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Category: DevOps Culture

AppDynamics Survey Reveals High IT Stress

A global survey published today by AppDynamics, a unit of Cisco, suggests the last year took a substantial toll on IT teams at a time when many organizations either launched or accelerated digital business transformation initiatives.

The survey, of 1,050 IT professionals in organizations with revenue of more than $500 million, finds organizations, on average, implemented digital business transformation initiatives three times faster in 2020 than they did in 2019 in response to the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. That increased level of activity, however, appears to have come at a significant cost. The survey found 89% of respondents felt they are under immense pressure at work, with 84% admitting to having difficulty switching off after work.

The survey also found stress levels are, not surprisingly, rising as well, with 81% of respondents experiencing increased frustration and 63% conflicting more with colleagues.

The root cause of these issues cited most often include new sets of priorities and challenges (80%), technology sprawl and a patchwork of legacy and cloud technologies (78%), acceleration to cloud computing (77%) and multiple, disconnected monitoring solutions (74%).

A full 85% also identified cutting through noise generated by increasing volumes of data to identify root causes of performance issues will represent a significant challenge in the year ahead. A total of 92% also noted the ability to link technology performance to business outcomes will be what’s really important to delivering on innovation goals over the next year.

Three-quarters (75%) of respondents said they are already struggling to manage overwhelming “data noise.” Nearly three-quarters (73%) also noted they fear the inability to link IT performance with business performance will be detrimental to their business in 2021. Three-quarters (75%) of respondents also noted their organization needs to connect full-stack observability to business outcomes within 12 months in order to remain competitive. Two-thirds of respondents (66%), however, said right now they do not have the resources and support they need.

AppDynamics regional CTO Gregg Ostrowski said the survey makes it clear that existing approaches to merely monitoring IT platforms are not going to be sufficient, at a time when observability across the full stack of IT platforms being employed is now absolutely essential. Rather than convening war rooms where IT teams responsible for different platforms compare reports in the hopes of identifying the root cause of an issue, Ostrowski said modern observability platforms provide a holistic view of IT environments that IT teams need to proactively resolve issues before they impact the business.

That level of visibility will also play a crucial role in reducing the stress levels of IT teams that, in many cases, are now in danger of suffering from burnout, Ostrowski added. Of course, the more fatigued an IT team is, the more likely it is mistakes will be made.

It’s not clear to what degree IT teams are embracing observability as a core IT management concept. The AppDynamics survey noted that 71% of respondents are wary of misleading claims from vendors who are re-labelling monitoring tools as observability platforms. Regardless of how observability is achieved, the general consensus remains: whatever observability means within the context of IT, most organizations lack it.

February 23, 2021
Top 4 Challenges for Developer Teams in 2021

As remote work continues into 2021, developer teams are still navigating the new landscape for working across distributed teams and how this new way of working affects product delivery. In particular, there are several key challenges that every developer must face this year, including adapting to new tools and workflows internally, balancing the prioritization of keep-the-lights-on initiatives with product initiatives, and understanding how to address emerging customer challenges.

As developer teams are responsible for keeping both internal systems healthy and maintaining service uptime for customers, addressing these issues and implementing the strategies below will help ensure better delivery, easier deployment of application and software solutions and improved internal communication processes.

#1 Get Better at Digital Experience Monitoring

For businesses to survive in this current environment, neglecting to monitor a user’s digital experience across their life cycle can mean losing business to a competitor. At a bare minimum, developer teams must ensure that their application’s basic infrastructure is sound. This means monitoring key metrics like CPU load, memory load, memory used, disk space, queue lengths, API uptime or error codes returned.

For a fuller user experience, developer teams should also monitor things like page or app load times, drop-off points in an app and crash logs. The third level of digital experience monitoring is keeping tabs on what your users are doing, such as skipping the onboarding flow, inviting friends to your app, posting content or how much total time they’re spending within the app. Robust digital experience monitoring will ensure that you are constantly measuring the quality of your users’ experience and making improvements along the way.

#2 Expand Where and How You Gather User Feedback

Beyond initial user monitoring, teams should continuously collect feedback to improve features and fix issues that might not have been discovered during testing. One natural way to do this is to aggregate user reviews and support questions to find common themes that may help product teams prioritize future releases. It is also critical to think outside of the box in terms of where and how feedback is collected. Teams can also collect feedback in other ways, such as conducting data analysis and user research sessions or having direct conversations with customers. Giving key beta users early access to a new release can also help developer teams understand whether their application is meeting users’ needs, and whether it is intuitive to use.

