• Ronald (unregistered)

    The issue with this type of product is that in organizations that are mature enough to recognize the need for a systemic approach to ALM there is usually already a CMDB or an extensive ticketing system that does not integrate easily with build tools. So people end up having a duplicate CMDB in the build tools and as we all know: disconnected+duplicated = highway to hell. That's where integrated solutions like those from IBM or Microsoft have the upper hand.

  • saveddijon (unregistered)

    Hmm....

    Where I work not all of my bits are 1's and 0's. Some of them are X's and Z's. (And very occasionally 'H', 'L', 'U', 'W' or '-'.) Which should give you an idea of what industry I work in.

    But seriously, have you considered marketing BuildMaster to the hardware development industry? One big drawback: we don't do Windows.

  • (cs) in reply to saveddijon
    saveddijon:
    But seriously, have you considered marketing BuildMaster to the hardware development industry?

    We do have a few users who use BuildMaster to manage their embedded software --- which was surprising, since I thought all the value would be the cool deployment stuff we do. They find it pretty valuable to do CI and manage workflow.

    saveddijon:
    One big drawback: we don't do Windows.

    It's ok, a lot of our users don't --- while BuildMaster itself is .NET/Windows, it's a web app and connects just fine via SSH/FTP/etc to Linux. So, you just need a single Windows VM or something.

  • JS (unregistered)

    Alex - some thoughts about Inedo and BuildMaster and your relation with them.

    • This is your site, and people come at their own free will. Do with it what you like (but never change the name again... never)

    • As this is your site, and with your company/product being advertised, it is best that the relationship be known. If it is hidden (it wasn't, it just wasn't broadcast), folks may think that you are being underhanded in withholding the information

    • You have advertising on this site, so there's no ethical issue with advertising your own stuff - especially when those things fit the readership. Unless, of course, you intentionally hide any relationship between you and what is being advertised. Which you have not done, and are bending over backwards with today's post to make sure we all know.

    Thanks for the site and the stories.

  • (cs)

    Shouldn't this be in the "Alex's Soapbox" category rather than "Feature Articles" ?

  • Toby J (unregistered)

    I wish you the best of luck with BuildMaster, Alex. I always enjoy your commentary about build processes, deployments etc. and think you often hit the nail squarely on the head. I've shared your "Database Changes Done Right" article extensively inside my organization.

    We spoke briefly at your booth at AWS re:Invent in November (thanks for the mug!). So I'm sure you're also keenly aware that the market for this type of tool has changed a LOT since you started it five years ago.

    Making me install Windows somewhere, even in a VM is a non-starter. I hope you're looking into a fully-hosted version of this tool that ties directly in to AWS to launch instances, pull source from GitHub, and tie together ELBs and EBSes and RDSes and all those other cloud-y things.

    Even Amazon's own OpsWorks tool doesn't do that stuff right so I think there's a big opportunity there to run a bunch of BuildMasters in the cloud then sell access to dedicated instances.

    Either way, good luck and I hope it works out for you!

  • (cs) in reply to Toby J
    Toby J:
    Making me install Windows somewhere, even in a VM is a non-starter. I hope you're looking into a fully-hosted version of this tool that ties directly in to AWS to launch instances, pull source from GitHub, and tie together ELBs and EBSes and RDSes and all those other cloud-y things.

    Thanks! We've definitely got some interesting "cloud stuffs" in the works (need to write it all up, but patterns w/ CloudFormation, etc)... and are definitely exploring the "as a hosted service" bit.

  • Ronald (unregistered) in reply to Toby J
    Toby J:
    I wish you the best of luck with BuildMaster, Alex. I always enjoy your commentary about build processes, deployments etc. and think you often hit the nail squarely on the head. I've shared your "Database Changes Done Right" article extensively inside my organization.

    We spoke briefly at your booth at AWS re:Invent in November (thanks for the mug!). So I'm sure you're also keenly aware that the market for this type of tool has changed a LOT since you started it five years ago.

    Making me install Windows somewhere, even in a VM is a non-starter. I hope you're looking into a fully-hosted version of this tool that ties directly in to AWS to launch instances, pull source from GitHub, and tie together ELBs and EBSes and RDSes and all those other cloud-y things.

    Even Amazon's own OpsWorks tool doesn't do that stuff right so I think there's a big opportunity there to run a bunch of BuildMasters in the cloud then sell access to dedicated instances.

    Either way, good luck and I hope it works out for you!

