Schlomo Schapiro

In his blog DevOps is DOA  Tom Mornini writes that DevOps is already outdated in the face of PaaS offerings. His opinion is not entirely surprising as he is CTO and co-founder at EngineYard , a large PaaS vendor. Interstingly most people seem to disagree with his opinion (for example here , here and all  of the comments at Tom's blog). I also believe that he missed the main advantage of DevOps which is IMHO that DevOps actually supports knowledge-driven teams while PaaS requires one to trust in the service quality of the PaaS vendor with little to no way of influencing that. So, if you don't want to increase the amount of knowlegde in your organization then PaaS is a good way to go and then you maybe really don't need a DevOps approach. Just wait a while and find some of your developers turned into ops because in the end even in a PaaS world somebody needs to maintain the automation that is used to feed the PaaS hosting. But, if you want to increase the total amount...

In his recent blog post about Package Management Systems , Diomidis Spinellis gives sound advice about using packages for software management: "The breadth of modules you can reuse is nothing short of amazing, making it a crime to start writing code before you investigate what packages you can reuse. Whatever your need, there’s likely to be a package that you can effortlessly link with your application. Promisingly, the structure that package managers bring both to the tools we use in our development process and the libraries we reuse in our products ties nicely with the recent move emphasizing development operations (DevOps) as an integration between software development and IT operations. Orderly and organized package management is a key element of a well-run software production process. Maintaining a list of an organization’s recommended packages allows teams to share best practices and avoids package incompatibilities. So, if your business allows it, join a pack...