There are just 5 more days to register for ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’.  Join us to learn how you can achieve continuous application deployments within ServiceNow and minimize application release windows from days and hours to just minutes. In this webinar, Ron will showcase the unique capabilities of this bi-directional integration and explain:

1. The relationship between service management and application releases
2. Release operations and automated deployments
3. The ServiceNow and Nolio integration

Want to know more? Take a look at this exclusive sneak preview! We’ve put some highlights of the event online so you can get an idea what to expect – and maybe even start thinking about questions to ask.

There will be live demonstrations throughout the event and a ‘Question & Answer’ session which always proves to be educational and lively.

Registration is still open but spaces are filling up fast so we recommend you register online now to avoid disappointment. ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ will take place on Wednesday, May 23^rd 2012 at 11am EST/4pm GMT.

Click here to register for ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow  Part II’

Click here to view last year’s ‘Integrating Zero Touch Deployment™ with ServiceNow for Faster & Easier Application Releases’

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s ServiceNow Solution

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

Agile development and DevOps

Agile development offers one path to continuous delivery as it brings developers and testers together and focuses on iterative development. Yet, according to Narayanan, “the ‘last mile problem’ still exists.” The wall separating deployment from the development and testing side encourages a long time between testing and deployment, and furthermore, testers do not necessarily have a systems administration skill set.

DevOps offers a potential solution to this integration challenge, bringing together development, testing and operations all on the same team, a team capable of playing all the different roles.

“Like Agile, this approach aims at getting features deployment ready at a high frequency. But where Agile primarily focuses on the functional and non-functional readiness of the application, DevOps takes it one step further and ensures the Operational and Business readiness as well,” Narayanan writes in his blog.

Narayanan noted several websites that are currently employing the DevOps model, sites like Facebook, Etsy, Orbitz, Groupon and Flickr. He explained that the frontrunners have tended to be Web 2.0 firms with strong reliance on eCommerce where fast changes and improved response time are paramount. He mentioned that Netflix is involved in this space as well, actually going with a NoOps approach.

When it comes to testing, the change to the DevOps environment must be gradual, and the talent involved will need to acquire new skills and adapt to new responsibilities. Testers need to gain knowledge in development languages— which fortunately is a bit easier with user-friendly tools like Python and Cucumber – and they also need to learn deployment processes and tools. Developers and systems administrators, on the other hand, must learn about test processes, design techniques and related tools.

Making the change to DevOps

Shifting to DevOps also makes continuous integration mandatory, according to Narayanan. He explained that in test-driven development we expect to fail first, but those errors inform the next cycle of development and testing. He emphasized that teams must have strong discipline around the single source code repository. The build process can be automated, resulting in a fast build. In order for all of these elements to work effectively, he highlighted the need for transparency; everyone on the team needs to know what is happening.

The process is also affected by the heavy reliance on innovative automation, which is embedded early in the lifecycle. “’Smart testing’ is dissolving the boundaries of traditional system and integration testing,” said Narayanan. Teams can now “leverage an optimal mix of automation across the lifecycle,” which includes automated unit testing, automated service layer testing and automated regression testing. Continuous integration is further facilitated by release management automation.

What do you think? Can DevOps be adapted without continuous integration?

Click here to read the full article by Melanie Webb

In our latest whitepaper ‘The Value of Nolio Application Release Automation in a Microsoft Environment’, deployment expert Phil Cherry discusses how Nolio ASAP can seamlessly integrate into an existing Microsoft based environment to deploy applications across the application delivery chain.

Microsoft has developed a number of effective solutions for application lifecycle management that are excellent for their original intended purposes. They do not, however, answer all of the requirements for true end-to-end deployments of complex, multi-tier applications. For this reason you may want to consider adopting a 3^rd party application release automation solution such as Nolio ASAP, which can easily adapt to your ecosystem while enabling a completely automated deployment.

