devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Alan Shimel

A DevOps Thanksgiving

As we head into Thanksgiving and the start of holiday season here in the U.S., I wanted to reach out to readers, visitors and friends around the world with a message: In spite of things that make us all sad, there is much to be thankful for this year.

Hopefully, you are not living in an active war zone. Living in peace is something we used to take for granted. It is hard to concentrate on developing code and things like CI/CD, observability and vulnerabilities when you are worried about bombs, drones and gunshots around you. I never used to feel grateful for living a life that allowed me to focus on my work, building a better company and doing more business. But I realize this year how thankful I am to be able to pursue my livelihood in peace. While news of war, death and destruction is never far from our ears, it seems, for most of us, our ears and eyes are as close as it gets. For this, let us be thankful.

While this past year has seen so many layoffs and cutbacks, especially in the tech industry, we should be thankful for earning our livelihoods in an industry that is still so dynamic. We work in an industry that continues to lead the world with bold new innovations and cutting-edge technologies. Even for our friends who were impacted by the cutbacks and layoffs, most have found new jobs and greater opportunities to explore and grow. The past few years have seen such huge growth that some contraction, I guess, is to be expected. But overall, the tech industry is still chugging along. For this, let us be thankful.

What about DevOps, you ask? Well, let us be thankful for DevOps, which continues to evolve and adapt to the opportunities in the market. With innovations in platform engineering, cloud-native technology, GitOps and more, DevOps has proven resilient and adaptable in absorbing these innovations to continue allowing us to develop faster, better, higher-quality code. I am excited about some of the AI-powered innovations that seem on the cusp of once again accelerating our development and deployment choices. This coming year, I believe DevOps will continue to be a major force in IT departments. For this, let us be thankful.

Another trend I have watched develop this year is a return to a semblance of normalcy. We emerged from the pandemic and are returning to offices (well, some of us, anyway). We are going to in-person events and even dusting off our business wear. I think some of the traditional IT frameworks, like ITSM, project management, etc., will freshen up as they combine with new trends like generative AI, DevOps and more. This should bring a new spark to some of the more mature areas of IT and will revitalize IT across the board. For this, let us be thankful.

Finally, let us be thankful that you are reading this in good health. There are many biotech breakthroughs on the horizon that can make our lives so much better. This past year, I have personally undergone my own technology-powered transformation and am healthier and fitter than I have been in a long time. I hope you take time this holiday season to concentrate on your own personal wellness and physical condition. A life well lived requires you to live well. There are so many options available to help you. For this, let us be thankful.

From all of us here at Techstrong Group to all of our friends around the world, happy Thanksgiving and best wishes for this holiday season.

November 22, 2023
DevOps Dozen² 2023 Finalists Announced
We are excited to announce the finalists for the DevOps Dozen² Awards 2023, celebrating the greatest innovators and their achievements in the DevOps space. These individuals and companies have taken an active role in the DevOps community, demonstrating their leadership and commitment to the improvement of our industry in the past year.

Congratulations to every one of the finalists. All of your hard work and dedication are greatly appreciated.

Without further ado, here are the finalists for the DevOps Dozen² Awards 2023:

