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Author: Jenn Yarnold

Securing the Software Supply Chain with Full Visibility and Compliance

At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, JFrog’s Yossi Shaul, senior vice president of DevOps, joined Alan to reflect on both his personal journey and JFrog’s evolving role in shaping modern software delivery. Shaul has been with JFrog since its early days, starting with the creation of Artifactory nearly 16 years ago — before “DevOps” was even a recognized term. He recalled leading the Artifactory team, driving its adoption, and later stepping into architectural leadership before returning to oversee JFrog’s entire DevOps organization across product and engineering.

Shaul highlighted how much has changed since those early years. What began as a simple repository manager has grown into a platform that now touches nearly every aspect of software supply chain management. With the rise of AI, security concerns, and increasingly complex pipelines, the pressure on DevOps teams has only intensified. JFrog’s answer has been to expand beyond artifact management into governance, automation, and AI-driven workflows — all areas Shaul now helps drive.

One theme that stood out in the discussion was continuity. Shaul’s long tenure gives him a unique perspective on how JFrog has evolved with the industry — from open source beginnings to enterprise adoption, from managing binaries to securing supply chains, and now from human-driven workflows to AI-assisted delivery.

Shaul also emphasized the importance of listening to customer feedback. swampUP, he noted, is not just about unveiling what’s next but about validating that the technologies JFrog delivers address real-world challenges DevOps teams face daily.

JFrog’s DNA remains rooted in DevOps, even as it pushes into the AI era. For Shaul, the mission is clear: build platforms that help teams deliver software faster, more securely, and with confidence at scale.

September 26, 2025
Empowering Secure, Agentic Software Delivery

At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, JFrog co-founder and CTO Yoav Landman joined Alan to reflect on the company’s latest announcements and the broader direction of software delivery in the AI era. Landman noted that this year’s event may have been JFrog’s most ambitious yet, with a wave of product releases designed to tie together themes of trust, automation, and AI-driven DevOps.

One highlight is the company’s push to unify governance through AppTrust, which provides end-to-end traceability and compliance across the software supply chain. The aim is to ensure that every artifact — whether human- or AI-generated — can be validated and trusted before moving through the pipeline.

Another centerpiece is JFrog Fly, billed as an “agentic repository” that enables AI agents to securely interact with APIs and development workflows via the Model Context Protocol (MCP). As AI coding tools become commonplace, Fly is intended to help DevOps teams manage the complexity of agent-driven development while maintaining control and visibility.

Landman emphasized that these aren’t abstract roadmaps — they’re production-ready features shaped directly by customer feedback. The feedback loop from swampUP, he noted, often influences products within months rather than years, especially as AI accelerates iteration cycles.

For Landman, the common thread across these initiatives is addressing the realities of modern DevOps: accelerating release velocity while ensuring governance and security don’t lag behind. With software supply chains under constant pressure and AI poised to reshape workflows, he argued that platforms like JFrog must become the system of record for DevOps in order to keep pace.

The conversation underscored the urgency: in a world where AI is changing how code is created and deployed, trust and automation aren’t optional — they’re foundational.

September 19, 2025
Building End-to-End Trust in the Software Supply Chain

At swampUP 2025, JFrog’s Guy Levi, head of the architects team, highlights some of the technologies shaping the company’s next chapter. Levi’s role centers on exploring advanced technologies “beyond the horizon,” but he emphasized that swampUP isn’t about future promises — it’s about showing what’s available today.

One of the highlights Levi pointed to was AppTrust, JFrog’s initiative to establish end-to-end trust across the software supply chain. By unifying governance, risk, and compliance capabilities into a single framework, AppTrust is designed to give enterprises more confidence that applications are secure and reliable from development through deployment. The goal is to tie disparate security and verification processes into one cohesive approach that simplifies how organizations enforce trust at scale.

Another major focus was JFrog Fly, which Levi described as a breakthrough in supporting AI-era DevOps. Fly provides an “agentic repository” that integrates with Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) to enable AI agents to securely interact with APIs and development pipelines. With AI-generated code and autonomous agents becoming part of daily workflows, Fly aims to ensure those components can be governed, tracked, and optimized just like traditional software artifacts.

Together, these initiatives underscore JFrog’s push to position itself as the system of record for modern DevOps and AI-driven development. AppTrust tackles the governance side, while Fly addresses how AI agents and automation will reshape pipelines.

