ANZ Pied Piper

If 2017 was full on, 2018 has started with an even higher tone. Last week (22-26 January 2018) we carried in Singapore the class-based Pied Piper workshop. Prior to that 21 enthusiastic DellEMC Systems Engineers had gone through some technical prerequisites in the form of Python, basic Linux CLI commands and some basic HTML. The progress of the prerequisites as well as the logistics and other aspects of the organization were conveniently tracked with a Trello board formatted as a Scrum board. The program participants came from from all over the region: Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Philippines, Vietnam, South Korea, Pakistan and China. 21 people is a big class, especially for content that focuses so heavily on hands-on. Hence I requested Theo, one of the key members from the ANZ team, to join me for the delivery. This, not only contributed to a much better outcome for the students but also gave him an opportunity to get exposure to the teaching side as the goal of the program is

Software releases can be a very painful experience and typically involve some downtime, especially to traditional monolithic applications. As we have seen in previous posts the process of pushing code to a platform like Cloud Foundry is quite easy but it still a push can take between one and two minutes and during the most part the app has to be down. One or two minutes doesn't sound too bad for most people, but while working for EMC I have met some customers for which "mission critical" has a complete different meaning. I have seen systems where 1 second downtime could be measured in hundreds of millions of dollars. There is lots of talk about CI/CD (Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery) but here we are talking about accepting a minute downtime. Well, the good news is that Cloud Foundry has the tools to allow you to do a zero downtime deployment. The most common procedure is typically referred to as "Blue-Green deployment. The trick is to have two