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Category: DevOps Culture

  • Atlassian Embeds Generative AI Across Cloud App Portfolio

    Atlassian Embeds Generative AI Across Cloud App Portfolio

    At its Team 23 conference today, Atlassian announced it is adding an artificial intelligence (AI) capability to the enterprise editions of its cloud portfolio to automate a wide range of routine tasks.

    Sherif Mansour, distinguished product manager for Atlassian, said Atlassian Intelligence uses natural language to drive a virtual agent that resolves routine help desk issues from within Slack or Microsoft Teams. Atlassian Intelligence can also identify incidents that have been previously resolved along with issues that are related to one another.

    In addition, IT teams can also leverage Atlassian Intelligence to create summaries for projects being tracked using the company’s Jira project management software, noted Mansour.

    The overall goal is to streamline incident management processes while also making it simpler for application stakeholders to collaboratively participate in software development, he added.

    Generative AI capabilities are likely to be infused into almost every imaginable application going forward, but Atlassian is clearly at the forefront of an effort to leverage AI to improve productivity. For example, instead of spending time handling routine issues that increase the amount of daily toil, IT teams should be able to spend more time resolving more complex issues, noted Mansour.

    The cumulative effect of AI should result in a significant decrease in the backlog of tasks that many IT teams would otherwise have to manually perform, he noted.

    It’s not clear just yet how much generative AI will impact the way software is developed and how IT is managed, but it’s already apparent that fundamental change is on the way. The Atlassian Intelligence approach is intended to augment the capabilities of IT teams so they can do more with the same number of or fewer personnel.

    The challenge IT teams will face is identifying tasks they couldn’t previously accomplish simply because there wasn’t enough time available.

    Fundamentally, generative AI changes the way humans interact with machines. Instead of requiring a developer to create a level of abstraction to communicate with a machine, it’s now possible for machines to understand the language humans use to communicate with each other. That makes it possible for anyone to make use of large language models used to create generative AI platforms to, for example, automate a routine task or, one day soon, create code.

    At this point, like it or not, the generative AI genie is out of the proverbial bottle. Just about every job function imaginable will be impacted to varying degrees. In the case of IT organizations, the ultimate impact should involve less drudgery as many of the tasks that make managing IT tedious are eliminated.

    Hopefully, as IT continues to evolve, there will still be plenty of demand for human expertise. For better or worse, the nature of the expertise required, however, will undoubtedly be at a much higher level than it has been for the past four decades or more.

  • Mobb Launches Community Edition of Automated Remediation Tool

    Mobb Launches Community Edition of Automated Remediation Tool

    Mobb today made available a free community edition of a namesake tool that creates fixes to open source vulnerabilities. The fixes are based on the results of code scanning by a static application security testing (SAST) tool.

    Fresh from raising $5.4 million in seed funding, Mobb CEO Eitan Worcel said the company developed a tool that creates validated patches based on the scan results of third-party SAST tools from Checkmarx, GitHub and Snyk. Initially, the tool is aimed at Java vulnerabilities.

    Worcel said that most vulnerabilities can be traced back to eight types of mistakes that developers routinely make. The company created a pattern for those common mistakes, along with patterns to fix them, called Mobb rules. That ability enables Mobb to accurately produce a code fix that both remediates the vulnerability and adheres to the correctness of the language to eliminate code defects. Mobb then makes available a patch to address those issues in a way that can be readily downloaded and applied by developers. Mobb does not automatically apply those fixes because most developers prefer to review them first, noted Worcel.

    The Mobb approach eliminates the need for IT teams to sort through SAST scans themselves, which can result in the discovery of thousands of vulnerabilities that might theoretically need to be fixed. Each vulnerability, at minimum, is going to require 30 minutes to fix, so the Mobb platform provides a better return on investment and reduces patch backlogs, added Worcel.

    For decades, application development teams have been attempting to find a way to remediate vulnerabilities as quickly as possible. With increased focus on adopting DevSecOps best practices to address those vulnerabilities, more organizations are now reviewing which types of vulnerabilities should have a higher remediation priority.

    Historically, one of the reasons for the wide divide between application development teams and cybersecurity professionals is that many of the vulnerabilities being discovered don’t actually impact applications running in production environments. Development teams then find themselves wasting time investigating vulnerabilities and, when they do determine a vulnerability is an issue, spending time developing a patch. The Mobb tool addresses that later issue by automatically creating the necessary patch, said Worcel.

