For those of us in the tech sector, jet travel is part of the deal. It can be time consuming and mind numbing. Everybody seems to have a few tricks up their sleeves to make their own trips more manageable. Some share tips with their friends. CTP’s own Robert Christiansen, a Doppler podcast co-host, goes a step farther: He’s interviewed dozens of travelers and packed years’ worth of insights into a book he’s calling “The Zen of High-Performance Travel.” Our panelists chat about some of Robert’s travel do’s and don’ts, as well as our own. Like this one: Do you know which cluster of seats is the ..read more

DevOps has come a long way in the past decade. In a report released more than a year ago, Forrester declared that the practice had reached “escape velocity,” with more than half of all enterprises implementing and expanding DevOps processes. But, according to some in the field, gaps still exist between the dev and the ops sides of most organizations. We talk with Brad about why the two sides remain at odds and how companies are struggling to create a delivery infrastructure that balances agility and control. We discuss how people – not tools – remain the biggest obstacles to companies’ drives ..read more

Over the past 10 years, the power structure has shifted inside IT organizations. Maintaining the infrastructure used to be the top priority, so infrastructure teams tended to control more resources and command more respect than their counterparts overseeing applications. Today, that equation has flipped. Businesses need to move faster, so they’ve elevated application teams to star status. We discuss the implications of this power shift. Instead of reacting, app teams now are dictating the requirements of organizational initiatives – choosing resources, deciding which platforms they want to use ..read more

Software developers are a prideful group. They like to create things, figure out their own short cuts and come up with new ways to innovate on the fly. But sometimes, developers’ inner creativity can be the biggest thing holding them back. There are still times when relying on tried and tested tools can help get a project done more quickly and more efficiently. We discuss how developers can optimize their own work by identifying a few key value-adds and admitting that, for many other tasks like observability and log-ins, outside vendors have better tools to get the job done. Shawn sums it up b ..read more

Microservices have become a popular software development technique in recent years. Breaking down applications into distinct sets of loosely coupled smaller services helps organizations port workloads from cloud to cloud and get better utilization out of the resources they’re paying for. But there are challenges associated with the practice, starting with security. Microservices can make security much more costly – if you’re not careful. We discuss why microservices put such a heavy load on verifications of credentials and make it harder to manage access to specific services. We go through som ..read more

We’ve been through several major technology paradigm shifts – from mainframe to client server to internet to, now, cloud. Cloud has given people the opportunity to refactor applications, which means different things to different people: From a minor change, akin to a chef adjusting ingredients in a seasoning, to a major shift like heart surgery. Refactoring provides the opportunity to think about how to get the most effective operations out of that application in the cloud, whether in terms of cost, disaster recovery, legal, security, or user experience. We also discuss how with Outpost, Azure ..read more

It’s a brave new world when it comes to data privacy and security, as companies work to comply with regulations such as the California Consumer Privacy Act and GDPR. No matter the size of the company or where they fall on the compliance spectrum, technology and culture change are both critical drivers of success. We discuss how to overcome “anti-patterns”: the often-repeated mistakes that stand in the way of cloud migration. For example, rather than an app-centric approach, data-centric security is key to being able to leverage the benefits of the cloud. This provides your data scientists with ..read more

Securing applications in a hybrid world can be a challenge. Companies that try to control threat vectors across cloud platforms and infrastructure environments with the same set of tools often run into trouble. We discuss how containers and serverless platforms are starting to solve some of these security challenges – how their shared responsibility models work and how they interact with technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning. We touch on the prospects for – and challenges facing – Oracle, IBM and Alibaba cloud platforms. We also talk about issues companies face rewriti ..read more

How do you get the most out of your cloud investment? We discuss how Densify uses machine learning analytics to help customers optimize utilization and cloud billing. One direct path to optimization is to “practice basic hygiene.” Andrew discusses how developers’ concerns about resource constrictions leads them to over-order and purchase mismatched solutions. Understanding usage patterns, linkages between services and organizations’ evolving needs can help developers buy more strategically and keep bills under control. We also talked with Andrew about his journey to cloud consulting, lessons h ..read more

What does “cloud native” really mean? Ask different organizations, or even different business units, and you’ll get hugely disparate answers. The fact is, there is no one answer and there’s no manual for cloud computing, which can make it difficult for seasoned executive to grasp the new technology ecosystem that has evolved in recent years. We discuss how edge computing is evolving as organizations become more decentralized, and talk about best practices for how organizations can remain effective – for example, by adding redundancy, sharing knowledge with peers, and remembering security princ ..read more