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Category: DevOps Culture

4 Strategies to Manage Freelancers with In-House Dev Teams

Remote workers are a growing segment of the global workforce. Freelancers account for a big part of that segment, especially when development teams need to bring in specialized skillsets for upcoming projects. Working with freelancers offers many benefits, but there can also be challenges when integrating freelancers with in-house teams.

Here are four strategies to help in-house developers effectively manage freelancers in their development teams:

1. Keep Remote Workers in the Loop

Don’t leave freelancers and remote workers in the dark about your overall business direction and goals. If a freelancer is only joining the team temporarily to handle one part of a project, it might not seem necessary to give them the full details about the project’s goals and the reasons behind your decisions.

However, providing this information enables every member of the team to fully understand what you need from the products and features they are working on and how they will serve the end user. It also helps to create common goals and motivations that the team can work toward together, rather than keeping your remote workers’ tasks separate from other members of the development team.

2. Make Consistent Feedback a Priority

In an OfficeVibe survey, 96% of employees said they wanted to get regular feedback from their managers, but 32% said they receive feedback less than once every three months. Freelancers and remote workers arguably need more feedback than in-office employees, for several reasons.

Freelancers and remote workers are often less exposed to the wider business context in which they are developing products and features. This can make it harder to assess and optimize their output from the viewpoint of an end user. Just as importantly, it can make it less clear what the other members of the team are working on and how their output affects their colleagues’ work.

“Without consistent feedback, even the most talented developers in a team can invest a lot of time in a non-feasible solution. An ongoing feedback loop is one of the best ways to support a team and enable them to put their skills to use,” said Irene Avdus, a product manager at TextMagic, which has offices in multiple countries and which regularly brings on freelance talent.

Giving freelancers and remote workers consistent and regular feedback doesn’t just help them improve their output for a better end result. It also helps them to fit in with the workflow of the rest of the team, enabling the project to go more smoothly for everyone.

3. Provide Growth Opportunities

“Great leaders invest in their employee’s career development and steer them from being a one-trick pony,” said Phidelia Johnson, Pac-J Investment Services executive director of HR.

When it comes to upgrading a team’s skillset, companies tend to skip over freelancers and remote workers in favor of employees they see as more permanent. However, opportunities to develop skills and advance their career are just as important to remote workers and freelancers as they are to any other employee.

As a result, the perception of remote workers and freelancers as more temporary team members can be a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. When companies don’t invest in developing employees’ skills outside of their in-house teams, it is to be expected that remote workers will move on after the project is done to advance their careers.

Often, treating remote workers as temporary doesn’t result in any less training, anyway. Whenever you add a new freelancer to your development team, there will be a certain amount of training and onboarding necessary to get them up to speed with how your team works. In fact, this can often be a major time and resources investment

“In a lot of situations, the biggest challenge of working in data engineering or BI is not learning technology X or Y—it is being able to pick up quickly all the business rules and processes of the department you are building your pipeline or dashboard for,” said Mohamed Khalil Ouachikh, ArmedAngels data engineer and BI specialist.

Rather than spending time onboarding new remote workers with each development cycle, investing in upgrading and expanding the skills of current team members and freelancers can result in a more capable team that is already familiar and comfortable with your business and the needs of your clients.

4. Informal Team Meetings

Making people feel like part of a team is important to ensure they can collaborate and coordinate effectively with other members. Both of these factors are crucial to developing any successful product.

Why is this relevant to managing freelancers in your development team?

Remote workers don’t have the same opportunities to connect with colleagues as in-house employees unless you provide them. As many as 20% of remote workers say they feel isolated from their colleagues. This can take a toll on their emotional well-being, and that lack of social connection to coworkers will also affect their ability to collaborate.

As a result, they may not be able to communicate as effectively with other team members. Building connections between team members let them understand each other more easily and reduce miscommunications that could lead to development mistakes and delays.

Informal meetings via webinar platforms or video conferencing solutions can have a significant positive impact in this area. A weekly meeting gives everyone a chance to talk about what they are working on and their challenges. As a result, every team member, including freelancers, has the chance to lend their skills to a colleague’s work and help the team pull together toward achieving a common goal.

Just as importantly, it gives remote workers a much-needed opportunity to connect with their colleagues socially and chat about things other than work. Besides the importance of team-building, this develops more of a connection between remote workers and your business. Inviting freelance developers to all meetings and social events is a great way to ensure greater inclusivity, and it can pay off if freelancers later take full-time positions at the company.

