Development and General
After a couple of weeks of vacation, some minor oral surgery, a birthday, and my five year anniversary at F5 Networks (has it really been that long?), I’m back to annoy or please you some more. Our holidays were acceptable, and here’s hoping all of you had an enjoyable time also. One thing I noticed is either that I was out of touch over vacation, or there were far fewer “tech predictions for 2012” type articles than has been the case in the past. I think that’s a good thing. Let’s just deal with things as they come, shall...
#F5 DevOps – Managers need to make use of existing technology and adopt culture change. It is entertaining to read all that is currently being written about DevOps. Having been a developer, a development manager, an operations manager, and even a CTO, I can attest to the fact that the “throw it over the wall” syndrome is real, and causes real problems for everyone involved. That is about where my agreement with the current round of pundits ends. The thing is that they talk like there is some fundamental technological reason why DevOps isn’t happening. That’s...
Developers are a great lot of folks, people who spend their day trying to do the impossible with bits for a customer base that is, by and large, impossible to satisfy. When the bits all line up correctly, the last line of code has been checked in, and the nightly compile accepted for deployment, then they get to sit back, relax for five minutes, and start over again. If this makes you think it’s not a great life, then you should live it. Developing gives instant feedback. No matter how unhappy users can be, fixing that nagging bug you’ve...
There was a time when application developers worried only about the hardware they were developing the application for. Those days passed a good long while ago, and then AppDev’s big concern was the OS the application was being developed for. But the burgeoning growth of the World Wide Web combined with the growth of Java and Linux to drive development out of the OS and into the JVM. Then, the developer focused on the JVM in question, or in many cases on the interpreted language interfaces – but not the OS or hardware. For our purposes I...
One of the things that F5 has been trying to do since before I came to the company is reach out to developers. Some of the devices in your network could be effective AppDev tools if utilized to their full extent, and indeed, I’ve helped companies develop tools utilizing iControl that give application managers control over their entire environment – from VMs to ADCs. While it is a struggle for any network device company to communicate with developers, I think it is cool that F5 continues to do so. But increasingly, the Network is the place you need...
This is the second part of this series talking about things you need to consider, and where cloud usage makes sense given the current state of cloud evolution. The first one, Cloud Storage, can be found here. The point of the series is to help you figure out what you can do now, and what you have to consider when moving to the cloud. This will hopefully help you to consider your options when pressure from the business or management to “do something” mounts. Once again, our definition of cloud is Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - “VM containers”, not...
My mother recently had hip replacement surgery. She’s tough, has needed this most of her life, and only had the surgery now because doctors wouldn’t treat her any more without it. So we kids are taking our turns visiting her during her six to eight week recovery period. The one thing I’ve noticed since I arrived, is that while she is thrilled to have a hip that works like it hasn’t since she was a teenager, the things she cannot do frustrate her. One rule is that you take steps one at a time during the healing process, stepping up...
Don MacVittie is a Technical Marketing Manager at F5 Networks. In this role, he supports outbound marketing, education, and evangelism efforts around development, storage, and IT management topics related to F5 solutions. His role includes authoring technical materials, participating in social and community-based forums, and providing guidance for the development of marketing resources. As an industry veteran, MacVittie has extensive programming experience along with project management, IT management, and systems/network administration expertise. Prior to joining F5, MacVittie was a Senior Technology Editor at Network Computing, where he conducted product research and evaluated storage and server systems, as...
A few of us were talking on Facebook about high speed rail (HSR) and where/when it makes sense the other day, and I finally said that it almost never does. Trains lost out to automobiles precisely because they are rigid and inflexible, while population densities and travel requirements are highly flexible. That hasn’t changed since the early 1900s, and isn’t likely to in the future, so we should be looking at different technologies to answer the problems that HSR tries to address. And since everything in my universe is inspiration for either blogging or gaming, this lead me to...
There is a theory in traditional military strategy that goes something along the lines of “take land, consolidate your gains, take more land…” von Moltke the Elder found this theory so profound that he suggested a defender could trade land for time – advice that Russia managed pretty well in The Great Patriotic War (known in the west as World War II), and German General Kesselring practiced against the allies in Italy during the same war. By giving up land, the enemy is forced to occupy it before they can begin forward movement again, buying you time to build...
Full Development and General Archive
