devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Author: Niladri Choudhuri

  • The State of DevOps Report 2019 Is Out

    The State of DevOps Report 2019 Is Out

    The Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 is out like every other year. Now, let’s talk about the key findings of this year’s survey:

    • The Industry Continues to Improve, Particularly Among the Elite Performers: Proportion of high performers have tripled, now comprising 20% of all teams. This shows the improvement is real for those who really are doing the right things.
    • Delivering Software Quickly, Reliably and Safely Is at the Heart of Technology Transformation and Organizational Performance: It is evident that speed, stability and availability leads to organizational performance in terms of profitability, productivity and customer satisfaction.
    • The Best Strategies for Scaling DevOps in Organizations Focus on Structural Solutions that Build Community: High performers favor strategies that create community structures at both high and low levels of organization. Having established community of practices, having proof of concepts, helps them become more resilient and successful. Dojos are becoming more and more important.
    • Cloud Continues to Be a Differentiator for Elite Performers, and Drives High Performance: The use of cloud as defined by NIST Special Publication 800–145, is predictive of software delivery performance and availability. High performers are 24 times more likely to execute all five capabilities of cloud computing:
      1. On demand self-service
      2. Broad network access
      3. Resource pooling
      4. Rapid elasticity
      5. Measured service
    • Productivity Can Drive Improvements in Work/Life Balance and Reduction in Burnout, and Organization Can Make Smart Investment to Support It: To support productivity, organizations can foster a culture of psychological safety and make smart investments in tooling, information search and reducing technical debts through flexible, extensible and viewable systems.
    • There Is a Right Way to Handle the Change Approval Process, and It Leads to Improvements in Speed and Stability and Reductions in Burnouts: Heavy weight change approval processes such as CAB, negatively impact speed and stability. In contrast, having a clearly understood process for changes drives speed and stability, as well as reduction in burnouts. It is nice to see ITIL 4 has adopted this best practice, and the CAB there is no longer mandatory.

    The study was done on varied departments and industries.

    Software Delivery and Operational (SDO) Performance

    Over the last 6 years, a set of key metrics has been developed to measure SDO performance which provides a high-level system view of software delivery and performance and predict an organization’s ability to achieve goals. Last year, one operational metrics were added and found this measure helps delivering superior outcomes.

    This puts the focus and proves operational performance adds to the overall performance of the organization and helps in achieving the outcomes. Availability becomes an important component to recognize the outcome and co-create value. In ITIL 4 we also find this being brought out in the Service Value System. Importance of operations in adopting DevOps is very important.

    The SDO for Elite Performers as per the Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019

    This year the report has shown two research models to help drive improvement in both improvement in performance and productivity.

    Use of cloud has been one important factor. How it is used leads to the benefit generated out of it.

    The Five Essential Characteristics of Cloud-Related Result:

    Only 29% of the respondents who said they use cloud infrastructure agreed or strongly agreed they met all the five essential characteristics of cloud computing as defined by NIST.

    The report talks about technical practices.

    Executing for maximum effect:

    • Concurrent efforts at team and organization levels
    • Continuous delivery using automation
    • Team-level technical capabilities
    • Organization-level technical capabilities

    Factors within are:

    Importance of architecture still remains important at organization level. Relook at the change process, it’s an important point highlighted in this year’s report. Use of cloud services is giving more improvement. DR testing is as critical as any other testing.

    Change management needs to be tuned to facilitate continuous delivery. It should not be heavyweight and on the other hand do not compromise risk. Points to be looked at in change management are:

    1. Implementing segregation of duty
    • Use Version Control
    • Use Infrastructure as Code
    1. Role of CAB becomes more strategic
    • Helping teams to implement capabilities that improve performance by providing guidance and resource
    • Weigh important business decisions that require a trade-off or sign-off at higher levels of the business
    • Shifting detailed code review to practitioners and automation and providing more time for strategic decisions to leadership
    • Transition from gatekeeper to process architect and information beacon
    1. Clear change process with proper delegation of authority

    Psychological safety helps in improvement of performance.

    This report talks about improving productivity. How do we improve productivity? The following factors can help:

    • Useful and easy-to-use tools
    • Technical professionals and tools
    • Internal and external search
    • Technical debts

    Finally, the approaches to improve–heatmap of DevOps transformation strategies by performance profile.