Make Freelancers Part of the Team

Keeping freelancers in the loop and ensuring they have the same opportunities and voice as other employees ensure they have the same level of investment in a project’s success as every other member of the team. The tools and the opportunity to coordinate with colleagues and receive feedback are critical parts of this. Following these strategies will help you integrate and manage your freelancers more effectively.

November 11, 2021
The Need for Agile, Adaptable IT Infrastructure
Through the adoption of Agile concepts and new best practices such as automated testing, organizations can move beyond the innovation curve and bolster their IT infrastructure. In fact, the need to build agile and resilient IT infrastructure has become increasingly pertinent over the past 18 months.

From remote working and managing the diverse needs of employees in remote locations to the growing rates of cybercrime, the move from the physical world to the virtual one has seriously impacted the ability of organizations to operate. It comes as no surprise that business leaders are increasingly investing more in new tools and technologies to improve their IT infrastructure, transform operations and drive business value.

That said, it still remains relatively rare for enterprises to wholly adopt Agile approaches and techniques, despite the fact that doing so can help improve the efficiency at which goods and services hit the market. The fact is that many technology companies still do not use Agile as it is difficult to implement at scale. In addition, Agile transformation demands a cultural change, which can often take time.

Nevertheless, sooner or later, Agile IT will need to be implemented across businesses in various industry sectors, as well as across all branches of an organization. Our experience has been that Agile transformation will help your business grow and succeed.

What is Agile IT?

Agile is a philosophy—a mindset that can be applied to improve the provisioning, management and operation of digital infrastructure. Agile promotes business-led development, whereby a product owner and software development team collaborate as a single entity to deliver tasks that are prioritized based on business value. These tasks are also delivered over a short timeframe, such as via two-week sprints.

Essentially, your infrastructure is far more likely to be both secure and resilient if Agile concepts are implemented throughout the software engineering process. As a result, new digital products can be delivered to customers more quickly. For example, Agile ways of working include making small, iterative changes to deliver high-quality results with speed. You can also spin up infrastructure when needed, which keeps the cost of innovation down.

The Differences Between Agile and Traditional IT Infrastructure?

Infrastructure agility is best achieved using modern solutions such as cloud technology. This significantly differs from the traditional approach of having on-premises infrastructure, which cannot be scaled up or down as needed. In fact, on-premises solutions often require extensive upfront capital, while investing in cloud resources works on a pay-as-you-go model to deliver flexibility and elasticity for strategic needs.

The conflict between adaptive software methods and predictive methods is another significant difference between these approaches. Development teams follow a comprehensive plan in traditional waterfall approaches, and any changes must go through stringent change control management. Agile requirements, on the other hand, require flexibility, allowing teams to adjust to changes as soon as they occur. This method is suitable for smaller projects that must be performed quickly and efficiently.

Benefits of Implementing Flexible IT Infrastructure

The advantages of having Agile IT infrastructure are numerous. In fact, the adoption of Agile methods not only promotes business growth but is also a great way to reduce costs and improve team performance. By working in sprints, teams can turn around features more often and nurture their value throughout the business. Agile transformation also enables organizations to offer new products or solutions to customers faster, gain early feedback and make changes if necessary, thus avoiding error from the very beginning.

Cost optimization is another benefit to consider. With Agile infrastructure housed in the public cloud, IT leaders can expand or decommission resources based on consumer demand. Cloud companies’ pay-as-you-go strategy also ensures that costs are kept to a minimum viable level. For example, maximum limitations can be set for the scaling out of resources. Most importantly, agile working methods eliminate the need for substantial upfront investments, resulting in a higher return on investment (ROI).

How to Achieve Agility

The benefits of Agile transformation are clear; however, the journey to achieving this can take time. First and foremost, becoming Agile requires a clear understanding of what it means and why it is important for your business’ competitive context. Once the ‘what’ and ‘why’ are defined, the ‘how’ becomes easy. The three core steps to achieving this agility are:
1. Implementing new methods
  Instead of trying to rework existing IT management tasks and procedures, it is often better to think of new ones as part of the Agile journey. This will ensure that your system’s performance and availability are in line with your core goals.
2. Investing in the right tools
  Agile is all about delivering smaller outcomes quickly. To achieve this speed, automating key stages of the software development process is key. There are a host of tools available to undertake this automation, including hybrid cloud solutions that can seamlessly switch between the public and private cloud. A careful selection of the tools that best fit your needs and the correct implementation of these throughout the organization is paramount to achieving success.
3. Changing the culture
  To become an agile business, the entire organization requires a cultural change—from how the business discovers a problem to how that problem is resolved by technology teams and monitored in production to enable a faster feedback loop. At every stage of the process, team members need to perform tasks differently, which often requires training, buy-in from the wider team and a collaborative approach.
Investment in Agile IT is a smart decision for business leaders hoping to transform their operations, ensure resilience and drive business value. By choosing infrastructure that caters to these needs, you can save money and ensure confidence at critical moments.
November 10, 2021
Developer Familiarity is Key to Digital Success