If you’re still not convinced that an outsider can help ease the deployment headache, here is a list of all the Microsoft programs that can directly communicate with Nolio ASAP:

1. TFS – Visual Studio Team Foundation
2. TFS Deployer
3. MSBuild
4. IIS WebDeploy
5. SCCM – System Center Configuration Manager
6. System Center Orchestrator
7. System Center App Controller
8. System Center Operations Manager
9. PowerShell
10. .Net
11. BizTalk
12. SQL Server

In addition, ASAP supports all of the major Windows Server versions, Windows 7, Vista and XP. Not convinced yet? Send me (Nili) an e-mail at nili@noliosoft.com and I’ll arrange for you to have a live demo.

“Nolio takes automation to the next level beyond code, server and systems management. Our end-to-end automation solution compliments the Microsoft solution set and many Nolio customers are using it with a combination of technologies. In complex Microsoft only environments, or in environments where it is one of multiple technologies used, Nolio provides consistency, standardization and ease of use to address the complexities of application service automation.” –Phil Cherry

Click here to download the whitepaper

Click here to learn more about our Microsoft Integrations

Click here to learn more about the our Solution

NEW ORLEANS, LA–(Marketwire – May 15, 2012) – Nolio — the leading provider of application release automation — today announced a new integration with ServiceNow, a leading provider of cloud-based services to automate enterprise IT operations. The integrated offering helps ServiceNow customers achieve continuous application deployment and reduce application release windows from hours or days down to minutes. Nolio and ServiceNow are working together to mitigate change risk and to minimize application service downtime.

Nolio ASAP enables the full integration of Zero Touch Deployment™ within the change management system of ServiceNow. All the platform’s process rules and data are automatically integrated with Nolio ASAP affording ServiceNow users to enjoy fully automated deployments without having to change any aspects of their current application management system. This offers the best of both worlds; rapid and accurate deployments with complete auditability, visibility and control.

Adopters of these processes are benefiting from accelerated IT transformation by streamlining their release operations across the application lifecycle. Some of the results they are enjoying include:

1. Reduced Time-to-Market
2. Greater Flexibility and Agility
3. Visibility and Auditability
4. Advanced Analytics and Reporting
5. Support for Physical, Virtual and Cloud Environments
6. Full IT Governance and Compliance

“Extending ServiceNow software development life cycle functionality through Nolio ASAP provides a strong and unique solution to the market. We will continue to execute on our commitment to transform IT by automating and standardizing business processes and consolidating IT across the global enterprise. By partnering with Nolio, we now have an end-to-end release operations platform to provide to our fast-growing enterprise customer base.” – Rob Luddy, ServiceNow VP of Business Development.

Don’t forget to stop by booth 138 for the opportunity to learn more about Nolio’s new and improved integration with ServiceNow. See you in New Orleans at Knowledge12!

Want to learn more? Join us on Wednesday, May 23^rd at 11am EST/4pm GMT for our live webinar ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ with Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron

Click here to read the full Press Release

Click here to register for our live webinar

Bridging the DevOps Divide by Leveraging Cloud Technologies

In today’s increasingly instrumented and interconnected world, business leaders are seeking ways to leverage strategies that optimize growth, improve agility, driver higher-value customer relationships and lead to increased revenue. Many see cloud as the answer. In fact, a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study found that 90 percent of organizations expect to adopt or substantially deploy a cloud model in the next three years. While cloud adoption is becoming more mainstream, organizations are also now moving beyond virtualization to higher value stages of cloud computing.

As a result, the rate at which new cloud-based applications and updates are being delivered is often faster than the IT operations team can manage – creating a divide between development and operation sides of the business. How can companies leverage cloud and increase business agility without sacrificing operation discipline, quality and governance?

Through continuous software delivery practices, companies can bridge the DevOps divide and leverage cloud technology in a strategic way that also sets themselves apart from the competition by enabling the creation of differentiated products and services quickly and efficiently — bringing products to market on time and under budget.