For Levi, the key message was that the industry can’t afford to wait for “next year” to solve these challenges. AI and security pressures are already here, and JFrog is working to deliver the tools teams need now to navigate them.

September 19, 2025
Outages and Security Threats in DevOps Tooling: Cracks in the Foundation
DevOps has always been about speed and trust. Speed in how we deliver, trust in the pipelines and platforms that make it all possible. But what happens when those very pipelines — and the tools behind them — start to falter?

That’s where we find ourselves today. The same DevOps tooling that transformed software delivery into a high-velocity, continuous flow is now showing troubling cracks. From GitHub outages that ripple across the globe to vulnerabilities in Jira and supply chain compromises in CI/CD pipelines, incidents are piling up.

These aren’t isolated inconveniences. They are systemic risks. And they raise a critical question: Is the DevOps foundation we’ve built over the last decade starting to crumble?

The Cracks are Showing

The numbers tell the story. In just the first six months of 2025, there have been hundreds of documented outages, degradations and security incidents across major DevOps platforms and services.

The issues fall into two broad buckets:
- Outages & degradations. Service instability, scaling failures, and infrastructure hiccups at core tools like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket stall development pipelines worldwide.
- Security breaches. Leaked credentials, compromised dependencies, and exposed APIs highlight the fragility of toolchains that were supposed to be our guardians.
When your code, builds and releases all rely on these systems, even short disruptions ripple into developer productivity, release schedules, and ultimately customer trust.

Why This Matters Beyond Inconvenience

It’s tempting to shrug off outages and breaches as “just part of software.” But in a DevOps world, tooling isn’t peripheral — it is the delivery pipeline. And when pipelines fail, entire organizations stumble.

Here’s why these incidents matter:
- Single points of failure. Centralized DevOps platforms are often chokepoints. If GitHub sneezes, half the industry catches a cold.
- Erosion of trust. If the tools that enforce governance or manage secrets are themselves compromised, confidence in the process collapses.
- Productivity drain. Developers waiting on broken CI/CD runs or chasing phantom alerts aren’t building value.
- Risk amplification. As AI-assisted coding and agentic workflows plug into these same pipelines, fragility only multiplies.
DevOps promised resilience through automation and culture. But brittle tooling undercuts both.

How Did We Get Here?

Why are these cracks widening now? A few culprits stand out:
- Overreliance on SaaS. Many organizations outsource critical delivery functions to cloud services with opaque SLAs and limited transparency.
- Integration complexity. Toolchains have become patchworks of plugins, extensions and third-party modules — a brittle web that’s hard to secure.
- The AI rush. Vendors are bolting AI features into DevOps platforms at breakneck speed. Innovation is exciting, but security and reliability often lag.
- Vendor monoculture. A handful of big players dominate. When they stumble, the blast radius is massive.
In short, the industry has traded convenience for fragility.

What DevOps Teams Can Do

So what’s the fix? We can’t abandon the tools that drive modern delivery, but we also can’t keep building castles on shaky foundations. DevOps teams need to rethink resilience at the toolchain level.

Here are four practical steps:

1. Design for failure. Assume outages will happen. Build fallback paths, redundancy and caching into pipelines. For mission-critical functions, consider self-hosting or hybrid approaches.

2. Harden your security posture. Continuously monitor your toolchain. Rotate credentials, patch aggressively and audit permissions like you would production systems.

3. Hold vendors accountable. Demand clearer SLAs, transparent incident reporting and real commitments to security hardening.

4. Treat tooling like production. Apply the same DevOps principles — observability, chaos testing, DR drills — to your toolchain. Don’t assume resilience. Engineer it.

This isn’t just “good practice.” It’s survival.

Shimmy’s Take

I’ve been around this space long enough to see patterns repeat. We get comfortable. We assume the tools are solid. Then the rug gets pulled out from under us.

Here’s the truth: DevOps is only as strong as its weakest link. And lately, those weak links are glaring. Outages and breaches in our toolchains are more than annoyances. They’re canaries in the coal mine.

The DevOps community needs to expand its mindset. We can’t just be practitioners of automation — we must become architects of resilience. That means questioning assumptions, stress-testing our own dependencies, and never putting blind faith in vendor promises.

