devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

EvolveWare Further Automates App Modernization Tasks

EvolveWare today announced it has added an Agile Business Rules Extraction capability to its Intellisys application modernization platform.

EvolveWare CEO Miten Marfatia said the Agile Business Rules Extraction capability eliminates the need to freeze code development while applications are either being shifted to the cloud or refactored. Instead, the Intellisys platform will now keep track of updates to code and apply them once the application has been modernized, he said.

Code updates can now be transferred automatically into the extracted business rules repository without affecting the rules that are not impacted by the updates. For rules impacted by the updates, a report is generated that highlights the changes. IT teams can now also update business policies and modernize applications concurrently via the repository that also keeps track of documentation such as diagrams, logic, database details and critical dependencies, said Marfatia.

In addition to presenting logic in multiple formats, including pseudo-code, flowcharts, decision tables and business analyst language, it enables consolidation and optimization actions to be reverted to their original state if required.

In general, IT teams have been struggling with application modernization efforts that require them to either lift and shift a monolithic application running in an on-premises IT environment into the cloud or refactor it into a set of microservices that run natively in the cloud. Eventually, most organizations will refactor monolithic applications, so the debate becomes to what degree to undertake those efforts before lifting and shifting an application into the cloud. Most monolithic applications were not designed to run in the cloud, so when the app is shifted it’s not uncommon for any number of performance issues to be encountered.

EvolveWare claims that its Intellisys platform reduces the cost of application modernization by as much as 60% by eliminating much of the manual effort that would otherwise be required. Modernization efforts, in general, are hindered by manual processes that should be automated, said Marfatia.

The issue that most DevOps teams encounter when modernizing an application is that it is not a task they regularly perform. As such, many of the processes required have not been automated with the same level of zeal they’ve applied to more routine manual tasks. The Intellisys platform is designed to enable IT teams to automate the most common tasks associated with migrating an application to another platform.

The biggest driver of those migrations these days has been digital business transformation efforts that have accelerated since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Organizations of all sizes are moving applications to the cloud to ensure greater availability and resiliency to limit the amount of disruption that might be encountered should the pandemic worsen, or in case some other unexpected event makes accessing IT services difficult.

The challenge, of course, is moving applications—and the database they depend on—from one platform to another is not easy. It can take some organizations months, sometimes even years, to make the transition. Given the backlog of applications that many organizations are looking to migrate to another platform, it’s clear there is a need for much higher levels of automation to accelerate a transition that, on its present trajectory, might take years to complete.

October 4, 2022
Dynatrace Adds Grail Data Lakehouse to Observability Platform

Dynatrace today announced it has added a data lakehouse, dubbed Grail, to the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform to make it simpler to aggregate all the observability data an IT team collects.

Bob Wambach, vice president of product marketing for Dynatrace, said Grail will initially drive analytics of log data but in time will also be applied to additional types of application development, security and business intelligence data.

The goal is to streamline processes such as data indexing and rehydration across a unified observability platform that eliminates the need to maintain multiple disparate repositories, he added.

Grail, at its core, is a causational data lakehouse based on a massively parallel processing (MPP) analytics engine that will initially be made available on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. IT teams can use the Dynatrace Query Language (DQL) to query data stored in the data lakehouse. Additionally, the Davis artificial intelligence (AI) engine that is already embedded within the Dynatrace Software Intelligence Platform will be able to apply machine learning algorithms to the data stored in Grail.

Data lakehouses have recently emerged as an approach to enable organizations to apply the structure of a data warehouse platform to massive amounts of data that previously would have been stored in a data lake. In effect, a data lakehouse combines the attributes of both types of platforms for centralizing the management of data. One of the biggest issues with any approach to observability is the massive amount of data that winds up being stored to allow DevOps teams to track issues over time.

Of course, it’s up to each individual IT team to determine how much data they want to save to drive analytics, but the more data they save the more cloud storage costs will naturally increase. Grail provides a purpose-built means of consolidating data silos in a way that reduces the total cost of observability, noted Wambach.