DevOps Dozen Community Awards

1. Best DevOps Industry Implementation
- Codacy Pioneers Program (Codacy’s Pioneers Programme)
- DevOps Implementation across the SJP enterprise systems (St James’s Place in Partnership with Intellect Design Arena)
2. Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research
- State of Digital Quality Report 2023 (Applause)
- The Shift to a Security Approach for the Full Application Stack Report (Cisco AppDynamics)
- Accelerate State of DevOps Report (DORA)
- Charting Observability Research Report (Edge Delta)
- 2023 State of IaC Report (Firefly)
- Observability Survey 2023 (Grafana Labs)
- 2023 Software Artifact State of the Union (JFrog)
- What’s in Your Open-Source Software (Lineaje)
- 2023 Software Engineering Benchmarks Report (LinearB)
- 2023 Observability Forecast Report (New Relic)
- State of the API Report (Postman)
- Global State of API Security Report (Traceable AI)
3. Best DevOps-Related Video Series (video)
- DevOps Exchange YouTube Channel (DevOps Exchange)
- DevOps Toolkit (DevOps Toolkit)
- KubeSimplify (Kubesimplify)
- Saiyam Pathak (Kubesimplify)
- Ned in the Cloud’s Terraform Tuesday Series (Ned Bellevance)
4. Best DevOps-Related Audio Podcast Series
- The Modern Mainframe (BMC Software)
- 0800-DEVOPS Podcast by Ivan Krnic (CROZ)
- DevOps Paradox (DevOps Paradox)
- Let’s Get To The News (Kubernetes community)
- Dev Interrupted (LinearB)
- DevOps in Agile Way Podcast (Pawel Piwosz, DevOps Institute Ambassador)
- The MLSecOps Podcast (Protect AI)
5. Best DevOps Book/eBook of the Year
- Crafting a Mainframe Modernization Roadmap (Broadcom)
- Strategizing Continuous Delivery in the Cloud (Garima Bajpai , Thomas Schuetz)
- Redbook: Accelerate Mainframe Application Modernization with Hybrid Cloud (IBM)
- Industrial DevOps: Build Better Systems Faster by Dr. Suzette Johnson and Robin Yeman (IT Revolution Press)
- Beyond Agile Auditing: Three Core Components to Revolutionize Your Internal Audit Practices (IT Revolution)
6. Top DevOps Evangelist
- Sam Dion (National Bank of Canada)
- Garima Bajpai (Canada DevOps Community of Practice)
- Pawel Piwosz (Company or Community: DevOps Institute Ambassador)
- Amanda Lewis (DORA Community)
- Fatima Sarah Khalid (GitLab)
- Ayelet Sachto (Google)
- Richi Hartmann (Grafana Labs)
- Stephen Chin (JFrog)
- Eran Kinsbruner (Lightrun)
- Mayank Solanki (TataCliq)
- Viktor Farcic
7. Best DevOps Transformation (non-vendor)
- Informatica (Grafana Labs)
- Pera People Science B.V
- CGI Life and Health Insurance Agile and DevOps Team
8. Best DevOps Event of the Year
- DevOps World 2023 (CloudBees)
- DevOps Exchange
- GrafanaCON 2023 (Grafana Labs)
- swampUP (JFrog)
- Galaxy ’23 (LaunchDarkly)
- PASS Data Community Summit (Redgate Software)
9. Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project
- Coder OS (Coder)
- AIaC (AI generator for infrastructure as code by Firefly.ai)
- Beyla (Grafana Labs)
- Jenkins
- Frogbot (JFrog)
- Galasa (Open Mainframe Project)
- OpenRewrite (OpenRewrite / Moderne)
- CNAPPgoat (Tenable Open Source)
- Terrascan (Tenable Open Source)
10. DevOps Executive of the Year (non-vendor)
- Garima Bajpai (Canada DevOps Community of Practice)
- Dan Rogers (LaunchDarkly)
- Idit Levine (Solo.io)
- Kavitha Srinivasulu (TCS)
11. Best DevOps Presentation of the Year
- Time to Rip Off the Training Wheels and Enable End-to-End Automation, a SHARE Atlanta 2023 presentation by Tony Anter and Mark Schettenhelm (BMC Software)
- Beyond Agile Auditing: The Path to a Better Audit Experience by Clarissa Lucas
12. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year
- Six Mainframe DevOps Predictions for 2023 (BMC Software)
- VS Code for Mainframe: The Enterprise Developer Tipping Point (Broadcom)
- Muneesh Sharma (Neem Consulting Ltd.)
DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards

1. Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service
- Bitrise
- Copado
- Harness Software Delivery Platform
- Morpheus v6.x
- The Netlify Platform
- PagerDuty Process Automation
- Sourcegraph’s Code AI Platform
- BMC AMI DevX
- Digital.ai AI-Powered DevSecOps Platform
- JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform
- Nethopper KAOPS
- Opsera Unified DevOps Platform
- Rootly
- Reliability Management
2. Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service
- gitStream (LinearB)
3. Best CI/CD Tool
- Bitrise
- BMC AMI DevX Code Pipeline
- Buildkite Pipelines
- CircleCI
- CloudBees CI/CDRO
- Codefresh CI/CD Solution
- Copado
- Octopus Deploy
- OpsMx Secure CD
4. Best Value Stream Management Tool
- Allstacks Platform
- ValueOps by Broadcom
- Digital.ai’s Value Stream Management Tool
- LinearB
- Planview Value Stream Management
5. Best Observability Solution
- Apica
- BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps
- Cribl Stream
- Grafana Cloud Free Tier
- Lightrun Observability Platform
- Memfault
- The New Relic All-In-One Observability Platform
- Observe
- StackState
- BMC AMI zAdviser Enterprise
- Cisco Observability Platform
- Edge Delta
- Honeycomb.io
- Logz.io Open 360™ Platform
- Mezmo Telemetry Pipeline
- Nobl9 Reliability Center
- SolarWinds Observability
- vFunction Architectural Observability Manager
6. Best DevSecOps Solution
- Broadcom SBOMz
- CodeSonar
- CodeSentry
- Dazz Remediation Cloud
- Digital.ai AI-Powered DevSecOps Platform
- GitLab
- Mend Application Security Platform by Mend.io
- Progress Chef
- DuploCloud DevOps Automation Platform
- Graylog
- JFrog Curation
- Lineaje AI with BOMbots
- Moderne
- ReversingLabs Software Supply Chain Security Platform
- Tanzu Application Platform
- Xygeni Software Supply Chain Security Solution
7. Best Testing Service/Tool
- Telepresence (Ambassador Labs)
- Applitools
- BMC AMI DevX Total Test
- Buildkite Test Analytics
- Copado
- Digital.ai Continuous Testing
- Sauce Labs / Sauce Orchestrate
- SonarQube
- Tricentis Mobile
8. Best Kubernetes Platform/Service
- BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps
- Edge Delta
- Kalix
- Rafay Systems
9. Best Cloud-Native Security Solution/Service
- The Aqua Platform (Aqua Security)
- Axiomatics’ Orchestrated Authorization Solution
- Britive Identity Security Platform
- Cyera
- Dazz Remediation Cloud
- Fleet Endpoint Security Platform (Fleet Device Management, Inc.)
- JumpCloud Directory Platform
- The Orca Cloud Security Platform
- Sumo Logic SaaS Log Analytics Platform
- Sysdig Secure
- Tenable Cloud Security
- Tetrate Istio Subscription (TIS)
10. Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution
- BMC AMI DevX tool suite (BMC Software)
- Code4z (Broadcom)
- Wazi Deploy (IBM)
- PopUp Mainframe
- Rocket DevOps 10.2.2 (Rocket Software)
11. Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution
- BMC AMI DevOps for Db2® – BMC Software and BMC AMI SQL Performance for Db2® (BMC Software)
- Coalesce Data Transformation Platform
- Percona
- Flyway (Redgate Software)
- TDengine
12. Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider
- Applause Crowdtesting Solution for DevOps Teams
- BMC AMI DevX Code Insights (BMC Software)
- BMC Helix ServiceOps, BMC Helix Operations Management with AIOps, BMC Helix ITSM
- Devtron
- Firefly Cloud Asset Management
- New Relic Grok
- PerfectScale Platform
- PopUp Mainframe
- Recommended Learning Paths (Security Journey)
- Sourcegraph’s AI coding assistant, Cody
- Tabnine Chat
- Vercel
Finalists were picked by the judges and based on which entry had the most nominations.