Trust, but verify. And always design for failure.

Closing Call to Action

If you’re a DevOps leader, ask yourself: When was the last time your team rehearsed a pipeline outage? Or simulated a supply chain breach in your CI/CD?

If the answer is “never,” you’re betting your delivery future on luck. And luck has a lousy uptime record.

The cracks in our DevOps foundation are real. The question is whether we patch them now, or wait for the next outage or breach to collapse what we’ve built.

Because in a world where software is the business, fragile toolchains don’t just slow us down. They put everything at risk.
September 16, 2025
Sketch Coding and the Rise of MCP in DevOps

At swampUP 2025, JFrog’s Yonatan Arbel reflects on his journey inside the company and how developer DNA continues to shape JFrog’s culture. Arbel, who has spent nearly a decade with JFrog, began as a software engineer before moving into leadership and eventually into a developer relations role. But as he emphasized, “once a developer, always a developer.” He still codes daily, keeping a hands-on perspective that influences how JFrog builds and communicates its platforms.

That commitment to staying close to the keyboard led Arbel to create JFrog’s first experimental MCP (Model Context Protocol) server as an open source project. Uploaded to GitHub almost as a side experiment, the project quickly gained traction — even attracting pull requests from NVIDIA and references from Cisco. For Arbel, it was validation that MCP represents a real turning point in how enterprises will connect APIs, AI models, and DevOps workflows.

He described his process as “sketch coding,” akin to vibe coding, where ideas start as rough AI-assisted prompts before maturing into production-ready tools. That approach mirrors how many developers are now blending AI into their workflows: iterating quickly, validating ideas, and only then investing in hardening code for scale.

Arbel also highlighted the excitement — and occasional sense of magic — that comes from integrating AI into day-to-day development. Whether it’s pulling runtime insights from an IDE or rapidly prototyping new capabilities, the goal remains the same: help developers work smarter while ensuring JFrog’s platforms support security, governance, and scalability across the software supply chain.

The conversation underscored how JFrog continues to bridge its engineering roots with the demands of modern DevOps, proving that innovation often starts with developers who never stop building.

September 12, 2025
Bringing Trust and Governance to AI-Driven DevOps

At swampUP 2025 in Napa Valley, Alan Shimel sat down with three industry leaders whose companies sit at the heart of today’s AI-driven DevOps transformation: Rahul Tripathi, general vice president and GM of ITSM at ServiceNow; Justin Boitano, vice president of enterprise AI at NVIDIA; and Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog.

Tripathi, only months into his role at ServiceNow, stressed the importance of grounding product strategy in lived practitioner experience. Having led DevOps teams himself, he emphasized that ITSM remains the “bread and butter” of ServiceNow, but AI integration is reshaping expectations for productivity and security across IT operations.

Boitano reflected on NVIDIA’s long journey from pushing CUDA adoption in 2008—when many thought GPU computing was a stretch—to today, where GPUs and AI frameworks have become central to enterprise computing. He noted that partnerships with companies like ServiceNow and JFrog are critical to building out the ecosystem, particularly as organizations look to infuse AI into every layer of their development lifecycle.

Ben Haim underscored the urgency behind what he called “AI FOMO.” With board-level pressure driving 40% of CIOs to expand AI budgets, enterprises are rapidly embedding AI into software supply chains. For JFrog, that means positioning itself as the “system of record” for DevOps, launching new platforms like JFrog Fly to simplify AI agent adoption while strengthening governance, traceability and security.

Together, the panel painted a picture of an industry balancing excitement with pragmatism. AI agents may not replace developers anytime soon, but they are already changing workflows, tooling expectations, and the economics of software delivery. As the panelists made clear, success will depend less on hype and more on how well organizations align AI adoption with trust, verification, and long-term resilience.

September 12, 2025
DevGovOps, A New Play on DevOps, or is It?
I’ve been around this space long enough to remember when any attempt to wedge something between “Dev” and “Ops” would set my teeth on edge. There was only DevOps — pure and simple. The term represented a cultural and technical shift in how we build and run software. Adding extra syllables in the middle felt like watering it down.

But at JFrog’s swampUp conference this week, I was reminded that sometimes the middle matters. The new variant I heard about — DevGovOps — isn’t just another buzzword grafted onto the DevOps family tree. It struck me as something worth paying attention to, especially given where we are in this age of AI.

