The question running through the Future of Software Development retreat: How much do we let an agent decide, and how do we stay confident in what it does?
Slides and links from my talk Humans on the Loop: Taking agents end do end, PlatformCon June 2026. How does CD work with agentic software engineering?
Slides and links from my talk, Pulling Continuous Delivery inside the agentic loop, from Craft Conference 2026.
I could have Claude Code directly create infrastructure for me. But I prefer to have it write infrastructure code, for consistency, confidence, and composabi...
Agentic software engineering looks familiar to me. We’ll manage systems that produce, deliver, and operate software, including infrastructure code. How do we...
DevOps removed the wall between developers and operations, but the wall between developers and infrastructure remains. The next generation of infrastructure ...
Slides from my presentation at DevOpsDays Istanbul on 1 November, 2025
An approach for identifying what value organizations get from digital infrastructure and how to trace that to the specific infrastructure delivery capabiliti...
Can software delivery be made more effective by moving beyond current IaC tools to give software developers a friendlier, more effective interface for defini...
In January I set up an “Infrastructure Effectiveness Survey” and asked people to fill it in, promising that I’d share what I learned from it later on. Later ...
The idea that you can trade speed and quality off of one another is false. The quality x speed quadrant illustrates that the goal is to use quality and speed...
Slides and notes from my presentation at Configuration Management Camp in Ghent in 2025
An infrastructure management team is not as effective as an infrastructure platform.
Infrastructure as Code was supposed to bring an end to snowflake servers. It hasn’t.
Measures are useful for making decisions about infrastructure delivery workflows and practices, as well as about design and team organization. The four key m...
I’ve been advocating better ways of working for delivering infrastructure as code. There are a number of interesting tools around that seem to be addressing ...
O’Reilly has published several new chapters in the Early Release of the third edition of the Infrastructure as Code book. That’s fifteen out of twenty-one ch...
In order to get the team moving quickly, we’ve kicked this all off using what we’ve called a ‘tracer bullet’ (or ‘trail marker’, for a less violent image). T...
I’ve been furiously typing away on the new edition of the book and now have a rough (very!) draft of the first eight chapters. You can get access to the Earl...
Infrastructure as Data integrates declarative infrastructure management into a Kubernetes cluster, so you can write infrastructure code and use it with the K...
Given that you have multiple code projects, should you put them all in a single repository in your source control system, or spread them among more than one?...
Dan North has recently published his long-awaited list of CUPID properties for making software a joy to work with. Dan teased CUPID almost a year earlier in ...
Github introduced the pull request practice, and features to support it, to make it easier for people who run open-source projects to accept contributions fr...
The second edition of Infrastructure as Code is out! Mostly. E-Books are available now (Amazon.com | Amazon.co.uk | Amazon.in | O’Reilly), while the dead-tre...
Most infrastructure projects I’ve been involved with have a script, or usually a set of scripts that act like a build tool for software projects. These are o...
I’ve delivered the second edition of the book to O’Reilly’s production department, and the wheels are turning to have it available by the end of the year. Se...
Blog posts about “What is DevOps” are a dime a dozen. I find myself repeating my 0.8 cent version of this, and other buzzwords that people knock around these...
TL;DR: Go read the early release of the second edition of Infrastructure as Code on O’Reilly! This is the first eight chapters of what will probably be eight...
Many of our clients at ThoughtWorks are building internal services for development teams to use in developing, delivering, and running applications. I’m ofte...
The term Infrastructure Stack is something I’ve found useful to explain different patterns for organizing infrastructure code. An infrastructure stack is a c...
Tools like Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Azure Resource Manager Templates, Google Cloud Deployment Manager Templates and OpenStack Heat are a great way to d...
Infrastructure as Code is officially published! The “Pre-order” buttons on Amazon.com and the O’Reilly shop have flipped to “Add to Cart” for both print and ...
A key part of any team’s infrastructure management approach is how to make changes to existing servers.
A dynamic infrastructure platform is a fundamental requirement for Infrastructure as Code. I define this as “a system that provides computing resources, part...
The thumbnail definition that I trot out for Infrastructure as Code is using development practices and tools to manage infrastructure. This sounds like a nat...
I’ve delivered the text of my book to O’Reilly’s production team, which means we’re on the path to publication! The last “early access” release should be ava...
My employer, ThoughtWorks, is sponsoring a free download of three chapters of my upcoming book, “Infrastructure as Code”. These chapters focus on software en...
Last week I gave a talk at the operability.io conference. This was a great conference, small (about 170 people), single track. I met a lot of people I know, ...
O’Reilly has pushed the latest update to the “early access” (i.e. rough draft) of my book-in-progress, Infrastructure as Code. You can buy the book now, gett...
My former colleague Martin Thompson borrowed the term Mechanical Sympathy from Formula One driver Jackie Stewart and brought it to IT. A successful driver li...
I’m excited to announce that an “Early Access” (Raw and Unedited) version of the Infrastructure as Code book is now available for purchase from the O’Reilly ...
I ran my current draft of the book through wordle and got this:
At an open spaces session on configuration automation at a DevOpsDays a year or two ago, I asked the group how many of them were using an automation tools li...
Systems administrators have probably been writing scripts and tools to make their jobs easier since day one. When I joined my first systems team, the mantra ...
I’ve run across many teams who are in the same place I was a few years ago, people who are using cloud, virtualization, and automation tools, but haven’t got...