For some time, the goal of digital transformation was to replace legacy systems. It became a battle between all that was new and shiny and that which was old, outdated and “had to go.” However, this philosophy has since shifted as companies realized two crucial facts.

First, legacy systems are often too important to be phased out entirely for traditional organizations—given SQL’s flexibility and familiarity among developers, for example. As a result, many of these legacy applications and systems are instead being converted into virtual versions of their former selves.

Also, while it’s not impossible for some organizations to reinvent themselves as greenfield businesses that rely entirely on new, cutting-edge technologies, that is a route that is usually resource-intensive and time-consuming for many companies, at least for the foreseeable future.

Second, tossing out legacy systems disrupts existing skills—and not in a good way—especially given that 64% of digital architects report being locked into using them because they have invested heavily in the relevant skills. Furthermore, overtly focusing on new talent excludes many IT professionals with well-honed skills and considerable knowledge about business processes and systems relationships. And, at the same time, digital skills are expensive—not just to acquire but also to upskill. Even startups—which often have a literal “system blank check”—are facing skills constraints, and many are considering bringing more established skills into emerging tech environments.

The Developer Skills Problem

Digital transformation is now in the spotlight thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic, and project managers have consequently accrued valuable experience on what makes transformation projects successful. Recent surveys conducted by 451 Research revealed that 44% of companies are well into the execution stages of their transformation strategies and of that group, 66% are starting to see success. Another 10% declared their transformation projects to be a complete success.

Archimedes said he could move the planet with a sufficiently large lever. For digital transformation goals, skills are that tectonic lever. According to a report from WorldSkills UK, 60% of businesses believe that their reliance on advanced digital skills will increase. Pressure relating to skills requirements is not going anywhere, and the competition between legacy and new technologies only compounds it further.

As you might expect, developers are caught in the middle. As the world digitizes—witness the acceleration of digital projects over the past two years—developers have emerged as the heroes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 92% of respondents to a Couchbase survey agreed with that statement. Around 63% also revealed that a proper development culture allowed them the flexibility to change their goals pertaining to digital transformation outcomes.

Yet whenever digital projects get stuck, developers are often blamed for the delays. According to the same research, at least one-fifth of developers do not have the skills or access to technology that they need. Many also aren’t given the support or space to deliver and an astounding 49% say they are being asked to do too much in too little time.

Digital transformation projects have been increasingly successful, and we can thank developers for much of that success. But those successes haven’t alleviated the pressures or problems surrounding skills, and many projects consequently still get stuck. Furthermore, a recent report by Gartner found that IT executives are struggling to source skills that enable cloud and edge adoption.

Legacy is Not the Enemy

If we combine these points (the need for continual support for legacy, emerging modernization demands, increasing developer skills shortages and the fate of established technology experts), they appear to be at odds with each other. Something must give, right?

Not necessarily. There is growing acknowledgment that orphaning legacy skills is a mistake. Doing so can cannibalize skill sets and business knowledge that should be retained. There’s also the realization that we don’t need to juxtapose legacy and newer technologies. Modern systems can incorporate and even absorb legacy environments, coding languages and processes.

Modern multi-model databases provide a good example. At a high level, we can group databases into relational (SQL) and non-relational (NoSQL) systems. SQL databases cannot provide the agility NoSQL systems are known for, yet it’s a technology approach that still delivers many benefits. Multi-model database systems, where a SQL developer can use SQL coding on a NoSQL system, accomplish both.

A New Place for Established Developer Skills

Creating this familiarity is essential for successful digital projects. Focusing exclusively on broad reskilling or continually hunting for new talent aren’t the only ways to meet the demands required by modern enterprises. Instead of asking if developers can go to the mountain, vendors should ask: Can we bring the mountain to the developers?

Deploying new technologies that can leverage existing developer skills is becoming increasingly popular. Besides certain databases, we also see this with mainframes connected to web services via APIs and using microservices to accentuate specific parts of legacy environments.