In general, because of the need to embed a data lakehouse capability, most observability platforms will be consumed as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. That means the number of IT teams that will likely build and maintain their own observability platform will be limited. IT teams are also now struggling to manage increasingly complex IT environments made up of both cloud-native applications built using microservices and legacy monolithic applications. In fact, a global survey of 1,303 CIOs and senior IT practitioners commissioned by Dynatrace found 71% of respondents believed the explosion of data produced by cloud-native technology stacks is beyond the ability of IT staffs to manage without help from an AI platform.

It’s not clear how quickly IT teams will be migrating from legacy monitoring tools that are designed to track specific metrics to observability platforms that promise to make it easier to identify the root cause of an issue by simplifying the launch of queries against a massive pool of data. However, as organizations continue to become more dependent on software, it’s apparent that the level of tolerance for any kind of disruption is steadily declining; it’s now more a question of when rather than if a different approach to managing IT will be required.

October 4, 2022
Cosmonic Previews Deployment Platform for Distributed Wasm Apps

Cosmonic has made available a preview of a platform for deploying applications built using the portable WebAssembly (Wasm) binary format that enables applications to be deployed on any platform.

Cosmonic CEO Liam Randall said the company is providing early access to the Cosmonic Platform Developer Preview platform to enable developers to experiment with a new type of software artifact that will be used to build a new class of cloud-native applications.

The Cosmonic Platform Developer Preview platform is based on wasmCloud, an open source application runtime that hosts components written as Wasm modules that can then be loosely connected to build applications. Originally developed under the auspices of the World Wide Web Consortium for building browser applications, Wasm is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment.

That approach replaces the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries. It’s that lack of distinct boundaries that enables malware to flow so easily from one software module to another. The wasmCloud runtime, originally developed by Cosmonic, provides a platform for deploying distributed Wasm applications and is now being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

Prior to Wasm, Randall noted, every format for building applications led to the creation of ‘walled gardens’ that resulted in developers being locked into a platform. Wasm is the first software artifact that enables applications to run on an platform, including Linux and Windows, without any modification required, said Randall.

It may be some time before Wasm becomes the preferred artifact for building applications, but it’s clear the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are about to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. Just as importantly, those applications will run in a memory-safe sandbox that is more secure than what can be enabled in legacy IT platforms. In fact, as more organizations review the security of their software supply chains, they may decide to accelerate their embrace of Wasm to build more secure applications.

Naturally, the transition to Wasm will have major implications for DevOps teams, as it represents an opportunity to streamline deployment processes across multiple platforms. In effect, the total cost of application development and deployment would decline as processes spanning multiple platforms become more automated using platforms such as wasmCloud. Ultimately, much of the infrastructure complexity that developers need to navigate today would be eliminated, noted Randall.

It’s not clear just yet to what degree Wasm will drive a transition to another era of computing, but the potential to change almost every aspect of IT is on the horizon. Ultimately, the issue will be decided by how quickly developers are willing to embrace yet another software artifact for building and deploying applications. What is clear is that the number of platforms that will make it possible to experiment with Wasm are starting to multiply.

October 3, 2022
Business Leaders Will Trade Speed for Security

A global survey of 600 C-level executives conducted by CloudBees found that when it comes to building software, more than three-quarters of respondents said it is more important to be secure and compliant than fast and compliant.

As a result, more than three-quarters (77%) also noted their organization is implementing a shift left strategy for implementing security and compliance even though 58% recognized that those efforts created additional burdens for developers.

Three-quarters of respondents also conceded that compliance (76%) and security (75%) challenges limited their company’s ability to innovate. Nevertheless, 83% said shift left is important for them as an organization despite the fact that 88% of executives said their software supply chain is secure or very secure. However, only 33% of respondents said their software supply chain is completely compliant.