The numbers speak for themselves. Companies can expect to see:

1. 20% reduction in resource costs while increasing predictability of deployments through low touch and self-service applications
2. 40% more agility by streamlining operation and development collaboration with in-context communication
3. 20% increase in application service availability and performance by improving stakeholder of alignment development, test and ops
4. 5 times faster application build and deployment times and reduced errors by 93% in one client example

Cloud computing can fundamentally change the economics of business infrastructures and speed the delivery of innovative products and services – yet the DevOps divide cannot be overlooked if companies want to achieve the full potential of cloud.  As enterprises look to accelerate delivery and realize agility, many are starting their cloud implementation journey around development, test and deployment operations to ensure coordination between development and operations.

What do you think about the DevOps divide? Will moving to the cloud help bridge the gap?

Click here to read the full article

Click here to download our free whitepaper ‘Does The Cloud Simplify Application Release Deployment’

DevOps and strategic community management alliances

I have many friends who work in ops or as developers, and as a community thinker, I’ve been fascinated by the DevOps movement for some time.

You can read more about it here, from the godfather of the movement, Patrick DeBois.

Here’s my take.

Two often warring tribes of the IT landscape, both with challenging jobs to pull off in a rapidly iterating world, are working to collaborate more constructively and understand each other a little better, to make their own daily grind less obstacle riddled, and cultivate a leaner, more united playground.

It’s an amazing piece of community building, happening on an international scale (and inspiring music videos).

It involves challenging assumptions and confronting boundaries and comfort zones, so it’s an uphill battle that has its critics. I see value –  understanding where you live in your IT ecosystem and a real empathy for your peers should lead you to better ways of working (and playing).

I’m no DevOps expert but over the years I’ve come to have enormous respect for the guys and gals that make our sure our communities are up and running.

Managing vast communities in many large enterprises and organisations, developers and sysadmins are among the folks I talk to the most on a regular basis. We’ll discuss risks and issues that will emerge within the community from the latest release of tools or features; we’ll comb through log files looking for problem IPs or users. I’ll work with them to develop new reports that tell me about critical community behaviours. And we’ll bond while having a whinge that no one seems to really understand the users of our website except us.

The truth, while it is undoubtedly strategic, community management is absolutely operational. In some respects, ops is a more natural paradigm for our work than marketing, which is designed to focus on the ideal rather than the reality.

And lets not forget that most of the earliest online community managers were system administrators – SysOps are our forefathers.

So here’s some highlights of my presentation, covering ’8 reasons #ops and #cmgmt should be strategic allies’.

Think of us as Social Ops.

Reason 1: Nobody understands what we do

Ops and community management folks struggle to articulate precisely what we do. It’s not that we can’t describe it. It’s that when we start, eyes generally respond by glazing over.

Most people, if they think of it at all, consider ops some sort of auto-magical mojo that either runs itself, or, involves aSheldon Cooper-type typing furiously while simultaneously kicking ass in an online game and bidding for geek memorabilia on eBay.

Many, when they think of community management, think of perky, relentlessly positive cheerleaders (somewhere between the casts of Bring it On and Glee) who sit around posting banalities and pretty pictures to various, largely superficial social networks encouraging people to buy more of brand x, and Be Happy!

The truth is actually less appealing, but way more interesting.

Reason 2: We both use metrics to tell important stories

If there’s one thing ops folk are known for, it’s their talent for measuring. Everything. They understand that numbers reveal secrets and a bigger picture that might otherwise be missed.

Despite our qualitative qualities, (good) community managers are also data nerds. We recognise the importance of fuzzy data, but we’re constantly striving to measure and report on numbers that tell the most relevant stories about our communities.

We understand that number of users is fundamentally meaningless, if there’s not a high ratio of replies to posts and viable sharing activity within and beyond the social system. We know that a lot of activity isn’t good in and of itself. It may point to aggressively vocal members, gaming of the system and a need for re-calibration.

We look at reported content volumes and how they inform the health of a community. And we understand just how important lurkers are.