    Azure does that.

    http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/develop/net/common-tasks/publishing-with-git/

  • HowItWorks (unregistered) in reply to Medinoc
    Medinoc:
    Shouldn't this be in the "Alex's Soapbox" category rather than "Feature Articles" ?
    This is a valuable article on the 'DevOps' process (as good a name as any), independent of your product. For that I agree it is worthy of the Soapbox. Thank you, Alex,

    A co-worker and I are dealing with this issue this morning, because we develop and another group deploys and manages production servers. Getting the production environment setup and our applications deployed is a tedious and sometimes painful process.

    I will be forwarding a link to this article to a few people around here. And take advantage of your offer to try BuildMaster. Partially to expand my knowledge of the process, but with the expectation I will like it and can get it into the workplace here.

    __ Note from Alex -- Good suggestion on moving to Soapbox; I guess this, if anything, is what I'd shout from a Soapbox :-)

  • (cs)

    The biggest hurdle I've hit so far has, ironically, been the #1 reason to use BM.

    I work in a fairly small company on a fairly small team. 3-4 developers, one QA, and one out-of-date manager who doesn't always get the idea that time spent == time saved.

    We have tons of manual processes that BM could automate. Right now a simple 1 line code change can take upwards of 4 hours to deploy due to poor "best practices", manual processes, etc. And that doesn't even count time lost when something goes wrong and we have no way of rolling back (or even what has been deployed where).

    Using BM could save hundreds of hours a year. Easily. BUT in order to use BM, I would need to install it, configure it, learn it and train the other devs on it. I would guess it'd eat up about 2 weeks in total of time across everyone's time sheet.

    2 weeks is 80 hours. 80 is significantly less than 100s of hours. But all what the boss hears is "spend time on learning something".

    The boss, though, is someone who is easily "wowed" (I hate myself for even using that in airquotes). A neat, slick piece of technology that clearly and unambiguously demonstrates a usefulness can get his attention. Especially if there's some soothing pieces of data that show "this isn't going to be a run-away disaster where you'll dump months into it to never get it off the ground".

    I guess a more polite way would be to say that he knows about technology, but doesn't entirely understand it. He enjoys the benefits of technology, but is risk adverse in adopting anything "strange" and "unknown".

    If he's sold on it, though, he'll gladly drop the change on a full license.

    So how do you target someone like me, who is trying to target someone like my boss?

    Maybe a dead-simple, less than 5 minute video that clearly shows "easy to set up, your developers WILL learn and understand it. It'll save you tons of time."

    I'm thinking something like those icky infomercials. "Do you have doing X? Spend too much time? Well now there's!". Strip away the slime but focus on that core idea. Demonstrate somehow that the current process is a wrong and a time waster. Make them feel it. Then show how BuildMaster solves it.

    Maybe a graphic/cartoon with tons of arrows going all over the place, backing up on themselves because of errors-- eventually becoming a giant, tangled mess-- all while the voice over gets frantic. Developers frustrated as they try to make a change as the clock ticks to 5pm! Then BAM, buildmaster. Run one script, clean lines everywhere. Happy developers.

    I'd really like to help solve that issue, because I want to run BuildMaster here. I swear I'm one "manual deployment" away from venting my frustrations in a long-winded post on a IT humor forum. . . . crap. It's begun.

  • joe (unregistered)

    It costs money? no way.

  • Covarr (unregistered)

    This seems pretty cool. I'm not sure how useful it'd be to me, since most of what I do is web, and I don't really work on any teams, but I'll check it out anyway.

  • Mr A (unregistered)

    Alex, This seems like a good product - but would you be able to explain what it gives me over other CI tools like Jenkins or Bamboo? Cheers

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    how hard would it be to make it run under apache / mono ?

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered)

    Is BM compatible with SAS70 and PCI DevOps requirements?

    If so, I can see a great use for that type of a system in my vertical channel.

  • (cs) in reply to Ronald
    Ronald:
    The issue with this type of product is that in organizations that are mature enough to recognize the need for a systemic approach to ALM there is usually already a CMDB or an extensive ticketing system that does not integrate easily with build tools. So people end up having a duplicate CMDB in the build tools and as we all know: disconnected+duplicated = highway to hell. That's where integrated solutions like those from IBM or Microsoft have the upper hand.

    Indeed. It's always the cost of transition. And not only that, it's the people as well. The most successfully DevOps product sold will be one that comes with competent workers.

  • (cs) in reply to Mr A
    Mr A:
    Alex, This seems like a good product - but would you be able to explain what it gives me over other CI tools like Jenkins or Bamboo? Cheers

    We need to write the articles on these specifically, but basically they're just different products. CI tools are designed to specifically solve the problem of CI, where as BuildMaster is designed to solve the much larger problem software delivery (and it also does CI, too). Our BuildMaster vs. TeamCity article explains this in more detail.

