Articles

Environment management is an essential function in any complex, mission-critical system. Unfortunately, environment management is often overlooked and, even when addressed, usually only handled in the simplest way. Keeping an eye on your environment is actually one of the most important functions for IT operations. Bob Aiello explains how to get started with environment management.

The root cause of bad service may have much to do with a personality trait known as anxiety and the often-dysfunctional defense mechanisms people resort to in an attempt to deal with its discomfort. If you want your IT operations group to be successful, then you need to consider the personality issues—at both the individual and group levels—that may impact their performance and your success.

One of GNU make's many features allows you to shorten build times by running more than one command at a time. If your dependencies are all correct, or nearly correct, this can give you a significant improvement, and since it's built into the tool you get it "for free." But GNU make's parallel build feature—often called "dash j mode," after the command-line option that is used to enable it—is not without drawbacks. The worst of these is that GNU make parallel builds can produce incorrect results if the build dependencies are not sufficiently correct.

The release management system is an important component of the service-transition process. This article highlights the importance of building a monolithic release management system, which encompasses all of the functions and processes necessary to support application build, package, and deployment. The monolithic release management is holistic, comprehensive, and based upon industry best practices. These guidelines are applicable for any type of organization or projects of any size.