Open Credo

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State of Open Conference – Internal Developer Platforms of the people, by the people, for the people (Recording)

March 29, 2023 | Blog, Kubernetes, Platform Engineering

State of Open Conference – Internal Developer Platforms of the people, by the people, for the people (Recording)

Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the State of Open Conference on her talk “Internal Developer Platforms – Of the people, By the people, For the people.”

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Kubernetes Community Days – Kubernetes-based platforms – of the people, by the people, for the people (Recording)

December 8, 2022 | Blog, Kubernetes, Platform Engineering

Kubernetes Community Days – Kubernetes-based platforms – of the people, by the people, for the people (Recording)

Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the Kubernetes Community Days on her talk “Kubernetes-based platforms – of the people, by the people, for the people.”

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GOTO Copenhagen 2022 – From Data Mess —> Data Mesh: Navigating People, Process & Platforms (Recording)

July 6, 2022 | Platform Engineering

GOTO Copenhagen 2022 – From Data Mess —> Data Mesh: Navigating People, Process & Platforms (Recording)

Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the GOTO Copenhagen Conference 2022 on her talk ” From Data Mess —> Data Mesh: Navigating People, Process & Platforms”

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PlatformCon 2022 – People, Process, and Platform – a community-focused approach (Recording)

June 22, 2022 | Platform Engineering

PlatformCon 2022 – People, Process, and Platform – a community-focused approach (Recording)

Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the PlatformCon Conference 2022 on her talk “People, Process, and Platform – a community-focused approach.”

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PlatformCon 2022: People, Process, and Platform – a community-focused approach

May 26, 2022

PlatformCon 2022: People, Process, and Platform – a community-focused approach

Our CEO/CTO Nicki Watt shares about her upcoming talk at PlatformCon 2022.

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Microservices Anti-patterns: It’s All About the People

April 18, 2018 | Microservices

Microservices Anti-patterns: It’s All About the People

Quite a few of the anti-patterns we observe today on microservices projects are strongly related to how people approach the problem. Given their nature, these anti-patterns tend to be deeply ingrained and self-sustaining. Addressing them starts with increased awareness and by changing ways of approaching the problem, rather than by the introduction of yet another technical tool or framework.

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Platform Engineering Day Europe 2024 – Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative (Recording)

March 28, 2024 | Blog, Platform Engineering

Platform Engineering Day Europe 2024 – Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative (Recording)

Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2024 on her talk “To K8S and Beyond – Maturing Your Platform Engineering Initiative.”

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The Importance of Chunking in RAG

February 6, 2024 | AWS, Blog, OPA

The Importance of Chunking in RAG

Check out the latest blog by our Consultant, Tristan Hosken, as he explores Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG). Tristan provides insights into advantages and disadvantages of RAG through hands-on experiments with AWS’s Bedrock and Azure’s OpenAI service.

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GOTO Amsterdam 2023 – Why is it so Hard to Create a Great Platform-as-a-product? (Recording)

February 1, 2024 | Blog, Platform Engineering

GOTO Amsterdam 2023 – Why is it so Hard to Create a Great Platform-as-a-product? (Recording)

Watch the recording of our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt from the GOTO Amsterdam Conference 2023 on her talk “Why is it so Hard to Create a Great Platform-as-a-product?”

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How to use LLMs to Generate Coherent Long-Form Content using Hierarchical Expansion

October 30, 2023 | Blog

How to use LLMs to Generate Coherent Long-Form Content using Hierarchical Expansion

As impressive as they are, Large Language Models (LLMs) face difficulties when creating long-form content, primarily due to token limitations and inconsistencies in the output over time.

Together with Livy.ai, we developed a “Hierarchical Expansion” method to address these challenges and better the quality, flow, and structure of the content produced. Read further to learn more!

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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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OpenCredo awarded Britain’s Healthiest Workplace for SMEs

September 8, 2023 | Blog

OpenCredo awarded Britain’s Healthiest Workplace for SMEs

We were recently awarded ‘Britain’s Healthiest Workplace for SMEs’ by Vitality. Read on to learn more about our journey to achieving this award and what we are doing to improve our workplace culture.