Ultimately, by engaging with customers in extensive and real conversations, teams may learn where there are disconnects between users and the products, and what they can do to bridge this gap. Once the information is collected, teams should then prioritize what needs to be done first by ranking requests by frequency received, financial value of fixing the issue, strategic importance to the overall organization and engineering effort.

#3 Prioritize Low-Code and Customer Self-Service Models

Removing barriers to entry for customers is especially critical right now, as developers consider changing user needs, tighter budgets and fewer personnel to implement new code. Customers just don’t have time for entire enterprise sales and onboarding cycles to implement new solutions, so requiring less code is a great way to introduce a more self-service model. This model is also great for non-developers to implement and ensures that customers (whether fellow developers or even someone on a marketing operations or web team) can easily integrate new tools and software into their existing solutions. This is not only critical for those without a more technical background, but also valuable for time-strapped product teams who want to buy, versus build, a new feature.

#4 Codify Hiring to Help Developer Teams Succeed

During the pandemic, both large companies and small startups have pivoted significantly in the way they recruit and onboard engineering, DevOps and technical roles. Leaders of developer teams need to codify their hiring plans and put in place remote work strategies, especially with the hybrid working model that combines remote personnel with in-office staff.

When hiring for remote teams, consider where individuals are located for both development and customer support purposes. Once you determine these core hubs, there should be guidelines in place to reduce the need for team members to work across major time zone differences. This can mean having a core software team in a centralized region that also overlaps with a major customer base, or having an engineering team located in a similar time zone to the design team for easier communication.

Overall, the needs of each developer team will differ depending on the size of the company and the industry it serves. That’s why it’s critically important to adapt your systems and infrastructure accordingly. Furthermore, listening to and processing user feedback, building products that meet ever-changing customer demands and continuing to focus on team communications will help ensure long-term success in a post-pandemic world.

February 23, 2021
Amex, Adobe Join GitHub Intern Program

GitHub revealed today that Adobe and American Express have joined its Summer 2021 Fellowship program, a 12-week, hands-on curriculum where interns work alongside developers to contribute to open source projects hosted on the GitHub repository.

Vanessa Gennarelli, senior director of education at GitHub, said the overall goal of the program is increase the pool of developer talent with experience working remotely on an open source project that requires a fair amount of collaboration with other developers.

The program was developed in collaboration with Major League Hacking (MLH), which organizes hackathons for students. Each intern participates in a series of short hackathon sprints involving multiple open source projects over the 12-week period. GitHub originally created the fellowship program as a way to address the demand for online internships during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Those internships have provided open source maintainers with access to a pool of talent that can reside anywhere versus, for example, always trying to recruit individuals located in a specific geographic area, Gennarelli said. GitHub is also trying to increase diversity within the open source community, Gennarelli added.

Three quarters of open source maintainers (76%) that have worked with MLH interns reported their open source project was in a better state after working with MLH Fellows. Of eligible fellows who were matched for jobs with an MLH Fellowship partner company, more than 20% ended up receiving full-time offers at that company.

Mike Swift, MLH CEO, said the internships provide a way to partially close a gap in developer expertise that only continues to widen. Organizations are especially keen to find developers that have open source expertise, Swift added.

A survey of 3,400 developers and technology managers conducted O’Reilly Media on behalf of IBM finds 65% of respondents preferred skills related to the underlying open source technologies. The same percentage agreed that contributions to open source projects impress potential employers and result in better professional opportunities. In many cases, open source projects are among some of the most innovative development initiatives in the IT industry, Swift noted.

Of course, as open source becomes a primary driver for building software, more contributors are looking to get paid for their efforts. Much of that compensation comes in the form of organizations that hire developers for the express purpose of contributing to open source projects that they deem critical to their operations.

Regardless of how developers are compensated for their time and effort, it is apparent open source projects are the fountainhead from which many opportunities spring. Future success in any endeavor has as much to do with who someone knows as it does actual talent. The best place for any developer to expand their base of industry contact is to collaborate on an open source project. The more projects they contribute to, the greater the reach of their personal network and, by extension, their net worth, will become.

February 19, 2021
Survey: Fixing Bugs Stealing Time from Development

A global survey of 950 developers published today finds more than a third (38%) of developers spend up to a quarter of their time fixing software bugs, with slightly more than a quarter (26%) spending up to half their time fixing bugs.