The Long Line of “XXOps”

Let’s be honest: The “Ops suffix” has been abused. Over the years, we’ve seen attempts to coin DevBizOps, DevSalesOps, and more. Most of them never got past the press-release stage.

But DevSecOps was the turning point. Initially, I thought it was unnecessary — security should already have been part of DevOps. Yet DevSecOps resonated because it forced organizations to recognize security as a first-class citizen in the software supply chain. It became shorthand for cultural change, tooling integration and process realignment. In short, it earned its place.

Since then, I’ve been more willing to listen when new variations come along. Most still fade away, but once in a while, something sticks. DevGovOps, in my opinion, has the potential to be one of those.

What is DevGovOps?

At its core, DevGovOps is about weaving governance into DevOps practices. Governance isn’t glamorous. It conjures images of checklists, auditors and compliance officers wagging fingers at engineers. But in the real world of modern enterprises, governance is no longer optional.

Why now? Because AI has changed the game. With the explosion of shadow AI — teams experimenting with ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, or custom LLMs without IT’s blessing — organizations need visibility and guardrails. Boards are asking tough questions. Regulators are circling. CIOs are feeling pressure to show they’re in control.

DevGovOps offers a way forward: Instead of banning or stifling innovation, it proposes structured governance built into the DevOps pipeline. Done right, it enables creativity while protecting the business.

swampUp and JFrog’s Play

JFrog, to their credit, has a knack for spotting emerging patterns in software delivery. At swampUp this year, their announcements reinforced the idea that governance is moving front and center.

JFrog highlighted features in its platform designed to address AI supply chains, artifact trust and compliance. These are not theoretical problems — they’re real challenges enterprises face today. How do you know which AI models are being used in your org? Are they secure? Are they licensed properly? What happens if code generated by an LLM introduces risk?

This is where DevGovOps comes in. It’s not governance bolted on after the fact. It’s governance integrated into the flow of DevOps itself. Think of it as DevSecOps’ cousin — but instead of zeroing in on threats from outside attackers, DevGovOps focuses on organizational accountability, transparency and compliance in the AI era.

Governance Without the Chill

The danger, of course, is overreach. If DevGovOps devolves into bureaucracy, it risks killing the very experimentation that makes AI exciting. The last thing anyone wants is engineers filling out forms in triplicate just to test a model.

The real promise of DevGovOps is that it shouldn’t be a chilling effect. It should be an enabler. Governance frameworks should provide safe playgrounds for teams to try AI, knowing there are rails to keep things from going off the cliff.

Imagine a DevOps pipeline where governance rules are automated:
- AI usage is logged and tracked.
- Model sources are verified.
- Compliance requirements are checked automatically.
- Alerts fire when risk thresholds are crossed.
In this world, engineers aren’t slowed down — they’re empowered. They can move fast, knowing someone (or rather, something) has their back.

Why it Matters in the Age of AI

The stakes here aren’t trivial. Shadow AI isn’t going away. Developers, testers, ops teams and even business analysts are going to use AI tools whether or not IT approves. The question isn’t if AI seeps into the software lifecycle — it’s how responsibly it does.

Boards and executives know this. Gartner recently reported that a large share of CIOs are increasing budgets under direct pressure from their boards, specifically to address AI. That’s governance demand, plain and simple.

DevGovOps is one answer to that demand. It frames governance not as a roadblock but as part of the cultural and technical DNA of how we build, ship, and run software in 2025 and beyond.

Shimmy’s Take

So, is DevGovOps just another marketing term or something real?

I’ve been skeptical before, and I’ll admit — a lot of these “XXOps” variants don’t deserve to last. But DevGovOps hits differently. With AI running wild, shadow projects multiplying, and governance pressure mounting from the top down, this isn’t a fad. It’s a necessity.

No, it doesn’t mean we throw out DevOps or pretend governance was never there. It means we recognize governance as a first-class part of the process. We give it a name. We operationalize it. We use it to protect the business without handcuffing innovation.

Like it or not, DevGovOps is here. And if you care about responsible AI adoption — and you should — it’s going to matter a lot more than most people think.
September 10, 2025
JFrog Continues Leaping at swampUP

Every year, JFrog’s swampUP conference gives us a look at what’s next in DevOps, software delivery, and increasingly, AI. This year’s event in Napa did not disappoint. If you’ve followed JFrog over the years, you know they have never been shy about leading the conversation on how software is built, secured, and shipped. At swampUP 2025, they reminded everyone once again: JFrog is not just keeping up with the industry—it’s defining it.