Consider Lehman’s famous laws of software evolution, among which are familiarity and organizational stability. Most modernization projects ignore these two laws in favor of brute force progress. But digital modernization is a journey, and every successful journey needs all hands on deck—not dead weight and stowaways. Providing developers that which they already know best in a new environment is the key to digital success.

November 9, 2021
5 Tips for a Successful DevOps Implementation

More businesses are turning to DevOps implementations to deliver software and updates with more efficiency. As much as business leaders know DevOps can help them to be faster and more agile, many of them are unsure how to get started. Many businesses even begin implementing DevOps only to run into unforeseen problems that hinder the process.

While DevOps can be beneficial, you do not want to make changes lightly. You need to know what you are getting into and prepare for ways the change can impact your company. Having a good team and providing them with the right infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools will help, but there is so much more you need to consider before starting.

Here are five vital tips for successful DevOps implementations.

Evaluate Your Processes

You need to start by learning what DevOps is and what it means to your organization. Everyone on the team needs to understand what DevOps can do and the types of problems it can solve for your company.

Evaluate your entire development cycle from beginning to end. Look at the different processes that go into development to find different bottlenecks and inefficiencies. By finding the areas where your current processes come up short, you will be able to identify the areas to concentrate on when implementing DevOps.

Collaboration and Communication

Collaboration and communication are at the heart of successful DevOps implementation. You can get all of the best DevOps tools available, but if you do not have teams ready to work together and communicate, you will not achieve the full benefits of DevOps implementation.

If you are going to succeed, you need to instill a strong sense of collaboration and cooperation among teams. Beyond that, you also need to provide your team members with tools that will help them communicate and collaborate. Communications platforms and collaboration software can be just as important as the tools that contribute directly to development.

Set Goals

DevOps implementation is not just about getting the right tools and changing processes. You need to assess the operations of your company and set goals for the implementation. If you are just buying new tools without setting a new direction, the implementation will not result in that much change.

Another good tip is to start with one smaller, more easily achievable goal and then scale up from there. Changing everything at once might be too much of a disruption. Instead, select a smaller goal and once that is achieved, move on to goals that are larger and more complex.

Automation

Automation is a big part of what makes DevOps beneficial to modern businesses. If you are going to achieve the full benefits of the change, you should automate as much as you can. Whether it is scanning code for misconfigurations or automated testing, you can do a lot to make your operations more efficient by using a variety of different automation tools.

You may also want to take automation one step at a time. If you try to dive headfirst into automation, it might be a bit too much for your team to keep up with. Instead, take a manual process that has been taking a lot of time and toil from your team and implement an automation tool. Let your team monitor for a few weeks to see how it goes and then take what you learned and apply that feedback to automating more processes.

Know Your Key Metrics

Set your key metrics from the very beginning of the implementation process. Without metrics, you won’t be able to keep track of the progress you make. A lack of tracking will also make it difficult to identify issues that might be holding back your progress.

Most organizations will need to focus on three points: Lead time, deployment time and mean time-to-recover. Beyond that, try to think about your users when defining key metrics. What do they like? What do they care about? What makes for a more pleasing experience?

DevOps implementation is not simple. By taking the right steps to prepare, you can avoid the worst problems and put yourself in a position to respond well to the issues that do come up during implementation.

November 4, 2021
AWS BugBust Challenges Developers to Set World Record for Bug Busting at re:Invent 2021
Software bugs are irksome, time-consuming and can be one of the most expensive software development costs for any company on an ongoing basis. Software Testing News cited a study that found the cost of poor software quality in the United States alone was estimated to be $2.8 trillion dollars. Let that sink in. $2.8 trillion dollars. And 18.22% of that cost was technical debt. Pair that with the fact that Watts Humphrey¹ estimated in his book, A Discipline for Software Engineering, that, on average, software developers make 100 to 150 errors for every thousand lines of code.

Suffice it to say that the costs of poor software quality are significant.

Welcome to the First Annual AWS BugBust re:Invent Challenge

AWS is making a commitment to help software teams around the world improve software quality with their global AWS BugBust Challenge. The first annual AWS BugBust re:Invent Challenge is right around the corner.