Not surprisingly, 86% are focusing on compliance more now than they were two years ago and, in the wake of a series of high-profile breaches of software supply chains, 82% are more concerned about attacks.

CloudBees CEO Anuj Kapur said it’s clear there is a greater need to reduce security and compliance burdens for developers by putting guardrails in place that automate DevSecOps processes. The survey noted that only 22% of executives believed their software delivery supply chain is completely automated, while another 37% said it is close to being automated. Only 22% said their compliance process is completely automated, with 35% believing it is almost completely automated.

Three in five (59%) executives said they have all, or mostly all, external tools for security and compliance issues and 29% said they have a mix of internal and external tools. Only 11% use mostly internal tools. A full 90% said their risk management team has the tools, knowledge and expertise to build and/or maintain a secure software supply chain.

The real challenge, of course, is that while compliance issues are relatively static, new security issues arise all the time. Developers make mistakes or a new zero-day vulnerability is discovered after an application has been deployed in a production environment. It’s critical for organizations to embrace automation to enable developers to address those issues as part of a continuously automated update cycle, noted Kapur.

As more responsibility for compliance and security is shifted left, the degree to which DevOps workflows will need to be adjusted will naturally vary by organization. However, the days when developers could ignore security issues during the application development process are all but over. The leadership of organizations of all sizes are making it clear they want to see a reduction in the number of security and compliance issues that arise in production environments.

Ideally, efforts to build more secure and compliant applications would not slow down the rate at which applications are being built and deployed. However, the CloudBees survey made it clear that more executives are willing to prioritize security and compliance over speed of application development. The issue is how to strike a balance between what are clearly two competing priorities.

October 3, 2022
Five Great DevOps Jobs Opportunities

DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience.

Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers. Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role, it creates an opportunity for others.

The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale offered.

We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

Indeed.com

Level Home
Redwood City, California
DevOps/SRE Manager
$175,000 to $275,000

Monster.com

Jobot
Houston, Texas
Senior DevOps Engineer
$150,000 to $180,000

LinkedIn

Lenovo
Colorado, New York City, Nevada and Washington
Software DevOps
$125,000 to $145,000

SimplyHired

Spring Health
New York, New York
DevOps Engineer
$110,000 to $150,000

Dice.com

Black Knight, Inc.
Remote
DevOps Engineer III
$91,000 to $125,000

October 3, 2022
Atlassian Aims to Improve Collaboration With DevOps Teams

At an Atlassian Presents: WorkLife event today, Atlassian furthered its efforts to integrate the tools technology and business professionals use to manage processes.

Erika Trautman, general manager and vice president of product for Work Management for All at Atlassian, said that as organizations increasingly rely on digital processes to engage customers, partners and employees, the need to facilitate collaboration across a diverse set of knowledge workers is becoming more pressing.

As part of that effort, Atlassian is now making generally available a Smart Links capability within the Atlassian platform. Smart Links can be used to integrate both Atlassian applications such as Trello and Jira as well as third-party applications. That capability is now critical because there has been a Cambrian explosion of adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications that all need to be integrated into a common set of workflows, noted Trautman. Otherwise, each SaaS application environment becomes yet another walled garden that prevents any meaningful collaboration, she added.

In addition, the company announced that Atlas, a directory that tracks projects and simplifies communications across teams using disparate applications, will become generally available next month. DevOps teams, for example, will be able to synchronize Jira events with projects being tracked via the Atlas platform.

Atlassian has also streamlined the tools it provides to reduce the number of steps required to administer its applications and onboard new users.

Finally, the company also has launched Atlassian Together, a single subscription offering through which organizations can license its Trello, Confluence, Atlas and Jira Work Management applications delivered via the cloud. An enterprise organization with more than 5,000 users can now, for example, license those applications for $11 per user.

Atlassian is making a concerted effort to enable organizations to more easily collaborate at a time when they have become more dependent on software than ever, noted Trautman. In many cases, businesses are now trying to adjust to the rapid rate at which software is being delivered thanks to the adoption of DevOps best practices, she noted.