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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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PlatformCon 2023 – Why is it so hard to create a great Platform-as-a-Product? (Recording)

July 11, 2023 | Blog, Platform Engineering

PlatformCon 2023 – Why is it so hard to create a great Platform-as-a-Product? (Recording)

Check out our CEO/CTO, Nicki Watt’s, talk “Why is it so hard to create a great Platform-as-a-Product?” from the PlatformCon Conference 2022.

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Controlling Kafka Data Flows using Open Policy Agent

August 2, 2022 | Blog, Kafka

Controlling Kafka Data Flows using Open Policy Agent

Read Matt Farrow’s blog as he explores the potential for using Open Policy Agent to filter and mask data being sent to and read from Apache Kafka.

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HackCredo – An Internal OpenCredo Hackathon

July 5, 2022 | Blog, Culture

HackCredo – An Internal OpenCredo Hackathon

As we are passionate about using technology to solve problems, we are thrilled to share with you our internal competition, “HackCredo.” Read on to learn more about the competition, the groups, and the winners.

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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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When Your Product Teams Should Aim to be Inefficient – Part 1

June 14, 2022 | Blog, Culture, White Paper

When Your Product Teams Should Aim to be Inefficient – Part 1

Many businesses advocate for efficiency, but this is not always the right goal. Part one of this article explores how product teams can balance two important considerations – efficiency and effectiveness. Part two builds on this idea, uncovering the non-obvious implications of using technology to bring about efficiency and wider change.

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Lunch & Learn: Secure Pipelines Enforcing policies using OPA

March 3, 2022 | AWS, Open Source, Software Consultancy

Lunch & Learn: Secure Pipelines Enforcing policies using OPA

Watch our Lunch & Learn by Hieu Doan and Alberto Faedda as they share how engineers and security teams can secure their software development processes with the Secure Pipelines application.

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DZone Repost: Testing Serverless Functions

February 11, 2022 | AWS, Cloud, GCP, Kubernetes, Microservices, Open Source, Software Consultancy

DZone Repost: Testing Serverless Functions

Serverless functions are easy to install and upload, but we can’t ignore the basics. This article looks at different strategies related to testing serverless functions.

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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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WebAssembly – Where is it going?

December 11, 2020 | Cloud, Cloud Native, Kubernetes, Microservices

WebAssembly – Where is it going?

“WebAssembly is a safe, portable, low-level code format designed for efficient execution and compact representation.” – W3C

In this blog, I’ll cover the different applications of Wasm and WASI, some of the projects that are making headway, and the implications for modern architectures and distributed systems.

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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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Evolutionary challenges faced by VC funded organisations

November 13, 2019 | Software Consultancy

Evolutionary challenges faced by VC funded organisations

Pioneering and pushing technology boundaries – pretty much a given nowadays for the software-driven startup. Here are some insights we’ve observed working with a number of venture capital (VC) companies who have managed to navigate the choppy waters and successfully grow their business including winning further investment along the way.

With our deep hands-on technical expertise and pragmatic focus, OpenCredo has become a natural software acceleration partner for VC funded organisations who are looking to deliver tangible value as effectively as possible. We’ve been brought in to work alongside these innovators at various stages of their journey. As such we’ve gained an appreciation for and acquired, first-hand insight into some of the pressures and challenges faced. From getting and securing that next round of funding, to grappling with the technical decisions and challenges inherent in sensibly evolving offerings to accommodate future growth and scaling.

 

This blog is written exclusively by the OpenCredo team. We do not accept external contributions.

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Happy World Kindness Day

November 13, 2019 | Culture, Software Consultancy

Happy World Kindness Day

Back in August, we shared with you a pro-bono project we had embarked upon – the build of an application that would bring the Mental Health Collective’s vision-of-kindness to life: Technology, Kindness and Bananas.