In the DevOps world, it’s easy to get swept up in hype. AI, compliance, automation—everyone claims to be innovating. But JFrog’s announcements this week are more than marketing spin. They represent a coherent, ambitious vision for how software supply chains must evolve in a world where AI-native development, trust, and compliance are as central as speed and scale.

The Bigger Picture: Why This Matters

The past few years have seen software supply chain security leap to the top of every CIO and CISO’s priority list. Add in the explosion of AI tools, and the stakes are even higher. Enterprises need to innovate faster, but they can’t afford to cut corners on governance, compliance, or security. That tension—between speed and trust—is what JFrog is targeting.

Their strategy is clear: build the system of record for all software artifacts and now, AI models, and extend that system with governance and compliance baked in. Partnerships with hyperscalers, NVIDIA, and ServiceNow reinforce this ambition. JFrog isn’t just integrating with the ecosystem—they’re embedding themselves into the very fabric of how modern software is created, secured, and delivered.

JFrog Fly: The Agentic Leap

Let’s start with JFrog Fly, billed as the industry’s first agentic repository. For years, we’ve heard how AI has transformed coding, with tools like GitHub Copilot and Cursor making developers more productive. But release management—the actual process of getting code into production—remains stubbornly manual and disconnected.

JFrog Fly rethinks this by creating a zero-config, AI-native repository designed for “vibe coding” and agentic workflows. It promises semantic release management, centralized sharing of artifacts, and seamless integration with AI repos. In other words, Fly aims to do for release management what Copilot did for coding: make it frictionless.

For small teams, this could be game-changing. Fly could allow startups and scrappy developer squads to scale software delivery at a pace that used to be reserved for big enterprises. It’s JFrog reminding us that innovation doesn’t just happen at the code level—it happens in how you package, release, and deliver.

JFrog AppTrust: Governance Becomes DevGovOps

The next big announcement was JFrog AppTrust, described as a “DevGovOps” solution. The name may be new, but the need is not. As JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim put it, after DevOps and DevSecOps, the next big challenge is governance.

AppTrust creates a secure release management layer that signs and secures evidence, automates release quality gates, and integrates governance into platforms like ServiceNow. The promise here is clear: every release is trusted, verified, and compliant—without slowing teams down.

The most intriguing part? AppTrust doesn’t just measure code quality; it contextualizes applications with ownership, dependencies, and risk insights. It’s governance not as a speed bump, but as an accelerator, reducing friction between developers, security, and compliance teams.

JFrog AI Catalog: Governing the AI Flood

AI adoption has exploded, but governance has not kept up. That’s where the JFrog AI Catalog comes in. This is a secure hub for discovering, governing, and deploying AI/ML models—whether they’re internal, open source, or from external providers like NVIDIA and Anthropic.

With direct access to NVIDIA’s Nemotron models, one-click deployments, and continuous scanning through JFrog Xray, the AI Catalog brings the same rigor to AI models that enterprises already expect for software artifacts. Think of it as Artifactory for the AI era.

Here’s the Shimmy take: enterprises are flying blind today when it comes to AI governance. The AI Catalog offers a way to bring visibility, compliance, and trust to a part of the stack that has so far been the Wild West. That’s not just an incremental step forward—it’s foundational if AI is going to scale responsibly in the enterprise.

The Evidence Ecosystem: Compliance You Can Trust

Finally, JFrog extended AppTrust with its Evidence Ecosystem, partnering with GitHub, ServiceNow, Sonar, and others to create a centralized audit trail of cryptographically signed attestations. This is about creating a single source of truth for compliance—no more scattered logs, no more manual processes.

In an era where regulators, auditors, and even AI agents will demand verifiable proof before a release goes live, this matters. JFrog is saying: don’t just trust us—prove it. And they’re giving organizations the tools to do exactly that.

Where This Is Headed

All of this fits into a broader trend I’ve been tracking: the convergence of AI-native development, secure supply chains, and governance. The days of “move fast and break things” are over. The future is “move fast and prove trust.”

