Devops

I have been having a lot of discussions recently about tooling to support continuous delivery and DevOps practices. There is an incredible and ever increasing array of tools available for these practices. Whilst a number of vendors have developed one-stop solutions or suites of integrated tools, many of the tools in the space tend to be tightly focused on addressing a particular problem. Unfortunatley this can be confusing and overwhelming, especially to people starting out, making it difficult to know where to start and which tools to consider. »

In enterprises there is often a strong desire to standardise. The reasoning is simple: if we are all doing things the same way, using the same technology, then we can simplify our operations, benefit from economies of scale and make our people more fungible. So by extension, not standardising means duplicated effort, resources and expenditure. But are things really this clear cut? Perhaps we should begin by thinking about the meaning of the word standardisation and understanding the alternatives. »

This is the start of my new blog. It is something I have been meaning to do for a long time but somehow never quite got around to. Part of the problem for me was choosing a blogging platform and tool chain - I was overwhelmed by the number of different options available. I know lots of people use platforms like Wordpress but I always liked the idea of static generators like Jekyll. »