    Any tool can be made to do just about anything, as we've seen here -- so it's a question of what problem are you trying to solve.

  • Ken B (unregistered)

    It installed, but then gave me an "unhandled exception" when I clicked the "launch BuildMaster" button. Also, pointing my browser to "localhost:81" gives a "server error in '/' application".

    I've used the "contact us" link on the troubleshooting page, but I thought I'd mention it here, in case anyone else has run into this. (Windows 8 64-bit edition, SQL Server 2008R2.)

  • (cs) in reply to Paul Neumann
    Paul Neumann:
    Is BM compatible with SAS70 and PCI DevOps requirements?

    If so, I can see a great use for that type of a system in my vertical channel.

    Yes, a lot of our users have regulatory requirements like SAS70 and PCI (and FISMA, HIPPA, SOX, etc), and use BuildMaster to make these less painful. Check out this story for more details.

  • Ian Ceicys (unregistered) in reply to Alex Papadimoulis

    So I'm wondering....we use Microsoft TFS (ya ya we could use GIT...so shoot me)...and we use Microsoft Team Build with the windows workflow (.xaml) based builds. We are as using System Center Ops manager with what used to be Avicode to get a better DevOps story...it's painful overly complex and very expensive. So help me understand does BuildMaster work with windows workflow or TFS?

  • moz (unregistered)

    The bit about the Rational wikipedia page seems a bit uncalled-for, when the person you highlighted made one set of edits on 5th December 2008, and has not touched the article since.

    Then again, there are 167 individuals watching the Wikipedia page, so maybe one of them would immediately leap into action if you were to write that the product is outdated there.

  • Bubba (unregistered)

    Linux server installation?

  • (cs)

    ugghh it's one of those story's with brown at the top.

  • Henning Makholm (unregistered)

    But what does it actually do?

    I've read the entire article (and looked at the ads for years), and I still have no freaking idea what the concrete task this software carries out it.

    Oh, so I can try it for free? Why would I do that, not knowing whether whatever it does is something I even need to have done? Or something we have a well functioning process for doing already?

    Watch a video? Dude, life is too short to watch videos in order to get information that could be conveyed in prose that takes 1/10 of the time to read that it takes for some guy to recite it on a video.

    It's your product, so its your task to tell me why I should be interested in it. Not my task to tease that information out of a bazillion links.

  • Norman Diamond (unregistered)

    But how many competent programmers got fired for trying to fix bugs in BuildMaster?

    And what happened to your sick daughter? Did she overheat because of an unscheduled and unbudgeted flow of fire at a barbeque?

    Inquiring minds want these reports yesterday.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Henning Makholm
    Henning Makholm:
    It's your product, so its your task to tell me why I should be interested in it. Not my task to tease that information out of a bazillion links.

    And therein lies a fundamental problem with this industry. This ridiculous entitlement attitude that certain developers have.

    "If you don't tell me exactly what I want to know in 30 seconds -- and no, I'm not going to spend my time telling you what I want -- then you're a waste of my time."

    When I read the article I got the impression that "BuildMaster is a DevOps/automation tool that saves a lot of time and helps establishes best practices."

    Maybe it does, maybe it doesn't... but if the prospect of saving time and doing things better is not worth five minutes of your time to watch a video (though, you do find the time to complain about how you don't have such time), then you're nothing more than a trolling, a negligent amateur.

    Seriously guy, spend some time learning new things. Innovation didn't stop with you, and there are things out there that you can't possibly understand within 8 seconds.

  • skington (unregistered)

    I get that you're a Windows shop, but not supporting anything other than Flash for the video page is pretty thoughtless.

  • TK (unregistered) in reply to Alex Papadimoulis
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    saveddijon:
    But seriously, have you considered marketing BuildMaster to the hardware development industry?

    We do have a few users who use BuildMaster to manage their embedded software --- which was surprising, since I thought all the value would be the cool deployment stuff we do. They find it pretty valuable to do CI and manage workflow.

    saveddijon:
    One big drawback: we don't do Windows.

    It's ok, a lot of our users don't --- while BuildMaster itself is .NET/Windows, it's a web app and connects just fine via SSH/FTP/etc to Linux. So, you just need a single Windows VM or something.

    I assume the "build" process runs on the server, though, right? If so, that wouldn't work for ASIC/SoC work.

    Our build process involves running lint, then tons of systemverilog or vhdl simulations (sometimes taking days or weeks to finish). Next there's synopsys design compiler, which converts your RTL to standard cell gates. Then there's equivalency checking (make sure the gates match RTL), timing closure, clock tree synthesis, check timing again, layout, then check timing again.