JFrog gets this. And by putting themselves at the center of that conversation, they’re not just staying relevant—they’re shaping the next era of DevOps.

Wrapping Up from Napa

JFrog swampUP isn’t over yet, and I expect more announcements as the week continues. Techstrong and Techstrong TV are here on the ground, live-streaming sessions and capturing conversations. Jon Swartz is on-site covering the event editorially, so keep an eye out for more analysis from us.

But for now, one thing is clear: JFrog continues to leap, and in doing so, they’re pulling the entire industry forward with them. If you’re in DevOps, security, or AI development, these are announcements worth paying close attention to.

September 9, 2025
Nominations Are Open: DevOps Dozen 2025
Once again, it’s that time of year when our community steps into the spotlight. The DevOps Dozen is back — and nominations are officially open. If you’ve shipped something meaningful, mentored someone, elevated a team, or built the next great platform, this is your moment to share it with the world.

Over the years, these awards have grown into a signal we can trust — honoring the people and products shaping how modern software gets built and run. This year’s program reflects where the market is headed, with deeper attention on AI, platform engineering, and the practical realities of secure software supply chains. There are 24 total awards, split between Community and Tools & Services — a balance that celebrates both the humans who lead and the technologies that make them faster, safer and better.

What’s New, What Matters

A few things to note up front. Community nominations remain open and accessible. For Tools & Services, there’s a $300 fee — not to ring a cash register, but to keep spam out and ensure we’re evaluating serious entries. If a commercial submission doesn’t make the finalist cut, the fee is refunded. We also cap finalists at 10 per commercial category to keep the field competitive and focused. And as always, final selection blends public voting (40%) with judges’ evaluation (60%) — a formula that balances community energy with experienced scrutiny.

Note: Tools/Services vendors aren’t eligible for three of the community awards — check each description for the fine print.

The Categories (All 24)

Community Awards (9):
- Top DevOps Community Evangelist
- Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project
- DevOps Enterprise Leader of the Year
- Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year
- Best DevOps-Related Video or Audio Podcast
- Best DevOps Survey/ Research/Report
- Best DevOps Event of the Year
- Best DevOps Book of the Year
- Best Application of AI in Enterprise DevOps Practices
Tools & Services Awards (15):
- Best Application of Agentic AI in a DevOps Tool/Platform
- Best New DevOps Service Provider
- Best New DevOps Tool
- Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution
- Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution
- Best Testing Service/Tool
- Best Platform Engineering Solution
- Best DevSecOps Solution
- Best Observability Solution
- Best Supply Chain Security Solution
- Top DevOps Vendor Evangelist
- Best Application of Generative AI in a DevOps Tool/Platform
- Best End-to-End DevOps Platform
- DevOps Industry Leader of the Year
- Best DevOps Industry Implementation
If you’re scanning for what’s “new,” you’re not imagining it: Agentic AI and Generative AI each get their own category on the tooling side, and Platform Engineering has a dedicated slot as this practice matures from trend to table stakes. Likewise, Supply Chain Security Solution earns standalone recognition — reflecting how software integrity, attestations and provenance moved from “nice to have” to “non-negotiable.”

How it Works (and Why it’s Fair)

The process is transparent and deliberate:
- Nominations: Open to the public. For Tools & Services, the $300 nomination ensures signal over noise. Community nominations remain free.
- Finalists: We limit commercial finalists to 10 per category; if you don’t make it, your fee is refunded. Once finalists are set, public voting opens across all 24 categories.
- Winners: Determined by a 40/60 blend—community vote (40%) and judges’ scores (60%). Finalists receive badges and recognition across the Techstrong network; winners receive trophies and the full spotlight they’ve earned.
The Judges

Every year, we assemble a panel that’s both broad in experience and sharp in judgment. This year’s Honorable Judges:
- Alan Shimel — CEO, Founder and Editor-in-Chief, Techstrong Group, Inc.
- Mitchell Ashley — VP & Practice Lead, Software Lifecycle Engineering, Futurum
- Tracy Ragan — OpenSSF and CDF Board Member
- Garima Bajpai — Senior DevOps Leader and Advisor
- Ketan Jani — Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Apple Inc.
It’s a strong mix of industry leadership, community credibility, and day-to-day operating reality — the combination you want when the mandate is to separate sizzle from substance.

