devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Mike Vizard

New Relic Extends AI to Identify Alert Coverage Gaps

New Relic this week added additional artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to its observability platform that make it possible to detect and resolve alert coverage gaps.

Camden Swita, a senior product manager for New Relic, said it’s not uncommon for DevOps teams to discover an issue that the existing alerts they put in place were not designed to address. New Relic is adding machine learning algorithms at no additional cost that are designed to identify anomalies indicative of those potential issues. The platform then surfaces recommended alerts that DevOps teams can apply or further customize as they see fit, he added.

Those machine learning algorithms ensure DevOps teams are tracking the right thresholds to ensure there are no blind spots that could adversely affect application performance, noted Swita.

New Relic is employing both predictive and generative AI to enable DevOps team to detect and resolve issues faster. The company has been using machine learning algorithms for predictive AI for several years and, more recently, started providing early access to a generative AI tool dubbed Grok.

The overall goal is to make the capabilities of an observability platform more accessible, Swita said. This is accomplished by surfacing issues without requiring a software engineer to craft intricate queries to interrogate metrics, logs and traces, he noted.

The AI capabilities also serve to reduce the amount of alert noise; it’s now possible to more easily understand the root cause of an issue and reduce the total number of alerts that might otherwise be sent, he added.

While there’s no doubt AI will help democratize DevOps by making it possible to write scripts and better manage workflows, it might be a while before DevOps teams trust the recommendations made. AI models typically require some time before they understand how an IT environment functions, and not every initial recommendation may be valid. In time, however, DevOps teams will find themselves increasingly supervising processes that AI models are executing.

In addition, there are competing approaches to building large language models (LLMs) that drive generative AI. For example, it’s not clear whether chaining LLMs together will be more efficient than creating a single large ‘parent’ LLM that has ‘child’ relationships with smaller LLMs, noted Swita.

In the meantime, DevOps teams would be well-advised to list tasks that are likely to be automated by AI models. Many of them will tend to be manual tasks that most software engineers don’t especially relish, so in that regard, there’s naturally a lot of interest in AI. It remains to be seen, however, whether various forms of AI might one day automate an entire DevOps workflow. In fact, most DevOps engineers are going to set a high bar for AI models that, at the very least, will be expected to perform a task as well as humans before it’s trusted completely.

August 24, 2023
IBM to Provide Hybrid Cloud Service Based on VMware Cloud

At the VMware Explore 2023 conference this week, IBM announced that it will soon provide a fully managed service based on a streamlined edition of VMware Cloud.

Brendan Kinkade, vice president for independent software vendors, technology and hybrid cloud partnerships for IBM Global Sales, said VMware is now making available editions of VMware Cloud that are both easier to deploy and manage and, just as importantly, migrate between cloud platforms and on-premises environments as IT teams see fit.

IBM is committed to using that platform to deliver a managed VMware Cloud service that will span hybrid cloud computing environments aligned to an NIST-validated framework, he added. That approach is critical because it will enable IT teams to apply VMware license credits to any instance of VMware Cloud no matter where it is deployed, noted Kinkade.

In addition, the streamlined edition of VMware Cloud doesn’t use proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) to make it simpler to port IT environments to another cloud service or back to an on-premises IT environment whenever necessary, he added.

At the foundation of the hybrid cloud service will be an instance of a multi-tenant vCloud Director console residing on the IBM Cloud. Through the console, IT teams will be able to work with IBM to co-manage application environments.

In addition, IBM is providing a managed IBM Cloud Cyber Recovery (ICCR) Service to better secure cloud computing environments.

It’s not clear how much of IT is now being consumed as a managed service, but the COVID-19 pandemic has certainly increased that number. Many IT organizations are also finding it simpler to rely on a managed services provider (MSP) to manage infrastructure so they can focus more of their time and effort on application development, noted Kinkade.

MSPs are also in a better position to aggregate all the telemetry data needed to train artificial intelligence (AI) models that will be used to automate workflows, he added.

Exactly how DevOps workflows will evolve as organizations rely more on external service providers to manage IT infrastructure is, naturally, a work in progress within many organizations. The main challenge is aligning a unique set of continuous delivery (CD) practices for deploying and updating applications with a provider that has already defined its own workflows.

Nevertheless, given the complexity of those environments, many organizations are not able to hire and retain the IT expertise required to manage it, so the only option may be to rely on an MSP.

Each IT organization will need to decide whether to rely on an MSP, given the total cost of a service. Many organizations often wind up having a mix of workloads managed by internal IT teams and external service providers. The one thing that is certain is that as the pace at which workloads are being deployed in the cloud increases, many internal IT teams are overwhelmed by a level of complexity that will only increase.

