Continuous Delivery and DevOps Consulting

Simply aligning your IT capability with your business goals isn’t enough to grow your company. To achieve real IT-enabled growth you’ll need to build on a foundation of technical excellence and thanks to DORA that’s something you can now actually measure.

Choosing the right tools for your critical infrastructure is a daunting task. To help you make an informed choice on binary repository management systems we took it upon ourselves to explore three leading solutions. So, how do Artifactory, Nexus and ProGet stack up?

Consultants are valued for their expertise and the fact that they’re outsiders. In this post I’ll argue that the single most valuable skill a consultant can bring to the table is to break the mental barriers in the client’s organization.

Helm charts lifecycle management is a manual task. Helmsman allows you to automate your Helm charts lifecycle management using declarative configuration files.

Job DSL or scripted/declarative pipelines are becoming the standard when it comes to defining jobs in Jenkins. Now we need a similar solution to maintain Jenkins itself.

Continuous Integration and Code Review are strongly correlated with success. Many use Pull Requests for code review, but for co-located teams this can be an obstacle for CI. Is there a better way?

A developer that pushes their changes and goes on a celebratory walk to the water cooler is done. But, they’re not done done, their changes have yet to be thoroughly tested, added to future release notes, properly peer reviewed and more. These are pains we want to rid the software industry of, and here’s how we do it.

What do we need from a CI/CD system? How should we decide which one to use? In this blog we ask ourselves what a modern CI/CD system should look like and compare two commonly used build systems: Jenkins pipelines and Concourse CI.

With the arrival of microservices code is becoming disposable. Does this mean that we no longer need maintainable code? Is it the end of refactoring?

In software development tight coupling is one of our biggest enemies. On the function level it makes our application hard to change and fragile. Unfortunately, tight coupling is like the entropy of software development, so we have always have to be working to reduce it.

In this blog I will show you how to create snapshots of Persistent volumes in Kubernetes clusters and restore them again by only talking to the api server. This can be useful for either backups or when scaling stateful applications that need “startup data”.

When I read Fowler’s new ‘Refactoring’ book I felt sure the example from the first chapter would make a good Code Kata. However, he didn’t include the code for the test cases. I can fix that!

Nicole Forsgren and the Accelerate DORA team has just released the newest iteration of the State of DevOps report. The report investigates what practices make us better at delivering valuable software to our users as measured by business outcomes. Read on for our analysis of the report, and how it can be best put to use.

A major challenge of software development is that our work is by and large invisible. This makes our folklore essential in business matters. Some of our commonly used arguments and visualizations are digital urban legends rather than solid foundations for informed decisions. Here, we’ll go through a few examples and some measures to address our misconceptions.

When you embark on your cloud native journey there will be important choices to make about cloud providers, continuous deployment, environments’ setup and separation. This guide will help you make the right choices by sharing lessons learnt from running cloud native apps in production.

Kubernetes has become the de facto container orchestration platform. When we help clients of different sizes and domains start their cloud native journeys in Kubernetes, we assist them in making sound decisions and technology choices. There is no one-size-fits-all solution when it comes to choosing cloud providers, CI tools, continuous deployment pipelines etc., so it is important to make the right decisions at the start. Failing to do so can be very costly in terms of lost time and money.

Learn how Docker and Kubernetes work and the key benefits they bring. Using real demos, I show how Docker is a great packaging and distribution technology, and how Kubernetes provides a powerful runtime for containerized applications.