Dates You’ll Care About
- Nominations: Open now and run through mid-October (get yours in early; the best entries tell a crisp story with outcomes).
- Finalists: Announced soon after; voting begins immediately thereafter.
- Winners: Revealed at Predict 2026, our annual kickoff to the tech year — where trends and truth meet.
Why These Awards Still Matter

DevOps has always been bigger than tools — and yet tools matter. Culture and process drive outcomes — and yet champions matter. The Dozen sit at that intersection. When a community evangelist rallies practitioners around a better way to ship, that changes outcomes. When a platform reduces toil and cognitive load, that changes outcomes. When we hold ourselves to higher standards in software integrity, that — again — changes outcomes.

That’s why we do this. Not for trophies, but for momentum. Not for vanity, but for validation. Not just to say “good job,” but to say “this is the work that moved us forward.”

If you’re reading this, you likely know who deserves a nomination: the unsung maintainer who shipped the fix at 2 a.m., the team that turned a monolith into a product platform, the product that finally made security guardrails feel like guardrails—not handcuffs. Tell us about them.

Nominations are open. Show the community what great looks like. Good luck to everyone who participates — and may the best DevOps win.

Celebrating Noteworthy DevOps Dozen Winners (2020–2024)

You can learn a great deal about the industry by examining past winners. Here are some of the past winners over the last 4-5 years. It is a retrospective on standout winners who’ve shaped DevOps culture, tools, and leadership:
- Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service – GitLab (2020)
  GitLab’s all-in-one platform accelerated DevOps workflows with collaboration baked into CI/CD.
- Best CI/CD Tool – CircleCI (2020)
  The go-to modern CI/CD platform empowering teams with reliability and speed.
- Best Value Stream Management Tool – Digital.ai Value Stream Platform (2020)
  Bridged Agile planning, security, test automation, and AI analytics into a seamless delivery flow.
- DevOps Executive of the Year – Shlomi Ben-Haim (JFrog) (2021)
  Recognized for guiding DevOps tooling evolution during a pivotal era.
- Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool – Red Hat OpenShift GitOps (2021)
  Helped teams scale GitOps workflows securely across clusters.
- Best Observability Solution – Honeycomb (2021)
  Empowered teams to dig deep into performance and reliability signals.
- Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service – JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform (2023)
  Offered comprehensive supply-chain workflow integration, from dev to production.
- Best CI/CD Tool – CloudBees CI/CDRO (2023)
  Marked its ninth consecutive award, demonstrating leadership in enterprise CI/CD.
- Best Platform Engineering Solution – Harness Internal Developer Portal (2024)
  Recognized as the leading solution enabling self-service capabilities for engineering teams.
- Best Application of AI in DevOps Tool/Platform – GitLab Duo (2024)
  Elevated DevOps by integrating AI-driven workflows seamlessly.
Each of these winners has done more than just collect trophies — they’ve changed the fabric of the DevOps ecosystem, fostering efficiency, security and innovation.

Call to Action — Nominate Now!

Be a champion — recognize the standout DevOps talent and innovations of tomorrow. Here’s your guide to getting started:

1. Submit a Nomination – Nominations are open through mid-October. Go ahead and shine the spotlight on those who deserve it.

2. Understand the Rules –
- Community categories: Free to enter.
- Tools & Services: A $300 fee (refunded if not a finalist) to maintain high signal and quality submissions.
3. Stay Tuned for Finalists – After mid-October, we’ll unveil the finalists and open public voting. Get the word out!

4. Join the Celebration at Predict – Winners will be announced at the Predict virtual event in early January. Finalists and winners receive badges, trophies, and recognition across the Techstrong network.

Nominations are live — make sure your DevOps stories get the stage they deserve. Nominate here.
September 8, 2025
What is the Secret Sauce Behind Atlassian’s $610M Buy of The Browser Company

The news hit like a thunderclap across the tech world: Atlassian has agreed to acquire The Browser Company for $610 million. On the surface, many are scratching their heads. Why would a software collaboration giant known for Jira, Confluence and Bitbucket want to own a browser? Is Atlassian suddenly gunning to compete with Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge or Apple Safari?

If that’s the first question that popped into your mind, you’re not alone. But let me stop you there: Atlassian isn’t crazy. Atlassian is crazy like a fox.