The challenge, taking place from November 29, 2021 at 10 a.m. PST through December 2, 2021 at 2 p.m. PST, enlists Java and Python developers to collectively fix bugs and eliminate technical debt using Amazon CodeGuru. Within this time frame, registered participants across the globe—participating virtually—and those present onsite at the BugBust Hub at the AWS re:Invent Expo, can compete to fix as many bugs as possible to win prizes, glory and claim the title of the Ultimate AWS BugBuster. For each bug that you fix, you receive points based on the complexity of the bug. The more bugs you fix, the more points you will gain and the higher you will climb up the AWS BugBust Leaderboard. The live leaderboard will track each participant’s progress and showcase the number of bugs fixed and points received.

Be a Part of Setting a Bug-Busting World Record

At re:Invent, AWS also is looking to set a Guinness Book of World Records record for the largest code-fixing challenge ever. To date, there are no existing records for an event of this kind. Fix at least one bug to qualify to be part of setting the Guinness record. You can join onsite or online. Be part of the excitement of trying to set a world record while winning prizes and gaining recognition!

Milestone Prizes

While developers will go head-to-head to win the title of the Ultimate AWS BugBuster, they will also have the opportunity to win prizes for their milestone achievements. The Grand Prize will be $1,500 in cash.

There will be five key milestones that developers will be working towards:
- First milestone—1 point—AWS BugBuster Fly Swatter
- Second milestone—50 points—AWS BugBust branded sanitizer (BugSpray)
- Third milestone—150 points—AWS BugBust glow-in-the-dark Bug Jar
- Fourth milestone—300 points—AWS BugBust hoodie
- Fifth milestone—500 points—AWS BugBust branded Echo Dot
- Grand prize—$1,500 for the top BugBuster
In addition to the milestone prizes, all developers who have contributed toward setting the record for the world’s largest code-fixing challenge will receive an exclusive AWS certificate. The bugs fixed at this live event will count toward the global total which the AWS BugBusting team will have front and center at the event.

AWS BugBust Hub

The BugBust Live Challenge will be hosted in the BugBust Hub. The Hub will provide a fun and relaxing environment for developers to fix bugs and ask questions of the AWS BugBust SWAT team as they get started on the BugBust Live Challenge. Not on-site at AWS re:Invent? No worries—developers can still participate and win prizes virtually, too!

For more information and to pre-register for the AWS BugBust re:Invent Challenge, please visit the AWS BugBust website.

1 Known as “the father of software quality,” Watts S. Humphrey is the author of numerous influential books on the software development process and software process improvement. Humphrey is a fellow of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University, where he founded the Software Process program and provided the vision and early leadership for the original capability maturity model (CMM). He also is the creator of the personal software process (PSP) and team software process (TSP). He was awarded the National Medal of Technology―the highest honor given by the president of the United States to America’s leading innovators.
November 3, 2021
Sustainability No Longer Just a Buzzword for Cloud IT

A recent CloudBolt survey on IT sustainability finds that sustainability is no longer just a buzzword — the market is demanding real change, and it appears that environmental concerns finally are influencing large IT investments. For example, 67% say that a cloud provider’s sustainability initiatives are important in deciding whether to do business with them. A significant portion of organizations are even willing to pay a premium to support green initiatives!

Below, I’ll review the report to find its major takeaways. We’ll see how sustainability is directing real action in cloud IT and briefly compare how the market perceives current green initiatives among three top cloud providers: AWS, GCP and Azure.

Sustainability Gains Real-World Traction

In June and July 2021, CloudBolt polled 256 global CxOs and tech leaders on its Pulse platform, and found that 76% of respondents now consider climate change an existential threat. Not only are IT purchasers factoring compute and cost, but a sustainability conscience is now influencing executives to direct sweeping change. In fact, 79% of respondents indicate their IT departments are expected to help their companies achieve specific sustainability initiatives driven by the board of directors of the C-suite.

Interestingly, other studies found that a sustainability commitment results in tangible business outcomes. For instance, 88% of the research conducted by Oxford University and Arabesque showed that solid environmental, social and governance (ESG) practices result in better operational performance of firms and higher profits. This study also noted that 80% of the time, a company’s stock price is positively influenced by sustainability practices.

Climate Conscience Guides Cloud Choices

Most organizations now consider a cloud vendor’s sustainability initiatives when choosing whether to do business with that provider. A full 78% of respondents agree that the public/private cloud choices they make can materially affect the environment for better or worse. New environmental cloud commitments not only attempt to minimize carbon emissions from their data centers but factor in ecological ramifications and aim to erase companies’ historical carbon footprints, as well.

