Server image in Amazon EC2.

In May 2011 the version of Neo4j was 1.3 and just recently guys at Neo Technology published version 1.7.2 so I thought now is the time to revisit this exercise and make fresh AMIs available.
Last year I created Neo4j AMI manually in one region then copied it across to the remaining AWS regions. Due to the size of the AMI and the latency between regions this process was slow.

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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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The 2023 Mayor’s Business Climate Challenge (BCC) – Part 2

September 19, 2023 | Blog, Culture, News

The 2023 Mayor’s Business Climate Challenge (BCC) – Part 2

In this blog we share the latest developments in our efforts to create a more sustainable business as part of The 2023 Mayor’s Business Climate Challenge.

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Why should you upgrade your Terraform provider to the latest version of the API

August 17, 2023 | Blog, Terraform Provider

Why should you upgrade your Terraform provider to the latest version of the API

Check out John Sharpe and Will May’s latest blog where they give suggestions for Terraform Provider authors who are thinking about upgrading from SDKv2 to Framework

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The 2022/2023 Mayor’s Business Climate Challenge (BCC)

January 20, 2023 | Blog, Culture, News

The 2022/2023 Mayor’s Business Climate Challenge (BCC)

OpenCredo is thrilled to be a part of the 2022/2023 Mayor’s Business Climate Challenge (BCC). Read this blog to learn more about our initiatives to lower carbon emissions as part of the voluntary energy efficiency programme!

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When Your Product Teams Should Aim to be Inefficient – Part 2

June 29, 2022 | Blog, Organisational Transformation, Software Consultancy

When Your Product Teams Should Aim to be Inefficient – Part 2

Many businesses advocate for efficiency, but this is not always the right goal.

In part one of this article, we explored how product teams can balance two important considerations – efficiency and effectiveness.

In this second part we will introduce the – often unexpected – implications of turning to technology to bring about efficiency and wider change, and the deeper considerations that must be addressed first.

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Making Sense of Data with RDF* vs. LPG

January 31, 2022 | Blog, Data Engineering

Making Sense of Data with RDF* vs. LPG

There are two camps of Graph database, one side is RDF, where they are strict with their format, and somewhat limited for their extensibility. The other side is LPG, where they can define labels to the relationships. With its recent extension, RDF now allows users to add properties, thus becoming RDF*. In this blog, Ebru explores the structural and performance differences between LPG and RDF*.

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What you might have missed in Kubernetes 1.22 release

December 5, 2021 | Cloud, Kubernetes

What you might have missed in Kubernetes 1.22 release

Kubernetes’ second release in 2021, version 1.22, has been out for a little while now and with 1.23 on its way, we thought we’d take a look back. Kubernetes 1.22 was a highly comprehensive release with 53 enhancements in all three graduation levels: 13 features have graduated to stable, 24 enhancements reached beta status, and 16 new features have been accepted into the alpha stage. 

The latest version has some noteworthy security features such as running Kubelet without root access, pod security policies, and seccomp. There are also a couple of deprecated and removed APIs. In this blog, we’ll discuss the significant changes in v1.22, as well as how to handle the removed APIs.

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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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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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Security, Usability & Cloud Data Services in Finance

March 20, 2020

Security, Usability & Cloud Data Services in Finance

Traditionally, Usability and Security have been set in opposition to each other: with tight security, we end up with painful user experience. In this blog, Guy focuses on financial services as an exemplar of how we can introduce usability into a vertical with challenging security and compliance requirements.

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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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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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Securing Kafka using Vault PKI

February 20, 2019 | DevOps, Hashicorp, Kafka, Open Source

Securing Kafka using Vault PKI

Creating and managing a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) could be a very straightforward task if you use appropriate tools. In this blog post, I’ll cover the steps to easily set up a PKI with Vault from HashiCorp, and use it to secure a Kafka Cluster.

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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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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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[Past event] Developer Week New York 2017

Join our Lead Consultant at Developer Week 2017 New York; New York City’s Largest Developer Conference & Expo!