Conducted by the market research firm Propeller Insights on behalf of Rollbar, a provider of artificial intelligence (AI) tools to detect software errors, the report also notes that 88% of developers find traditional error monitoring tools are not meeting expectations.

Daniel Day, vice president of marketing at Rollbar, said the survey makes it apparent that continuing to rely on manual processes to surface errors in code is having a major downstream impact on both DevOps teams, in particular, and the business as a whole.

For example, nearly nine in 10 developers (89%) also noted that undetected errors take a big toll on the business. More than one-fourth (26%) of developers also said that their employers have lost a significant number of users due to errors in software. The same share (26%) said software errors damage their company’s reputation and its ability to attract investments, and nearly a fifth (18%) said that undetected software problems anger their company’s investors.

Nearly a third (32%) of developers said they spend up to 10 hours a week fixing bugs instead of writing code, while 16% said they spend up to 15 hours a week. Another 6% said they have to dedicate up to 20 hours a week fixing bugs instead of writing code.

More than half of developers (55%) said that if they didn’t have to spend so much time fixing bugs, they would have the time to build new features and functionality. Many of these errors are not addressed because current tools require them to manually respond to errors (39%); it takes too long to find all of the details they need to fix bugs and errors (36%); focus on system stability and not enough on code health (31%); make it difficult to detect errors (29%); and have an approach to error aggregation that is either too broad or too narrow (23%).

Nearly two-thirds of developers (62%) said they have found out about errors from users reporting through the application, while a quarter (25%) said that they have heard about errors from users sharing these issues on social media. Another 17% said media coverage clued them in about errors in their software, while more than a fifth (21%) said they heard about them from their CEO.

Nearly a third of the survey group (31%) said that manually responding to errors makes them feel frustrated, while more than a fifth (22%) said they feel overwhelmed when using manual processes to address errors in software. Nearly as many (17%) said it leads to burnout. More than a tenth (12%) said it elicits feelings of resentment, and 7% said it makes them want to quit their jobs.

Nearly two-thirds of all developers said they would rather do an unpleasant activity than fix errors, including pay bills (26%), go to the dentist (21%) and spend time with in-laws (20%).

Rollbar clearly has a vested interest in convincing developers to increase reliance on AI to surface errors in code. The productivity paradox holds that, the more application code developers write, the more time they spend fixing existing code than writing new code. Most developers have a lot better things to do with their time than manually combing through lines of code looking for those errors. In fact, the problem is, many of them simply don’t have the time required to catch all the issues before an application makes it into a production environment.

February 16, 2021
Future-Proof Your Product Development Life Cycle
In product development, change is vital. In fact, some might say that product development is the embodiment of change. Continuous improvement keeps products from becoming stagnant, which, in turn, keeps companies afloat.

While change is important, it’s not always helpful, especially when it involves the management of employee attrition and retention. Over the last year, many organizations have witnessed how an uncertain business environment can leave their workforce in chaos. Every year, thousands of experienced developers and engineers in the product development ecosystem leave their jobs, taking valuable tactics, insights and tools with them to their next role. Though these workers often pass on their expertise to those who take their place, without formal systems or standardized processes for gathering that information, much of the knowledge will be lost. The ultimate result is an increase in development costs and deployment delays.

We’ve all heard the phrase, “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” When it comes to an employee, that individual’s informal knowledge isn’t always easily captured by existing internal company processes. To retain and protect this knowledge, companies need technology that makes it easy to gather, store and access for future use.

Enter future-proofing, the process of using digital tools to capture knowledge and make accessibility seamless for future employees at various stages of product development. Employing future-proofing strategies will help IT company leaders and decision makers ensure a continuum throughout the product development life cycle.

Future-proofing is especially vital in this age of digital transformation, as it helps address common concerns that crop up about collaborative environments, team efficiencies and product integrations. Let’s take a look at what this entails.