Since then we have been experimenting with technologies, developing a platform, and implementing a solution that will allow MHC to take their initiative onwards.
(Tech stack employed: React, Amplify – DynamoDb, Lambdas, API Gateway)

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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 1)

October 1, 2019 | Cloud, Cloud Native, Culture

3 Highlights from CloudNative London 2019 (Day 1)

One of the benefits we have working at OpenCredo (OC) is the opportunity to both attend and speak (although not on this occasion) at conferences. For some of you, this may be pretty common, but OC was actually the first to offer me this as part of a broader learning and development plan.

Cloud-native development and delivery is a core area of expertise for OC and we are always looking for what’s new and interesting in this space. So when I was offered the chance to go to CloudNative London it seemed like a good place to start. With its diversity in topics and technologies, the conference provided a perfect opportunity to collaborate and hear from others in the industry and what they are doing in this space.

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Technology, Kindness and Bananas

August 14, 2019 | Culture, News

Technology, Kindness and Bananas

Here, in our little nook of the internet, we usually write about our experiences of emerging technologies, the tricky coding problems we’ve solved and how we have enhanced our clients’ businesses. We do this because we are very proud of this work. It truly matters.

Today is a little different. Today I’d like to share something a little more personal. Something that brings loneliness, kindness and technology together in an oxytocin-generating, slightly awkward embrace. Because hugs matter too.

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Kafka Connect – Source Connectors: A detailed guide to connecting to what you love.

July 30, 2019 | Blog, Kafka

Kafka Connect – Source Connectors: A detailed guide to connecting to what you love.

Writing your own Kafka source connectors with Kafka Connect. In this blog, Rufus takes you on a code walk, through the Gold Verified Venafi Connector while pointing out the common pitfalls

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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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HA Prometheus – The Thanos Evolution

February 5, 2019 | Cloud Native, DevOps, Kubernetes, Microservices, Open Source

HA Prometheus – The Thanos Evolution

While Prometheus has fast become the standard for monitoring in the cloud, making Prometheus highly available can be tricky. This blog post will walk you through how to do this using the open source tool Thanos.

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10 Pieces of Borrowed Wisdom for Effective Tech Consultancy

August 29, 2018 | Software Consultancy

10 Pieces of Borrowed Wisdom for Effective Tech Consultancy

My last year or so here at OpenCredo has involved a very well-supported first foray into tech consultancy. Different engagements pose both unique, as well as familiar challenges for me as a consultant, all of which played a part in shaping and moulding the way I understand and approach problems. This blog is a brief collation of wisdom that’s helped me the most during this adventure; gained by learning the hard way, as well as that acquired from mentoring and colleagues who have gone before. The shared wisdom has made me a much more effective consultant, and kept me sane in the process, for which I’m very thankful.

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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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DevOpsDays Riga 2017 (Video): Technical and Project Management
Testing a Spark Application

May 9, 2017 | Cassandra

Testing a Spark Application

Data analytics isn’t a field commonly associated with testing, but there’s no reason we can’t treat it like any other application. Data analytics services are often deployed in production, and production services should be properly tested. This post covers some basic approaches for the testing of Cassandra/Spark code. There will be some code examples, but the focus is on how to structure your code to ensure it is testable!

 

This blog is written exclusively by the OpenCredo team. We do not accept external contributions.

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OpenCredo, goes Back to The Trenches for Regenerate!
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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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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The Three ‘R’s of Distributed Event Processing

January 25, 2017 | Cassandra

The Three ‘R’s of Distributed Event Processing

One of the simplest and best-understood models of computation is the Finite State Machine (FSM). An FSM has fixed range of states it can be in, and is always in one of these states. When an input arrives, this triggers a transition in the FSM from its current state to the next state. There may be several possible transitions to several different states, and which transition is chosen depends on the input.

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Let’s Encrypt and Terraform – Getting free certificates for your infrastructure

January 24, 2017 | Cloud

Let’s Encrypt and Terraform – Getting free certificates for your infrastructure

This blog aims to provide an end to end example of how you can automatically request, generate and install a free HTTPS/TLS/SSL certificate from Let’s Encrypt using Terraform. Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority (CA) aiming to make it super easy (and free – did I say free!) for people to obtain HTTPS (SSL/TLS) certificates for their websites and infrastructure. Under the hood, Let’s Encrypt implements and leverages an emerging protocol called ACME to make all this magic happen, and it is this ACME protocol that powers the Terraform provider we will be using. For more information on how Let’s Encrypt and the ACME protocol actually work, please see how Let’s Encrypt works.

