Skelton Thatcher

Agile in the City: Birmingham – Political Tactics, Rockstars and Applying Music

This post was written by Jovile Bartkeviciute.

Another chapter of Agile in the City events started in Birmingham today and I am glad I had an opportunity to be a part of it! Agile in the City are practical events run in Birmingham, London and Bristol for the Agile community from the organisers of Agile Cambridge and Agile Manchester and as usual for the series, the audience had a chance to learn a lot of useful tips and advice from the industry experts and their peers giving the talks. Not only the speakers were knowledgeable, but entertaining too! From a real comedy number to making the audience draw pictures and sing acapella – there was no time to be bored.Continue reading “Agile in the City: Birmingham – Political Tactics, Rockstars and Applying Music”

Scale Summit 2017 – It’s not just microservices that need to scale

Two people are placing noted index cards on to a whiteboard which has been laid out with day's timings.

This post was written by Chris O’Dell co-author of Team Guide to Software Releasability.

Friday saw another great Scale Summit event which Skelton Thatcher Consulting were proud to sponsor. Scale Summit is an annual unconference which brings together operations and software development communities with a particular interest in scalable, high performance systems. There’s no schedule created in advance and no speakers – attendees make our own conference through the Open Space Technology format. Frank discussions with your peers leads to advanced topics and in-depth conversation you may normally find only in the hallways of most events. There were so many good sessions to choose from.Continue reading “Scale Summit 2017 – It’s not just microservices that need to scale”

Smart IoT London: All Emerging Technologies Under One Roof

This post was written by Jovile Bartkeviciute.

This week I had an opportunity to visit Smart IoT London conference and expo. The event was organised by CloserStill Media and was co-located with four other events: Big Data World, Cloud Security Expo, Cloud Expo Europe and Data Center World. Altogether that was 500+ talks and 500+ vendors to see in 2 days! The talks run in 28 theatres simultaneously, covering all new emerging technologies and analysing those that are industry standard already.Continue reading “Smart IoT London: All Emerging Technologies Under One Roof”

Pipeline 2017

This post was written by Jovile Bartkeviciute.

It is that time of the year and we are excited to be at PIPELINE again. Organised by Matthew Skelton, Steve Smith, Chris O’Dell, Beccy Stafford and Inka Howorth, the “unconference” is getting better and better every year!

After a quick opening by Inka Howorth and Chris O’Dell the conference started with the Dan North talking about DevOps, automation, autonomy and… Jane Austen!

Here is a quick summary of the talks that I managed to catch:Continue reading “Pipeline 2017”

The DZone Guide to DevOps: Continuous Delivery and Automation, Volume IV

Discover the acclaimed **Team Guides for Software** – practical books on operability, business metrics, testability, releasability

DZone has recently released the latest version of their free DevOps report: “The DZone Guide to DevOps: Continuous Delivery and Automation, Volume IV”, a collection of articles, reports and surveys by IT experts.

Container Clustering with Rancher Server (Part 5) – Automating the deployment of AWS infrastructure and Rancher with Terraform

This post was written by Rich Bosomworth.

This is the fifth post in an on-going series exploring Rancher Server deployment, configuration and extended use. In the last post I detailed how to deploy and manage containerised GoCD continuous delivery using Rancher. In this post we look at automating deployment of Rancher and the supporting AWS components using Terraform. Terraform is an orchestration tool developed by Hashicorp that enables you to build, deploy, manage and update your infrastructure.

Container Clustering with Rancher Server (Part 4) – Deploying and Managing Containerised GoCD Continuous Delivery

This post was written by Rich Bosomworth.

This is the fourth post in an on-going series exploring Rancher Server deployment, configuration and extended use. In the last post I detailed how to add an extra level of HA by configuring an AWS EFS volume for shared storage and mounting it using the Rancher-NFS service. In this post we focus on GoCD. GoCD is an open source continuous delivery server developed by Thoughtworks. We adapt the previous configuration with AWS EBS volumes to enable single node HA for GoCD server. We will also be deploying auto-scaled self registering GoCD agents.

DevOps Showcase North: DevOps and Microservices

This post was written by Jovile Bartkeviciute.

This Tuesday I had an opportunity to attend DevOps Showcase North conference in Manchester. The event was organised by UNICOM and was co-located with 2 other conferences – Testing Showcase North and Agile Showcase North. Due to the unique conference format, all keynotes were held together in a joint morning session and attendees had a chance to listen to the leading experts in all three fields, while the afternoon was split into separate tracks.Continue reading “DevOps Showcase North: DevOps and Microservices”

Migrating Infrastructure to the Cloud using AWS and Chef

This is a guest post from Kamalika Majumder, an Independent Cloud and DevOps Consultant and founder of CloudKata (previously Senior Consultant at ThoughtWorks). For the past seven odd years, she has been helping enterprise customers apply DevOps practices and culture in their organisations and have also been helping them go to Cloud securely with scale.

You can check out Kamalika’s blog here: http://blogs.kamalika.net/. To read more of Kamalika’s case studies, go to CloudKata – an independent Cloud advisory on how to build, secure, scale and enable your applications on the cloud.