Let’s start with the basic: Wake up smiling Do some sport (morning + evening if possible) Don’t leave your office with a big list of tasks Be “inbox 0” two times a week, at least Mail system First of all, if you using something else than Gmail, just stop it. Most extensions and tools in this article are working for gmail, and gmail is the standard. Time Time is the most important part to organise.

What is the importance of ITOps and DevOps? 1. What are IT&Dev operations? “Operations” is actually shorthand for “OAM&P”- operations, administration, maintenance, and provisioning. Recently, rogue proponents of FLAs (five-letter-acronyms) have added a “T” to that unpronounceable moniker, for troubleshooting - so it’s now an almost-pronounceable “OAMPT” if you omit the “ands”. Most operations teams handle, in reality, OAM&P(&T) - not just O. OAM&P(&T) is a crucial and central function with an important charter, to keep the company’s core production systems operational, 24x7.

In 1960, the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company was 75 years. Today, the average lifespan is just 15 years and declining further. So, why the devolution? We only have to look as far as the “Uber-effect” to understand why so many companies fail. Uber very simply and quickly disrupted a centuries-old industry with the touch of a button—making cab service part of the On-Demand Economy, where consumers get what they want, when they want it, with no delays.

I’m working in Dubai since 2 years and half, and I’ve seen many times the same problem, the same issues in IT departements. As a CTO, I’m trying to be a better manager, but I would like to expose some bad and good points, which will be the beginning of a new serie of articles. Bad points Book Keepers As a book keeper, everything is an investment so everything should have a Return On Investement (ROI).

Few days ago, I’ve received a call from a very nice recruiter (Robbie from Digital Gurus) regarding a position of DevOps engineer. Even if I’m happy with my current position, I like a lot to challenge myself, and I think that’s a good way to do it. I’ve signed a NDA regarding the company, but I can reveal some informations that I received before the NDA. It’s a startup with a very good seed funding which want to become the Amazon of Middle East.

Logs, logs, logs, the nightmare of every company. Even in the same company, nobody have the same format. Stdout, file, syslog, rabbitmq, MySQL are some usual destinations of the logs, but which one is the best? Short answer: stdout or syslog A file is always a bad idea: you need to manage the disk storage and you are stateful. RabbitMQ can be a good idea, but no, you don’t want to limitate your application with managing a connection ro RabbitMQ, and it’s the same for MySQL

Currently, my job is to review the global infrastructure of ICFlix and as a streaming company, the most important part is the streaming. I’m not allowed to talk about our infrastructure, but I can give you some fake metrics to illustrate our scenario. Let’s imagine you have 500 TB of hot storage, it will cost: Backblaze B2 $30,000/year Amazon S3 $168,000/year Google cloud $156,000/year OVH Cloud Storage $67,200/year In that case, you have a temptation: let’s manage it ourselves!

I don’t really understand something: from startups to big companies, I’ve seen in a lot of companies which are having a stupid Ops Support Center. Your monitoring system is detecting an alert, which is broadcasted via email/slack/whatever, then an agent will manage this ticket, take the error code, open a documentation, which is generally not up to date and with some weird characters, copy the command to do if this error is raised, open an ssh console, and execute this command.

You are facing performance issues? It’s time to fix your problem(s) Just imagine this situation: you are developing a web application you had to release fast, so your code isn’t perfect and scalable you start to grow and you start to see some performance issues It’s time to act!!! Why? Because performance are not a linear issue. Just imagine that you have a request which is taking 1 time unit, it’s perfect, every time unit, you server a request, but if you start to slow down, what will be the status?

We (IT people) are lucky. Why? Because most of us are working on their passion, we have no issue to find a job and if you are reading this article, it’s probably because we are sharing the same target, we’re on a quest of knowledge in a world which is changing every hour, which increase our capacities of acceptation of changes. This quest of knowledge is a big investment of your time, and if you are investing so much, it’s at the end to reduce your work load: your final target is efficiency.