Mediating the data models, communications protocols and operation activities of devices from many different vendors is challenging and complicated. Use device convergence to bring different devices from different vendors under one common model.

Project managers often contact the enterprise architecture team and ask, "Do I need an architect for my project?" The answer is simple. Every project has an architect, whether or not they are titled as such. The real question is how much time should your project dedicate to architectural decisions.

Using Terraform and Ansible together is a great way to provision both infrastructure and computing resources. Managing variables in both tools can become unwieldy. Here is how to simplify variable management between the two tools.

Call Ansible with an IP address or hostname as the inventory (-i) argument.

Ansible is an open source operations automation platform which is very simple to setup and use. It makes performing repetitive tasks on multiple computing resources far simpler and more consistent. Getting started with Ansible is simple and uncomplicated. Here is one way to start learning Ansible.

This is a trick from the old days (the 1980s) of programming in COBOL and RPG. In those days, we had to set up working storage and were basically limited to fixed storage sizes in bytes. Overflow and truncation were always a concern but sometimes it could be used to our advantage. This is a trick to convert MDY to YMD and back again.

DevOps is currently getting a lot of attention, but there still seems to be some confusion about how it relates to agile.

When I was a student at Ohio University, I setup a BBS, a Bulletin Board System, where people could dial in, post and receive messages, and share files.