Future-Proofing in the Age of Digital Transformation

The best-case scenario for adept future-proofing in the age of digital transformation is to have product development adapt alongside any systemic changes. Under these terms, software solutions that holistically capture both formal and informal knowledge are the secret to future-proofing the product development process. An effective digital solution will help you do this in three ways:
- Comprehensively enables collaboration: A comprehensive solution will give users a single source of truth to track decisions, questions and problems. Unlike a shared Excel spreadsheet or Word document that can get overwritten, forgotten, corrupted or contains incomplete, fragmented information, future-proofing tools can effectively gather, store and then pass along knowledge.
- Increases team efficiency: By working from a single source, teams can capture knowledge – often without even realizing it – through feedback and team communication. Additionally, a single source of information reduces design inconsistencies and discrepancies.
- Seamlessly integrates digital tools: Because product development does not rely on a single digital system, solutions need to be integrated across different digital tools and throughout the product development life cycle. By integrating with tools that track development and with other information gathering and tracking solutions, knowledge is captured at multiple levels, streamlining future projects.
Overall, fostering an environment that encourages teamwork is the best way to ensure knowledge sharing and preservation. However, when that is not possible, companies need to have a backup plan. By merging talent with technology, you can capture both formal and informal knowledge before an employee walks away, and, therefore, future-proofing your product development life cycle.
February 11, 2021
How the SRE Role Is Evolving

In recent years, site reliability engineering (SRE) has garnered much interest. In 2019, LinkedIn listed site reliability engineer as the second most promising job in the United States. Now, in 2021, the role continues to grow and evolve within many organizations.

Initially spearheaded at Google and credited to engineer Ben Treynor, the strategy seeks smarter accountability for application reliability. An SRE team sets service level indicators, makes error budgets for new features and uses tools like application performance monitoring (APM) to visualize performance insights, among other tasks. SREs are quickly becoming a key check to increase business output in response to new digital innovations.

I recently met with AppDynamics Regional CTO Gregg Ostrowski to discuss the emergence of SRE and how the approach is evolving. In short, it appears SREs will only continue to grow in importance across more companies, adopting new tactics like chaos engineering, and diversifying their teams with new domain knowledge in response to increasing technological complexity.

What is an SRE?

Traditionally, organizations employed system administrators, or sysadmins, to maintain operations for large computing systems and services. However, this typically produced a dichotomy: product developers want to push new features, while operations teams (sysadmins) want to make sure the existing service doesn’t break. The split between developers and operations can be unhealthy and cause friction.

Whereas sysadmin positions are detached from development and involve a lot of manual work, an SRE approach, on the other hand, takes a more engineering-focused approach to automate operations. Google’s SRE book, which has become a bible of sorts, defines the role as “What happens when you ask a software engineer to design an operations team.”

So, what does an SRE do? Well, at Google, they are in charge of availability, latency, performance, efficiency, change management, monitoring, emergency response and capacity planning for the services they operate. At Google, they spend no more than 50% of their time on traditional “ops,” like tickets, on-call and manual tasks, and are encouraged to use the remaining 50% of their time to develop automation that will replace human operations labor.

5 Ways the SRE Approach is Evolving

It’s been a few years since Google introduced the SRE concept, and naturally, unique iterations have popped up within other enterprises. But, on the whole, where is the concept heading? Ostrowski sees SREs evolving in a few key areas: growth and maturity, increased diversification with domain-specific experts and new monitoring tactics.

1. Increased Adoption

First, not all companies have embraced an SRE model. A recent study by Blameless found “… 50% of respondents employ an SRE model with dedicated engineers focused on infrastructure and tooling, or an embedded model where full-time SREs are assigned to a service.”

The SRE model is gaining momentum, but there is still room for greater adoption. There is also room for internal growth. Ostrowski sees a single SRE team as a single point of failure. “It needs to be a whole department,” he said.

In addition, SREs are gaining a more prominent voice at the table, influencing feature rollout. “With proper and mature SRE involvement, teams can’t willy-nilly deploy,” he said. Ostrowski views these teams as maintaining a critical balance between business risk and introducing new technology.

2. Larger, Diversified SRE Departments

Many companies are experiencing rising user demands, and thus must rapidly scale their application networks. Simultaneously, there has been a Cambrian explosion of deployment types — systems could be using any assortment of legacy infrastructure, mainframe, microservices, cloud environments and multiple cloud vendors. “The complexity and topology of the IT space has grown substantially, with many interdependencies,” Ostrowski said.

Due to increasingly complex technical stacks, SRE must now cover many domains. Thus, SRE departments will likely require a more diversified team of domain experts. Ostrowski likens SREs to “Navy SEALs of the IT team.” For example, assigning them with experience navigating the nuances behind Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure could maintain service reliability in respective clouds.

Individuals’ personality matters for suitability to SRE, too, said Ostrowski. The role requires a specific type of innovator who considers the repercussions of code, and loves improving processes and performances.