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[Past event] DevOpsCon 2017

Join Daniel Bryant and Antonio Cobo at DevOpsCon 2017; The Conference for Continuous Delivery, Microservices, Docker, Clouds & Lean Business! DevOpsCon will be running from the 12th-15th of June, and offers you a glimpse at popular topics such as innovative infrastructure and modern lean business culture through hands-on workshops, sessions and keynotes.

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[Past event] HashiDays London 2017

We are excited to announce that our CTO, Nicki Watt will be speaking at HashiDays London 2017! Hashidays London is a one-day, single track, deeply technical Hashicorp event!

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Agile Eastern Europe 2017 (Video): Delivery Mindsets – From Stone Age To DevOps

[Past event] Agile Eastern Europe Conference 2017

We are pleased to announce that Antonio Cobo will be presenting at Agile Eastern Europe Conference 2017. Agile Eastern Europe 2017 will be held from the 7th to 8th of April in Kiev and will be bringing together speakers from all over the world that will cover topics such engineering, coaching, enterprise, offshore and management.

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Data Analytics using Cassandra and Spark

March 23, 2017 | Cassandra, Data Analysis, Data Engineering

Data Analytics using Cassandra and Spark

In recent years, Cassandra has become one of the most widely used NoSQL databases: many of our clients use Cassandra for a variety of different purposes. This is no accident as it is a great datastore with nice scalability and performance characteristics.

However, adopting Cassandra as a single, one size fits all database has several downsides. The partitioned/distributed data storage model makes it difficult (and often very inefficient) to do certain types of queries or data analytics that are much more straightforward in a relational database.

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How Not To Use Cassandra Like An RDBMS (and what will happen if you do)

September 15, 2016 | Cassandra

How Not To Use Cassandra Like An RDBMS (and what will happen if you do)

Cassandra isn’t a relational database management system, but it has some features that make it look a bit like one. Chief among these is CQL, a query language with an SQL-like syntax. CQL isn’t a bad thing in itself – in fact it’s very convenient – but it can be misleading since it gives developers the illusion that they are working with a familiar data model, when things are really very different under the hood.

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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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You Are Ignoring Non-­functional Testing

June 15, 2016 | Software Consultancy

You Are Ignoring Non-­functional Testing

It’s as simple as that – and as a consultant, it’s a problem I see all the time. Testing is always focused on functional testing. Non-functional testing, by comparison, is treated like a second class citizen. This means that functional requirements get refined, and non-functional requirements are ignored until the very end.

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The Seven Heavenly Virtues a Project Manager needs

June 7, 2016 | Software Consultancy

The Seven Heavenly Virtues a Project Manager needs

In my previous blog post I explained to you the Seven Deadly Sins of Project Managers. With that post in mind, I would like to share with you my views on what a project manager needs to overcome these sins and become a valuable member of the team, and ultimately helping to achieve success on the project.

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The Seven Deadly Sins of Project Managers

May 27, 2016 | Software Consultancy

The Seven Deadly Sins of Project Managers

People make mistakes. People can improve. People need to be told of their mistakes. Surprisingly project managers are people too… I know… in some cases it is really hard to believe it; and then they can improve too! Shocking! I have more than 15 years working in IT, occupying different roles from software development to project management in three different countries. I’ve seen really bad project managers and some really good project managers; Yes, they DO exist!

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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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Versioning a Microservice System with git

March 2, 2016 | Microservices

Versioning a Microservice System with git

Microservice-style software architectures have many benefits: loose coupling, independent scalability, localised failures, facilitating the usage of polyglot data persistence tools or multiple programming languages.

However, they also introduce other challenges. A major one is the fact that the end-user functionality of the system will ultimately emerge as a composition of multiple services. This significantly increases the complexity of deploying the system. In addition, because we lose the concept of “versions” of the system, it becomes harder to answer questions like “what capabilities are in production?” and “when is a new feature considered ‘done’?”.

