devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

  • COVID-19 Pandemic: Appian Offers Free HR App

    COVID-19 Pandemic: Appian Offers Free HR App

    Appian, a provider of a low-code platform for building applications, has decided to make available a free application to help organizations with 1,000 or more employees track healthcare incidents stemming from the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Designed mainly for human resources (HR) professionals, the COVID-19 Response Management application is designed to track the health and work status of all employees by geography and department, including their travel history.

    Appian CEO Matt Calkins said that while Appian has built a handful of applications for customers before by request, the company decided to leverage its expertise to provide a free application to help organizations maintain business continuity during the COVID-19 pandemic that is forcing employees to work remotely for the foreseeable future. Organizations can either access the COVID-19 Response Management application as a cloud-based service provided by Appian or download and install it themselves, he said.

    Organizations in highly regulated industries that need to still comply with rules concerning personally identifiable information (PII) are likely to want to run the COVID-19 Response Management application in a local data center, noted Calkins. The cloud-based instance of the application runs in an environment that is already certified to be compliant with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA).

    Calkins said the COVID-19 Response Management application is designed to be set up and configured in less than two hours. Because the application was built using low-code tools, COVID-19 Response Management application is highly customizable using the company’s namesake low-code platform, so as the crisis continues to evolve, organizations will be able to extend the application as they best see fit.

    Millions of individuals, unfortunately, may contract the COVID-19 coronavirus or may be unable to work because they need to care for loved ones who have fallen sick in the weeks and months ahead. As organizations race to implement business continuity plans, many of them are likely to discover their existing HR applications were not designed to help manage a highly distributed workforce, which may need to be augmented with little notice. The COVID-19 Response Management application provides a way to manage talent in addition to other HR functions, noted Calkins.

    The Appian application is also designed to enable HR teams to function as the hub around which organizations can build online communities that employees can use to interact and provide mutual support. For example, employees can connect with each other to volunteer their time to go shopping on behalf of employees who may be quarantined.

    As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies, many organizations are clearly entering unchartered territory. Workforces may be sharply reduced or increased depending on vertical. The number of temporary workers may skyrocket in some cases. Regardless of the outcome, most organizations will need access to applications that enable them to be as flexible as possible to deal with whatever lies ahead. In some cases, organizations may have HR applications in place that enable them to achieve that goal. In most cases, however, it’s probable they don’t.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Cato Networks Offers Instant SD-WAN Service

    Cato Networks Offers Instant SD-WAN Service

    Cato Networks has added an instant-on capability to its software-defined wide area network service (SD-WAN) service to make it easier for IT teams to provide employees with remote access to applications.

    Dave Greenfield, technology evangelist for Cato Networks, said rather than having to configure and install a virtual private network (VPN) client on every device to access applications, IT teams can simply share a URL to provide network access via a single sign-on protocol without requiring client software. At a time when many IT teams are scrambling to allow every employee to work at home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 coronavirus, the Cato Software Defined Perimeter (SDP) service provides an alternative approach to achieve that goal at scale, he said.

    The Cato SDP network is an instance of a global SD-WAN service co-managed by Cato Networks. IT teams still control who gains access to what applications using multifactor authentication, while Cato Networks manages the underlying network and security infrastructure, including all the firewalls and endpoint protection software. As such, Greenfield said, Cato SDP is one of the first instances of a service based on what Gartner is now describing as a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture.

    Greenfield said trying to scale access using legacy VPN software is problematic because it requires IT teams to acquire more software licenses and bandwidth, while end users are provided with passwords to access the corporate network, which can be easily hacked. And, perhaps most problematic, most VPNs limit the number of simultaneous users allowed on the network.

    Cato SDP provides access to a zero trust network environment that only provides access to applications that end users have been specifically authorized to use, said Greenfield, noting all of that can be accomplished in as little as 10 minutes.

    Cato SD-WAN

    Since the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, Greenfield said Cato Networks has seen a sharp increase in usage of its global network, which consists of points-of-presence residing in third-party data centers distributed around the world. This setup makes it possible to optimize application experiences based on where end users are physically accessing the internet.

