The scene

Dockerfile quick tour

Delivering apps quickly and on a budget is a common challenge for government IT.  But there is a path to developing and delivering apps faster – it’s one that uses the building blocks of PaaS and DevOps.

When using modern application platforms, such as Red Hat OpenShift 3, developers can forge an easier path to develop, deploy, and run applications. OpenShift has recently been retooled to support containers.

Last November, the Red Hat Government Symposium brought together more than 500 government and industry IT professionals to discuss open source software’s role in addressing key government IT challenges. The event focused on strategies to advance innovation, as well as the benefits of deploying flexible, agile, collaborative, and cost-effective open source solutions within the Public Sector.

Federal and industry leaders presented keynotes, demonstrations and panels on key topics including:

As more agencies begin to realize the benefits of agile development and DevOps for their IT missions, 2016 is the year to refine your DevOps skills.

The good news is these skills do not require funding or even leaving the comfort of your desk.

Here are three options to expand your current Dev or Ops skill set at your own pace:

DevOps is a powerful IT services management approach for the public sector. Implemented strategically, DevOps can help speed and efficiency in developing IT.

But where should agencies start? Instead of simply throwing DevOps as a new system at your agency and hoping for the best, different methods need to be used to best optimize workflows and impact.

2016 is the year in which DevOps will go mainstream, predicts Gartner. But what does the Silicon Valley culture of agile development practices, open source, and DevOps culture mean for the government sector?

As a Solutions Engineer at GitHub working with government customers, I speak to a lot of organizations looking to improve their software development process. They recognize GitHub as the most popular code repository and sharing environment in the world - where more than 11 million developers worldwide discover, fork, and contribute to over 29 million projects. Some of these agencies are already hosting their own projects on the site.

Open source has changed the way we build software. A fully distributed team of strangers, rarely working on the same thing at the same time or in the same place at the same time, yet open source projects consistently produce better software than their closed-source and proprietary counterparts. How then, can this reimagined software development workflow be leveraged by the enterprise to produce more modern software, even if that software ultimately remains closed source?

Red Hat recently announced the general availability of OpenShift Enterprise 3 (OSE3), the next-generation of Red Hat's award-winning Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering. OSE3 is the first enterprise-ready web-scale container application platform based on Docker format Linux containers, Kubernetes orchestration and Red Hat Enterprise Linux to provide full support from the operating system to application runtimes. OSE3 helps organizations accelerate application development and delivery by enabling development and operations teams to be more agile, responsive, and efficient.

I am not going to go into the holy war of the JSON vs YAML discussion. That is something that should be left to folks that have time and willingness to discuss this, just like discussions of OS X vs Windows vs Linux, or VMware vs Xen, or iOS vs Android, or …the list could continue way past this blog. But this blog is not to discuss either/or. It is to show you a way to convert from one to another to ease the pain of dealing with one or the other side. Let’s take a simple JSON template for DynamoDB table creation in AWS.