August 23, 2023
VMware Preps Generative AI Assistants to Automate IT Workflows

At its VMware Explore 2023 conference today, VMware previewed what will become a suite of intelligent assistants that use generative artificial intelligence (AI) to automate the management of a wide range of IT tasks.

Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for cloud infrastructure at VMware, said VMware will eventually build out assistants for managing individual platforms such as VMware vSphere and the integrated VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) platform through which the company aggregates those offerings into a single platform.

VMware is creating those assistants, also known as co-pilots, using multiple large language models (LLMs) that the company uses to train AI models using code written by site reliability engineers (SREs), said Prasad. That approach ensures that the recommendations being made along with the code generated are of the highest quality, he added.

That approach will enable IT teams to identify configuration drift that might be adversely impacting performance or that could create a cybersecurity risk, for example, noted Prasad. The first of those assistants is being made available in beta for VMware Tanzu, a platform based on Kubernetes. VMware is also building an assistant for its NSX virtual networking software that analyzes security events to generate policies and rules that can be applied to firewalls in real-time as threats are identified.

It will then be up to each IT team to decide whether to implement those recommendations. Over time, it’s clear that the management of IT infrastructure is going to become increasingly automated as confidence in those recommendations increases, he added. In fact, the ultimate goal is to fulfill the promise of ‘lights-out’ IT management, said Prasad.

In effect, advances such as these will lead to the democratization of DevOps workflows as it becomes simpler to manage IT infrastructure at scale. IT organizations will be able to invest more resources in building and deploying applications rather than hiring specialists to manage IT infrastructure, noted Prasad.

In fact, the pace at which applications are built and deployed should dramatically increase in the months ahead, Prasad predicted.

The rise of generative AI creates a unique opportunity for IT teams to become more relevant than ever to their organizations. It will soon be possible to build and deploy a wide range of distributed applications capable of processing and analyzing data at the point where it is created and consumed.

While generative artificial intelligence (AI) has captured the popular imagination, it’s becoming apparent that multiple forms of AI will soon be used together to automate DevOps workflows at levels of unprecedented scale.

Machine learning algorithms, of course, are already used by many organizations to automate everything from analyzing log data to identifying security issues to surfacing patterns in tests made using multiple regression, function and unit testing tools. With the rise of generative AI, it is now possible to automatically generate code and create summaries of reports that multiple stakeholders can more easily understand. Generative AI doesn’t replace the need for previous use cases involving machine learning algorithms. Instead, generative AI makes use of a form of deep learning algorithms to create different types of AI models.

As a result, DevOps workflows will soon be invoking multiple classes of AI models to automate workflows in ways that should enable IT teams to automate processes at unprecedented levels of scale.

August 22, 2023
SmartBear to Acquire Stoplight to Advance API Governance

SmartBear announced today it plans to acquire Stoplight, a provider of tools for editing and governing application programming interfaces (APIs).

Sean Butler, vice president of product management for SmartBear, said the deal, once finalized, will add a set of complementary tools and open source software that extends the core API catalog platform that SmartBear provides to manage APIs. The open source software provided by Stoplight includes Prism, an HTTP mock server that emulates API behavior; Spectral, an API style guide enforcer and linter; and Elements, an API Documentation tool.

The governance capabilities are especially critical as organizations begin to deploy hundreds, even thousands, of APIs that are used to integrate the microservices that are at the core of modern cloud-native applications, noted Butler.

As those applications are deployed, the management of APIs is naturally becoming more challenging. Organizations, for example, might have a different set of rules for APIs that are externally facing than they do for internal APIs. However, it’s not uncommon for internal APIs to be made externally facing without updating them when a new use case is discovered.

SmartBear is advocating a “design first” approach to the building of APIs that ultimately serves to make them simpler to manage, said Butler. In fact, good governance provides the foundation upon which API security can be achieved and maintained at a time when the number of cyberattacks seeking to exfiltrate data via API endpoints is starting to increase, noted Butler.

Unfortunately, too many developers are still prone to building and deploying rogue APIs, many of which turn into zombie APIs that developers forget to remove long after the function they were designed to enable is no longer required.

It’s not clear how many organizations are adopting a design-first approach to building APIs before they write application code, but as more APIs are deployed, the way IT is managed is rapidly changing. Application services are essentially becoming more disposable, so long as the APIs used to expose them to other applications remain stable. In fact, it’s now only a matter of time before most organizations fully appreciate the degree to which their entire IT strategy now revolves around their APIs.