    Learn more about the Accelerate State of DevOps Report 2019 and attend the DevOps India Summit 2019 to hear the global experts.

    — Niladri Choudhuri

  • DevOps India Summit 2019 (DOIS19)

    DevOps India Summit 2019 (DOIS19)

    DevOps India Summit 2019 (DOIS19) is a platform provided by Xellentro in India to meet and learn from the top technology and business leaders from across the globe for two days of immersive learning.

    Experience the DevOps journey from these leaders who are helping to drive this transformation in organizations of various sizes at various geography.

    Share your own experience, insights, challenges and how you have overcome these as practitioners and SMEs in DevOps, and get to discuss and get tips from the leaders of DevOps from various parts of the world.

    DOIS19 is a place to meet up with the top leaders and practitioners, authors and founders of DevOps and hear about their transformation.

    Day One

    On the first day, Aug. 31, there will be various workshops on the following:

    • Full-day workshop on DevOps by Rosalind Radcliffe.
    • Full-day workshop on Microsoft Azure by Microsoft.
    • Half-day workshop on Value Stream Management by Phil Hombledal of Collabnet.
    • Half-day workshop on Microservices on Cloud by Shaun Norris and Ananda Bose of pivotal.io.
    • Half-day workshop on Cloud Native by Aymen El Amri.
    • Half-day workshop on CI/CD on Cloud by Marc Hornbeek.

    Day Two

    On day two of DOIS19, Sept. 1, speakers will have presentations all day. During the breaks you will be able to have interesting discussions while having your coffee or lunch at the Lightning Talk booths. There will also be a one-hour panel discussion with some of the eminent speakers you will be hearing throughout the day.

    Sponsors

    • Title Sponsor – Microsoft Azure
    • Platinum Sponsor – IBM
    • Gold Sponsor – Collabnet VersionOne
    • Gold Sponsor – Publicis Sapient
    • Gold Sponsor – Infosys
    • Gold Sponsor – Axelos

     Partners

    DOIS19 Speakers

    This year we have four keynotes from some of the most famous DevOps leaders and practitioners. You will be able to learn from DevOps experts, including:

    • Tapabrata Pal, senior director and senior engineering fellow at Capital One. His topic is “Cloud, Culture and Continuous Everything–Build your own DevOps.” Pal will share some of his key learnings along the journey. He will describe how cloud technologies and DevOps culture have played the most critical roles in the transformation. He will also make a case as to why he believes there is no prescribed way of doing DevOps and how one should think about Building Your Own DevOps (BYOD) focusing on continuous everything.
    • Sanjeev Sharma, vice president global practice director, data modernization at Delphix. His session, “Is Data Friction Putting a Crimp in Your CI/CD Flow?” will go into client-tested and proven methods and practices to address data friction in the CI/CD pipeline, and show how to bring secure, compliant data on demand to practitioners and achieve CI/CD flow.
    • Rosalind Radcliffe, chief architect for DevOps for enterprise systems at IBM. Her topic is “DevOps Best Practices for Enterprises.” Radcliffe will discuss best practices and the transition to a DevOps mindset, focused on reducing waste and delivering value.
    • Gary Gruver, president at Gruver Consulting LLC. His topic is “Engineering the Digital Transformation.” Businesses implement the latest Agile and DevOps practices from the software industry, hoping that simply doing so will provide the required improvements. Gary talks about his new book. This book focuses on high-level principles for engineering improvements, leveraging as much as possible from manufacturing, and modifies them to address the unique characteristics and capabilities of software.
    • Shaun Norris, field CIO, APJ, Pivotal.io. Will be talking about how a PaaS platform can remove a number of ops pain points.
    • Marc Hornbeek, principal consultant DevOps at Trace3 and DevOps Author. “DevOps in the Cloud from Chaos to Continuous Improvement…and Beyond.”
    • Matt Hogstrom, chief architect of IBM Z Systems Management. His session is “Service Management and DevOps in Cloud Environment.”
    • Daniel Oh, principal technical product marketing manager at Red Hat, South Korea. He will talk on “Quarkus brings Serverless to Java Developers.”
    • Aymen El Amri, founder of Eralabs and DevOpsLinks, tech author, Entrepreneur. His session will be “Designing Cloud Native Applications: The Best Practices.” Moving to the cloud without being cloud native is a waste of time and resources. In this talk we will discover the cloud native approach and the best practices to implement it.
    • Naresh Choudhary, vice president, Infosys. His session is “Platform Approach to DevSecOps.”
    • Dheeraj Nayal, ambassador, DevOps Institute. His session will be “Multi-Dimensional Professionals Powering Cloud and DevOps Adoption.”
    • Mohammad Wasim, Publicis Sapient. His session is “Headwind or Tailwind.”