3. New Testing Tactics Will Emerge

Ostrowski also foresees SRE departments introducing new monitoring and testing approaches to maintain reliability. One of these is chaos engineering, which champions the idea of intentionally breaking application systems. Different strategies will undoubtedly emerge to help drive user experience (UX) and ensure that performance is always top of mind.

4. Businesses Rely on SREs to Mitigate Risk

All things will inevitably fail, at some point. SREs accept failure and learn to manage it, designing repeatable operational mitigation structures. “As companies become reliant on the consumerization of IT, business is dependent on SREs to drive business,” said Ostrowski. This reliance will likely increase as businesses tap SREs to maintain stability.

Whether it’s reducing mean time to repair (MTTR), programming service level indicators to monitor website load time, or forecasting error budgets for new feature introductions, SREs will be increasingly relied upon to maintain business stability and high performance.

“The SRE mindset is about coming to terms with a blameless environment,” said Ostrowski. They can help “balance a risk between the business and application team,” described Ostrowski.

5. SREs Steer UX

In this digital-only environment, “The application has become the business,” described Ostrowski. If the application is core to the business, monitoring the user journey is necessary to improve it. Ostrowski believes SREs oversee a unique territory that could produce valuable business insights too.

In addition to monitoring uptime to ensure URL response times meet SLAs, SREs could track UX-related insights, such as conversion rates or cart abandonment percentages. Tracking such analytics and setting standards baselines could help pinpoint problems affecting UX. It could also assist product development in designing better-performing software.

Final Thoughts

“Anything that you do more than twice has to be automated.”
-Adam Stone, CEO, D-Tools

Traditional operations teams are typically detached from product development and are culturally very different. However, within an SRE approach, operations instead aim to run systems that automate work typically performed manually by sysadmins.

In this brief introduction, we barely scratched the surface of the topic. And of course, each company is unique in its approach to hybridizing product development and operations. DevOps tenants are closely aligned with SRE — often they are intermixed or one and the same.

Ultimately, truly reaping business value from this approach will depend on breaking down silos and opening conversations — or at least automated notifications — between disparate units. Only then can operations and development coexist in the most productive way.

February 10, 2021
The Benefits of Open Source Technologies

Over the last 20 years, we have seen the proliferation of open source software and technologies become part of commercial offerings, either as part of the technology stack that powers the product or part of the product itself. Although these two use cases are largely different, both have come to showcase just how useful open source is, not only for the developer community but for businesses as well.

One of the benefits of working with open source technologies or projects is the free sharing of ideas. Open source brings people together to brainstorm and develop a common piece of technology. The shared love for what they do crosses cultural and geographical boundaries. One of the best-known – and arguably, most important – open source projects is the Linux kernel and operating system. Linus Torvalds released the first version of the kernel to the open source community through a mailing list, sparking worldwide collaborative development and widespread adoption.

The passion for open source stems from a deeply rooted belief that contributors are solving an important problem, and that they are working towards the betterment of the world as a whole. In many cases, this is demonstrable. The Linux kernel now powers the majority of data centers worldwide, serving billions of users. But it’s not only that subjective passion that has played a key role in establishing open source technologies. The peer-review process of open source projects means that each code commit passes a rigorous, public audit and verification process. It has proven to be a superb way to increase code quality, reduce bugs and regressions and guard against vulnerabilities. Research has shown, objectively, that this process produces higher quality software than the standard, proprietary quality assurance and testing procedures.

When selecting an open source technology to use in development, there are a couple of issues that need to be considered in order to safeguard the quality of your product. One key consideration is to resist chasing the latest technology fad. Instead, select the right technology for the job. It’s in developers’ DNA to obsess over new and exciting technologies, but this does not always mean that they are appropriate. While Kubernetes may be the right solution if you need to serve millions of users at Netflix-like scale while managing maintenance and cost, it likely isn’t the best choice for a new startup launching the first iteration of their product. In this case, speed of development and flexibility to make changes is more important than scalability (so, perhaps, the startup might be better off using Ruby on Rails or Django). These three projects all share an important characteristic: They have active communities that not only safeguard project features but also maintain them and offer peer-to-peer support.

