DevOps Blog | Flux7 | Aater Suleman

Aater Suleman

Aater Suleman is co-founder and CEO of Flux7, an Austin-based IT consultancy helping organizations to apply cloud technology, DevOps approaches, and advanced development knowledge for business agility and efficiency. After starting his career in hardware architecture and performance optimization, Mr. Suleman has spent nearly a decade working at the forefront of cloud technology. He is a frequent speaker at Devops and Cloud development events. With a passion for research, Mr. Suleman continues to serve as a member of the faculty of the University of Texas, Austin and ensures Flux7 continually invests in research, development and testing of new technologies for the benefit of Flux7 clients.

CIOs: Why Are you Justifying Your Work?

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

As the CEO of a DevOps consulting organization, I speak regularly with CIOs and heads of IT about the projects they are working on -- or would like to work on. Looking to learn from others, one of the questions I frequently hear is, "How do other CIOs justify their projects?" While you can Google and find a wide variety of answers to this question -- from internal needs analysis to benefit statements -- I have come to a slightly controversial conclusion.

What We Can All Learn from the Hertz-Accenture News

This article originally appeared on Medium

The Hertz digital experience project presents an opportunity to examine continuous improvement and innovation. For those who may have missed the story, a brief background: Hertz hired Accenture to help it create a “world-class digital experience”, most notably to “redefine the customer experience on Hertz’s digital platforms” with a redesigned website and “complementary suite of mobile applications.” Hertz paid more than $32 million, which it is suing to recover.

Upskill Your Team to Address the Cloud, Kubernetes Skills Gap

This article originally appeared on Forbes

According to CareerBuilder's Mid Year Job Forecast, 63% of U.S. employers planned to hire full-time, permanent workers in the second half of 2018. This growing demand coupled with low unemployment is driving a real talent shortage. The technology field, in particular, is experiencing acute pain when it comes to finding skilled talent. Indeed, more than five million IT jobs are expected to be added globally by 2027, reports BusinessInsider.

Could DevOps Best Practices Have Saved Jurassic Park?

This article originally appeared on Medium.

The other day I decided to re-watch Jurassic Park, the pop-classic from 1993 in which a theme park suffers a major power breakdown that allows its cloned dinosaurs to rampage freely throughout the park. If you are one of the few that haven’t seen it yet, I definitely recommend you do -- if nothing else for the realization I had as I watched it again. While the film steers us toward Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect, the big a-ha moment I had as I re-watched the film is that Jurassic Park is actually an IT failure that would have benefited from DevOps best practices.

Letter from the CEO: Flux7 Raises Funding to Help Enterprises Build and Scale DevOps

Today Flux7 announced it has closed a round of funding from NewWave Partners, LLC. This is truly exciting news for us, and a significant milestone as we continue to expand our DevOps consulting services to speed our customer’s time to results. The news just gets better as we are also announcing today that Sagar Lagisetti, a NewWave partner and executive director for Magnum Opus IT, an SAP Service Partner, will join the Flux7 Board of Directors. We are truly honored to have Mr. Lagisetti join our Board, bringing a breadth and depth of experience in shaping how companies do business.

Common Assumptions to Avoid When Starting with Kubernetes

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

As businesses increasingly realize that they are technology companies that happen to make a product or service, the line of business (LOB) often becomes more involved in technology processes. A natural evolution of this is that the LOB will look to find ways to help a development team deploy and scale faster, bringing solutions to market as quickly and competitively as possible. Many organizations are turning to containerization to easily and efficiently achieve these goals.

Docker & Kubernetes: Furthering The Goals Of DevOps Automation

This article originally appeared at Forbes.

Containers are a hot topic, yet production usage remains low, according to Gartner, with most enterprise container adoptions in an early phase. A recent survey by Diamanti backs this up, finding that while almost half (47%) of the IT leaders it surveyed plan to deploy containers in a production environment, only 12% have already done so.

The Best Cloud Migration Path: Lift and Shift, Replatform or Refactor?

This article originally appeared on Forbes.

With more and more infrastructure and applications moving to the cloud in support of digital transformation, one of the decisions enterprises must confront is the best approach to cloud migration for long-term success. While some favor a lift and shift model, others come down on the side of replatforming or even a refactoring approach. However, there is no single path to success. And, indeed, a hybrid approach is often the ideal answer.

5 Expert Recommendations when Hiring a DevOps Engineer

As DevOps adoption grows, the demand for DevOps engineers grows with it and a field of highly diverse applicants. Here at Flux7, we are frequently asked for best practices and tips when sourcing and hiring a DevOps Engineer. While we highly recommend “breeding” DevOps experts in-house, when our customers do feel the need to hire a DevOps resource, the following are our top five recommendations:

Feb 4, 2016 12:07:00 PM Aater Suleman DevOps

As I’m flying from Austin, the home of Flux7, to the Silicon Valley, my immediate thoughts are honed in on the session I’m sharing this week at the Internet of Things Expo in Santa Clara. I’ll be discussing how Docker helped our client Horan & Bird quickly advance the development of its IoT app. It’s a really good story. And one I hope you have a chance to hear at the conference.

If you won’t be attending, you can read about it here.

But, as my jet mates and I soar above the clouds over Nevada, my thoughts are also wandering to other significant events, both recent and upcoming.

Docker in Austin — Before the Docker Austin March meet up

54 signups so far and still increasing. We have the Docker Austin meet up coming up this Thursday and the Flux7 team is excited to be playing a key role in it.

Docker saves the day at Flux7!

Our website, flux7.com, runs inside a Docker container and last weekend we learned that Flux7’s investment in Docker is really starting to pay off. Using Docker we were quickly able to recover the website from a buggy code change, quickly reproduce and fix the bug. Here’s what happened.

Feb 17, 2014 5:34:45 AM Aater Suleman Docker

The Great Debate: Should you use Docker or not?

We had a very interesting discussion with a client yesterday about the use of Docker and where it fits within their environment. The client’s representative was pushing back on us for using Docker and, as always, I enjoyed the constructive argument. As it turned out, we pretty much fought to a conclusion that Docker does have some clear advantages in an Dev environment. Our debate challenged me to crystallize my thoughts and to clearly articulate why we use Docker at Flux7, hence, this article.

Feb 12, 2014 5:15:00 AM Aater Suleman Docker

At Flux7, we believe in high productivity, so each of our engineers handle multiple AWS client accounts, and sometimes multiple engineers handle one client. As a team leader who manages 10s of client accounts, I need to switch in and out of each account several times an hour, which is a real challenge because so much customer-specific information must be loaded into files and environments that we call “customer profiles”. Each includes the following:

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