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Knowing Which Services Are Critical to a Business Service
In the age of exploration, cartographers used to navigate around the world and map the coastlines of unexplored continents. The coastline of IT, and moreover the inner landscapes and features, has become much more complex than a decade ago. The cost and effort needed to perform adequate mapping the old way has gone way…
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CostOps: The Overlooked Developer Responsibility
Developers are the kingmakers. Millions of decisions made by tens of thousands of developers are ultimately responsible for the triumph or tragedy of IT. Developers for commercial vendors, open-source projects, cloud and software as a service (SaaS) solutions, managed service providers (MSPs), and internal teams make most…
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Cloud Native, You Keep Using Those Words
Ask a hundred IT pros and their managers what “cloud native” is, and you’ll get as many different definitions. In part it’s because public cloud providers (PCPs) seek to provide all things to all IT teams, but it’s also because each organization has different goals for cloud. If I could get away with it, I’d enclose cloud…
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After the Great Cloud Debate, What’s Next?
This month, we’ve spent time discussing how cloud will affect traditional on-premises IT operations staff. Many of you provided great feedback on how your organizations view cloud computing, whether cloud is a strategic solution for you, and what you give up when you go with a cloud solution. Broadly, your responses fell…
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IT Operations: Coping with Cloud
You’ll find no shortage of blog posts and thought pieces about how cloud computing has forever changed the IT landscape. The topic is usually addressed in an “adapt or die” argument: cloud is coming for your on-prem applications, and without applications in your data center, there’s no need for IT operations. You’ll…
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IT Pro Day 2019: Harder, Faster, Stronger
Even after all these years in technology, I remain in awe of IT pros. Watching my kids’ classes, it seems everyone—including elementary school students and other civilians—is practicing truly geeky, hands-on-keyboards arts. We’re also seeing more casual administrators—people with a keen interest in spending some time…
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IT Operations - How to Slide Into Cloud
The most difficult step in any organization’s journey to the cloud is the first one: where do you start? You’ve watched the industry slowly adopt cloud computing over the last decade, but when you look at your on-premises data center, you can’t conceptualize how to break out. You’ve built your own technology prison, and…
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IT Operations: How SecOps Saves the Day
Few messages strike fear in the hearts of IT operations staff like the dreaded scan results from your security team. These messages often appear in your inbox early on Monday morning, which means it’s sitting there waiting for you. You’re not even into your second cup of coffee when you open the message: Good morning, Your…
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A Sysadmin's Guide to Spaghetti Cabling: Bridging the Gap between IT Operations and Business
No, it’s not the latest culinary invention from a famous Italian chef: spaghetti cabling (a nice wording for cabling inferno) is a sour dish we’d rather not eat. Beyond this unsavory term hides the complexity of many environments that have grown organically, where “quick fixes” have crystallized into permanent solutions,…
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A Fool’s Errand: Standardizing DevOps Tools
The other day, as is often the case when an engineer is deep in a troubleshooting task that requires a restart if interrupted, I got a request for advice. “Hey, if you have a second I wanted to ask a question about standardizing DevOps tools. Should my friend use Chef, Puppet, or something else to get DevOps going?” He…