Cloud consumers also want to contribute to addressing these green initiatives. An impressive 79% of respondents indicate that they will pay a premium to work with vendors who incorporate sustainability into their business. And 41% of companies are willing to pay a premium of 11 % to 15% of their current bills. This shows that sustainability is now a vital factor within the marketplace, and companies are willing to pay the price to increase their own environmental standing.

Though this commitment is undoubtedly growing, the report did find that operational requirements such as security, cost and agility, still rank significantly higher than sustainability when comparing cloud providers. Though IT professionals recognize climate change as an existential threat, they still have day jobs and must keep operations moving.

AWS: King of Green Clouds

Slightly more than half (51%) of respondents agree that the industry-wide green energy commitment is real and growing among all cloud providers. However, when comparing the top three—Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure and Google, AWS appears to be emerging as an IT sustainability leader; 41% of respondents perceived AWS as doing the most to address green initiatives.

AWS is on track to power its entire operations with 100% renewable energy by 2025. With their solar plant investment in April 2021, Amazon became the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in Europe. Around the globe, AWS has invested in a combination of on-site solar, solar farms and wind farms to power their data centers and Whole Foods divisions.

To their credit, both Microsoft and Google also committed to climate pledges that affect their cloud footprint. Azure supports a similar initiative to reach 100% renewable energy by 2025, in addition to further investments to improve water, waste disposal and surrounding local ecosystems. Google Cloud’s commitment is to operate on carbon-free energy 24 hours a day by 2030, and the company has already achieved 100% renewable every year since 2017.

Not only does AWS appear to be doing the most to address its environmental impact, it also retains the most market traction as a cloud leader. The majority of respondents (62%) said that AWS is winning the cloud wars while only 31% said Azure and just 7% said GCP.

Final Thoughts

It is heartening to see that ESG standards are having a measurable impact on a company’s cloud allegiances. The market now demands real change and is willing to pay the price for more ethical and sustainable cloud hosting.

But choosing a cloud provider is only one aspect of reducing IT’s impact. As I’ve covered before, there are many ways IT can curb its climate impact. Such actions include optimizing overall infrastructure, shuttering zombie VMs, avoiding over-provisioning resources, increasing performance visibility, refactoring code and other measures. What’s great is that most of these initiatives have the added benefit of reducing cost to the business.

The CloudBolt Industry Insights Report, The Truth About IT Sustainability: Paying More Green to Get More Green, surveyed 256 IT leaders on their perception of cloud sustainability. For additional insights, you can pick up a copy here.

October 29, 2021
Postman Survey Shows Focus on Building and Deploying APIs

A survey of more than 28,000 developers and application programming interface (API) professionals published today by Postman found nearly half of respondents (49%) are now spending the majority of their time developing APIs. More than a quarter (28%) now spend 20 or more hours per week working with APIs.

Kin Lane, chief evangelist for Postman, a provider of a platform for building APIs, said that shift reflects an increase in software development and integration activity that began at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. Almost two-thirds of respondents (63%) said the pandemic somewhat or significantly affected their work, with almost half of those respondents noting that changes made with their organization were enabled and supported by APIs.

Additionally, a full 94% of respondents said the investment of time and resources into APIs will increase or stay the same for the next 12 months. The biggest obstacle to creating APIs is lack of time (45%) while the biggest obstacle to consuming an API is lack of documentation (55%). In terms of API goals, the survey found that quality (80%), agility (66%) and reliability (65%) are the top three goals among survey respondents.

However, the survey also noted only a third of respondents said they could build and deploy an API in anywhere from a single day to a week, with most requiring one week to a month. About one-third also said they deploy APIs to production between once per week and once per month. More than 80% of respondents noted that less than 25% of their changes fail while a similar percentage said they can recover in less than a day with a third reporting they fully recover in less than an hour.

The Postman survey also found that more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) have less than five years of experience with API development. Only half of respondents indicated that they agree or strongly agree that the leadership of their API team has a clear sense of where their API practice should be in five years. However, microservices (58%) and Kubernetes (50%), containers (46%), serverless architecture (44%) and GraphQL (35%) were ranked among the technologies that respondents were most excited about heading into 2022.

On the plus side, more than 60% of respondents felt their API leadership and governance teams demonstrated a “willingness to change” as well as duly considering “the interests and opinions of employees.” When it comes to regularly providing feedback and process, more than half of leadership and governance teams (53%) scored well.

The top two ways API teams collaborate is via a dedicated collaboration platform (50%) or by publishing API artifacts to repositories such as GitLab, GitHub and Bitbucket (45%), according to the Postman survey. The most widely used DevOps tools are Jenkins (37%), Azure DevOps (26%), GitHub Actions (25%), AWS DevOps (23%) and GitLab Pipelines (22%).