The challenge is that it’s not always clear who within an IT organization is responsible for API management. Although an API is created by a developer, that developer eventually moves on to other projects. Therefore, responsibility for managing and updating APIs often winds up shifting to DevOps teams that were not part of the API development process.

One way or another, the management of APIs will need to improve once legislation that holds organizations more accountable for how data is managed becomes law. The issue that many organizations will soon discover as they move to address those requirements is: A general lack of visibility into both the number of APIs they have and, just as importantly, how they are being employed.

Hopefully, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will one day soon make it simpler to manage APIs. In the meantime, however, a modicum of governance applied today should go a long way to preventing a problem that otherwise is all but inevitable.

August 22, 2023
VMware Looks to GitOps to Drive Edge Computing

At its VMware Explore 2023 event, VMware today unveiled an orchestration tool, dubbed VMware Edge, that promises to simplify the management of edge computing services at scale.

At the same time, VMware has launched a Project Keswick initiative through which it will work with customers to define additional use cases for VMware Edge based on zero-trust principles and GitOps workflows for deploying applications. The company also unveiled a VMware Retail Edge platform based on VMware Edge and is planning to add additional offerings aimed at specific vertical industry segments.

Finally, VMware is making available a managed connectivity service through which it will provide private 4G/5G wireless services.

VMware Edge Cloud Orchestrator is based on a tool that VMware created to orchestrate the management of its secure access service edge (SASE) platform. That has now been extended to support a wider range of software running on edge computing platforms.

Sanjay Uppal, senior vice president and general manager of service provider and edge for VMware, said the goal is to streamline the management of software-defined edge computing platforms via a single console. Achieving that goal requires the ability to identify and programmatically manage workloads distributed across a mix of networks, he added.

VMware is betting that as more workloads are distributed to edge computing platforms, there will be a greater need to centralize the management of workloads running on platforms that are not always easy to physically access. Less clear, however, is to what degree those edge computing platforms will be managed by IT teams versus operational technology (OT) teams that are usually embedded within a department that manages a specific business process.

However, regardless of who manages those platforms, they will be relying more on GitOps workflows to programmatically provision infrastructure and deploy applications that will need to be regularly updated. In fact, because these platforms are often dispersed across hundreds of physical locations, the need for a pull-based orchestration tool that works asynchronously is critical, said Uppal.

In the longer term, IT teams should also expect artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities to be applied in a way that makes edge computing self-healing, he added.

No one can say exactly how many organizations have adopted GitOps to manage the provisioning of both infrastructure and the delivery of applications, but it’s conceivable that edge computing will force the issue. The tricky part will be finding a way to manage those GitOps workflows at the necessary level of scale. Most DevOps teams already struggle with implementing DevOps workflows at scale, so if more workloads are to be distributed across hundreds of edge computing platforms, there will be a much more acute need for automation to consistently deploy, secure and update applications.

Regardless of approach, however, there may come a day when the number of workloads deployed at the edge far outnumbers the number of workloads deployed in the cloud or in a data center. The challenge and the opportunity now is to get ahead of edge computing issues before they inevitably create a set of management issues that will be more difficult to address after applications have already been deployed.

August 22, 2023
VMware Looks to Streamline Multi-Cloud Computing Management

VMware today integrated its console for managing cloud instances with its VMware Cloud Foundation to streamline the deployment of its software in on-premises IT environments.

Announced at the VMware Explore 2023 conference, the latest edition of VMware Cloud will make it simpler to manage multi-cloud computing environments by combining VMware Cloud Foundation Software and VMware Cloud Services into a single platform.

VMware also announced early access to an ESXi life cycle management cloud service for VMware vSphere+ that enables IT teams to centrally manage upgrades across a distributed vCenter environment. Additional updates to vSphere in the upcoming release include doubling GPU capacity per virtual machine.

Krish Prasad, senior vice president and general manager for cloud infrastructure at VMware, said the goal is to improve the overall pace of innovation; in addition to deploying workloads in on-premises IT environments, organizations are also deploying workloads on multiple cloud computing services.

VMware Cloud is being made available in five editions that can either be managed by an internal IT team, an external services provider or by VMware. In addition, a VMware Ransomware Recovery service based on VMware Cloud is also generally available. Following a breach of an on-premises IT environment, VMware Ransomware Recovery will enable organizations to run production workloads in the cloud until forensics are completed. The company also unveiled a technology preview of cybersecure storage that will integrate recovery workflows with native vSAN snapshots and add support for Google Cloud VMware Engine.

In addition, VMware is adding a managed NSX service delivered via the cloud, dubbed NSX+, that manages instances of the virtual networking software that runs on top of its virtual machine software. There is also now an NSX+ virtual private clouds (VPCs) option that isolates instances of the virtual networking platform.