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Akka Typed brings type safety to Akka framework

January 18, 2016 | Software Consultancy

Akka Typed brings type safety to Akka framework

Last time in this series I summarised all the Akka Persistence related improvements in Akka 2.4. Since then Akka 2.4.1 has been released with some additional bug fixes and improvements so perhaps now is a perfect time to pick up this mini-series and introduce some other new features included in Akka 2.4.x.

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Improving Flow

January 7, 2016 | DevOps, Software Consultancy

Improving Flow

Good consulting is, by its nature, an act of collaboration. We recently helped a company with a variety of challenges – some architecture, some coding, some systems, some people, some process (normal consultancy challenges) – unique to this client. During the project, we formalised some things we had thought before, but which had never crystallised – all the work we did was transformative. Whether it’s a code review, process review, DevOps implementation, or outright transformation, the primary goal is the same – improving flow. Flow (sometimes known as throughput) is the movement of raw materials through a system to become finished goods. It’s analogy in the service industry is the movement of customer requirements through to usable solution. And we help improve it.

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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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OpenCredo is now an Amazon Web Services APN Consulting Partner
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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Join us at the Inaugural ContainerSched Conference

October 16, 2015 | Software Consultancy

Join us at the Inaugural ContainerSched Conference

Interested in Containers and Schedulers?

OpenCredo is helping Skillsmatter with the organisation of the inaugural ContainerSched conference, and we were last night in attendance at CodeNode, working our way to finalising the program alongside the Skillsmatter team. I’m pleased to say that the provisional lineup looks great (speaker acceptance emails are being sent out over the next few days), and so I wanted to share the details of some of the great content we have confirmed already.

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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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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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OpenCredo’s Agile Transformation

August 11, 2015 | DevOps

OpenCredo’s Agile Transformation

For years, OpenCredo has been working with organisations to help them introduce new technologies, and more effective development practices, to their IT teams. This has met with a great deal of success, and we have worked with a variety of companies of various sizes. During these projects, we have consistently noticed that the changes we make reach beyond IT in their impact and effects.

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Boot my (secure)->(gov) cloud

August 10, 2015 | Cloud, Software Consultancy

Boot my (secure)->(gov) cloud

As a company, we at OpenCredo are heavily involved in automation and devOps based work, with a keen focus on making this a seamless experience, especially in cloud based environments. We are currently working within HMRC, a UK government department to help make this a reality as part of a broader cloud broker ecosystem project. In this blog post, I look to provide some initial insight into some of the tools and techniques employed to achieve this for one particular use case namely:
With pretty much zero human intervention, bar initiating a process and providing some inputs, a development team from any location, should be able to run “something”, which, in the end, results in an isolated, secure set of fully configured VM’s being provisioned within a cloud provider (or providers) of choice.

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Round up from the Kubernetes London meetup / Vol.2
OpenCredo and Container Solutions Partner to Deliver Emerging Technologies
Traits with Java 8 Default Methods

January 30, 2015 | Software Consultancy

Traits with Java 8 Default Methods

When I first started programming in Scala a few years ago, Traits was the language feature I was most excited about. Indeed, Traits give you the ability to compose and share behaviour in a clean and reusable way. In Java, we tend deal with the same concerns by grouping crosscutting behaviour in abstract base classes that are subsequently extended every time we need to access shared behaviour in part or in total.

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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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Validating your test strategy

November 6, 2013 | Software Consultancy

Validating your test strategy

In many organisations, development and test teams have a ready answer for this, and that answer is usually wrong. Commonly, teams use test counts and code coverage statistics, which alone are not enough to validate a test approach and run the risk of giving a false sense of security to stakeholders. In practice, we are not able to fully prove the efficacy of our test strategy until after a release. Once software is in use, new defects highlight where our tests are failing to validate the software and where we need to invest effort to improve coverage. This is where many teams fail to learn and improve.

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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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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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Webinar series on MongoDB within Financial Services