• Home
  • Site Aliases
    • www.cloud-native.info
    • oracle.cloud-native.info
    • Phil-Wilkins.uk
  • About
    • Background
    • Presenting Activities
    • Internet Profile
      • LinkedIn
    • About
  • Books & Publications
    • Logging in Action with Fluentd, Kubernetes and More
      • Logging in Action with Fluentd – Book
      • Fluentd Book Resources
      • Log Generator
    • API & API Platform
      • API Useful Resources
    • Oracle Integration
      • Book Website
      • Useful Reading Sources
    • Publication Contributions
  • Resources
    • GitHub
    • Mindmaps Index
    • Oracle Integration Site
    • Useful Tech Resources …
      • Oracle Tech Resources inc Open Source
      • Useful Tech Resources
      • Python Setup & related stuff
  • Music

Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

~ from Technology to Music

Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Tag Archives: CI/CD

Phoenix project

21 Saturday Jan 2023

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

agility, automation, book, CI/CD, CICD, devops, DevSecOps, Gene Kim, IaC, OWASP Top 10, Phoenix project, Security, software, Work

The Phoenix Project by Gene Kim has been recommended reading for the IT industry for a long time now. It’s been on my to-read list for a good while, but to be candid, it never made the top of my reading list, as I had some reservations. Who wants to read a novel about IT if you already work and live it every day.

Recently IT Revolution, to celebrate its 10th anniversary, offered the book through Amazon for free for a limited period (even now, as a Kindle ebook, it isn’t that expensive anymore). Given I had determined I should read it at some point, I took the opportunity to get a copy. As it happens, through the Christmas break, I got into a run of reading books, and with it being at the top of my ebook list, I bit the bullet.

First of all, the story was engaging and very readable, characters are likable, human, and relatable. It isn’t a huge book either (perhaps I’ve been looking at too many 500+ page novels), making it a fairly quick read. As a pure novel, some of the devices to keep the narrative moving along were perhaps a little obvious, but then given the goal of the story, that isn’t really an issue. It didn’t break the reading flow, which did keep the pages turning with a plausible story; plausible enough to wonder how much of the story was based on a real-life experience of Gene or one of his writing collaborators.

What struck me the most is that most industry writing I have read doesn’t address all the points the book makes. So, DevOps, as is typically presented by a lot (most ?) content, uses some variation of a diagram like the infinite cycle, as shown here:

Image courtesy of Amis.nl

Not only that, it is common to view DevOps as focusing on either :

  • Automation, particularly around CI/CD and IaC (Infrastructure as Code)
  • The development team also owns the operations tasks

But the book portrayed DevOps as both and neither of these. I say this as these approaches can help with the goal, but they should be subservient to the larger objective. Unfortunately, we do get caught up with the mechanics and tools and not the wider goal. The story is about how to deliver business value and needs in a streamlined manner, so we aren’t tying up the investment (time or spend) any longer than necessary. Yes, that does mean IaC and CI/CD style automation but only in service of the goal, which is the business need, not IaC.

The book also highlights the point of continuously working on improvement and paying down against debt, as removing debt is part of the way we remove the blockages to the streamlining (in the story, we actually see the release pipeline being temporarily stopped so that time could be invested in paying down the debt). Yet, this aspect is rarely discussed in a lot of the industry content on the subject. Maybe we are, in part, our own enemy here, as debit work is not greenfield. It is going back over old ground and making it better. We all love breaking new ground and leaving the past behind. Not to mention many organizations measure progress on the number of features rather than how well a feature serves the business goals. I have to admit to that mistake, which in our world of microservices is a bit of a mistake. After all, aren’t microservices about doing one thing and doing it well?

Another interesting view that the book put a lot of emphasis on was a variant of what is sometimes called the Eisenhower matrix. Anyone who has done any leadership training will most likely recognize it (see below).

However, the quadrants of work are as the book describes them are:

  • Quadrant 1 – Project work (i.e., planned activities central to the business)
  • Quadrant II – IT work (work that is planned and needed but doesn’t originate from the business, such as building new infrastructure)
  • Quadrant III – Updates and changes (e.g., system patching)
  • Quadrant IV – Unplanned (e.g., outage recovery work, demands on the team that has bypassed scheduling / divert individuals from the agreed goals, etc.)

The key difference between this representation and that of the book’s work definition is the words on each of the columns and rows. For example, Quadrant IV isn’t ‘Not Important’ and ‘Not Urgent’ – but it would be fair to say ‘Not Wanted’ and ‘Not Productive’. Unplanned work is the killer and roughly aligns with quadrant IV. This comes from the issues of not dealing with technical debt and solution facilities etc.

My last observation is that in the last couple of years, we have seen the rise of DevSecOps, which recognizes the need that security should be as much of the delivery process as Dev and Ops. The book (written 10 years ago) showed that security should be part of the DevOps process. Like other areas, the story seeks to address the point that security focussing on just the development and operational processes while necessary for things like catching OWASP Top 10 also needs to see the bigger picture otherwise, you could easily add additional needs that are already handled by controls elsewhere in the end-to-end business processes. That doesn’t mean to say security controls can5 be in software, but are they part o& improvement and pushing actions left vs. getting out of the starting blocks?