    It may be a few months to as long as two years before the COVID-19 pandemic subsides. What today may be viewed as a singular disruptive event could very well be a harbinger for how organizations will need to work from now on. Even once IT teams get everyone in their organization up and running from home, many of them will have to ask themselves how long they are prepared to manage IT as a remote service. The emergence of SASE-based services provides an alternative co-managed approach that allows IT teams to rely on an external service provider without having to give up control over their applications to a managed service provider (MSP).

    Naturally, it may be a while before the current crisis subsides enough for organizations to realize they may need to fundamentally change the way they consume IT. The only thing that is for certain right now is that conversation is all but inevitable.

    — Mike Vizard

  • 42Crunch Extends API Security Alliance With Microsoft

    42Crunch Extends API Security Alliance With Microsoft

    42Crunch this week announced it has extended an existing alliance with Microsoft to now include support for Microsoft Azure Pipelines for its REST API Static Security Testing Tool. Previously, 42Crunch only provided support for the Microsoft Visual Studio integrated development environment (IDE).

    Dmitry Sotnikov, chief product and marketing officer for 42Crunch, said support for the Microsoft IDE assumes that developers will run security tests themselves. By integrating its API security testing tool with the Microsoft continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, it now becomes possible to make testing APIs for security vulnerabilities part of a DevOps process, he said.

    That approach means organizations don’t have to rely on developers to remember to run a security test on their APIs. Instead, security testing of APIs becomes just another gate in the CI/CD process that gets automatically conducted, he noted.

    The company has already integrated its API security testing tool with other CI/CD platforms at the request of individual customers. 42Crunch will be moving to make those integrations commercially available in the months ahead, said Sotnikov.

    As IT organizations have become more adept at thwarting attacks aimed at end users, cybercriminals are now increasingly focusing their efforts on APIs. Akamai, a provider of content delivery networks, recently reported that from December 2017 through November 2019 it observed 85,422,079,109 credential abuse attacks across its customer base. Nearly 20%, or 16,557,875,875, of those attacks were against hostnames that were clearly identified as API endpoints. Many of those attacks involve, for example, unexpected injections of values to a call made to an API, noted Sotnikov.

    The REST API Static Security Testing Tool can locate API contract files in the repository and run more than 200 security checks based on OpenAPI standard requirements, authentication, authorization and data validation. This makes sure that no new or changed API be deployed in production without meeting those standards.

    Issues discovered are also prioritized by impact and each issue is accompanied by a knowledge base article explaining the issue, its severity, exploit scenario and suggested ways to fix it.

    Sotnikov said the REST API Static Security Testing Tool provides a tangible means for DevOps teams to embrace best DevSecOps processes. Too much of what passes for DevSecOps today amounts to little more than attempting to blame developers for cybersecurity issues, he noted, adding organizations that want to embrace DevSecOps in a meaningful way need to put tools into the hands of DevOps teams that enable them to address vulnerabilities once they are discovered and prioritized.

    It’s also critical to provide those tools within the context of existing DevOps processes; otherwise, developers are likely to resist changes to their existing workflow processes, Sotnikov said.

    It remains to be seen how DevOps and cybersecurity teams will meld their respective cultures to drive DevSecOps. It is likely cybersecurity teams will continue to define controls and discover vulnerabilities. However, as DevOps teams continue to make security a natural extension of the quality assurance process associated with building any application, the number of vulnerabilities being discovered after an application is deployed in production should decline steadily.

    — Mike Vizard

  • 2nd Watch Allies With GitLab for Managed DevOps Service

    2nd Watch Allies With GitLab for Managed DevOps Service

    2nd Watch today launched a managed DevOps service based on the continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform from GitLab that it will operate on behalf of customers in addition to coaching them on how to adopt best DevOps practices.

    Stefana Muller, a senior product manager, said the 2nd Watch Managed DevOps service combines the managed and professional services capabilities of 2nd Watch into a single offering. That approach is required because when it comes to DevOps most organizations need as much help transitioning their culture as they will operating their CI/CD environment, she said.