    Many organizations just allocate junior developers to the task of remediating vulnerabilities, which Worcel noted frees up more experienced developers to focus on writing additional business logic.

    There will, of course, be vulnerabilities that the Mobb tool will not be able to address simply because there may not be enough affected applications to warrant pre-building a patch. Even with the most robust set of rules, it is improbable that an automated tool can, with 100% certainty, safely fix every issue. However, given the number of routine vulnerabilities present in applications, such as SQL injections, there’s plenty of opportunity to improve developer productivity by relying on patches that have already been developed.

    One way or another, the process by which patches are prioritized, developed and then applied has long been a source of DevOps frustration. Anything that streamlines that process will go a long way toward improving the overall state of application security at a time when cybercriminals are becoming more adept at exploiting vulnerabilities wherever they may be found.

  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    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:

    Monster.com

    Ace American Insurance Company (Chubb)
    Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
    DevOps Engineer
    $157,477 to $172,000

    LinkedIn

    DRISHTICON
    Mountain View, California
    Senior DevOps Engineer
    $120,000 to $150,000

    Dice.com

    Srivango Technologies
    Cary, North Carolina
    Java Developer with Azure and DevOps Expertise
    $120,000 to $140,000

    Indeed

    The Coca-Cola Company
    Atlanta, Georgia
    Cloud DevOps Engineer
    $102,00o to $109,000

    SimplyHired

    Moody’s
    Remote
    DevOps Engineer
    $90,000 to $159,300

  • PagerDuty Bets on AIOps and Automation to Simplify IT Management

    PagerDuty Bets on AIOps and Automation to Simplify IT Management

    PagerDuty this week made generally available an artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform that leverages the data model embedded in its incident management software to reduce the amount of time required for an AI platform to learn how an IT environment operates.

    Jonathan Rende, senior vice president and general manager for PagerDuty, said that approach enables the PagerDuty AIOps platform to begin surfacing valid recommendations sooner than other AIOps platforms. Other platforms first need to be integrated into IT environments by an expensive team of consultants and integrators, he added. The PagerDuty approach makes the benefits of AIOps immediately available to both IT operations teams and application development teams alike, he said.

    The arrival of PagerDuty AIOps comes on the heels of the launch of PagerDuty Process Automation, a platform for orchestrating automation across multiple platforms that is integrated within PagerDuty Operations Cloud. That capability makes it possible for organizations to centralize the management of islands of automation that have emerged across the enterprise without having to replace any framework that has already been deployed, said Rende. There are also more than 700 integrations between PagerDuty AIOps and the PagerDuty Operations Cloud platform.

    Like other platforms, PagerDuty AIOps relies on machine learning algorithms and an AI model created by PagerDuty to correlate events so that the platform can put them in context. Incident response recommendations are then made, which an IT team can accept and automatically implement or reject. The platform then uses those inputs to surface more accurate recommendations over time, said Rende.

    The platform will also automatically group apply defined rules coupled with its machine learning capabilities to aggregate alerts. That capability reduces the overall alert noise that might otherwise be generated, noted Rende.

    Organizations are looking to invest in AI and automation more heavily at a time when many of them are reducing the overall size of their IT staff, said Rende. The challenge with AI, however, is that it can take six months or more for a rival AIOps platform to learn enough about an IT environment to begin making recommendations. The PagerDuty approach takes advantage of the data within the PagerDuty incident management platform to train an AI model more quickly, in a way that reduces the time to generate valid recommendations to a matter of days, noted Rende.

    PagerDuty has been building that AI model for the last four and a half years with that specific goal in mind, he added.

    It’s not clear how quickly organizations are embracing AIOps, but as IT environments continue to evolve, many once-manual tasks are being automated. There is a natural fear of the impact those advances might have on specific roles within an IT organization, but as IT environments get more complex, there will always be a need for IT personnel that can focus on higher-order tasks, said Rende.

    Overall, the rate of IT staff turnover should also decline as much of the toil that contributes to burnout is also eliminated.

    It may be a while yet before AI becomes pervasively applied to manage IT, but the proverbial genie is not going back into the bottle. The challenge is determining precisely where the line between the man-machine interface with IT environments is today versus where it might be tomorrow.