In terms of deploying APIs, continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms are the most widely employed (57%), followed by deploying APIs in the cloud (38%), frameworks (34%) and custom-built deployment methods (27%).

Just over 70% of respondents ranked security and performance as the top factors considered when integrating with an API. When producing an API, however, the top factors are integration with internal systems, integration with external systems, adding functionality to an internal system and enhancing functionality for an end customer. Similarly, when consuming an API the top factors are integration with external systems, adding functionality for end customers, adding functionality to internal systems and integration between internal systems.

In general, Lane noted that, as more APIs are developed and deployed to drive various digital business transformation initiatives, organizations will need to pay more attention to API discovery and management. There’s a tendency for different teams within organizations to not only create redundant APIs but also forget about so-called zombie APIs that are no longer supported but can still be exploited by cybercriminals.

Overall, Lane said the survey makes it clear more organizations are pursuing an API-first approach to digital transformation. The challenge now is managing all the APIs that can quickly become too much of a good thing.

October 28, 2021
GitHub Expands Developer Productivity Tools Portfolio

During the online GitHub Universe 2021 conference, GitHub today unveiled a bevy of updates intended to boost developer productivity by making it easier for developers to write code faster and collaborate more easily.

The GitHub Copilot tool that GitHub developed in collaboration with OpenAI, a research and development lab, to help developers write better code faster is being extended via a technical preview to add support for Java and the integrated development environment (IDE) JetBrains.

In addition, the Codespaces tools that GitHib makes available to pre-configure development environments is being extended to include support for devcontainer feature composition, the GitHub command line interface (CLI) and REST application programming interfaces (APIs) along with additional access controls.

GitHub Actions has also been updated to add support for deployments using the OpenID Connect standard in addition to providing access to deployment environments to simplify approvals, improvements to reusable workflows and auto-scaling functionality for self-hosted runners.

There is also now a Command palette tool in beta to help developers navigate GitHub along with a public beta of a GitHub Issues tool that makes it simpler for developers to filter, sort and group issues and pull requests. Additional features that have been added since GitHub Issues was first previewed include iteration support, reporting and data visualization tools and the ability to employ it across public projects.

Finally, GitHub is adding, in beta, support for Ruby as a programming language that CodeQL analysis engine can now scan for vulnerabilities along with the ability to customize permissions for accessing GitHub Enterprise Cloud.

Ryan Salva, vice president of product management for GitHub, said collectively GitHub is committed to making developers more productive by, for example, autocompleting code as developers write. Support for additional programming languages will also be forthcoming in the months ahead. The goal is not to leverage AI to replace developers but, rather, eliminate the drudgery that gets in the way of developers becoming more creative, noted Salva.

There won’t come a day any time soon when developers won’t have to type to write code, but it is possible to leverage AI to provide a type-ahead capability that reduces coding errors, added Salva.

The goal should be to enable developers to create more application experiences at a time when more organizations than ever are consuming applications that drive a wide range of digital business process transformation initiatives, said Salva.

As part of that effort, Salva noted it’s also critical to reduce the amount of friction developers encounter writing code starting with setting up the development environment itself.

It’s not clear yet what impact all the focus on developer productivity and collaboration will have on the rate at which applications are being built and deployed. However, as developers become more productive, the number of application development projects that can be launched simultaneously should increase. In fact, there may come a day when applications are being built faster than organizations can deploy them without adopting continuous delivery best practices that rely on higher levels of automation to install software.

Regardless of that application delivery challenge, however, it’s a problem most organizations right now would consider themselves fortunate to have.

October 27, 2021
Observability Vs. Monitoring: What’s the Difference?

As more and more IT organizations pivot from strategies rooted in monitoring to ones that aim to achieve observability, one of the first questions that teams need to answer is, “What is the difference between the two?”

That’s a somewhat loaded question because there are some differences of opinion out there regarding what, exactly, distinguishes monitoring from observability. But in general, the differences can be distilled into two main points, as we will explain.

What is Observability and What is Monitoring?

The first step in understanding the difference is to understand what each term means on its own.

The classic definition of observability is that it is the use of external data outputs to understand the internal state of a system. In the IT industry specifically, observability could be defined as the use of logs, metrics and distributed traces to understand the state of a complex software system.

Meanwhile, monitoring is the process by which data is collected from a system. In IT, monitoring is how teams collect logs, metrics and traces and move them to a place where they can be analyzed.