Voting for the winners in all 24 categories is now open to the public. To vote for the leaders, tools and companies you think are truly deserving of an award for their exceptional service to the DevOps community, please visit the DevOps Dozen² website.

Winners will be chosen from among the finalists, with general public voting weighted for 40% of the final score and our judges’ selections for 60% of the final score. The deadline for public voting is December 31 at 5:00 p.m. ET.

The winners will be announced at the Predict 2024 Virtual Summit on January 18, 2024, and will receive both digital badges and physical trophies celebrating their achievements.

Thanks to everyone who has supported the DevOps Dozen² Awards by nominating candidates and voting. Good luck to all the finalists!
November 13, 2023
DevOps Halloween: Tricks and Treats

The world of DevOps is like a labyrinth—filled with choices at every turn. Some paths lead to efficiency and success, while others may lead to unexpected challenges and delays. In the spirit of Halloween, let’s explore the tricks and treats of DevOps choices to ensure your team ends up with a bag full of treats rather than some nasty tricks.

Version Control: Treats of Consistency, Tricks of Complexity

Treat: Implementing a robust version control system is crucial for any DevOps team. Tools like Git provide a reliable way to track changes, collaborate on code and maintain a history of your project’s evolution.

Trick: However, the complexity of these systems can lead to confusion and errors if not properly understood. Branching strategies, for instance, need to be clearly defined to avoid chaotic merges and lost work.

Continuous Integration & Continuous Deployment (CI/CD): Speedy Treats, Tricky Configurations

Treat: CI/CD pipelines automate the process of code integration, testing and deployment, speeding up release cycles and ensuring more reliable software.

Trick: Setting up these pipelines can be complex and error-prone. Misconfigurations can lead to failed builds, delayed releases or even the deployment of buggy code to production.

Containerization: The Sweetness of Isolation, Beware of the Overhead

Treat: Containers provide isolated environments for applications, ensuring consistency across development, testing and production. Tools like Docker and Kubernetes have revolutionized application development and deployment.

Trick: Containerization adds an additional layer of complexity to your infrastructure. Mismanagement of containers can lead to resource inefficiencies, and Kubernetes itself has a steep learning curve.

Monitoring and Logging: The Treat of Visibility, The Trick of Overload

Treat: Comprehensive monitoring and logging give teams visibility into system performance and behavior, enabling proactive issue resolution and performance optimization.

Trick: The sheer volume of logs and metrics can be overwhelming. Without proper tools and strategies for filtering and analysis, important information can be lost in the noise.

Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC): Sweet Automation, Sour Complexity

Treat: IaC tools like Terraform and AWS CloudFormation allow teams to automate and version infrastructure setup, ensuring consistency and reducing manual errors.

Trick: IaC scripts can become complex and difficult to maintain. Errors in these scripts can lead to misconfigured infrastructure, potential security issues and resource waste.

Collaboration and Communication: Treats of Teamwork, Tricks of Misunderstanding

Treat: DevOps emphasizes the importance of collaboration between development and operations teams, fostering a culture of shared responsibility and continuous improvement.

Trick: Miscommunication and lack of alignment between teams can lead to inefficiencies, mistakes and a breakdown in the collaborative process.

Security: The Unseen Specter

Treat: DevSecOps enables a “shift left” on security, integrating security checks and practices early in the development life cycle, ensuring safer, more secure applications.

Trick: But this integration requires continuous attention and maintenance. Outdated dependencies, misconfigured settings and inadequate security practices can leave your applications vulnerable, turning the unseen specter of security issues into a ghastly reality.

What about you? What areas of DevOps are ripe for trick or treat this Halloween season?

