The last 6 weeks have been very busy and a lot has happened in the meantime. A lot of change in the job, a lot of development in DevOps.
Regardless, it is hard to keep track of what is going on in DevOps even without some “external” disruptions.

Enough whining.
Let’s get back to business. As much as possible I tried to keep track and below is a somewhat condensed summary of links from the past weeks. If you found other
great articles, posts or musings, as always:

I show you mine, you show me yours.

100 Days of DevOps with PowerShell 
This project is about to wrap on December 22^nd according to the website. They are now at day 75. Getting close. Let’s hope the team gets all done. But even if not, awesome content!

Azure Resource Manager DevOps Jump Start
“This course promises lots of helpful demos, an exploration into the JSON language for creating resource templates, and a look at Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) integration. And it takes a deep dive into some DevOps best practices …”

Microsoft’s Second-Gen Open Compute Server Design Now Open Source
Microsoft invested already over $15b in cloud infrastructure. Learn some of the technical details and read about its Open Source strategy around server design.

What Makes Someone an Engaging Leader?
“Engagement is a leadership responsibility – but by and large, leaders are failing in this regard. Our research suggests that, for most companies, the turnaround won’t happen quickly.”

Visual Studio Release Manager for Azure VMs
Automating multi-stage deployment and managing the release process.

Four ways to help the business understand what IT is talking about
More on the soft skills side of technology folk talking to the business. Helpful read to get started making valuable connections.

Culture Change, Slow And Steady
Sue Schade, CIO, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers, writes about her experiences, successes, and challenges in changing the culture in IT at UMHS. Great read.

A Hybrid Approach to Outsourcing Fuels IT Success
“Rompetrol, a European petroleum producer, rethinks and revises its IT strategy to be more cost-effective and to align more closely with business requirements.”

Microsoft study finds everybody wants DevOps but culture is a challenge
Shameless plug: My team worked with an awesome team from Saugatuck Technologies to find out more about challenges and opportunities ahead in DevOps. It was also meant to get some insights into where a typical Microsoft customer (not that that exists) stands vs. what companies using mostly Open Source technologies want and expect from a DevOps supporting infrastructure. You can download the full study here.

CoreOS is building a container runtime, Rocket
The Container Wars, Episode 1

DevOps and Change Agents: Common Themes
Another great post from the folks over at Puppet Labs. “The urge for change is driven by frustration.”

CIOs need to get clear on their cloud for DevOps to work
Cloud is one of the most influential change agents for DevOps. 

After about 18 hours of flights, missed connections and other unpleasant events with a well know German airline I arrived at the final destination for me and about 5000 close friends. Barcelona, Spain, will be Microsoft capital for most of next week. The company hosts it major technology events TechEd for IT professionals and developers in the enterprise. But that is something for next week’s Top DevOps Links.

First things first; plenty of great content and information has become available last week.

I show you mine, you show me yours.

Design a Workspace that Gives Extroverts Privacy, Too

What? You might wonder why this link. Developers – according to popular prejudice – are all introverted and it might call true for a certain number of individuals in the operations teams too. Nevertheless, the article helps us operations people to understand why some of the offices of extroverts are painted in pastel colors and how to approach more extroverted individuals. See for yourself.

Docker and DevOps: Why it Matters

You probably saw the Microsoft announcement of a deep collaboration between the Docker team and Microsoft. Here’s some insight into why containerization in general and Docker in particular is of importance, in the cloud but also on-premises.

DevOps has moved out of the cloud

David Linthicum from InfoWorld explains why DevOps is not only for the cloud.

“Although the cloud is certainly a better place for devops, I don’t believe that devops should be used only in cloud deployments. Instead, you should use devops approaches and enabling tools such as Puppet or Chef in most of the development you do these days -- both cloud and on-premises.”

Why CFOs Should Embrace SysAdmins

Bill Koefoed is CFO of Puppet Labs shares on Wired magazine’s why he believes finance and management in general should discover their love for operations folk. Automation and the streamlining of automated processes is the next big frontier in cost savings and delivery of predicable outcomes. This can only be achieved through greate collaboration between developer and operations. DevOps anyone?