  • Can ChatGPT Fix Bugs? ‘Wolverine’ Dev Says YES

    Can ChatGPT Fix Bugs? ‘Wolverine’ Dev Says YES

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Instead of AI aids for programming, what about for debugging? The pseudonymous “BioBootloader” says he’s persuaded GPT-4 to make his code self heal. (more…)

  • Fiberplane Adds Open Source Libraries to Automatically Collect Metrics

    Fiberplane Adds Open Source Libraries to Automatically Collect Metrics

    Fiberplane today added an ability to automatically collect metrics in real-time and make them accessible either via its namesake notebook software for debugging infrastructure or an open source Grafana dashboard.

    Fiberplane CEO Micha Hernandez van Leuffen said Autometrics is an open source set of libraries the company created to make it simpler for developers to see platform performance metrics using a set of tools embedded within their integrated development environment (IDE).

    The goal is to reduce the cognitive load on developers; today, developers need to first determine what metrics to track, find a way to collect the appropriate data and then launch queries against those metrics to determine the root cause of an issue, said Hernandez van Leuffen.

    Autometrics, in contrast, provides access to a set of common queries using the Prometheus programming language (PromQL) against data that has been collected using open source OpenTelemetry agent software, he noted.

    That approach, for example, makes it simpler to track error rates, response time and latency of any function. Links to live charts based on real-time data can also be inserted into the comments section of any document a development team creates.

    The Fiberplane notebook uses the same operational transformation algorithm embedded within Google Docs to enable teams to easily collaborate around a document or spreadsheet. The core platform itself is built in Rust and WebAssembly (Wasm) to make it simpler to integrate Fiberplane as a plug-in into an existing DevOps workflow.

    Autometrics extends that capability in a way that enables DevOps teams to provide developers with instant access to observability data. They can then see how their code is performing on any given platform, which is critical as more responsibility for running applications continues to shift left, said Hernandez van Leuffen. Today, many developers need to wait for an IT operations team to share data collected via an observability platform that was designed to be used by ITOps rather than a developer, he added.

    As observability capabilities become more federated across the entire software development life cycle, it’s critical to make sure developers and IT operations teams can see metrics being generated in real-time. Otherwise, confusion arises because teams are not looking at the same set of metrics.

    Fiberplane address that issue by taking the concept of notebooks—often used by data science teams to collaborate—and applying it to DevOps workflows to reduce the amount of time it takes to resolve any issue. As IT environments become more distributed in the age of the cloud and microservices, troubleshooting issues invariably spans the responsibilities of multiple members of an IT team. In effect, a notebook makes it possible to spin up a virtual war room on demand that enables the members of an IT organization to collaborate—regardless of where they are physically located or which organization they may be employed by.

  • How Platform Engineering Makes Software Sustainable

    How Platform Engineering Makes Software Sustainable

    The world is constantly becoming more and more aware of the importance of sustainability in every aspect of our daily lives from buying groceries to traveling, and the IT world is no exception. Indeed, sustainability is already gaining importance in software development. For example, in the latest version of Thoughtworks’ Technology Radar, “carbon efficiency as an architectural characteristic” is one of the new techniques of interest. Moreover, in its research “Predicts 2023: Environmental Sustainability Is Now an IT Sourcing Imperative,” Gartner states that “by 2026, 75% of organizations will increase business with IT vendors that have demonstrable sustainability goals and timelines, and will seek to replace vendors that do not.”

    This shows that there is a growing need for sustainability. How is the software development industry responding to this need? Many great initiatives are arising, but platform engineering, in particular, helps make software more sustainable.

    What is Platform Engineering?

    According to Gartner’s definition, platform engineering is “the discipline of building and operating self-service internal developer platforms (IDPs) for software delivery and life cycle management.” This trend has gained momentum in the last few years, and an increasing number of organizations are adopting internal developer platforms (IDPs) to scale their development process. IDPs allow developers to self-service the technology they need, whether it is infrastructure, runtime resources or ready-to-use services. This helps speed up the development process and ensures higher-quality software.

    Platform engineering is becoming more and more popular and foundational. According to Gartner, “by 2026, 80% of software engineering organizations will establish platform teams as internal providers of reusable services, components and tools for application delivery.” Therefore, given the expected widespread adoption of IDPs in the next few years, sustainability emerges as a requirement. Ignoring or underestimating the importance of sustainability may cause organizations to waste all the benefits ensured by an internal developer platform.

    Platform Engineering for Economically Sustainable Software

    To survive and operate properly in the market, a company has to be economically sustainable and therefore stable. Usually, software is an asset that contributes to revenue generation for the company, but it still has maintenance costs. To make software economically sustainable, the total cost of ownership (TCO) needs to be lower than the generated income.