Similarities

There are some obvious similarities between the two. Both involve (at least in part) the collection of diverse sets of data. Both also serve the goal of helping teams identify problems within their software stacks and deliver a high-quality user experience.

Two Key Differences

But the similarities end there. Ultimately, monitoring and observability are distinct concepts and processes, with two main differences that distinguish them from each other.

Monitoring collects data. Observability interprets it.

The first is that observability focuses on interpreting and understanding data, whereas monitoring is merely the collection of data.

In this sense, you can think of monitoring as one of the processes that makes observability possible. But observability requires more than monitoring. In addition to collecting data, observability also involves the correlation of data from multiple sources and the identification of relevant patterns or anomalies within that data.

Monitoring Tells you What is Wrong. Observability Tells you Why it’s Wrong

The second main difference is that monitoring simply alerts you when something goes wrong. Observability goes further by helping you understand why it’s wrong and how to fix it.

For example, a monitoring tool might tell you that your application’s response rate is no longer adequate. But you need observability to figure out which specific microservices within the application are causing the problem. Using that information, you can plan and execute an effective response to reliability issues using an incident management platform.

With monitoring alone, you only know that something is broken, not how to fix it.

Observability and Monitoring: Better Together

Although it’s common to speak in terms of “observability versus monitoring,” the reality is that you can’t have observability without monitoring. (You could monitor without observing, but doing so would significantly reduce your ability to understand and resolve problems quickly.)

So, don’t think of it as an either/or proposition. Think of them as concepts and practices that go hand-in-hand, even if they perform different functions.

October 27, 2021
AsyncAPI: Transparency as a Value

History has been marked by opaque and totalitarian power systems. Aided by prisons and walls that keep out the light. The concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals has marked human evolution. From feudalism to fascism, the annulment of the rights of individuals has been based on obscurantism and ignorance. Information has always been guarded by a few, in a few places, and under lock and key. Darkness was always understood as the opposite of knowledge, of science. Plato referred to the cavern, the place where shadows are barely glimpsed, distorted, manipulable from the outside. Subjected to the opacity of the camera obscura, we live in the hope of a shutter that will open a first light bulb.

Fighting the One-Dimensional

Faced with the danger of control and censorship, of single direction, of what Marcuse would end up calling “one-dimensional man”, the new tools born at the end of the 20th century cracked the traditional foundations on which power was based. The expansion of the internet offered an opening of windows to the world, the multiplication of paths. The entry of light into every home in the form of a seemingly infinite torrent of information, impossible to censor, unfathomable.

The arrival of Society 2.0 marked the definitive turning point in government systems toward a necessary democratization. Under its premises, nothing can or should be hidden; everything is potentially visible. Moreover, there are no longer spectators who attend the show, but users appear ready to add their grain of sand in a collective bet, to open their shutter to let in some more light.

The Spotlight

The involvement and activation of users is the strength of a collective intelligence. The multiplication of images uploaded by users makes manipulation more difficult, broadens the options for contrasting perspectives and opinions. They add lines of writing to an amplified story.

The user thus becomes a spotlight that avoids blind spots. One more flashlight at the service of the common good. For the image of a transparency, a slide, for example, to be projected on the wall, we need a light source directed toward the acetate, thus allowing us to see the intricacies of an image that remained in the dark until that moment.

Disclosure

Transparency has probably become the fundamental concept of the democratization processes undertaken by governments, institutions and companies in recent years. Ultimately, in its ideal state, democracy is nothing more than a method that allows the members of a community to analyze reality from different points of view to finally make decisions.

From all this arises open source policy, a system that makes information free and at the same time allows users to see its management and decision-making processes and in which everyone is invited to collaborate. The community thus becomes an essential engine of work and communication.

The Light

AsyncAPI arises from this foundation. As an open government project, it defends transparency and democratization in its system of governance and organization. This organizational system aims to empower the people who make up the project, based on a horizontal structure for decision making.

All relevant project data are public. The tasks under development are within the reach of and open to participation by the community. This is intended to cultivate an environment of trust and respect for the user that stimulates their participation in the pursuit of a common goal. This allows projects to be increasingly collaborative and participatory. Data and metadata. Code and image. As digital photography does, it is no longer possible to attend only to the final state, to the superficiality of the image that is shown, edited, composed, manipulated. The image becomes an open, transparent process, where we can compare its properties, its internal structure.

Finally, the light.

October 26, 2021