As such, there is a greater need for integration between tools such as Jira that development teams use to manage projects and a wide range of tools used by knowledge workers residing in various departments, said Trautman. In effect, Atlassian is trying to enable organizations to reduce the “collaboration tax” they incur as workflows span multiple silos, she added.

In fact, in many cases, organizations are struggling to keep pace with how agile software development teams have become. The irony is that not too long ago business executives routinely complained about how long it took IT organizations to adjust as business conditions changed. Now, many businesses are rolling out additional digital capabilities via software updates that can be made multiple times a month.

The rate at which organizations will collaborate across departments will naturally vary, but the days when each department was a fiefdom unto itself are coming to an end. The challenge and opportunity may now be determining how modern organizations should be structured once it becomes easier to collaborate.

September 29, 2022
Latest DORA Report From Google Surfaces Raft of DevOps Challenges

The annual Accelerate State of DevOps 2022 report published today by the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) team at Google found the percentage of high performers is at a four-year low, with the percentage of low performers rising dramatically from 7% in 2021 to 19% in 2022.

Based on a survey of 1,350 DevOps professionals, the report evaluated organizations based on the five DORA metrics: Deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service, change failure rate and operational performance. The DORA team also identified clusters of DevOps teams ranging from “starters” to “flowing” based on their overall maturity. Only 17% of respondents achieved a ‘flow’ state defined by high reliability, high stability and high throughput characteristics.

The DORA survey sample shifted this year to include more respondents that are earlier in their careers than in previous reports. However, Claire Peters, DORA research lead at Google, said that while there are a lot of factors that impact those metrics, the current hypothesis is that the COVID-19 pandemic has taken a toll on DevOps productivity as more DevOps professionals continue to work remotely.

The report noted a marked shift in deployment targets requiring new skills, with 54% of respondents now working with container artifacts.

Overall, the report finds software delivery performance is beneficial to organizational performance when operational performance is also high. The challenge is the number of organizations that have achieved high operational performance is relatively small. In fact, the report also noted that site reliability engineering (SRE) practices had a negative impact on software delivery performance until an organization achieved a high level of SRE maturity.

The report also concluded that organizations that built software on and for the cloud tended to have 1.4 times higher organizational performance than those that didn’t. The percentage of respondents using public clouds is 76%, up from 56% in 2021, while the number of respondents not using a cloud stands at 10.5%. Usage of multiple public clouds is at 26%, while 35% reported using a private cloud.

Less clear is the impact on DevOps teams of shifting application security left. The report suggested the biggest challenge organizations face when it comes to achieving application security have more to do with cultural issues than any technical shortcomings. The report notes that organizations that focus on accelerating software delivery without implementing meaningful DevSecOps best practices find themselves in a vicious counterproductive cycle that results in applications being successfully deployed in production environments less often.

Peters noted that there is greater developer fatigue because organizations attempt to address security issues either just before an application is deployed or they remediate applications after they are deployed. Organizations that have low levels of security practices are 1.4 times more likely to experience developer burnout.

The DORA team used both the supply-chain levels for secure artifacts (SLSA) framework defined by Google and the Secure Software Development Framework (SSDF) defined by the National Institute of Standards (NIST) to evaluate organizations. The most widely-adopted practice is application security scanning within a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) system, with 63% of respondents reporting these tools are “very” or “completely” established. Preserving code history and using build scripts are also highly established, the report finds.

In general, Peters said the report suggested the biggest predictor of application security success was whether an organization had a high-trust, low-blame culture focused on performance. Organizations that have these cultures tend to have higher organizational performance. Similarly, organizations with teams that felt supported through funding and leadership sponsorships tended to have higher organizational performance, the report noted. In addition, team stability and positive perceptions about one’s team also tended to lead to higher levels of organizational performance. Lastly, companies that offer flexible work arrangements tended to see higher levels of organizational performance.