In the grand scheme, DevOps offers a treasure trove of benefits, from faster releases and improved collaboration to higher-quality software. However, it’s not without its challenges. Navigating the DevOps landscape requires a careful balance between embracing automation and maintaining control. By being aware of the potential tricks and focusing on the treats, teams can build efficient, reliable and scalable systems. Like a group of trick-or-treaters navigating the neighborhood on Halloween night, success in DevOps comes from preparation, collaboration and the ability to adapt to unexpected surprises. So, put on your costumes, grab your bags and get ready to collect those DevOps treats!

Image Source: Photo by Antonio Gabola on Unsplash

October 31, 2023
Something is Amiss in the Open Source World
You don’t have to be a psychic to grok that the winds of change are blowing hard in the open source world. For the last few months, I’ve seen hints and heard whispers about a new direction for what I believe is the most passionate and enthusiastic community in tech. I think we are about to sail off into unchartered territory—and it will be interesting to see what the repercussions are.

Of course, this will all play out against the backdrop of continued layoffs and belt-tightening in the broader tech sector. Before I detail what I think are the telltale signals of change, let me state that I am and have always been a big supporter of open source software. I firmly believe we live in a golden age for open source software, which I call the “Foundation era of open source.” At a time when 90% plus of organizations use open source software, many of the leading open source projects are under the domain of not-for-profit foundations (NFPs) such as the Linux Foundation, the Apache Foundation, etc. This allows multiple commercial companies who might otherwise compete with each other to work in coop-etition. This has, in many ways, enabled this golden age of open source. Prior to the Foundation era of open source, there were two prior dominant models. Initially, there was what I call the “Cathedral and Bazaar era,” named after the great book by Eric Raymond. This was a time of idealistic notions of “pure” open source, unsullied by commercial aspirations. To me, Dr. Richard Stallman embodied that time; if you were to make an analogy to history, it was akin to the 1960s era in the U.S.

From that era, let’s zoom to sometime in the early 2000s when we moved to what I call the “Big Brother era” of open source. In this era, open source projects were owned and managed by one vendor, for all intents and purposes. The project could have a vibrant community, but ultimately, it was the managing vendor or “Big Brother” who reaped most of the rewards. This made it difficult for multiple tool vendors to support the same project and stifled progress.

The dawn of the foundation era of open source changed all that, and we have seen transformational growth as a result. But nothing lasts forever—and I think the king of the hill may be on the way down. Why do I say this? Here are several events/trends I’ve noticed recently that lead me to believe this. Some of these things I was told in confidence, so I cannot reveal names to protect the innocent.
1. The move away from “pure” open source licenses. Over the last few months, several pillars of the open source world have moved away from accepted open source licensing. Red Hat has done so with Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) and now Hashi has, as well. Now, to some, this change is subtle and it’s not a big deal. Only paying customers get access to source code. The overwhelming majority of users never look at the source code anyway. Nevertheless, this is a huge red flag for the community—the accepted licenses and a core tenant of open source, that source code is available to everyone, are no longer being used.
2. Diminishing corporate financial support for open source communities and foundations. I guess this was to be expected in hard economic times. The path to profits from supporting open source foundations, projects and communities can sometimes be more of a dotted line than direct. And a dotted line doesn’t usually work when the bean counters are involved. In looking to cut expenses, these are low-hanging fruit.
3. Closing foundations. This is a natural result of the economic strife. Foundations may operate as not-for-profits, but without operating funds, foundations can’t operate. Generally, foundations get a lot of mileage from volunteers. However, volunteers can only go so far before hard costs are involved. Also, volunteers are able to volunteer because their corporate employers empower them to do so. When their employers pull back the funding for those activities, the volunteers have to do what they can to earn a living. I have heard of at least one NFP foundation forced to cease or curtail operations due to corporate sponsor funds drying up.
4. Orphaned projects. Again, this is a direct result of number two, above. With the foundations closing and supporting funds drying up, I know of at least two bellwether open source projects that are in danger of becoming orphaned. Both of these projects boast huge community numbers and dominate their markets. The fact is though, that supporting a major project costs hundreds of thousands of dollars. While millions of community members may use a project and support it, they don’t contribute dollars. Dollars that pay for hosting, infrastructure and other hard costs. Coughing up a few hundred grand to support a project is a bridge too far for some companies in the current economic climate.
What does this mean for open source software and you? Well, in the near term, if you are just a consumer of open source software, probably not much will change day-to-day. You may have to cough up some money if you want access to source code or support from the community. Bigger picture, though, is the winds of change are blowing. I think we are going to see more companies taking a Hashi-type approach to protecting their source code. This will result in more forks of open source projects. However, my experience is that most open source forks don’t succeed (with some notable exceptions—like Jenkins forked from Hudson). Companies who are building businesses around open source models will be the most at risk. I think an open core business model may be the best bet for an open source vendor. I think the future of NFPs as the stewards of open source may become a bit cloudy (no pun intended). What will take its place or fill the void? That remains to be seen.