Because make no mistake, there’s a shootout at the OK Corral brewing in the browser world, and the stakes are nothing less than who owns the front door to your AI-powered work life.

The AI Browser Wars Begin

For most of the past two decades, the browser has been a commodity. Chrome became the default, Safari the loyal Apple sidekick, Edge and Firefox hanging on. But fundamentally, browsers haven’t changed much since the early 2000s — they’re just the window to whatever app, site, or SaaS you need.

Enter the new crop of AI-first browsers. Think of Arc from The Browser Company, Perplexity’s exploration engine, or OpenAI’s ongoing moves to redefine how people search, consume and interact online. These aren’t just windows anymore. They’re becoming agents — your concierge, your assistant, your personalized UX for work and life.

And when the UX itself is powered by AI, the browser stops being a neutral layer. It becomes the platform. That’s where Atlassian sees opportunity.

Why Atlassian Wants In

Atlassian doesn’t care about winning 10% of the consumer browser market. They’re not going to out-Chrome Chrome. That’s not the game here.

Instead, imagine this: What if the default UX for developers, DevOps engineers and platform teams wasn’t Google or Safari, but an AI-first browser designed around productivity and collaboration? What if your AI browser wasn’t just where you searched, but where you coded, deployed, tracked sprints and resolved incidents?

That’s the play. Atlassian wants to own the interface where their tools live natively. Jira tickets, Confluence pages, Bitbucket repos — all seamlessly integrated into a browser that anticipates what a developer needs before they even type.

It’s not about building another app. It’s about owning the environment. A browser Atlassian controls gives them home-field advantage. And in the AI era, whoever controls the environment controls the workflow.

Crazy Like a Fox

This is why I say Atlassian is crazy like a fox. To the casual observer, dropping $610 million on a boutique browser startup looks odd. But zoom out, and you see a very different picture: Atlassian buying not a product, but a beachhead.

A browser designed around AI workflows is going to be ground zero for enterprise adoption. Atlassian knows its customer base: Developers, IT teams, platform engineers. If AI browsers become the UX of choice for this community, Atlassian doesn’t just want a seat at the table — they want to own the table.

And make no mistake, this is a race. Once one vendor sets the tone, others will follow.

Expect “Me Too” Moves

If history teaches us anything, it’s that big tech doesn’t like to be left out of the next platform shift. You can already picture the strategy decks in boardrooms across Silicon Valley and Redmond: “Acquire AI browser technology now before we’re locked out.”

Expect a wave of “me too” acquisitions in the next 12 to 18 months. Every major enterprise software company — from ServiceNow to Salesforce to Oracle — is going to take a hard look at AI browser startups. Why? Because they don’t want to be dependent on Google, Perplexity, or OpenAI to deliver their UX.

Controlling your own browser isn’t about ego. It’s about ensuring your tools aren’t at the mercy of someone else’s roadmap. If Atlassian can set the precedent, others will scramble not to be left behind.

A New Front in the DevOps Battlefield

For DevOps and platform engineering, this changes the game. Up until now, tools have lived in silos: Jira over here, GitHub over there, CI/CD pipelines on another tab. AI browsers offer the possibility of stitching it all together, contextualizing and orchestrating workflows in real time.

Imagine an AI-driven browser that notices a CI/CD pipeline failure, pulls up the relevant Jira ticket, suggests the fix based on past commits, and even triggers the deployment pipeline — all in a single interface. That’s not sci-fi anymore. That’s the prize.

Atlassian sees this clearly. This is why they’re moving now, before the rest of the market wakes up.

Shimmy’s Take

Look, I don’t know if Atlassian’s $610 million bet will pay off exactly how they envision. Maybe Arc becomes the developer’s browser of choice. Maybe Perplexity or OpenAI swoops in with something more compelling. Maybe Chrome bolts on AI features so seamlessly that everyone shrugs and sticks with what they know.

But I do know this: The browser is about to become a contested frontier again. And this time, it won’t be about speed, tab management, or security settings. It will be about who controls the AI-driven interface for work.

In that battle, Atlassian has made a bold first move. They’re not chasing Google’s mass-market dominance. They’re betting that the future of DevOps UX is the AI browser — and they want their tools front and center when the dust settles.

So, is Atlassian crazy? Absolutely. But in the world of platform shifts, sometimes crazy is exactly what you need to see the future before everyone else.

September 5, 2025