Is it possible to have a true continuous deployment to production without feature flags? — Even the best software development teams I work with struggle to solve the problem of completely automated deployments to their production environments. The biggest hurdles to this tend to take the form of: Production change management that requires manual approval Even microservices architectures that have dependencies on multiple services being…

DevOps impacts the entire SDLC, so how do we manage to determine when which work should get done first? — Automate everything! How many of you have heard that phrase? How many of you are tasked with doing that work? If you’re in software development or a DevOps Engineer then you know exactly what I’m talking about. …

Creating pre-approved fast-lane Pipelines for rapid deployment — One of the biggest challenges software development teams face in 2020 is the need to deliver code to production faster. To do this seamlessly, we need a completely automated deployment process, and it must be repeatable through multiple environments. …

Choosing the right protocol for the job — If you’ve read an article or even some brief description of GraphQL, it probably included a line about what it does better than REST and other APIs. Glancing over the question like that isn’t really fair though is it? …

A personal note for myself to read 10 years from now. — 10 years ago (yesterday) I started my very first job as a System Engineer Intern at Cerner. Yes, my first day at my first real job was of course on my birthday. I was nothing but a 17-year-old high school intern that knew I really liked building computers and installing…

Making infrastructure-as-code easier by combining Terraform with Terragrunt Terraform (by HashiCorp) enables people to use code to provision and manage any cloud, infrastructure, or service. …

Automation made simple on Linux is the story of a match made in heaven — The first thing DevOps Engineers will probably share with you about their job is that they must know how to get around on the Linux command line. However, most DevOps Engineers will probably also admit they do not consider themselves Linux Engineers. So why is that? …

DevOps adoption is being implemented at lightning speed but there is still room for improvement — As a Senior DevOps Architect, it is my responsibility to keep a pulse on industry DevOps trends. Gitlab recently released its current state of DevOps report and there are several interesting data points that warrant some additional discussion. As technologists, it’s always important to keep the ever-changing world in perspective…

The top list of resources to start a company with only $1,000 — Over the last 2 years I have learned to fail with using the wrong resources and losing money on storage, legal, and communication. Here is my top list of resources to start a company with only $1000 and save over $10K. …