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What I Don’t Like About Error Handling in Go, and How to Work Around It

January 23, 2017 | Data Analysis

What I Don’t Like About Error Handling in Go, and How to Work Around It

More often than not, people who write Go have some sort of opinion on its error handling model. Depending on your experience with other languages, you may be used to different approaches. That’s why I’ve decided to write this article, as despite being relatively opinionated, I think drawing on my experiences can be useful in the debate. The main issues I wanted to cover are that it is difficult to force good error handling practice, that errors don’t have stack traces, and that error handling itself is too verbose.

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How to TDD FizzBuzz with JUnit Theories

January 13, 2017 | Software Consultancy

How to TDD FizzBuzz with JUnit Theories

The notorious FizzBuzz interview test was originally proposed as a way of weeding out candidates for programming jobs who – to put it bluntly – couldn’t program. The task is as follows:

Write a program that prints the numbers from 1 to 100. But for multiples of three print “Fizz” instead of the number and for the multiples of five print “Buzz”. For numbers which are multiples of both three and five print “FizzBuzz”.

It turns out that this problem has just enough subtlety about it to cause headaches to anyone who knows the basics but hasn’t learned how to think in nested structures.

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From Java to Go, and Back Again

October 13, 2016 | Data Analysis

From Java to Go, and Back Again

In Lisp, you don’t just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward your program. As you’re writing a program you may think “I wish Lisp had such-and-such an operator.” So you go and write it. Afterward you realize that using the new operator would simplify the design of another part of the program, and so on. Language and program evolve together…In the end your program will look as if the language had been designed for it. And when language and program fit one another well, you end up with code which is clear, small, and efficient – Paul Graham, Programming Bottom-Up

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Announcing GOTO Accelerate 2016: Business Strategy, Situational Awareness and Innovation

October 4, 2016 | Software Consultancy

Announcing GOTO Accelerate 2016: Business Strategy, Situational Awareness and Innovation

As many of you know, OpenCredo are part of the global Trifork family, and as such have access to the combined knowledge and experience of many technology and business leaders throughout the group. Getting public access to all of this expertise and technical leadership can be tricky – until now. GOTO Accelerate is a one-day business focused conference that has emerged from the very successful GOTO technology events.

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New Blog Series: Cassandra – What You May Learn the Hard Way

August 26, 2016 | Cassandra

New Blog Series: Cassandra – What You May Learn the Hard Way

At OpenCredo we have been working with Cassandra since 2012 and we are big fans of both open source Apache Cassandra and the capabilities of DataStax Enterprise. Over the years we have collected a great deal of experience throughout the company on how to deliver the benefits of Cassandra in real world projects and have also seen some common pitfalls that businesses have fallen into.

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Microservices Manchester (#micromanchester) Conference Recap

July 8, 2016 | Microservices

Microservices Manchester (#micromanchester) Conference Recap

OpenCredo recently co-organised the first Microservices Manchester event with OliverBernard recruitment, and it was a resounding success. Over 100 people showed up at the Victoria Warehouse near Manchester’s trendy Salford Quays for a day discussing the realities of implementing microservice systems.

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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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Product Development Is Science

March 7, 2016 | DevOps

Product Development Is Science

Businesses exist to make money; their purpose isn’t just to generate revenue, but to create profits, now and in the future. Generating profits means delivering products or services that people want to buy. The creation of what people want is the entire purpose of delivery pipelines. (NB: The rest of this article will use ‘product’ to refer to both products and services.)

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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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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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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 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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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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CloudCredo acquired by Pivotal
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
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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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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Ruby Web Acceptance Testing Framework

November 23, 2015 | Software Consultancy

Ruby Web Acceptance Testing Framework

Over a year ago, my colleague Tristan posted on the OpenCredo blog about a test automation quick start framework. It’s a prepackaged framework you can clone and get going with testing instantly, rather than wasting your time rebuilding your framework every single project. We have used this framework successfully used on many of our internal projects, and it relies upon a Java, Cucumber-JVM and Selenium stack.