Finally, VMware is adding a VMware Cloud with VMware vSAN Max, which will make 8.6 petabytes of disaggregated capacity and 3.6 million IOPS per cluster available on demand later this year.

VMware appears to be streamlining the number of platforms IT teams need to acquire to support and manage IT infrastructure at a time when more organizations are trying to navigate increasing economic headwinds.

One way or another, IT teams will need to reduce the cost of IT at a time when IT environments are becoming more complex. VMware is betting that, given its dominance in on-premises IT environments, there will be a natural inclination to deploy more of its software in the cloud to create a more homogenous IT environment that is less complex.

However, it’s not clear whether organizations are willing to pay extra for the privilege. Many organizations are now supporting multiple classes of virtual machines and associated software despite the fact that each additional platform raises the total cost of IT.

In the meantime, many IT organizations are also awaiting the outcome of Broadcom’s effort to acquire VMware before deciding how to centralize the management of multi-cloud computing environments.

August 22, 2023
Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted 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:

Dice.com

FICO
New York, New York
Senior Director of DevOps Enablement
$140,000 to $220,000

Indeed.com

Cisco Systems
Research Triangle Park, North Carolina
DevOps Engineer
$139,000 to $176,000

SimplyHired.com

Candid Health
San Francisco, California
DevOps/Infrastructure Engineer
$121,000 to $154,000

CareerBuilder.com

CACI
Springfield, Virginia
DevOps/Cloud Engineer
$110,000 to $180,000

LinkedIn

Cox Communications
Atlanta, Georgia
Lead DevOps Engineer
$105,700 to $176,100

August 21, 2023
Rebellion Against Changes to Open Source Terraform License Mounts

A segment of the community that has embraced open source Terraform software, originally developed by HashiCorp to provision infrastructure as code (IaC), has published a manifesto calling on the company to reverse recent changes made to licenses that determine how the software can be used.

If that demand is not met, the group plans to launch its own fork dubbed OpenTF under the terms of the previous license that governed the usage of Terraform.

Pawel Hytry, CEO of Spacelift, a provider of a platform for orchestrating the management of multiple IaC tools, said the issue comes down to restrictions that Hashicorp has put in place restricting use within platforms that have embedded it, in addition to limitations on how Terraform can be used in production environments.

HashiCorp is shifting from a Mozilla Public License v2.0 (MPL 2.0) to a Business Source License (BSL) v1.1 in all future releases of its software including Terraform, Vault, Consul, Boundary, Nomad, Waypoint, Packer and Vagrant, as part of an effort to maintain maximum control over its intellectual property.

This shift will have a chilling effect on Terraform innovation because fewer individuals and organizations will want to contribute to advancing the tool, said Hytry.

However, Hytry added, historically HashiCorp has not been perceived as not being overly receptive to contributions from external developers, so the bulk of the code used to create Terraform has come from developers working for HashiCorp.

It’s not clear to what degree this firestorm impacts DevOps teams, but the fragmentation of open source projects stemming from issues that come down to revenue streams is increasing as it becomes more difficult for vendors that create open source software to continue to increase the number of subscription services for the support they provide. Red Hat, for example, recently decided to no longer make the source code for the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) edition of its operating system available. The decision led to Oracle, SUSE and CIQ pooling their resources to create a fork of RHEL that they promise will be compatible with future updates to RHEL.

It remains to be seen how many vendors might throw their weight behind OpenTF. HashiCorp, in addition to having partners that built the business on the open source edition of Terraform, also has plenty of rivals that offer IaC tools.

It may be a while before this conflict is resolved, but for now, the situation remains fluid, said Hytry. DevOps teams that make extensive use of Terraform will need to monitor events to make sure any future usage of Terraform complies with BSL terms that supporters of the manifesto claim are at this point too vague.

In the meantime, organizations that rely on open source software should brace themselves for any abrupt changes to licensing terms that may be forthcoming in more challenging economic times. In fact, one of the hidden costs of using open source software is the different terms and conditions under which it is licensed. Resources to monitor each additional instance of open source software for compliance, with terms and conditions that are not always as simple or clear cut, need to be dedicated to a task that doesn’t make any meaningful contribution to return on investment.

August 18, 2023
Synopsys Taps NowSecure and Secure Code Warrior to Improve DevSecOps

Synopsys has partnered with NowSecure and Secure Code Warrior to enable organizations to better identify where they can improve DevSecOps best practices.

Scott Johnson, senior director of product management for the Software Integrity Group at Synopsys, said the data captured by the application security testing tools can now more easily be used to identify ongoing issues that, for example, can be used to create better mobile application security tests using the NowSecure platform.