    One of the major challenges organizations face when trying to embrace DevOps is they typically spend a lot of money upfront only to see those efforts flounder when changing the internal culture of the organization becomes too difficult, Muller said. As part of an effort to smooth that transition, 2nd Watch DevOps experts will assess an organization’s readiness to adopt DevOps tools and processes and then train internal teams on DevOps fundamentals such as managing infrastructure as code and Git principles. The assessment is based on a Culture, Automation, Lean Practices, Measurement and Sharing (CALMS) methodology.

    The 2nd Watch service is built around an on-premises edition of the GitLab CI/CD platform that it will host and upgrade on behalf of a customer on either an Amazon Web Services (AWS) or Microsoft public cloud platform. The DevOps service will focus on enabling organizations to build both monolithic and microservices-based applications faster because no organization today has fully transitioned to microservices. The company already provides a managed Kubernetes service for building and deploying applications based on a microservices architecture.

    2nd Watch chose to partner with GitLab because of the completeness of that CI/CD platform, which among other things includes integrated security modules that can be employed to advance DevSecOps practices as well, Muller said, noting that longer-term, 2nd Watch is planning to layer a more robust set of managed DevSecOps services on top of the GitLab platform.

    Managed DevOps offerings are starting to proliferate as the number of services providers that have attained certifications from multiple IT vendors has increased. It’s not clear to what degree organizations will prefer to rely on these services just yet. However, it’s is apparent many organizations are trying to shift as much of their limited resources to building application code versus managing IT infrastructure. It’s also possible that as the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic becomes more widespread many organizations will need to rely on external service providers to manage their DevOps environments.

    Regardless of the motivation, organizations that are at the beginning of their DevOps journey clearly will need more help than those that are further along the DevOps maturity curve. The decision most organizations will need to make is to what degree will they rely on a managed DevOps service to accelerate their transition versus opting to rely permanently on an external IT service provider to manage one of their most critical IT environments.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Coronavirus Response: Atlassian Expands Free Software

    Coronavirus Response: Atlassian Expands Free Software

    Atlassian announced today it will make cloud-based versions of Jira Software, Confluence, Jira Service Desk and Jira Core available for free as part of an effort to assist organizations whose employees are working remotely to help combat the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic.

    Robert Chatwani, chief marketing officer for Atlassian, said given the current unprecedented situation the company has decided to increase the number of free versions of its software, including Jira project management software, which is widely employed by software development teams.

    The company already makes available free versions of its Trello, Bitbucket and Opsgenie software. Atlassian is hoping that once the current COVID-19 coronavirus crisis subsides, a much broader base of end users including ones from business units will have gained some firsthand experience employing its project management applications and collaboration tools, said Chatwani. Previously, Atlassian revealed it has a goal of having 100 million active users of its software.

    Chatwani said many organizations are finding that having employees working from home is the new normal for the foreseeable future. While regions in Asia appear to be recovering from the initial COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak, that does not appear to be the case in other regions anytime soon. Once organizations re-engineer their workflows, they may discover some knowledge workers are more productive working remotely, he noted.

    Less clear right now is whether having most or all employees working remotely is a temporary measure in the furtherance of a business continuity strategy or simply an inevitable future of work that, because of the current crisis, is arriving much earlier than expected.

    Of course, not every employee is psychologically tempered to work from home. Software developers, for example, may be more accustomed to working in isolation than project managers. Chatwani said it will be important for organizations to establish new routines to maintain organizational cohesion, including determining when development teams should launch sprints to build elements of an application. Managers also may want to designate “office hours” during which anyone can contact them online to make sure employees feel they are accessible, he added.

    Organizations should also get used to the idea that children may be both seen and heard while online meetings are occurring, given the fact that millions of children are now being schooled at home, Chatwani noted.

    Many organizations to one degree or another have been relying more on remote workers. There are even some companies that don’t have physical headquarters—all the employees already work remotely. Some of those organizations have even gone so far as to define a time zone around which the organization will standardize on regardless of where employees are physically located.

    Whatever the strategy employed, organizations that hope to succeed in this new climate need to go well beyond ensuring remote network connections are available and secure—they need to find a way to either maintain their existing processes and culture to make sure that whatever product or service they provide continues to be built or delivered in a way that allows the organization to survive and hopefully continue to thrive.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Oracle Adds APIs to Java SDK To Advance DevOps

    Oracle Adds APIs to Java SDK To Advance DevOps

    Oracle announced it is making available the Java 14 software development kit (SDK), which provides access to several additional capabilities designed to help advance DevOps adoptions within IT organizations that still rely heavily on Java to build enterprise applications.

    Those capabilities include a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) to enable continuous monitoring of JDK Flight Recorder data and a set of APIs that make it easier to access foreign memory.

    In addition, via an incubator module Oracle is now providing access to a Packaging Tool that will enable developers to package Java applications and runtimes for distribution in platform-specific formats. That capability is being exposed as an incubator module because the associated APIs have not been finalized, which means they are subject to change in future releases.

    The Java 14 SDK adds Java language support for switch expressions to be used as either an expression or statement and extends the availability of the low-latency Z Garbage Collector to macOS and Windows.

    Finally, Oracle has added support for a Pattern Matching capability that eliminates the need for boilerplate code and a preview of a tool that makes it simpler to declare data immutable.

    Aurelio Garcia-Ribeyro, director of product management for Java SE, said a lot of the capabilities being added to Java SDK were developed as part of the ongoing Panama and Amber research projects that in some cases have been in development and testing for years.

    Despite the rise of rival programming languages, Garcia-Ribeyro said enterprise IT organizations continue to rely on Java to build most of their applications, especially mission-critical backend systems.

    The challenge is modernizing the processes via which Java applications are built and deployed. Many organizations, for example, are embracing containers and microservices to build next-generation applications. As that transition occurs the need to embrace best DevOps practices becomes more apparent because applications themselves are becoming more complex. The upside, of course, is that microservices also make it possible to build more robust applications faster, which has become a critical requirement as organizations embrace digital business transformation.

    Of course, no two organizations are likely to be at the same point on the DevOps maturity curve. In fact, in many cases, DevOps adoption is being driven from the bottom up as developers embrace new capabilities being added to familiar tools such as the Java Development Kit from Oracle. In some cases, the SDK will be used to build new applications while other members of the development team employ it to modernize legacy applications. Before long, however, IT operations teams start to realize how monitoring APIs and packaging tools are transforming how IT operations are managed.

    Naturally, Oracle is hoping all these new capabilities will help keep organizations focused on Java as the primary means for building enterprise applications at a time when developers have more options than ever. The one thing that Oracle has most in its favor is that most organizations don’t want to retrain developers to learn how to master a new programming language unless it can’t be avoided.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Survey Finds More Data Disruption Occurring

    Survey Finds More Data Disruption Occurring

    A global survey of 1,000 IT decision-makers with more than 250 employees conducted by Dell Technologies finds on average organizations managed 13.53 petabytes (PB) of data in 2019, a nearly 40% increase since 2018.

    The same survey also finds that as the amount of data has increased, so, too, has the cost of downtime. Those costs increased by 54% in the same period, resulting in an estimated total cost of $810,018 in 2019.

    The survey also notes 82% of respondents suffered a disruptive event in the last 12 months, with the total cost of a data loss now on average exceeding $1 million.

    Not surprisingly, the survey finds that a lot of the data that organizations are trying to protect resides in the cloud, thanks mainly to the rise of a variety of application use cases. The top five areas of investment cited by survey respondents include cloud-native applications (58%), artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) (53%), software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications (51%), 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (49%), and Internet of Things/endpoints (36%).

    Nearly, three-quarters of respondents (71%) noted these emerging technologies create more data protection complexity and 61% said they increase risks. The survey also finds 81% of respondents said their existing data protection solutions will not be able to meet all future business challenges.

    Specific areas where existing data protection platforms are expected to fall short include being able to recover data after a cyberattack (69%), recover data from a data loss incident (64%), comply with regional data governance regulations (62%), and meeting backup and recovery service level objectives (62%).

    Among organizations that have adopted these emerging technologies the percentage of organizations struggling with adequately protecting data is as follows:

    • 5G and cloud edge infrastructure (67%)
    • AI and ML platforms (64%)
    • Cloud-native applications (60%)
    • IoT and endpoint (59%)
    • Robotic process automation (56%)

    The survey also finds organizations prefer public cloud/SaaS (43%), hybrid cloud (42%) and private cloud (39%) as deployment environments for new applications. In the case of edge computing deployments, 62% cited private clouds as being the platform that will be relied on most to protect data.

    Bob Ganley, senior marketing consultant for cloud at Dell EMC, said the biggest challenge for organizations will be finding a way to centrally manage backup and recovery across multiple cloud computing platforms. Those platforms inevitably will span multiple types of public and private clouds accessed as a service and deployed in local data centers. Most organizations are relying on a “mash-up” approach to cloud computing where there is no unified control plane, so as they add each new cloud platform their total cost increases, he said Ganley, noting it’s now only a matter of time before IT organizations start to centralize the management of those multiple clouds to rein in those costs.

    It’s not clear to what degree that centralization effort will revolve around IT automation enabled by application programming interfaces (APIs) and best DevOps processes versus traditional data protection tools based on graphical user interfaces (GUIs). However, given the amount of data involved, it is more than likely that existing approaches to data protection are not going to scale, so a fundamental change in how backup and recovery is managed is now all but inevitable.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Tasktop Delivers Viz Value Stream Management App

    Tasktop Delivers Viz Value Stream Management App

    Tasktop this week announced the general availability of an application to manage projects based on a flow framework that captures events as they occur across the software development toolchain.

    Company CEO Mik Kersten said Tasktop Viz is the first substantiation of the flow framework in software that provides a value stream management application to enable organizations to more effectively manage software development projects. Tasktop Viz doesn’t necessarily replace project management software as a system of record for billing purposes, for example, said Kersten; however, it does provide a way to visually model the software development environment in a way that makes it easier to identify bottlenecks and potential opportunities to reallocate resources.

    Kersten said from a management perspective, existing approaches to managing software development projects are broken. They depend too much on software developers to manually enter data to update a project management application, which they don’t do as often as they should because it takes time away from developing software, he said. Tasktop Viz takes advantage of application programming interfaces (APIs) to automatically capture metadata from across the software development toolchain, providing instant visibility into software development projects without requiring DevOps teams to engage in an additional coding, Kersten noted.

    Tasktop Viz

    Kersten has been making a case for the adoption of an approach to managing software development projects based on the flow framework for several years. Tasktop Viz now provides IT teams with an application that is designed from the ground up using that model.

    Of course, the concept of value stream management applications has been around for some time. The debate now is not so much over the value of these applications as much as it is which architectural approach to building these applications best reflects modern software development. As the number of dependencies between projects continues to expand, it’s becoming next to impossible for organizations to manage multiple software development projects relying solely on spreadsheets and existing project management applications.

    That issue is further exacerbated by the fact that businesses are now more dependent on software than ever, so any delay to a project could have a dramatic impact on future revenues.

    Kersten said that despite the obvious business benefits, the biggest obstacle to adoption is more psychological than technical. Many software development teams are reluctant to adopt tools that might illustrate how chaotic the software development process within their organization really is. It’s critical that organizations that adopt value stream management applications do so with an eye toward wanting organizations to improve rather than just deploying another tool to measure metrics that are used to increase the amount of code being written.

    Of course, there’s no correlation between the amount of code being written and the quality of the applications being developed. The real challenge is to not just accelerate the rate at which applications are being developed, but also to ensure that once those applications are deployed in a production environment the number of fixes required are kept to the absolute minimum possible.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Catchpoint Provides Free Remote Monitoring Tools to Help Combat COVID-19 Pandemic

    Catchpoint Provides Free Remote Monitoring Tools to Help Combat COVID-19 Pandemic

    Catchpoint announced today it will provide free access to tools to monitor remote network connections to help organizations that are helping to combat the COVID-19 virus by requiring employees to work from home.

    Company CEO Mehdi Daoudi said supporting an entire workforce that suddenly needs to work remotely is clearly a major IT challenge. To enable IT teams to cope with that transition, Catchpoint is providing access to free tools that monitor access to software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications using agent software installed on endpoints. The company also makes available a browser extension through which remote users can discover instantly what is slowing down application performance, which they can then share with their IT support teams.

    Catchpoint is also making available an Enterprise Digital Experience Monitoring for free for 90 days to IT organizations that want to more proactively monitor application experience. That service is based on a Global Monitoring Network that consists of 825 worldwide locations through which Catchpoint monitors network traffic flows.

    With large numbers of workers accessing applications remotely, many IT teams are about to discover how intermittent network access from home can be. Not all neighborhoods and residences have access to the same levels of network bandwidth. With more workers trying to access backend network services remotely—some with children who are home from school because of COVID-19—the probability of connectivity issues is high for the next several months. In addition, Daoudi noted the need to have employees working from home could go on for as long as three to six months, which means many employees may decide to relocate to other places, such as summer residences, where connectivity is not as robust as their primary home service.

    Rather than viewing the virus outbreak as roughly the equivalent of an extended snowstorm, IT teams would be well-advised to make sure critical employees have access to multiple networks. In some cases, that may mean providing employees with multiple wireless access cards for different networks in case the services provided by one carrier become overly taxed or simply inaccessible. Daoudi said Catchpoint is already seeing divergent levels of network performance between carriers operating in the same geographic regions.

    At the same time, IT teams that operate in highly regulated industries may want to make sure employees are not inadvertently making use of their neighbor’s wireless network—or, potentially worse, accessing applications over a wireless network provided by their local café.

    It’s too early to say with any certainty just how fragile network services in the months ahead may become. What is clear is providing network bandwidth and making certain those connections are secure requires a lot of planning on the part of internal IT teams. In some localities, there is still time to put those contingency plans in place. Elsewhere, employees are already being told to work from home by local and state officials.

    Whatever the outcome, the dependency organizations have on IT and IT professionals is about to become more apparent than ever.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Atlassian Adds No-Code Automation Tool to Jira Cloud

    Atlassian Adds No-Code Automation Tool to Jira Cloud

    Atlassian announced today it has added a no-code tool to enable DevOps teams to make it easier to customize Jira project management software without having to learn how to code.

    Sean Regan, head of growth for software teams at Atlassian, said Automation for Jira will now become a core part of Jira Cloud that will be made available to all 65,000 customers using Jira software. Originally developed by Code Barrell, the tool was acquired by Atlassian last year. Previously, it had been available as an add-on adopted by about 6,500 customers, he said.

    The goal is to enable administrators that track projects to reduce the amount of time they spend on manually entering data. On average, organizations are spending 51 hours a month on administrative tasks involving the management of projects, Regan noted. Organizations should take inventory of those tasks and use Automation for Jira to start automating the tasks that are the most repetitive, he said.

    Automation for Jira, Regan said, is part of a larger ambitious effort to make Jira software accessible to more than 100 million active end users. By employing a visual tool to automate tasks it should become easier for a broader number of organizations to customize processes by defining rules that trigger events. Organizations will not be forced to depend on developers to write code to create those workflows, he noted.

    Automation for Jira

    Automation for Jira is also part of a concerted effort to modernize a venerable Jira project management application that has been widely employed by software development teams for decades. The ultimate goal is to enable software development teams to spend more time building applications versus trying to ascertain the status of any given development project, said Regan.

    The no-code Automation for Jira tool is also designed to integrate with collaboration tools Slack and Microsoft Teams within the context of a set of best DevOps practices. In fact, Regan noted any time there is an issue on a software development project it almost always comes down to a lack of collaboration between all the stakeholders involved.

    There is, of course, a lot more appreciation for project management software among DevOps teams that typically are trying to organize around multiple projects at the same time. A delay on one project might present an opportunity to reallocate resources to accelerate another. That can’t happen, however, if no one is aware of what bottlenecks exist in the first place.

    Not everyone appreciates all the nuances of project management. The less obtrusive project management becomes the more effective it tends to be. Developers are especially notorious for not always updating project management applications, which usually results in project managers having to nag them to share information that other teams are counting on before they can move forward. Hopefully, there may come a day when all project management applications are updated automatically. In the meantime, the less time spent on manual tasks the happier all the members of the software development team are likely to be.

    — Mike Vizard