    An internal developer platform can lower software product costs, making them more sustainable. How so? In a nutshell, by sharing resources that can serve multiple products and can be reused across multiple projects. Such resources include, but are not limited to, capabilities, processes, infrastructure, configuration, etc. Since the platform at scale manages shared capabilities, there product teams won’t waste time and effort replicating it every time. While lowering the TCO, this characteristic of platforms also contributes to reducing the software’s time to market.

    Moreover, platform costs are shared across the whole organization and are not part of the TCO of each software product. This helps software to be more sustainable from an economic point of view.

    Platform Engineering for Environmentally Sustainable Software

    When talking about sustainability, most people usually think about the environment. While respecting the environment is one of the most important factors, it is important to note that sustainability is not limited to this aspect.

    An internal developer platform can help software be more sustainable on two levels.

    • Observability: The platform should collect and easily expose metrics on the environmental impact of the software. Such metrics can include hardware resource usage, energy consumption and CO2 footprint.
    • Optimization: The platform should foster the adoption of sustainable patterns, like the ones provided by the Green Software Foundation. It should also include solutions that actively help reduce energy consumption, such as kube-green.

    It is important that both of these capabilities are present and implemented in the platform. Observability without optimization is useless, and optimization without observability cannot be done.

    Platform Engineering for Socially Sustainable Software

    When speaking about sustainability, social responsibility cannot be forgotten. The first social responsibility of each organization is toward its members and employees. Does developer self-service also have social implications? Yes, it does; mainly by improving the developer experience.

    Indeed, an internal developer platform helps organizations’ members to:

    • Reduce friction between teams: Since everyone can have everything they need right when they need it, there will no longer be bottlenecks and misunderstandings between different teams. This contributes to a better working environment where everyone feels welcome and more productive.
    • Decrease repetitive tasks and cognitive load for developers: Since the platform will manage and automate interactions with infrastructure and runtime, developers will no longer need to waste time and energy on such out-of-scope secondary tasks. This way, developers are more focused on their actual job of developing new features and they will feel more satisfied.
    • Enable work from anywhere at anytime: Since the platform can provide all technology and capabilities whenever a developer needs them, it will no longer be required that people work together in the same location and at the same time. In other words, IDPs enable remote and asynchronous ways of working. This allows organizations to offer remote working and to create distributed teams, ensuring a better work-life balance for the team members.

    All of this brings happier employees that will be more productive and satisfied with their work, which will reduce turnover.

    Conclusion

    The need for a more sustainable world is gaining momentum and involves every industry, including software development. No wonder Gartner included sustainable technology in the “Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends for 2023,” along with platform engineering. As platform engineering is being adopted by more and more organizations to accelerate software development, sustainability has to be addressed.

    An internal developer platform can help developers build more sustainable software. Platform engineering can help in all of these aspects, improving not only the developer experience but also the organization and the environment. This is just the beginning of the sustainable path platforms should follow, but the outlook is very encouraging.

  • How the ‘Great Rebalance’ Accelerates Low-Code/No-Code Adoption

    How the ‘Great Rebalance’ Accelerates Low-Code/No-Code Adoption

    If you were just reading headlines, you would think that careers in tech were limited—especially developers and DevOps professionals. The media and job sites have highlighted layoffs weekly since the beginning of the year, with over 120,000 employees eliminated from 400+ companies (including Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta and others). With this much shedding of technical talent, you would think there would be a glut of developers and limited new career opportunities for software developers.

    In fact, the opposite appears to be true. In the U.S., job growth accelerated sharply in January while the unemployment rate dropped to a 53-year low. According to a recent report from Bain & Company, at a macro level, the demand for technical talent is still high but is now growing within non-tech industries. “The growth of demand for tech talent from non-tech business has really been a game-changer,” said Jonathan Frick, a partner at Bain and one of the study’s authors. Using publicly available job postings and U.S. government data, Bain determined that demand for tech workers at non-tech businesses outpaces demand at tech businesses for the first time.

    So is the “Great Resignation” now being replaced by the “Great Rebalance” as other industries finally catch up and have the opportunity to find and hire technical talent? That appears to partly be true; however, there’s a bigger takeaway than developer talent is simply changing employers … it’s a more fundamental and structural shift in the industry. As talent moves beyond traditional tech firms, non-tech businesses seek to apply software innovation differently. So let’s discuss why this sets the stage for 2023 being “the year of no-code.”