More reading

The book provides references, but for my own personal benefit, a number of particularly interesting and useful references are made, which may interest:

  • The Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt (a novel addressing his Theory of Constraints in the same way as The Phoenix Project is a novel around the DevOps handbook)
  • Beyond the Goal by Eliyahu M. Goldratt
  • Value stream mapping
  • Theory of Constraints
  • DevOps Kaizen: Find and Fix What Is Really Behind Your Problems
  • Tech debt spiral
  • Work In Progress and impact of high amounts of WIP

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Print
  • Pocket
  • Email
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest
  • WhatsApp
  • Skype

Like this:

Like Loading...

Integrating API Management with the rest of your Development Pipeline

30 Thursday May 2019

Posted by mp3monster in API Platform CS, APIs & microservices, General, OIC - ICS, Oracle, Technology

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

API, CI/CD, Flexagon, Flexdeploy, OIC, SOASuite

Oracle API Management keeps API policy configuration and management internalized for a number of reasons including security (after all you don’t want your security rules for APIs out in the open).  The Platform does provide simple versioning.  But you need to able to link the policies to the back end implementations – so the policy configuration is aligned to what is implemented. For example you don’t want the policy to accept parameters that your back end can’t handle in version 1, but does in version 2 of your solution. I have blogged about some of these considerations in the past here.

We have had the good fortune to sit and discuss the challenges of how API configurations could be managed with Flexagon. As a result of our input and from others Flexdeploy has a number of new features making the configuration management of APIs very easy. In addition to this is further simplifying gateway deployment processes. When combined with a very powerful CI/CD that can handle traditional development, microservices and development with integration products such as like SOA Suite and OIC a huge amount of flexibility is made available enabling configuration management, multi environment deployments.

cropped-flexagon_diagram_81816-01-1024x343

Flexagon have started a series of blogs on the subject – recommend checking them out – here.

Share this:

  • Twitter
  • Facebook
  • LinkedIn
  • Print
  • Pocket
  • Email
  • Tumblr
  • Reddit
  • Pinterest
  • WhatsApp
  • Skype

Like this:

Like Loading...

Aliases

  • phil-wilkins.uk
  • cloud-native.info
  • oracle.cloud-native.info

I work for Oracle, all opinions here are my own & do not necessarily reflect the views of Oracle

Oracle Ace Director Alumni

TOGAF 9

Logging in Action

Oracle Cloud Integration Book

API Platform Book


Oracle Dev Meetup London

Categories

  • App Ideas
  • Books
    • Book Reviews
    • manning
    • Oracle Press
    • Packt
  • Enterprise architecture
  • General
    • economy
    • LinkedIn
    • Website
  • Music
    • Music Resources
    • Music Reviews
  • Photography
  • Podcasts
  • Technology
    • APIs & microservices
    • chatbots
    • Cloud
    • Cloud Native
    • Dev Meetup
    • development
      • languages
        • node.js
    • drone
    • Fluentd
    • logsimulator
    • mindmap
    • OMESA
    • Oracle
      • API Platform CS
        • tools
      • Helidon
      • ITSO & OEAF
      • Java Cloud
      • NodeJS Cloud
      • OIC – ICS
      • Oracle Cloud Native
      • OUG
    • railroad diagrams
    • TOGAF
  • xxRetired

My Other Web Content & Contributions

  • Amazon Author entry
  • API Platform
  • Dev Meetup (co-managed)
  • Fluentd Book
  • ICS Book Website
  • OMESA
  • Ora World
  • Oracle Community Directory
  • Packt Author Bio
  • Phil on Blogs.Oracle.com
  • Sessionize Profile

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Join 2,541 other subscribers

RSS

RSS Feed RSS - Posts

RSS Feed RSS - Comments

February 2023
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
2728  
« Jan    

Twitter

  • File system replication is now available as a fully managed solution for your enterprise workloads with #OCI File S… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…Next Tweet: 3 days ago
  • Find out how NIBIO's Smart Forest research center utilizes @OracleCloud to store, process, and apply #AI to data to… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…Next Tweet: 4 days ago
  • .@TechArena's latest ebook "Seven Strategies for Maximizing Organizational Return” highlights #OCI. Bev Crair discu… twitter.com/i/web/status/1…Next Tweet: 4 days ago
  • Clever use of SSH tunnelling, Applies to multiple Linux flavours and Windows .... blogs.oracle.com/developers/pos…Next Tweet: 5 days ago
  • 25% done with Let's Do It, by Bob Stanley goodreads.com/user_status/sh…Next Tweet: 5 days ago
Follow @mp3monster

History

Speaker Recognition

Open Source Summit Speaker

Flickr Pics

Pembroke CastleSeven Bridge Crossing
More Photos

    Social

    • View @mp3monster’s profile on Twitter
    • View philwilkins’s profile on LinkedIn
    • View mp3monster’s profile on GitHub
    • View mp3monster’s profile on Flickr
    • View philmp3monster’s profile on Twitch
    Follow Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog on WordPress.com

    Blog at WordPress.com.

    • Follow Following
      • Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog
      • Join 217 other followers
      • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
      • Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog
      • Customize
      • Follow Following
      • Sign up
      • Log in
      • Report this content
      • View site in Reader
      • Manage subscriptions
      • Collapse this bar
     

    Loading Comments...
     

    You must be logged in to post a comment.

      Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
      To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Our Cookie Policy
      %d bloggers like this: