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Here in Silicon Valley, the month of September typically is dry and hot. The rolling hills are still brown from the summer sun as the rest of America prepares for fall.

In September for Agile Stacks the old saying definitely came true "when it rains, it pours." No; I am not talking about a deluge of H2O from the clouds. Rather, in the span four weeks we sponsored, attended and spoke at three different events. Being invited to TechCrunch Disrupt, DevOps World and DC Startup Week is a fabulous honor.

So we want to thank everyone who helped us get in to and prepare for each event because you made the world of difference to getting our brand recognized.

Learn more about our experiences.

A few weeks ago TechTarget published a great article by Kurt Marko: "To build or to buy? That is the DevOps toolchain question” 
http://searchitoperations.techtarget.com/tip/To-build-or-to-buy-That-is-the-DevOps-toolchain-question

At the end Kurt summarizes an organization's decision to three factors: expertise and comfort toward deploying open source tools, opinionated versus non-opinionated tooling choices, and the underlying PaaS. Allow me to add another important criterion: automation. More to the point, should the automation code play a role in your decision to build or buy?

Until now, development and operations teams have had to choose between a custom-built DevOps pipeline or pre-made toolchain bundled with cloud provider or PaaS offering. A pre-made toolchain is simpler than individually collected tools, but it sacrifices flexibility and control. Organizations that don't want to use an opinionated PaaS stack and pre-defined toolchains, yet don't have the time or expertise to stitch together and manage a myriad of DevOps point products, now have a new option that combines the best of both worlds: full stack automation with machine generated DevOps pipelines.  Agile Stacks can provide customizable DevOps toolchain and create standardized environments, based on machine generated stack automation code.

We are still at an early stage of cloud deployment for the vast majority of companies in the world.  However, surveys show that this is changing rapidly.  The cloud has proven itself in cost, reliability and security.    In fact, the onus has gone the other way now.  

A few months ago Jason Bloomberg published a great article in Forbes:
You're Now 'Cloud First.' Are You Ready To Be 'DevOps First'?

It is so true that in order to unlock the real benefit of the cloud, it's necessary to implement DevOps.   If you don't start with DevOps, "productivity can grind to a halt because development teams can’t deploy their code.”

Cloud and DevOps go hand in hand - while you can have one without another, they are much stronger when applied together.  It's a classic case where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.