    There are many other speakers from Paper Submissions:

    • Divya Vaishnavi, Microsoft – “Seven Habits of Effective DevOps.”
    • BMK Lakshminarayanan, Bank of New Zealand – “Cloud Confusion, DevOps Dilemma, Microservice Madness.”
    • Archana Joshi, L&T Infotech – “Harness the Power of 3 DevOps, Cloud and AI.”
    • Prabhakaran Sivaguru, Netfoundry – “Universal Service Fabrics Will Unleash Developer Innovation While Being Secure-by-Design.”
    • Sakina Shaikh, Digite – “Our Journey of Implementing DataOps Pipeline Using Apache Nifi, Kafka, Spark and ELK for Monitoring.”
    • Saurabh Gupta, DigitalOcean – The session will cover the best security practices to be followed while designing and implementing Kubernetes within an organization.
    • Mohammed Wasim Shahpuri, Infosys – “Implementing Collaborative Security Model Using DevSecOps.”
    • Ashwini Lakshmikantha, Oracle – “Culture of the Enterprise-Optimize your DevOps with AI and ML.”
    • Sarat Dara, Intellect Design – “Intellect Design on Cloud Native Application Development.”

    Finally, I will also have a session on “Service Management and DevOps in Cloud Environment.”

    We hope to see all the practitioners from India present both days for DOIS19 and immerse themselves in the knowledge and experience, sharing with speakers and participants from all over the world.

    — Niladri Choudhuri

  • G2G3 DevOps Simulation: Lessons from the Facilitator POV

    G2G3 DevOps Simulation: Lessons from the Facilitator POV

    The G2G3 DevOps Simulation is a three-round game that gives a complete immersive experience to the participants. It has software that’s controlled by the facilitator and used to see the performance and improvement in each round.

    As a facilitator, I help on the retrospective at the end of each round, as the participants share about what they did and didn’t do well. At the planning stage for each round, the participants decide what they want to change and get to see the result.

    Below is a list of what I focus on as a facilitator.

    Looking at the Same Objective

    Participants in the G2G3 DevOps Simulation learn that, regardless of role, their only objective is generating maximum revenue. This is the common goal. They can see this objective on the screen from the system. The participants begin to understand the goal on round two and by round three the objective becomes clear. This helps them to work in collaboration, working in a “squad” and helping each other to achieve that one common goal.

    Collaboration and Sharing

    The G2G3 DevOps Simulation gives the participants the chance to experience how collaboration and sharing helps in delivering stable products faster. Each team starts helping each other to ensure that their business makes the maximum revenue. They understand the need for delivering the outcome.

    The simulation also shows the challenges of communication between “run the business” and “change the business.” They experience how the communication drops between the two and how to take care of it with better knowledge management.

    Project-to-Product Approach

    The participants learn how to work as a squad—one single team responsible for both development and operations. They learn how the value flows from the time change is requested, until it is deployed and then the deliverable is maintained.

    Business is Most Important

    The G2G3 DevOps Simulation shows the participants that business is the most important—and IT is business. Everyone in the value chain must work toward the same objective.

    Automation

    The simulation also gives the participants the experience of how automation helps in achieving the objectives faster and better. This is clearly shown in the performance report at the end of each round and the comparison can be seen between rounds with more automation in place.

    DevOps: 3 Ways

    The G2G3 DevOps Simulation explains the basics of DevOps, bringing all participants to the same page on various DevOps terminologies, the principles (Three Ways) and DevOps values.

    Conclusion

    The G2G3 DevOps Simulation is a good practice for anyone in any organization who is on the journey of DevOps or is planning to start the journey. The best can be achieved if members from the various departments of the organization participate, which is required to deliver any change.