DevOps Enterprise Summit bashes silos - SD Times

Beginning of week 43 I attended the DevOps Enterprise Summit (#DOES14), taking place this week in San Francisco. What a great event. Find out who was there and what was going on. All sessions where recorded and I heard they will available for free from the event portal. My all-time favorites of the event are the sessions by Target and Nordstrom.

Microsoft and Dell Team Up for Cloud-in-a-Box Systems

Microsoft Cloud Platform System (CPS) is an on-premises, Microsoft Azure compatible, hardware and software platform exclusively available from Microsoft. Starting early November Dell will start shipping the HW/SW platform.

Ignore Emotional Intelligence at Your Own Risk

I know, I reference hbr.org’s blog quite a bit. But their posts are very well written and may resonate so well with my own observations. Emotional intelligence is, next to empathy, something extremely important in a world of different teams with different philosophies having to work together. So, this post is an ideal candidate for the links list of the week.

GE’s Big Agile Bet

The title says it all. Head over to devops.com and find out more.

That’s it for week 43. Next week is TechEd. Actually for most Microsofties it has already started and final preparations, first meetings, rehearsals etc. are well under way. Talk to you soon.

If you are at TechEd (#TEE14) ping me on Twitter if you want to chat or see the team at one of the many activities we have planned around DevOps.

Volker

N.B. Excuse typos. This has been written last minute standing in front of a cupboard in my tiny 6’x10’ hotel room.

We're already in week 42, can you believe it. End of next week a huge trek of MIcrosofties heads out to Barcelona, Spain, for TechEd. Should be very, very exciting, specifically for DevOps interested people. Check out an earlier post http://bit.ly/1nYE73z. Now, let's do the links. As always, I am very interested in your favorite DevOps link(s) of this week. Please share them in the comments. I’ll read them all and will give you my biased opinion. Links are not in a particular order nor do they express a certain preference.

I show you mine, you show me yours.

• DevOps + IoT
  About the relevance of DevOps methodologies in a world of plenty of devices.
• 6 Ways CIOs Are Moving to the Digital Enterprise
  Digital Enterprise is more than a buzzword and CIOs know best. This article goes into discovery of new revenue streams, cultural implications and more of the enterprise in a digital world.
• Experiment with Organizational Change Before Going All In
  Know before you go. Especially for a DevOps transformation you want to try on a smaller scale before you go all in. This post from Harvard Business Review provides additional insights and tips.
• DevOps Talent: Grow It Internally
  That is exactly what I am preaching all the time. Before you go and hire new talent from the outside, look inside your company. The best “new hires” might be the ones you hired a while back. Useful insights on InformationWeek.
• Broad Support for Docker in Windows Server and on Microsoft Azure announced
  This week Microsoft announced native support for Docker container technologies in the next version of its Windows Server platform as well as in Microsoft Azure.
• Ghost in the (Bourne Again) Shell: Fallout of Shellshock far from over
  After Heartbleed, Shellshock. What’s next? The list of Open Source vulnerabilities seems to grow by the week
• "Six Challenges Facing DevOps in 2015"
  DevOps, like any other fundamental change, comes with its challenges. Each group will discover its own issues to overcome. Trevor Parsons believes to have found 6 challenges we will face in 2015. Only so much, they ain’t new. A good refresher anyway.
• How to Invent the Future
  Some pretty neat thoughts about how to and how not to invent the future. This and why a monkey doesn’t want to climb a ladder to get to a banana. Head over to hbr.org. It’s worth it.

Today’s announcement of a deep collaborations between Docker Inc. and Microsoft is additional evidence that Microsoft is very serious about supporting IT organization’s decisions to rely on multi-vendor and multi-platform operations models. With containerization becoming more and more relevant  and with Docker being one of the most advanced technologies in this area, a collaboration for the benefit of the customer is only natural.

After Microsoft added support for Docker containers on Linux VMs in Microsoft Azure back in June, customer will have the ability to access the Docker Hub from within the Azure management portal. This is the next step in supporting seamless integration of non-Microsoft technologies and solutions into our platforms. But it does not stop there.

Microsoft and Docker are working to integrate the Open Source Docker engine into a next release of Windows Server, making it easier for developers to create containers which include apps built in Java, C++, Node.js, .Net. and others. Read ScottGu’s blog for more details.

Another effort is under way to enable support for a native Docker client on Windows. Operations (and developers) will be able to manage and deploy Docker based solutions with Windows AND Linux environments.