Each organization, as always, will implement DevOps best practices in ways that best fit its internal culture. However, the latest DORA report makes it clear that the more empowered a DevOps team is the more proficient they tend to become.

September 28, 2022
CloudBees Acquires ReleaseIQ to Advance DevOps Orchestration

CloudBees announced today it has acquired ReleaseIQ, a provider of an orchestration platform for automating software delivery via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

Sacha Labourey, chief strategy officer for CloudBees, said the addition of ReleaseIQ to the CloudBees platform will provide more visibility into and control over software delivery on an end-to-end basis.

CloudBees already provides a Flow orchestration engine within its continuous delivery platform. However, ReleaseIQ provides a similar capability across multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms using a SaaS platform that is more accessible.

The ReleaseIQ platform is designed to enable DevOps teams to both create and maintain pipelines using a no-code tool. That enables greater transparency into workflows via dashboards that also provide optimization recommendations. That capability makes it much simpler to troubleshoot software deployments.

Labourey said that while ReleaseIQ can be integrated with multiple platforms including CloudBees CI, Jenkins, CircleCI, GitLab, Bamboo, ArgoCD and others, the primary focus will remain on the open source Jenkins platform that still owns the lion’s share of the DevOps market. The overall CloudBees goal remains to employ automation and remove as much friction as possible from DevOps workflows as part of an ongoing effort to improve developer productivity, he noted. CloudBees, however, regardless of the level of DevOps maturity within any organization, is committed to meeting customers where they are versus requiring them to rip and replace existing investments, Labourey added.

The overall level of DevOps maturity may vary widely both within and between organizations. However, as more organizations realize the extent to which they depend on software to drive digital business transformation processes, the need to further automate application development and delivery becomes more apparent. While CI is widely used today, the number of organizations that have consistently implemented CD is fairly limited. The underlying infrastructure that software is deployed on typically has a unique set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that each CD platform needs to support. Platforms such as ReleaseIQ provide a higher level of abstraction through which managing the pipelines that deliver software becomes simpler.

In general, most organizations are trying to strike some level of balance between centralizing the management of DevOps workflows and enabling development tools to adopt whatever tools they prefer. It’s not uncommon for application development teams to independently adopt any number of tools that ultimately need to be integrated with a DevOps toolchain. Each of those tools, however, contains metadata that needs to be shared with a centralized orchestration engine that automates a range of tasks across multiple pipelines based on the metadata collected from each tool.

There are, of course, still a lot of manual DevOps processes that should be automated. CloudBees is positioning ReleaseIQ as the orchestration engine for both unifying the management of pipelines and, ultimately. enabling value stream management across increasingly complex application development environments. It may take a while to fully realize that ambition, but with the acquisition of ReleaseIQ, a new foundation is being laid.

September 28, 2022
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience.

Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.

Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.

The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.

We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

LinkedIn

Underdog Fantasy
Remote
Senior DevOps Engineer
$150,000 to $240,000

SimplyHired

DISH Wireless
Littleton. Colorado
Senior DevOps Engineer
$106,210 – $143,750

Monster.com

UMD Energy Solutions
Bonita Springs, Florida
AWS Cloud Engineer
$100,000 to $120,000

Indeed.com

Medispend
Remote
DevOps Engineer
$100,000 to $130,000

Dice.com

Venusgeo
Clinton, New Jersey
AWS DevOps Lead
$120,000+

September 26, 2022
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience.

Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.

Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.

The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.

We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

SimplyHired

AmeriSave Mortgage

Remote

DevOps Engineer

$99,000 to $130,000

LinkedIn

Sparkrock

Remote

Vice president of platform development

$160,000

Indeed.com

Stanford University

Redwood City, Calif.

DevOps Engineer

$117,000 to $148,000

Monster.com

Ness USA

Remote

DevOps Engineer

$100,000 to $150,000

ZipRecruiter

LS Global Group

Remote

DevOps Engineer

$115,000 to $175,000

September 19, 2022