For the record I was never a fan of that old Irish proverb, “May you live in interesting times.” This kind of upheaval is a little too interesting for me. But one thing I have learned in 30 years in tech (and more than that in life) is that change is constant. You can embrace it and thrive or shrivel and die.
October 5, 2023
DevOps Dozen² Awards 2023 Nominations Now Open
We are excited to announce that the DevOps Dozen² 2023 nominations are now open. Now in its ninth year, the DevOps Dozen once again highlights the leading innovators in the DevOps world.

As we’ve done the last three years, there are actually 24 award categories. Twelve are aimed at the many great commercial DevOps solution categories in the market. The other twelve are aimed at the vibrant community and open source ecosystem which powers the DevOps movement.

As in years past, the selection process has two tiers. Nominations for finalists are open now and will close on October 20, 2023. We will announce the finalists on November 13, 2023. After the finalists are announced, open voting will be conducted to determine the winners in each category. Public voting accounts for 40% of the weighted final count, with 60% coming from the votes of this year’s panel of judges.

This year’s judges are myself, Alan Shimel, CEO of Techstrong Group, Mitchell Ashley, CTO of Techstrong Group, Sharon Florentine, managing editor of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and John Willis, DevOps luminary and author. As we’ve done in past years, we are asking the 12 companies that receive commercial category nominations to pay a nominal fee to cut down on spam submissions and help cover the cost of tracking the nominations, trophies and other administrative expenses. Community awards remain free to nominate but spamming nominations will result in disqualification.

We have not changed the categories from last year, though we did consider adding a category for AI in DevOps. Perhaps next year. Without further ado, here are the 24 categories for the DevOps Dozen awards:

DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards
- Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service
  Consolidation in the DevOps space has led to a greater selection of platforms offering end-to-end solutions. This award honors the platform with the most diverse and robust solution for DevOps teams.
- Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service
  GitOps has become an integral part of the DevOps toolbox. This award is presented to the most outstanding code repository/Git/GitOps tool.
- Best CI/CD Tool
  This award recognizes the best CI/CD tool that helps teams to deliver quality code faster.
- Best Value Stream Management Tool
  Value stream management has come into its own as an important tool for measuring the business value of DevOps and application development. This award recognizes the value stream management tool that most effectively helps organizations visualize the value stream, track metrics and measure improvement.
- Best Observability Solution
  This award recognizes the best observability solution for understanding the performance of individual components, systems and entire applications.
- Best DevSecOps Solution
  This award honors the best DevSecOps solution, which enables security to be included earlier in and continuously throughout the SDLC.
- Best Testing Tool/Service
  Testing is a mainstay in the DevOps toolchain. This award recognizes the best testing tool for ensuring the quality of code.
- Best Kubernetes Platform/Service
  The adoption of containers has paved the way for an entire solutions ecosystem. Kubernetes is perhaps the most widely recognized and utilized tool for container orchestration. There are many platforms and services that offer Kubernetes-based solutions. This award honors the best Kubernetes platform/service available.
- Best Cloud-Native Security Solution/Service
  The cloud-native movement has taken the IT world by storm due to the depth and breadth of the solutions available and the benefits of building applications and services specifically for cloud-native environments. This award recognizes the best cloud-native tools, solutions and services.
- Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution
  Despite their age, mainframes are a mainstay in the IT world, and a variety of solutions are available for enabling DevOps practices in mainframe and hybrid environments. This award recognizes the best of them.
- Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution
  Databases often have been left out of the DevOps conversation, but that is changing as the concept of DataOps is gaining greater traction. This award recognizes the best solution in the database and DataOps space.
- Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider
  This award recognizes the best new service provider or tool that has brought innovation to the DevOps space in the past year (must be less than 24 months old).
DevOps Dozen Community Awards
- Best DevOps Industry Implementation
  This award honors organizations that have successfully adopted and implemented DevOps principles and practices.
- Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research
  This award recognizes research that has significantly and positively impacted the DevOps community.
- Best DevOps-Related Video Series (video)
  This category highlights the most entertaining, educational and inspirational DevOps video series—those with the most engaging and highest-quality content.
- Best DevOps-Related Audio Podcast Series
  Which is your favorite DevOps podcast from this year? This category celebrates the many great DevOps podcasts driving discussions about everything from CI/CD and testing to DevSecOps, Kubernetes, containers and more.
- Best DevOps Book/eBook of the Year
  Each year sees a plethora of well-crafted DevOps-related books and ebooks. This category highlights the most popular and most-read of the year.
- Top DevOps Evangelist
  This category is one of our favorites! There are so many great evangelists who spread the DevOps gospel, but we want to know who does it best. Nominees can work within the DevOps space or outside of it.
- Best DevOps Transformation (non-vendor)
  In a year marked by continued digital transformation, we want to know which organizations stood out in their efforts to transform their business through DevOps.
- Best DevOps Event of the Year
  Virtual events became the norm throughout the pandemic. But as more people crave face-to-face interaction, in-person events have slowly made a comeback. Which DevOps event stands out from the crowd?
- Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project
  Open source projects are meant to promote innovation and increase efficiency, velocity and quality. While there are many great open source projects out there, the best ones are those that create a community of people who work on and with the technology and support each other.
- DevOps Executive of the Year (non-vendor)
  This category celebrates excellence among DevOps leaders at the C-suite (or equivalent) level.
- Best DevOps Presentation of the Year
  This category recognizes the best DevOps-themed presentation from the many (virtual) conferences that took place this year.
- Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year
  This category celebrates excellence among DevOps leaders at the C-suite (or equivalent) level.
Good luck to everyone nominating for the DevOps Dozen² Awards 2023. We will update finalists on November 13.
September 18, 2023
JFrog swampUP: Keynotes and What’s Next

At the sold-out JFrog swampUP conference this morning, the event’s keynotes were headlined by JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim and co-founder and CTO Yoav Landman. The theme was “next”—what’s next for DevOps and what’s next for developers.