    Some of these steps (like CTS) are skipped for FPGA builds.

    However, all of these steps are run on dozens (or hundreds) of Linux compute machines, typically launched in a SGE or LSF grid.

    It doesn't seem like BM would help us at all unless there is the ability to run the server on Linux.

    I agree with saveddijon. A tool to automate the complex hardware build process would be most welcome. Perhaps this is a bit too far afield from the problem BM solves, though.

  • Eric (unregistered)

    Buildmaster is a great product. My company beta tested it back in the day and it saved us a lot of time and pain with managing multiple environments and moderately complex deployment steps (dev->QA->prod).

    Also FYI the learning curve is incredibly low. You can go from knowing nothing to having working deployments of moderate complexity in half a day. The product has improved ten-fold since then too.

  • Henning Makholm (unregistered) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    Henning Makholm:
    It's your product, so its your task to tell me why I should be interested in it. Not my task to tease that information out of a bazillion links.

    And therein lies a fundamental problem with this industry. This ridiculous entitlement attitude that certain developers have.

    Entitlement? He's completely free not to tell me what his software do -- he just cannot expect that I'll spontaneously take an interest in it then.,

    When I read the article I got the impression that "BuildMaster is a DevOps/automation tool that saves a lot of time and helps establishes best practices."
    And for the love of Knbuth, what does a "DevOps/autopation tool" actually do?

    How can I know whether I need one if the guy trying to hawk it to me won't even take 10 seconds to write a sentence of prose to answer that simple, fundamental question about his product?

  • Henning Makholm (unregistered)

    What the product actually does is so an fundamentally important fact about it that it should be stated front and center in any attempt to promote it. Not hidden behind some link (among at least a dozen different links in the ad), or in a video behind a link.

  • (cs)

    A Long BuildMaster Introduction (FTFY)

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to Henning Makholm
    Henning Makholm:
    What the product actually does is so an fundamentally important fact about it that it should be stated front and center in any attempt to promote it. Not hidden behind some link (among at least a dozen different links in the ad), or in a video behind a link.

    You seem to fundamentally misunderstand how tools work. If you don't understand the problem that a tool solves (which you seem not to), then what the tool "actual does" is not going to help you either.

    A hammer solves the problem of "pounding in nails", but if you don't know (a) what nails are, (b) why nails are used, or (c) why something which pounds in nails would be helpful, then describing what a hammer actually does (i.e. applies lever mechanics and surface area to convert mechanical work into kinetic energy) won't help you either.

    Most people don't understand the problems that most tools solve. Most people also don't blame the inventor because they don't understand the problems.

  • mainframe web dev (unregistered)

    How does this fit into the enterprise strategy for Application Lifecycle Management? Does it integrate with IBM Rational Team Concert, Clearcase, TaskTop and Mylyn\Eclipse? Does this work for Unix, z/Linux and MVS? It sounds like a GUI Apache ANT for .NET from the text.

  • s377 (unregistered) in reply to Alex Papadimoulis

    In the story you linked, there are several typos towards the end. "attorneys" instead of the possessive, and the next to last paragraph has some copy-paste duplications in it. captcha: causa, "causa couldn't help noticing"

  • (cs)

    Alex, I have some feedback. The "gives you laser eyes" BuildMaster advert doesn't look like a man with laser eyes, it looks like an explosion painfully driving red rods into the poor man's eyes.

  • John (unregistered)

    I highly doubt we'll use this.

    1. It only runs on Windows. The only Windows licenses in our environment are in use by some laptops that people take home with them (not a great server to run this) and a couple machines IT manages for things some from the business side wanted (like Exchange). IT doesn't have time for this sort of thing - if we were going to try it it would be a dev like myself managing it at least at first (this is exactly what happened with Jenkins, and that worked out fine). Sure, I could submit a PO for a license of Windows and ask IT for permission to create a VM. This should take about a year (I know someone who tried) and would likely be denied. Assuming it was approved, though, you would need to pay me to use Windows. Whatever payoff BM might have just couldn't possibly be worth it.
    2. It's not F/OSS. As you pointed out, anything BM can accomplish can be accomplished without BM, so why should I have to use restricted software?
    3. It normally costs money. Sure, maybe it doesn't right now, but what happens five years from now when someone wants to update the version of BM? All the best development tools are free, so the reasonable heuristsic is to always avoid monetary cost on development software.
    4. It uses .Net. Even if I wasn't the one maintaining it, just knowing that it does (and that, apparently, it doesn't even work in Mono) leaves a terrible taste in my mouth and makes me want to avoid it.
  • (cs) in reply to Ronald
    Ronald:
    The issue with this type of product is that in organizations that are mature enough to recognize the need for a systemic approach to ALM there is usually already a CMDB or an extensive ticketing system that does not integrate easily with build tools. So people end up having a duplicate CMDB in the build tools and as we all know: disconnected+duplicated = highway to hell. That's where integrated solutions like those from IBM or Microsoft have the upper hand exactly the same problem.
    FTFY!