That same data can also be fed into the online learning platform Secure Code Warrior provides to enable developers to improve their cybersecurity skills.

Collectively, those observability capabilities will significantly reduce the overall level of application security risk that organizations today experience, noted Johnson.

Secure Code Warrior CTO Matias Madou noted that improving the cybersecurity expertise of developers is more critical than ever. The more expertise they have the easier it becomes to remediate issues before and after applications are deployed in a production environment.

That’s going to become an even more crucial requirement as the rate at which code is being written increases exponentially with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI). While AI can improve the quality of code being written, it’s also likely an AI platform trained using code collected from the internet is going to introduce vulnerabilities. This is because the code used to train an AI model, such as ChatGPT, from a quality perspective is inconsistent, he added.

It’s not clear at what rate application security is improving due to the adoption of DevSecOps best practices, but as AI becomes more widely employed by developers a paradox is starting to emerge. There is no doubt vulnerabilities developers have inadvertently introduced are being eliminated by AI tools that surface examples of secure code for developers to copy and paste. However, not every example of code is completely devoid of risk, so there is going to be more code that needs to be scanned for vulnerabilities.

This issue will become particularly problematic as regulations making organizations more accountable for application security will become law in the months ahead. Thanks to AI, there is no doubt organizations will be building and deploying applications containing vulnerabilities at much faster rates.

The hope is that AI tools specifically trained to identify vulnerabilities will soon be embedded in the tools that developers and DevOps teams rely on to initially build and deploy applications. However, a gap is emerging between the pace at which AI tools are being used to build applications and the availability of tools using AI to first detect vulnerabilities and help automate the remediation process. As a result, application security issues, at least for the immediate future, will continue to bedevil DevOps teams.

Unfortunately, given the insecure code that has already been deployed, it may be years before application security issues are resolved to the point where the current level of stress for all concerned is meaningfully reduced.

August 18, 2023
Survey Surfaces Shift in Digital Business Modernization Goals

A survey of 600 senior IT decision makers found that enterprises plan to invest on average $33 million on IT modernization over the next 12 months to achieve digital business transformation initiatives that have shifted in the last few years.

Conducted by Couchbase, a provider of NoSQL database platform, the survey also finds 60% of respondents identify their key modernization goal to be to improve business resilience and efficiency in the face of the evolving global economy. Well over half (58%) say that their projects have become more targeted towards specific business outcomes.

More than three quarters (78%) also noted their main transformation priorities have changed in the last three years, with more than half noted their focus is now more on reacting to market changes and customer preferences to enable the organization to remain agile. Well over a third (38%) are focusing on tangible modernization projects that will provide immediate results. Only 22% said their priorities have stayed the same over the last three years.

That focus on resiliency and efficiency represents a shift in modernization priorities that is being driven by a need to reduce the total cost of IT without introducing any additional risk to the business, says Jeff Morris, vice president of product marketing for Couchbase. That shift suggests organizations are looking to address outstanding technical debt that has been allowed to accrue over the past few years before investing in additional projects involving, for example, artificial intelligence (AI), he adds. “There’s more focus on cleaning up the mess,” says Morris.

Pressure from developers to support agile development and innovation (44%), and empowering developers to build more applications to meet customer needs (44%) were, as a consequence, the top two drivers behind transformation projects, the survey finds.

The top technologies organizations are investing in as a result are serverless computing (42%), edge computing and IoT (40%) and low- or no-code technologies (39%) followed by large language models (LLMs) for building artificial intelligence (AI) models.

Overall, more than half (53%) of respondents said their organization is either on target (31%) or ahead of their planned progress (22%), with increased business resilience (57%) being the most common benefit from digital projects in the past 12 months. Well over half (54%) claimed to have made “significant” or better improvements to the end-user experience.

The survey also notes, however, that, on average, organizations invested 14% of their digital transformation budgets in projects that failed, were canceled, or suffered significant delays. More than two-thirds (68%) said these failures, cancellations, and delays pushed back digital transformation goals by more than three months, with nearly a quarter (24%) admitting to delays of more than six months.

However, well over a third (38%) noted they do not have a clear sense of the top priorities for new transformation projects. In addition, the survey funds nearly half of respondents (49%) reporting their chief financial officer (CFO) is managing budgets in more detail, with 37% noting that pressure to achieve transformation with less budget and staff resources has increased in the last 12 months. More than a third (35%) said their IT department is under more strain now than at any other point in the last five years.

Modernization within the context of digital business transformation is, of course, no longer an event but rather a continuous never-ending process during which different priorities ebb and flow.

August 18, 2023