Of course, there are several answers, but cutting to the chase, it seems security is job one. Developers are squarely in the crosshairs of the bad guys, and protecting them and their code is top priority at JFrog. To do so requires shifting security even further left into the integrated development environment (IDE) itself. Landman demonstrated new functionality in the JFrog Xray scanning and remediation solution’s IDE and emphasized the difference between quality assurance and quality testing.

CEO Ben Haim took a higher-level view, looking at the issues facing organizations as they seek to develop more, develop faster and do so more securely. He also reinforced the themes hit on by Landman. Overall, the message from both co-founders was that the amount of code being deployed continues to increase exponentially. The need to go faster while being more secure is greater than ever, and JFrog has adopted that as the company’s mission, Ben Haim and Landman said.

Audience enthusiasm was high, and despite growing to almost 1,000 employees, many of whom have been on board for less than a year, the culture at JFrog remains a constant focus. Landman and Ben Haim reiterated that the company is committed to their customers and their community.

That community was well represented, with all three of the major cloud providers exhibiting in the expo area, as well as a good mix of other DevOps providers like CloudBees (whose own DevOps World Roadshow kicked off today). Additionally, some of the new channel partners, such as IT Methods, also exhibited.

Beyond the keynote, other JFrog presenters in the morning keynote sessions included the leadership of the Artifactory team and senior leadership of the security team.

JFrog leaders were not the only ones on the agenda at swampUP. A leading games company presented a demonstration of their use of JFrog for CI/CD pipelines. One of the big three cloud providers presented a session discussing whether AI will replace developers (spoiler alert: The answer is no). Additionally, frequent devopsy.kinsta.cloud contributors Tracy Ragan and John Willis also presented throughout the day. Our own Will Willis will be recapping some of those highlights.

All in all, it was a return to normalcy for swampUP. This event felt much like previous swampUPs that occurred before the COVID-19 pandemic began. The event was sold out with over 400 attendees, which tracks with what we’ve seen at other in-person events recently.

JFrog has grown and matured but continues to emphasize what has made the company successful. We’re excited to see lots of new features for developers and DevOps practitioners to explore.

September 14, 2023
JFrog Launches New Channel Partner Program

At JFrog’s swampUP event in San Jose, California, the company launched its Global Channel Partner Program. The program, led by Kelly Hartman, VP of alliances and partners, is JFrog’s first formal program to work with the channel to bring its DevOps and DevSecOps solutions to market.

Rather than the traditional pyramid model, Hartman, who was formerly at AWS, has designed a flatter program; partners can choose to work with JFrog in a co-selling arrangement, as a traditional reseller or as part of JFrog’s government sales partners. Partners can choose which type of relationship they want to use on a case-by-case, deal-by-deal basis. This gives them lots of flexibility.

This program is a sign of JFrog’s continuing evolution from a startup to a public company. Several of the founding channel partners in the program weren’t surprised at the announcement; the feeling was, as Mike King of IT Methods said, “They have been knocking on this door for some time.” Hartman added that the goal was not to make JFrog a 100%-channel company. Rather, the aim is to have as much business run through the partners as JFrog’s customers want while keeping the emphasis on the JFrog customer base.

The program is primarily aimed at DevOps consultants worldwide, rather than the larger integrators, JFrog said. The DevOps consultant market is broadly fragmented, and made up of numerous sized companies – from one to two-person operations all the way up to 1,000+-person organizations, such as IT Methods.

Hartman said she is learning from her past experience at AWS and other organizations. She has not crafted a traditional program with tiers and marketing development funds; instead, much of what partners need is built into a self-service portal, including a campaign in a box and social media kits.

IT Methods is an ideal partner for JFrog, King said. They offer a fully-managed SaaS, single-tenant platform allowing their customers to manage their DevOps environments. IT Methods supports more than 45 DevOps tools and its major clients are large enterprises. They have offered JFrog via their platform for six years, but welcome the formal partner program and accompanying certification offered for SMEs. King said he was pleasantly surprised at the JFrog program’s maturity, considering it is a new program. He added that joint lead generation and closing capability and partner enablement offerings would put JFrog “at the head of the class.”

The JFrog channel partner program joins their existing technology partner and cloud partner programs. In fact, Hartman said they are working with their cloud provider partners to source new channel partners.

It was an exciting new development in what promises to be a gangbuster swampUP here in San Jose. More developments will follow.