    Seriously: Suffering from exactly this WTF in our company. Everyone has to use the extensive CMDB / ticketing system and the software repository / ALM tool of choice is TFS. No integration between those two, so road-to-hell, but praised as following best practices.

    About the article: I get a better impression what buildmaster does from the ads than from this article!

    (But i would like to learn more about those robots that fixes the bugs ;-)

    So this is a soapbox-article about that buzzword "DevOps":

    DevOps in a Box

    It's always been a struggle for me to explain BuildMaster – at least, until the "DevOps" buzzword came around. One of our new (and admittedly cheesy) marketing slogans "DevOps in a Box", and that seems as good a fit as any.

    Where exactly is that buzzword "DevOps" defined? All i learn here is that it is a buzzword. But after reading the whole article, i still have no idea what it actually means.
  • (cs)

    When you say "don't need to worry about our pricing model" you should probably have clarified "for one year, because it's a subscription license not perpetual. After that, it will cost you $1495 annually". Just to nit pick a tad.

    Though I am still going to have a look and see if it solves any problems I have.

  • TRWTF (unregistered) in reply to HowItWorks

    The main problem with posting it here was that I assumed BuildMaster was going to be some convoluted WTF system.

    You're posting it between a story about an incompetent boss and a place that hired a guy who can't even talk to them, so BuildMaster has some expectations to live up to and they're probably not the kind you want.

  • (cs) in reply to Toby J
    Toby J:
    Making me install Windows somewhere, even in a VM is a non-starter.
    While I agree with you that a cloud-based solution is a great idea, seriously what company doesn't have even a single Windows box? I mean companies that don't fit in a garage and hire real people obviously...
  • Bill (unregistered)

    Buildmaster sounds great in theory, but it looks like its designed for low volume systems on a few servers in a single data center all of which can communicate directly with a windows PC. It would need so much customization that would essentially just be our existing scripts with a GUI on top.

  • khaled (unregistered)

    Prove that you're not a robot. Type in the word you see in the image.

  • (cs) in reply to TRWTF
    TRWTF:
    The main problem with posting it here was that I assumed BuildMaster was going to be some convoluted WTF system.

    You're posting it between a story about an incompetent boss and a place that hired a guy who can't even talk to them, so BuildMaster has some expectations to live up to and they're probably not the kind you want.

    Don't worry. I tried to install it and it more than lived up to the expectations. "Installation Failed. An error occurred extracting some files" (you know, the simplest operation known to man).

  • (cs) in reply to TRWTF
    TRWTF:
    The main problem with posting it here was that I assumed BuildMaster was going to be some convoluted WTF system.

    You're posting it between a story about an incompetent boss and a place that hired a guy who can't even talk to them, so BuildMaster has some expectations to live up to and they're probably not the kind you want.

    Don't worry. I tried to install it and it more than lived up to the expectations. "Installation Failed. An error occurred extracting some files" (you know, the simplest operation known to man).

  • BushIdo (unregistered)

    Unfortunately I have no special power to be of use as a minion or herald of Galactus err ... Build Master. Or maybe so for the better http://cargocollective.com/nicholasgurewitch/Magneto-Herald-of-Galactus

    My kismat or somenoe's else kismit or in any way a kismet of whatever kind thinks this comment ist spam. Well of course it is, but than again it is spam I want to post therefore I'm adding this.

  • BushIdo (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    Where exactly is that buzzword "DevOps" defined? All i learn here is that it is a buzzword. But after reading the whole article, i still have no idea what it actually means.

    It's meant to buzz, stupid.

    Here. And now I'm buzzy doing other things.

  • Oops (unregistered)
    TheDailyWTF footer:
    Copyright © 2004 - 2013 Alex Papadimoulis • hosted on a dedicated server at HiVelocity • deployed with BuildMaster
    Oops. Do we now know why CS is TRWTF?
  • Eldarhtc (unregistered)

    Can't answer an existing topic, what should I do ??
    Maybe I'm doing something wrong?
    Please tell me.
    Thank you.

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