Reason 3: We invest a lot of time running triage for others

Though we have our own priorities and strategic objectives, ops and community managers are technical and behavioural ‘fixers’.

We get stuff back online, diagnose problems and turn bad situtation around really well. So we’re the go-to guys and gals for this work. While we’re happy to help out, this can create the expectation that we’re the resident clean up crew for (avoidable) mistakes.

Here’s some examples from the community management world:

“The users hate the features we released. I know they didn’t ask for them, but make them love them!”

“We didn’t really consider what to do with this product after the first month. We’re working on other stuff now, can you make a plan for us?”

“We’ve installed a giant fly out advertisement over the top of sign in. Can you make sure that’s not an issue?”

Click here to read the full article

‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ is a free educational webinar that will show you how full incorporation of Nolio’s Zero Touch Deployment™ process with ServiceNow can minimize time-to-production, reduce bottlenecks, eliminate manual errors and ensure IT governance and compliance.

Following the success of our first ServiceNow webinar, Nolio’s Product Director Ron Gidron will showcase the unique capabilities of this bi-directional integration including:

1. Triggering fully automated release processes from within ServiceNow
2. Ensuring full IT governance and compliance with audited application releases
3. Managed application provisioning and application incremental releases

“Managing change or deployments in ServiceNow requires a series of time-consuming manual steps. Full integration with Nolio ASAP allows users to enjoy fully automated deployments without having to change any aspect of their current application management system. Users will have rapid and accurate deployments along with complete auditability, visibility and control.” – Ron Gidron, Nolio Product Director

Following the presentation and live demo, all participants will have the opportunity to participate in a question and answer session with Ron.

The webinar will be held on May 23, 2012 at 11am EST / 4pm GMT.

Don’t forget to look for us at ServiceNow’s Knowledge12 this year in New Orleans. We’ll be at booth 138 to answer questions, give demos and unveil our latest ServiceNow and Zero Touch Deployment™ integration.

Click here to learn more about ‘ReleaseNow with ServiceNow Part II’ and register for the event

Click here to view last year’s ‘Integrating Zero Touch Deployment™ with ServiceNow for Faster & Easier Application Releases’

Click here to learn more about Nolio’s ServiceNow Solution

About Ron Gidron

Ron has over a decade of experience in enterprise application management. He is the Product Director at Nolio and an expert in release deployment automation, with an extensive background in enterprise application monitoring, performance tuning and testing. Ron has worked as a consultant for Global 500 enterprises across all industry verticals.

Q&A: Serena Talks About DevOps

APM: For those who may not be familiar, what is DevOps?

DH: DevOps is an IT movement to deliver better communication, interaction and productivity between Development and Operations. The aim is to bring these two traditionally divided sides of the IT house closer together, bridging the divide between Development, which tends to concentrate on how features and functionality of the software are pushed forward, and Operations with its focus on reliable performance and delivery of these applications.

APM: DevOps seems like it should have been considered a good idea years ago. What has changed recently in our industry that has made DevOps such a hot topic today?

DH: The waning tolerance for application errors and the faster pace at which software/online services must be developed and delivered are already huge drivers to the introduction of new methodologies in Development and Operations. But to enable even faster hand-overs and meet these cost reduction targets, the intersection where Development meets Operations requires a re-think in its own right.

APM: What are the main barriers today that keep development and operations from working together?

DH: A primary challenge to DevOps is the way in which the handoff between Development and Operations is managed. Even though the trend is for companies to move to development automation, few can link all of the critical stages of the application delivery process.

However, Gartner reports that as software demands become more complex, and the teams working on these applications grow in number, the individual management practices for each stage of Development and Operations are being forced to evolve into more automated and linked up processes. So the issues surrounding handoff might actually slowly resolve themselves through sheer necessity.

APM: Does DevOps usually require a corporate culture change?

DH: It requires accountability on the part of developers to see their code through to successful production. Of course, that is only a reasonable proposition when they are given the necessary visibility and are able to depend on a fast and agile deployment process.

APM: How does a company go about starting a DevOps initiative? Is this something that can be homegrown or do they need a consultant?

DH: Many companies are finding that their existing Release Management and/or Change Advisory Board functions are morphing into DevOps initiatives. Thus the initiative can be homegrown. However, it requires automation to succeed at anything other than a micro level. The automation almost certainly has to come from outside, as the required process and deployment orchestration is considerable. The good news is that off-the-shelf release management solutions are now available that solve these problems in depth.

APM: What role can development teams play in application performance? What can they do to improve app performance in the development stage?

DH: It is not just application performance that dev teams need to concern themselves with. Rather, they need to think about how to architect their apps so they can be deployed easily, can be configured while in production, and so that there is traceability back into requirements. That said, DevOps thinking and staffing should provide developers with critical insight into application performance, thus guiding developers to the creation of performance enhancing changes, which can then be quickly deployed.

APM: As part of DevOps, should the operations team be providing more guidance to the developers?

DH: Sure, there should be more collaboration between Ops and Dev. Ops can provide “last mile” feedback to Dev about how architectural and design choices affect both deployment and runtime requirements.

APM: What basic advantages can a company gain if Dev and Ops work together more effectively?

DH: Speed and agility are the main benefits of Dev and Ops working together more effectively. This matters because most systems where DevOps is employed are mission-critical online services, e.g., they are how customers spend money with the company, or get customer care, or other fundamental mission enablement.

Because these systems are externally facing, they need to be revised regularly to keep ahead of the competition and customer expectation.

An enterprise that lacks the speed and agility of DevOps is bound to lose customers to faster moving competitors.

APM: What technologies support a DevOps approach?

DH: Release management technologies most directly support DevOps. These include the ability to automate the workflow around release planning and control, to securely manage a release package’s path to production, and to automate the actual deployment process. The first of these provides the visibility and confidence to operate at an accelerated cadence. The second ensures that release packages are known and pristine. The third slashes the labor and elapsed time for deployment, yielding tremendous cost, agility and quality benefits.

APM: Do you have any predictions on how DevOps will evolve in the near future?

DH: DevOps will become mainstream in all on-line business in the next year or two, albeit not necessarily with the title of DevOps. But the need for speed and agility required in online businesses means that the traditional silos of Dev and Ops must be brought together in organizations that expect to compete in the market.

IT management vendors are starting to compete for this important domain, leading to attractive automation solutions for DevOps practitioners.

Where do you think DevOps is headed? Share your thoughts with us.

Click here to learn more about David Hurwitz and to read the full article

OneOps, TwoOps, RedOps, BlueOps,
DevOps, NoOps, OldOps, NewOps.
This one relies on cooperation.
This one banks on automation.
Say! What a lot of ops there are.

- With sincere apologies to Dr. Suess

Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@jamesurquhart) may have come across frequent recent discussions about new operations methods enabled by cloud computing. The most common terms in these discussions include DevOps and it’s controversial sibling, NoOps. While I think the practices behind these terms are critical to understand as the nature of IT operations shifts to meet new demands, the terms themselves are less than helpful.

So, what I thought I’d do today is walk you through key new operations concepts being adopted by the most cloud-savvy organizations I know, but without allowing terminology to distract the discussion. If I am successful, you’ll be able to look past the label and see the incredible value these new models bring to businesses and institutions of all sizes.

If I am unsuccessful …well, maybe we’ll keep having these conversations for another year—kind of like Groundhog Day.

How is cloud changing IT operations?

Understanding how cloud computing drives fundamental changes to the way IT works, rather than just becoming another way of expressing what has come before, doesn’t rest with its causes, but with its effects:

1. In the past, I’ve gone into some depth about how cloud computing takes IT from server-centric to application-centric operations.

2. I’ve also pointed out that the very nature of “who owns what” in the cloud reorganized operations activities along application, services and infrastructure lines.

3. Furthermore, I’ve also discussed how the highly interdependent, multi-owner nature of the cloud brings forward the science of complex adaptive systems.

In conjunction with these three, one other concept is critical to understand. What matters most to any business is the application of IT to business problems, and the ongoing support of those applications as long as they remain applicable to the business. The rest of IT exists in support of that.

What people not working closely with cloud computing fail to realize is that the application-centric nature of cloud operations shifts the very nature of operations away from infrastructure (as it has been since the mainframe) to, well, applications. (While I usuallyhate electric utility analogies for cloud computing, this is indeed similar to the shift of power generation from private generation to public utilities.)

If you are focusing on running applications in an environment you may or may not control, you focus on how to keep code running, data available, configuration viable and policy enforced. And, since the only thing you control is the code, data, configuration and policy, you have to start focusing on how to build performance and survivability into the application itself.

This was the first lesson learned by the Web 2.0 companies that embraced Amazon’s EC2 and similar services early on. To make an application run well at high scale in someone else’s data center, you have to make the application responsible for its own operational integrity. So, the practice of integrating development tools and people with operations tools and people was born (and became the first form of DevOps—embedding operations skills into development teams).

When skills just aren’t scalable enough

That sounds like a heck of a solution, right? Build applications that utilize the services they run on, and add some custom automation developed by people who understand server, network and storage performance, and how to keep IT running.

Except … there’s one little problem.

In any organization with more than a few applications to deploy and operate, the problem of scaling operations resources (people and tools) to meet that demand becomes a question of not only cost, but coordination across teams. At a small scale, that’s not a big deal. However as application teams grow in number, the problem of coordinating operations activities becomes increasingly difficult.

In an ironic twist, some early adopters of this model report utilization and contention issues when operations staff are embedded in development teams. The operations staff are faced with a dilemma: either selfishly protect the needs of their own projects, or work with other operations staff on other projects to find common ground—potentially impacting their own projects’ approaches or schedules.

The solution for some of the most bleeding-edge of these companies is interesting. Rather than force bureaucracy into the mix, they took a different tack: turn operations into a service—with an API. A platform service, or PaaS, to be exact.

In the PaaS model, developers utilize a service that embeds most of the operations automation for a class of applications right into the platform. You work with code and data, and configuration and most policy is handled for you (though you might provide metadata to influence both). The development team steps back from defining the specific operations logic for their applications, and instead trusts it to the platform service.

Because the developer does little day-to-day operations in the traditional sense, this approach is sometimes called NoOps. I personally despise that term.

It should also be noted that these platforms are essentially coding frameworks provided as a service, which can limit the class of applications to which they apply. So, it is unlikely that a single platform solution will meet the needs of an entire business.

Nonetheless, I think this is the (long-term) future of IT operations: relying on platform services to manage most of the day-to-day performance and survivability challenges a custom application faces. For those companies that are big enough, there may be a team that uses more of a merged DevOps team approach to deliver a platform service of their own. But the vast majority of companies will slowly move away from running infrastructure toward building and constantly tweaking applications.

The road will be far from easy

I say that knowing full well that many of you are reading this thinking “there is no way my organization is moving to a model like that anytime soon.” And I completely agree. Legacy applications weren’t built for this model, and most organizations aren’t set up to handle these tasks, either. The “traditional” siloed operations model will survive for a while at most companies.

But for how long is, in my opinion, uncertain. Take a look at Netflix, a poster child for pushing cloud operations boundaries. They believe very much in the platform services model.

The truth is, if you haven’t already started automating operations for your applications built for the cloud, you are not taking full advantage of the model. Start, at least, with that. However, consider that, as platform services (both public and private) mature, it may make more sense to build your next generation of applications on one.

Just don’t fool yourself. Regardless of which model you adopt, your company will always be doing some sort of operations. Don’t let the terminology fool you when it comes to that.

How do you think cloud is changing IT operations? Share your thoughts!

Click here to read the full article by James Urquhart