September 13, 2023
Meet the DevOps Dozen² 2022 Honorees

We are proud to announce the DevOps Dozen² 2022 honorees. For the past eight years, the DevOps Dozen Awards have celebrated the most outstanding individuals and companies in the DevOps community and their remarkable contributions to the industry. These honorees have demonstrated their leadership and commitment to our community during the past year.

Congratulations to all those nominated and to the honorees. All of your hard work and dedication are greatly appreciated.

Without further ado, here are the DevOps Dozen² 2022 honorees:

DevOps Dozen Community Awards

1. Best DevOps Industry Implementation

OJA DevOps Transformation and Implementation

2. Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research

GitLab 2022 Global DevSecOps Survey

3. Best DevOps-Related Video Series (video)

DevOps Toolkit

4. Best DevOps-Related Audio Podcast Series

Grafana’s Big Tent

5. Best DevOps Book/eBook of the Year

Purple Book

6. Top DevOps Evangelist

Dan Garfield

7. Best DevOps Transformation (non-vendor)

Natura Cloud & DevOps Center of Excellence

8. Best DevOps Event of the Year

2022 DevOps Enterprise Summit

9. Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project

Backstage

10. DevOps Executive of the Year (non-vendor)

Idit Levine

11. Best DevOps Presentation of the Year

“Journey from 100’s of Pipelines to a Single Pipeline Ecosystem” by Ali Ravji and Prashant Parekh

12. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

What A Dev Wants

DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards

1. Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service

Harness Software Delivery Platform

2. Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service

Red Hat OpenShift GitOps

3. Best CI/CD Tool

CloudBees CI

4. Best Value Stream Management Tool

ConnectALL

5. Best Observability Solution

Nobl9 Platform

6. Best DevSecOps Solution

JFrog Advanced Security

Veracode Continuous Software Security Platform

7. Best Testing Service/Tool

Digital.ai Continuous Testing

8. Best Kubernetes Platform/Service

Red Hat OpenShift

9. Best Cloud-Native Security Solution/Service

Aqua Platform

10. Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution

Open Mainframe Project Zowe

11. Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution

Liquibase

12. Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider

BMC Compuware zAdviser DORA Metrics dashboard

The honorees will receive both digital badges and physical trophies celebrating their achievements.

Winners were chosen from among the finalists with general public voting counting for 40% of the final total and our judges’ selections for 60% of the weighted total. The panel of judges went through thousands of votes to choose the winners in each category—it was not an easy task. Many thanks to our judges for making the hard calls and to everyone who has supported the DevOps Dozen² Awards by nominating candidates and voting.

For more information, please visit the DevOps Dozen² Awards website and stay tuned for the DevOps Dozen² 2023 Awards.

January 12, 2023
Predict 2023: Stand and Deliver

It’s that time of year again—the New Year’s ritual: Time to predict the big trends in your world for the new year. By now you have probably seen dozens of headlines, articles, videos and interviews telling you what big trends will shape the coming year. Here at Techstrong Group, our Predict virtual event is built around this New Year’s ritual. This year, Predict is January 12, 2023 and, not to blow our own horn, but I think it is our best Predict event yet.

What sets this event apart? Well, we have a real Techstrong Research team now headed up by Mike Rothman and Mitchell Ashley who are leading this year’s Predict event. We will have four tracks: DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud-native and digital transformation. Each track will kick off with either Mitchell or Mike presenting a Techstrong Research trends report for that market.

After the trends report, there will be a keynote panel featuring some of the top thought leaders in each of these fields. This will be followed by other sessions that explore what this upcoming year has in store. Many of these sessions will be streamed live on January 12, 2023 and allow for audience questions and input.

But wait—there’s more! One session I am really looking forward to features John Willis and Damon Edwards live at Techstrong Group Studios giving us their personal predictions for 2023. John and Damon need no introduction to the DevOps community. This should be a great session, so don’t miss it. I am also moderating two great panels; one is with C-level executives from CloudBees, JFrog and GitLab and Kohsuke Kawaguchi (KK), the creator of Jenkins and co-CEO of Launchable. The other panel features my friend Emmet Keefe of Insight Ignite who has his finger on the pulse of the digital transformation market.

The best part? We’ll have a live chat available so you can interact with the speakers and network with your fellow attendees. And you can register and attend Predict 2023 for free. That’s right—this analyst-led, daylong virtual interactive event is free. Don’t wait! Head over right now and register here.

Another highlight will be the announcement of our DevOps Dozen winners at the event. This year, the DevOps Dozen broke all of our previous records for both nominations and community votes. It has been quite a tough job selecting the winners from such incredible submissions and nominations.

I haven’t even mentioned the amazing cybersecurity sessions hosted by Mike Rothman or the sessions covering the cloud-native vision with Mitchell Ashley and digital transformation with Mike Vizard. There is just so much great insight you won’t want to miss.

A big thank you to all of the sponsors, panelists and speakers who help us make this event a true standout. If you want to get a head start on learning about big trends for 2023 and how they’ll impact cloud-native, cybersecurity, DevOps and digital transformation, check out these articles and register for Predict 2023 on January 12, 2023. We hope to see you there!