Further, the Docker Hub will be included in the Microsoft Azure Gallery and the management portal.

Last but not least, Microsoft is contributing code back to Docker’s Open Orchestration API. This will enable operations (and developers) to use Docker at the command prompt to start Linux and Windows based containerized solutions directly in Microsoft Azure.

Resources

Find out more about today’s announcement at this selection of destinations (in no particular order):

• ScottGu’s blog: Docker and Microsoft: Integrating Docker with Windows Server and Microsoft Azure
• Azure blog: New Windows Server containers and Azure support for Docker
• MS OpenTech: Docker Containers Coming to a Microsoft or Linux Server Near You
• GigaOM: Microsoft and Docker team up to make sure containers can play nice on Azure and Windows Server
• ZDNet: Docker container support coming to Microsoft's next Windows Server release
• PCWorld: Microsoft to bring Docker to Windows Server
• TechCrunch: Microsoft Partners With Docker To Bring Container Support To Windows Server
• CNN: Docker and Microsoft partner to bring container applications across platforms
• Wired: Microsoft Says Windows Will Run Docker, the Next Big Thing in Cloud Computing

TechEd 2014 in Barcelona starts in a couple of weeks. More than ever you will find Linux focused or related sessions at the event. Acknowledging the fact that many of our enterprise customers demand the support for mixed environments in Microsoft Azure and on-premises, the teams use events like TechEd to share technical details about managing, deploying, monitoring and more for Linux. Here are the session and hands-on lab highlights for TechEd 2014 in Barcelona.

In case you have any questions WRT to the sessions and how this all makes sense in the context of DevOps, feel free to leave a comment or send a tweet with #TalkDevOps.

Breakout Sessions

CDP-B315 Running Linux in Microsoft Azure
Thursday, October 30 3:15 PM - 4:30 PM Room: Hall 8.1 Room H
In today's modern datacenter, heterogeneity is common with regards to Operating Systems, virtualization solutions as well as the software stacks that run on them. In this session, we explore the offerings Microsoft has made available for Linux and FreeBSD-based IaaS solutions running in Microsoft Azure, as well as how you can migrate your existing Linux-based IaaS solutions from your private cloud Azure.

DBI-B334 Azure Virtual Machines Deployment Scenarios
Thursday, October 30 5:00 PM - 6:15 PM Room: Hall 8.0 Room F1
Microsoft Azure is a hosted computing platform and infrastructure that enables building, deploying and managing applications and services such as Microsoft SQL Server 2014 through a global network of Microsoft-managed data centers. The Azure cloud supports infrastructure optimization through new hybrid cloud scenarios for high availability, backup/restore, data management and virtual machines. Virtual Machine templates include diverse technologies to include SharePoint, Oracle, Linux, and Ubuntu. In addition, Azure supports other storage paradigms such as mobile services as well as NoSQL technologies to include Key/Value and Hadoop MapReduce. This session explores the different data-centric scenarios that Azure enables to provide optimal deployment and design options for the SQL Server DBA and Developer. It also covers migration strategies to the cloud, cloud economics, as well as new cloud-centric networking technologies such as ExpressRoute and Equinix.

DEV-B333 Cross-Platform Continuous Delivery with Release Management for Visual Studio 2013
Friday, October 31 10:15 AM - 11:30 AM Room: Hall 8.0 Room B1
With Release Management you can achieve true continuous delivery on any platform. This session demos how to use Release Management for continuous delivery in Cross-Platform environments including Windows and Linux. We cover how to leverage Desired State Configuration (DSC) and Chef integration to create a release pipeline for both Windows and Linux.

Hands-On Lab

CDP-H306 Managing Linux Servers with System Center 2012 R2
Room: Hall 7
This lab provides an overview of new capabilities to manage Linux with System Center 2012 R2.

EM-H311 Implementing Linux Clients in System Center 2012 R2 Configuration Manager
Room: Hall 7
Starting with Configuration Manager 2012 R2, support for various Linux and UNIX server platforms are supported for management with Configuration Manager. In this lab, install the Configuration Manager 2012 R2 client agent on a Linux computer, generate hardware inventory from the Linux client, and deploy software to the Linux client.

You should check back the content catalogregularly as the teams might add additional sessions closer to the event.

Hope to see you at TechEd in Barcelona

Volker