The Ship Show

A look at build infrastructure architecture: what are some of the differences between continuous integration tools and orchestration tools, and what's the criteria for establishing the delineations between the two? We touch on ways to mesh the two together in a sustainable way.

We sit down with Perforce Software's Director of Product Technology, James Creasy, to discuss the issues faced by enterprises attempting to deploy git and the general challenges of using git in environments where its trackrecord isn't as established.

Whether it's your own tool, your own Jenkins or Maven plugin, your own whatever, we take a closer look at some of the costs associated with doing so and some of the aspects to think about when trying to decide whether to hack on (and join) the open source community around a particular tool, or buck up and write it yourself.

Can the configuration management and automation tools we all know and love be used to get setup developer workstations and get your new-hires writing, building, and shipping code more quickly? And is that even something DevOps and release engineers should be responsible for? In episode 7, we examine bootstrapping developer environments.

When it comes to configuration management frameworks, CFEngine is always part of the conversation. We talk with the father of the configuration management tool and the CTO of CFEngine Mark Burgess and CMO of CFEngine, Mark de Visser about CM, CM tools, where CM intersects business needs, and the trends affecting CM today. This, plus a discussion of the week's News & Views and a review of "The Facts & Fallacies of Software Engineering" by Robert L. Glass.

Is there such a thing as too much automation? Many would say "No, of course not," but is it that simple? Is blindly automating everything in sight the best use of time and resources and, more importantly, the best way to manage risk in the release process? Join us as we try to answer whether "too much automation" exists, plus News & Views and the premier of our new segment: "Dear Abby for DevOps."

What do you do "mistakes may have been made," and it's time to be solution-oriented?! Whether it's a deployment that replaced good code with bad, an infrastructure problem discovered after a maintenance window, or even a bug in the deployment process itself, join us as we look at the ins & outs of rollbacks, plus News & Views and in Tool Tips, a look at Vagrant.

How do you hire the best release and devops engineers? We look at methods, questions, and red-flags to be on the lookup for; also, News & Views, plus in Tool Tips, a look at "ack".

Is "DevOps" just "Release Engineering" for Web 2-dot-oh? How is it the same? How is it different? Plus, a review of Rundeck and the week's News & Views.

Why should companies bother with release engineering practices? What's the benefit? Plus, a review of "Configuration Management Best Practices" by Bob Aiello and Leslie Sachs.