    Continuing Demand for Digital Apps

    It’s been said that “every business is now a software business” (in the words of Watts S. Humphrey, the father of quality in software and CMMI). Businesses of all sizes and across all industries have taken advantage of software to enable sweeping digital transformation initiatives and put software at the heart of their business strategy. In fact, IDC predicts that by this year, over 500 million digital apps and services will be developed and deployed using cloud-native approaches – the same number of apps developed in the last 40 years. The majority of these new apps will be targeted at industry-specific digital transformation scenarios and will define competitive requirements in every industry.

    This exploding appetite for digital apps still vastly outstrips the supply of developers in the market. As a result, non-tech organizations have been desperately seeking new and creative solutions to keep up with demand. This is one of the key reasons businesses across all industries and all sizes have turned to no-code. By accelerating the pace of developing software, using visual and intuitive drag-and-drop tools, no-code levels the playing field and enables more rapid delivery of digital applications without having to wait on scarce IT or development resources.

    Headcount Budgets Remain Constrained

    Non-tech organizations tend to be more pragmatic about how they invest – unlike tech firms, they are less likely to simply invest in “shiny new technology” but look for stricter business justifications and returns on development projects. Also, the overall continued market uncertainty and concerns about recession will continue to pressure businesses to get the most value from their investments. So even though it may be easier to find developers in the talent pool, there’s not a blank check to hire at any price.

    This will drive non-tech organizations to look for ways to enable app development within their business teams as part of a ‘do it yourself” (DIY) approach to software development. The DIY approach enables business teams to play a more central role in app development using low-code/no-code solutions. By democratizing app development, low-code/no-code enables a whole new range of non-developer roles (often referred to as “citizen developers”) within an organization to take on the building of software applications. While IT and professional developers are still important for certain types of apps, the use of no-code has increased the talent pool inside most organizations, allowing employees within the business to take on development tasks.

    Non-Tech Organizations Accountable for Everyday Delivery

    Startups in the tech industry have been accustomed to a traditional venture life cycle of innovation – which has historically been accepting of years of challenges as long as the startup could demonstrate rapid growth at all costs; a single successful exit would be seen as a reward. However, non-tech firms don’t usually have the luxury of this sort of development model and are under scrutiny to show profitability and quarterly earnings. Non-tech businesses look for approaches to accelerate new sources of sales or add new products to market more quickly. They need to exploit app development strategies that deliver results in days/weeks (not months/years).

    Instead, an ‘everyday delivery’ approach to no-code is much more evolutionary and provides a continual but rapid stream of updates to the end user as part of a high-velocity, ongoing improvement cycle. The deployment can be based on specific features without a need to connect it to a specific Agile sprint deadline or other formal milestones. This mode of continuous everyday delivery builds on the rapid development and continuous deployment automation provided by low-code/no-code platforms. Combined, this allows for quick, small updates to be pushed frequently (perhaps daily) to production while maintaining higher levels of quality than traditional “big bang” software releases.

    Conclusion

    They say every challenge presents new opportunities. While the recent tech layoffs would appear to create challenges and uncertainty, “The Great Rebalance” presents an opportunity for a new accelerated model of innovation across industries as non-technical businesses find new and different models for software development. In the dynamic and unpredictable markets we live in today, those who evolve and leverage low-code/no-code to compete, expand and thrive will outgrow and outpace their peers.  This is why businesses are hungrily adopting low-code/no-code tools and everyday delivery approaches to realize the benefits of accelerating time-to-market and reducing time to deliver results.

  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    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:

    Monster.com

    SnapLogic
    San Mateo, California
    Infrastructure Engineer
    $183,310

    LinkedIn

    Metropolitan Transit Authority – NYC
    New York, New York
    Cybersecurity Officer – DevSecOp/Cloud Infrastructure
    $144,500 to $191,000

    Dice.com

    Flexion
    Remote
    Azure DevOps Engineer
    $140,000 to $170,000

    Indeed.com

    Woven Teams
    Remote
    DevOps Engineer
    $116,000 to $147,000

    SimplyHired.com

    Raytheon Missile and Defense
    Schriever Air Force Base, Colorado
    Senior Software Engineer
    $75,000 to $161,000

  • Android Apps Must Let Users Delete Data ¦ RISC-V in the Data Center

    Android Apps Must Let Users Delete Data ¦ RISC-V in the Data Center

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Google forces apps to make deleting users’ data easier, and the RISC-V drumbeat grows louder. (more…)