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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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Shadow IT

October 30, 2015 | Cloud, DevOps

Shadow IT

In some companies, the inevitable rapidly became accepted as the way to do things, and both development and IT operations worked together to figure out how to collaborate on building systems that satisfied development’s desire for change, and operations desire for stability. Outsourcing infrastructure, and all it implied, gave rise to Devops – the unification of business needs, developer delivery, and operational capacity – but it also gave rise to something else, in companies where the operations teams weren’t quite as quick to move – Shadow IT.

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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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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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The curse of correlation

October 7, 2015 | Software Consultancy

The curse of correlation

How correlated estimates make prediction in IT hard.

It’s well known that predicting how long a project/task will take in IT is hard. In this post I’ll address one aspect of this (correlation) and ask what insights a data science perspective can give us about how correlations can make prediction difficult. I’ll explain the problems that correlation poses, give some practical advice for teams & project managers and investigate possible innovations to tooling that might improve matters.

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The Underrated Value of Listening

September 24, 2015 | Software Consultancy

The Underrated Value of Listening

Unhappy Staff

You’ve implemented a change in how things work, and people aren’t happy. You spent time investigating the problem, and putting serious thought into what the issue was, and you’ve put a fix in place that you were sure people would be happy with. They aren’t. Why not?

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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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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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Software Circus: Thinking Fast and Slow with Software Development

September 13, 2015 | DevOps

Software Circus: Thinking Fast and Slow with Software Development

Making Good Decisions within Software

Last week I was privileged to be able to present my “Thinking Fast and Slow with Software Development” talk at the inaugural Software Circus conference in Amsterdam. The conference was amazing, and I’ll write more about this later, but in this post I was keen to share the presentation slides and the thinking behind this talk…

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

August 26, 2015 | Cloud

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

The challenges of building and deploying microservices

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last year, you’ll undoubtedly know that microservices are the new hotness. An emerging trend that I’ve observed is that the people who are actually using microservices in production tend to be the larger well-funded companies, such as Netflix, Gilt, Yelp, Hailo etc., and each organisation has their own way of developing, building and deploying.

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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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Building a Google analytics dashboard with Python3, Tornado and deploying it on OpenShift (for free)

August 5, 2015 | Data Analysis, Data Engineering

Building a Google analytics dashboard with Python3, Tornado and deploying it on OpenShift (for free)

A few weeks ago, we thought about building a Google analytics dashboard to give us easy access to certain elements of our Google Analytics web traffic. We saw some custom dashboards for bloggers, but nothing quite right for our goal, since we wanted the data on a big screen for everyone in the office to view.

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The business behind microservices: Exploring the organisational, architectural and operational challenges
Round up from the Kubernetes London meetup / Vol.2
OpenCredo at the Neo4j meet up. Graph Café London
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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Trifork & Erlang take a stake in OpenCredo
Introducing CloudCredo!
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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Spring Integration in Action is now available
Senior promotions within OpenCredo Executive
Neo4J Tales from the Trenches: A Recommendation Engine Case Study @ Skills Matter eXchange
OpenCredo brings the Spring User Group to QCon London
Practical behaviour driven development – Maintainable Acceptance Tests

February 3, 2012 | Software Consultancy

Practical behaviour driven development – Maintainable Acceptance Tests

Behaviour driven development (BBD)

Creating maintainable acceptance test

In this post we will look at the creation of a suite of maintainable acceptance tests, identifying some key issues as encountered on real projects and suggesting solutions.This post assumes some knowledge of behaviour driven development (BDD). If you are new to this concept, I’d recommend Dan North’s blog as a starting point, particularly his post introducing the concept of BDD.The idea of human readable acceptance testing championed by BDD enthusiasts is one that continues to grow in popularity, and it’s easy to see why.

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OpenCredo is Host for QCon London’s “Enterprise Agile Transformation” Track