Chris Ward

One main goal of DevOps is to automate repetitive tasks, “but being good at automation does not make you good at DevOps”, as the latest Puppet report clearly states. This article is about best practices in DevOps automation, how to find the right balance and how to avoid automating inefficiencies.

Knowing when to switch tooling as your company and application scales is tough. This article looks at when the digital freight company Forto migrated from Heroku to Kubernetes, why, and the problems they faced. We take a closer look at when Forto realized they needed to switch, how they planned the switch and their recommendations for others doing the same.

GitOps takes familiar tools such as Git and Continuous Delivery pipelines to automate infrastructure. The GitOps approach is vendor-neutral, provides a clear history of changes, and allows you to reproduce or roll back deployments. Yet, we can't ignore the problems with this approach: Proliferation of repositories, no help for secrets management, or simultaneous file writes. Let's explore.

When comparing products, you want to decide on their usefulness. Yet, we often forget to evaluate the project's documentation. A project might offer an excellent set of features but might lack easy-to-use documentation. This can have a detrimental effect on the developer experience and your team's efficiency. So, how do you evaluate the developer experience of documentation?

If you want to build your applications and business on existing APIs and not reinvent all functionality yourself, how do you decide between the plethora of options available? This article helps you make that decision based on the developer experience (DX) you should expect from an API.

German broadcaster Sport1 realized they were spending too much time grappling with an outdated deployment process, they decided it was time to build their own flexible Internal Developer Platform. Find out how it changed their development process in our roundtable with Paolo Garri, the director of technology.

At the end of September 2020, participants from Humanitec and Polar Squad met for a small hackathon to see how straightforward it was to create a resource driver for the Humanitec platform so that others can connect their custom infrastructure.

An Internal Developer Platform (IDP) is an essential step for rapidly scaling companies to keep their developers working productively and happily. In this roundtable discussion we speak with Jan Löffler who helped build Zalando’s IDP about the problems they were trying to solve and the steps they took.

In this article I look mostly at improving the developer experience within a company, and touch upon other aspects where relevant, we have future articles planned to help you improve the DX of the projects you maintain. The goal of this article is to help those in charge of development teams understand what their developers struggle with and complain about and help them do something about it.

Your Kubernetes configuration represents environments that are a fundamental part of your application, unyet we generally treat them as less important from our application code. In this post we look at best practices for managing changes to configuration, and how to treat it the way it deserves.

A good developer experience is crucial to keep developer teams productive, happy, and focussed on work important to your business aims. In this first roundtable, we get the opinions and experiences from two experts in the field: Nigel Simpson, Director, Enterprise Tech Strategy at a Fortune 100 company, and Erik Muttersbach, CTO at forto (formerly FreightHub), a Berlin logistics startup.

In this article, we look at ephemeral testing environments, small, discrete, and short-lived testing environments that reflect only the changes you are interested in testing.

Continuous delivery helps software development teams get their code changes from development to testing, and into the hands of users more quickly. In this post, Chris Ward looks at the benefits and best practices for implementing this practice into your teams.

Environment variables are a common way for developers to move application and infrastructure configuration into an external source outside of application code. This post shows you the variety of ways Kuberentes helps you create and manage environment variables within kubernetes.

Breaking applications into smaller coupled components like microservices, and running each of those components in containers often go hand in hand. These modern application architecture principles have allowed many businesses and software projects to make regular and rapid changes to running software and scale them to suit changes in demand and approach. In this article, we breakdown what a container is, and the direct benefits they bring to your developer teams and business.

Despite sounding similar, continuous integration, delivery, and deployment are subtly different from each other. While they have overlap, they are applicable and useful at different stages of the development process. In this post, we look at what the different terms mean, what benefits they bring to you and your team, and what you need to get started implementing the practice.

Orchestrating an application in Kubernetes can be even in a simple setup pretty complex. In this post, you learn how to architect a Kubernetes-native application and create a first deployment using kubectl.