With the rising trend of Devops, Steve Jin – the author of VMWare VI and vSphere SDK, got curious about the system administration from a software developer’s perspective. Here you will find Steve’s take on “The Path to Senior Sysadmin” session from the recent LISA 2010 conference.

How Twitter Operates Its IT Infrastructure: From Process to Tools

Another post from Steve Jim, but this time based on his notes taken at the talk by John Adams at LISA 2010 conference. “As one of the leading social Web site with 165M users, Twitter demands a huge infrastructure support its operation. There are 700M searches and 1,000 tweets per second and can go up to almost 4,000 at peak. The number of tweets is not that impressive, but these tweets need to be distributed to numerous followers which could be several millions after one account.”

What is DevOps and Why is it Important

This super short post (maybe should have been a tweet), had a promising starto with a mention of the salesforce.com purchase of Heroku, apparently giving Justin an epiphany of the future Sysadmin. I hope that we will get some interesting posts from Mr. Hamade.

Day 18 – Devops

It’s Brandon Burton‘s turn to explain what Devops is. “DevOps is really just a label for a rallying point around a variety of trends (primarily lead by Web Operations) that have begun to coalesce over the last couple of years. These trends, ideas, and tools have existed in various forms and have been adopted to various extents for many years, but have seen a huge coming together in the last two years.” This get’s me thinking – are we ever going to standardize on Devops instead of DevOps?

Are Software Developers Interested in Devops?

Tim Driggers is concerned that the Devops movement is taking on a one-sided approach to solving a two-sided, long-standing problem. This is a great trigger to some discussions around this long-due topic. For Nolio, many of our customers approach us during the development stage of new projects. I also see that the dev folks understand the need for Devops and application release automation, and in some cases, need to convince the operation side. Lets see if there will be traction on Tim’s blog.

Orchestrating Release Management

This is an older article from November, but was never mentioned. David Norfolk from Bloor Research covers the Release Management and discusses Serena’s approach to ALM. “What Serena actually announced at the GARTNER AADI Summit 2010 in Los Angeles today (16th November 2010) is a process-driven approach to application delivery and an ALM solution strategy based on federation and orchestration of end-to-end application delivery from demand to deployment.”

Nolio and Serena Software Partner to Deliver the Industry’s First Comprehensive Release Management Solution

In Gartner’s Data Center Automation Hierarchy of Tools and Processes, integrated configuration automation is all about defining and implementing cross-silo policies, governance, and workflow. The main data center automation benefits are:

• Automate labor intensive tasks – reduce costs.
• Increase consistency, reliability, availability.
• Reduce risk exposure and resulting outages and breaches.
• Increase speed and agility.
• Implement RTI and increase dynamic capacity optimization to policies and SLAs

“More than 80% of all mission-critical IT service outages are due to people and process errors and failures, with a significant number of those due to a lack of coordination among change, release, and configuration management.”

Gartner mentions Nolio as a vendor solution for application release, enabling faster, more accurate, and repeatable deployments.

http://www.gartner.com/technology/summits/na/data-center/track-4-modernizing.jsp

To deliver real-time option pricing, SuperDerivatives delivers 15 applications, operating across 100 servers, distributed over 8 global data centers. Each application requires weekly updates: content changes, new features and bug fixes.

Prior to adopting Nolio’s solution, these weekly changes involved R&D, QA and Operations and were done by executing a large number of error-prone manual service tasks. This obviously consumed a large chunk of SuperDerivatives’ web operation team’s time.

SuperDerivatives desperately needed to streamline application changes and eliminate misconfiguration errors.

Nolio’s Application Service Automation enabled SuperDerivatives to eliminate the use of scripts, affording a highly streamlined, error-free process for deploying application changes.

Matty Rosen, SuperDerivatives’ Head of Data Center Operations says, “Our customers depend on our hosted financial tools. Managing application consistency across our 8 global data centers, and our ability to reliably execute application changes in a timely manner, is therefor essential for our business.”

Rosen adds, “In addition to Nolio’s measurable productivity benefits, translating into labor cost savings, the ability to establish and enforce best practices across operations and all departments involved in application production, including R&D and QA, is Nolio’s intangible value of heightened application quality and manageability.”

SuperDerivatives experienced dramatic productivity gains once it adopted the Nolio solution for application change automation:

• Eliminating scripting reduced labor overhead from 2 days to just 30 minutes.
• Labor overhead for weekly updates has been reduced from 3 days involving 3 employees to JUST 1 HOUR.
• Labor for troubleshooting tasks has been reduced from 10 hours to 15 minutes.
• Application service auditing, not possible prior to Nolio, is now provided on demand.

Visit us at www.noliosoft.com to see how Nolio can dramatically improve your data center application operations.