January 10, 2023
DevOps 2022: The Year That Was and Wasn’t
We will be wrapping up our DevOps coverage for the year by the end of this week. It’s hard to believe that another year has gone by. The gravitational lensing of COVID-19 makes it hard to see the progression of the last nine years here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. Things seem to get a bit hazy looking back. However, 2022 was certainly one for the record books in ways both good and bad. 2022 saw DevOps, our community our countries and our world pushed and pulled in directions we would not have imagined just a few short years ago. To understand what happened in DevOps in 2022, we need to account for several macro factors that played outsized roles this year. They are:
1. COVID-19: It’s still here; still killing hundreds of people every day. While some in the U.S. and Western Europe have “moved beyond” it, COVID-19 is still draining our resources, sucking the air out of the room and impacting not just the economy but how we interact with each other individually. In the next few months, I am afraid we will see the 1.4 billion people of China experience a backlash as they move away from zero-COVID policies. Not to mention the other viruses and diseases that are circulating.
2. War: When I was a young boy, I remember a popular poster/sticker that said something like, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” That’s still true; it’s not healthy for the economy, either (unless you sell ammunition). The human toll of the war in Ukraine is heartbreaking in the present moment, and the toll that this war will take on the once-healthy tech sectors in Ukraine, Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe also will be felt for a very long time.
3. Inflation: Again, I am transported back to my youth as inflation rears its ugly head and puts its foot on the throat of our economy. Sometimes I wonder if the Fed and other central banks won’t stop raising interest rates until the economy is good and dead, but their fear of inflation is almost genetic. While recent signs point to a potential peak, we still have a long way to go and the possibility of more interest rate hikes ahead of us. These will continue to make it harder to raise money and put a crimp in companies’ budgets. That means layoffs and budget cuts; projects cut or pushed out. We haven’t seen disruption like this in tech for more than 10 years. But for those of my vintage, we have seen cycles like this before. This too shall pass.
4. Hate: Is it me or has the whole world gone crazy with tribalism, nationalism, racism, antisemitism and a bunch of other “-isms”? We seem to be ripping ourselves apart from the inside out. I don’t have a clue how to combat this on a macro level, but I pray every day that things get better.
With these four horsemen of the apocalypse riding among us, you may think that I am not very bullish on DevOps now and in the future. But you’d be wrong. Like the little boy in a room full of horse manure, I remain very excited because I know there must be a pony around here somewhere.

DevOps has continued to evolve, continued to mature and has become an indispensable part of today’s modern software factories. Like their own version of Marvel’s Avengers or DC’s Justice League, DevOps, along with cloud-native, SRE, Agile, CI/CD, DevSecOps and dare I say it, platform engineering, are wielded by IT teams around the globe to continue to push forward as we digitally transform our businesses and the very fabric of our lives. That is what gets me up and out of bed every day and makes me excited to come to work.

While some marketers are busy running around printing stickers and shirts proclaiming that DevOps is dead, nothing could be further from the truth. Look around—as far as the eye can see, DevOps is everywhere. As we explored in our DevOps Experience virtual event in October (the sessions are still there for you to watch on demand), DevOps is everywhere. It is at the edge; it is in the “connected things”; it is inherent in technologies like WebAssembly (Wasm) and DevOps is distributed.

In 2023, I think DevOps at the edge, the DevOps of things and Wasm will be huge areas of growth. I realized that some of these folks claiming that DevOps is dead are trying to say platform engineers will replace DevOps engineers. But like Darth Vader trying to strike down Obi-Wan, all they are doing is making DevOps stronger than ever. You see, DevOps was never about DevOps engineers; it’s not about one role or one individual. In fact, some of my best friends helped kick off the DevOps movement and they’d react quite loudly when they heard the term DevOps engineers. DevOps is about building, maintaining and managing our software and applications. It’s a way of thinking about how we can go faster, be smarter and achieve better quality. It’s not about a particular tool you use or the role you play on the team, it’s about the fact that you have a team.

So, what does 2023 have in store for DevOps? More of the same, I think. DevOps, along with all of the associated frameworks and technologies, will continue to allow us to do more and do it faster and better. As I think about the coming year, I am very excited about the potential for ML and AI and I think they are going to have an outsized role in allowing us to be more successful. I think the novelty of these technologies has worn off and we will get to the productivity phase. I remember interviewing Luke Kanies years ago; he told me that one day software would write software. I asked him when he thought this might happen, and he said maybe 2035 or so. I think we are on track. Much like ChatGPT and Jasper’s impact on copywriting, AI won’t take the place of developers. But it will free them of some of the mundane, repetitive chores they do now.

I think we’ll also see an emphasis on feedback loops and iteration. I think automation, ML/AI will contribute to this in a big way. We have put so much of our DevOps emphasis on the development, integration and deployment of software. But observability allows us to see patterns and use cases as never before. We need to incorporate those findings into the next revision of our software. This is going to be a big story in 2023. That old infinity loop model for DevOps will rise to the top once again.

Thank you for all of the support for devopsy.kinsta.cloud this year and over the past few years. I hope this holiday season finds you and yours healthy and happy. Merry, merry. Happy, happy. See you in 2023.
December 20, 2022