Architecting for Agility

The days of imposing an Enterprise Architecture top down are gone. It doesn’t scale and it doesn’t create good architectures. Now it’s all about building the right culture and community, effecting architectural change through organisational change, and creating generative feedback mechanisms which cause sustainable architectures to grow. Instead of cost reduction we focus on maximising customer value and organisational resilience. Squads Agile cross-functional teams or ‘squads’ are … Continue reading Architecting for Agility

Validating Ansible playbooks with Docker and Serverspec

I’m currently working with a client to bring in DevOps practices, including infrastructure automation and continuous delivery, both using Ansible. Why Ansible? Ansible is a great choice for an organisation new to this sort of automation thanks to its easy learning curve and agentless architecture. Whereas alternatives such as Chef and Puppet require the installation of agents running as root on each target machine, Ansible … Continue reading Validating Ansible playbooks with Docker and Serverspec

DevOpsDays London 2016

Last month, I took part in DevOpsDays London 2016, which focussed this year on the financial services industry. This is particularly relevant to me because I am currently working with a finance provider to introduce Agile and DevOps practices. And it made for an interesting mix of participants, many of whom were struggling with the challenges of modernising the delivery and operations practices in traditional siloed … Continue reading DevOpsDays London 2016