    — Niladri Choudhuri

  • DevOps India Summit Sets the Stage for DevOps’ Future in India

    DevOps India Summit Sets the Stage for DevOps’ Future in India

    DevOps India Summit 2018, India’s biggest DevOps conference, concluded with notable audiences and best in industry experts setting the tone for the future of DevOps in India. The summit was held Sept. 1 at the Marriott Hotel, Whitefield, Bengaluru with a pre-event workshop Aug. 31. Around 500 professionals, including corporate leaders and mid-level managers from across the country, who witnessed the best minds in DevOps sharing their valuable insights on all phases of DevOps transformation. The event was designed to create a platform where practitioners of DevOps in India can hear the stalwarts share their experience and share their own journey and experience through calls for papers.

    The world-class summit, organized by Xellentro in partnership with DevOps Institute, Crevise Technology, Confinity Consulting, GitLab, Datamato, Sumologic, Zoomcar, MongoDB, TechGig, The Entrepreneur and PEOPLECERT, focused on the future of DevOps in India. The attendees got an opportunity to connect with the industry pioneers and learned about some of the emerging DevOps practices they can apply in their own organization. Experts from the United States, France, Brazil and India gave a sneak preview of DevOps adoption and how those initiatives and technical practices can help organizations attain the highest levels of performance.

    The topics were well-chosen and balanced, starting from the keynote by John Willis on DevSecOps to Marc Hornbeek speaking about the Continuous Delivery Architecture, Aymen El Amri speaking about Cloud Native and Amanda Mattos sharing her DevOps journey in the organizations she has worked. We also had sessions on Container-based CI Solutions by Archana Joshi, director of Cognizant Technology Solutions; DevOps Assessment Framework by Dr. Shome from TCS; High-Speed DevOps from Zoomcar, the Importance and Use of Database by MongoDB; Gaming in DevOps by Wipro; Scaling DevOps by Padma; DevOps in Automotive Engineering by KPIT; and many more. There were 30 sessions and six lightning talks, all of which were received with great enthusiasm.

    There was a panel discussion with 10 speakers and various topics were discussed from various areas of DevOps including DevSecOps and the need to include DevOps in university curriculum.

    The participants expressed their happiness to be able to hear such varied topics on DevOps and the great learning they had in the event and expressed their desire to attend in future years.

    During the event, Xellentro also awarded the highest Tweeter with Amazon vouchers.

    The pre-event had workshops by Marc Hornbeek on Architecting Continuous Delivery and was attended by a large audience who found this session extremely useful.

    Niladri conducted the G2G3 DevOps Simulation and the participants were intensely involved in this great immersive experience, which taught them the basic principles of DevOps—a great way to start the DevOps transformation and helps in making the participants feel the difference practicing the principles.

    GitLab products were also shown by their representatives.

    “It was a great feeling to attend this summit, as we get to meet new people who have been in this industry for a while,” said John Willis, president, DevOps and Digital Practices at SJ Technologies. I have come across people who are smart, aggressive learners and are eager to know more that they put up questions that was never asked before, it took me a time to navigate to an answer.”

    Marc Hornbeek commented that the event had the feel of DOES Summit but at a more manageable scale, where speakers could mingle with the delegates and take part in more knowledge-sharing among each other.

    At the end of the event, prizes were awarded on behalf of Xellentro. PEOPLECERT announced awards for five participants who were given free examination vouchers for training through Xellentro. DevOps Institute also announced prize to the highest scorer in DevOps Practitioner certifications conducted through Xellentro.

    Thanking all the partners and participants at the event, Niladri Choudhuri, who conceptualized the event said: “It is very encouraging to see people coming together and working as team to promote the real essence of DevOps. I thank all the participants who brought their enthusiasm along and asked so many relevant questions. This is the first ever DevOps event in India in such large scale with prime focus on the core content and quality of speakers who bring value to organisation. This is a start to more such future initiatives and I thank everyone for their support.”

    DevOps India Summit is starting a community of DevOps practitioners to create a platform to share, learn and enjoy the DevOps journey and help each other in the journey. People interested, other than the delegates who are already members of this community, can join this community here.

    — Niladri Choudhuri