When implementing a new feature with a particular technology, this supporting community is very important, since they can greatly accelerate the development of your product. These are people who love what they do and want to see other community members succeed with the technology. In this regard, it’s also important to consider giving back to the projects and communities you benefit from. You can either participate in the communities and help others yourself, one-on-one, or contribute by sharing the improvements that you have made to the open source technology. If you have extended the API, for example, or discovered and fixed bugs, there is no reason not to contribute your changes back and further enrich the ecosystem. The credibility you build in this way can also be a benefit, as people will identify you, your team and your product as supporters of the open source project. It’s a virtuous cycle of collaboration with benefits that should not be underestimated.

As you and your product become an important part of the open source ecosystem, either because you use open source components or because the core of your product is open-sourced, remember that trust is notoriously hard to build and very easy to lose quickly.

Whatever one’s feelings are on this matter, the open source community is very careful about who they trust and can easily be alienated by a company that appears not to have their best interests in mind. In order to build trust, it’s important for teams to build credibility. Open source communities are largely merit-based, so unless the community sees proof of expertise and knowledge, they will not automatically trust a self-proclaimed expert. This credibility can even extend to the personal, like the many open source developers who have a large following on social media and lend their credibility to the projects and companies that they work for.

Finally, when dealing with open source technologies, projects, and communities, it’s key to remember that developers are very sensitive to blatant sales pitches. Authenticity matters in the way that a project, company or brand presents itself. Open source is all about collaboration and community; it’s a relationship built on trust and mutual benefit, not profit.

February 9, 2021
Amid COVID-19, Developers Struggle to Keep Pace
It’s been a wild ride for digital innovation. It’s also been a stressful year for developers. At most organizations, the pandemic has increased reliance on digital experiences (and its programmers) exponentially. IT spending is rising, and competition is skyrocketing. More than ever before, the pressure is placed on developers to meet rigorous demands.

A recent study by Couchbase revealed how developers are revolutionizing digital transformation efforts throughout the COVID–19 crisis. Yet, this output may not be sustainable. The 2020 Tech Lead Survey, which surveyed 450 senior IT decision-makers worldwide, exposed stressors for development teams, which, if not mitigated, could easily result in fatigue and burnout.

So Much To Do, So Little Time

Some digital transformation efforts that were slated to take five years have had timelines reduced to a matter of months. In this unprecedented era, flexibility is an indispensable characteristic to adapt to change. In fact, 63% of respondents said that flexibility to change direction on a whim is critical to meeting digital transformation goals.

But, extreme flexibility comes at a price. Forty-nine percent of respondents indicated their development teams have been asked to do too much in too little time. As a result, 40% of respondents said their development teams were behind schedule with their current projects.

“In a year when organizations have had to struggle to adapt to new decentralized ways of working and rapidly evolving markets, developers have come under severe pressure to help their organizations adapt,” said Steve Yen, co-founder of Couchbase.

It’s apparent that developers are under escalating pressure. If the weight continues to pile on, exhaustion could bring overall production to a grinding halt. At least leaders realize who is driving digital innovation — 92% acknowledge developers are the unsung heroes of current digital transformation initiatives.

Lacking Clear Direction From On High

Eighty-six percent of respondents experienced challenges with their development teams. However, this does not wholly reflect poorly on developer inabilities — managers have a responsibility to set more explicit guidelines.

Another obstacle: goal setting. Forty percent of respondents reported that setting clear, measurable goals for their team is a serious challenge. In addition, ensuring developers use the right technology, and ensuring teams understand overarching strategic goals were oft-cited pain points, as well.

Resolving these issues will be critical to reducing developer complaints and remediating the stressors outlined above. “There needs to be investment in not just people, but also in the technology, management and communication that will help individuals succeed,” said Yen.

Solution: DevOps

So, where should architects direct new investments? Well, of the 450 IT leaders surveyed, 92% believe DevOps could have a revolutionary impact on their digital transformation efforts.

The report refrains from offering specific technical advice, but makes the following general recommendations:
- Don’t rely on legacy technology ill-suited for the tasks at hand. Current investments must be future-proofed for tomorrow’s scalability and integration requirements.
- Don’t assume onboarding new tech will be easy. As digital innovation matures, new technology becomes more refined and specialized. As I’ve covered, whether it’s Kubernetes, service mesh or multi-cloud strategies, all require time to learn, along with some pretty specialized skillsets.
- Take time to communicate with developers and understand obstacles. Be realistic with timelines, and do not ask for too much. Plan out project goals strategically, because haste does not equate to overall speed.
Under pressure to perform and maintain flexibility, it makes sense that engineers are feeling the pressure of an amplified development pace. As that pace is likely not to decrease in 2021, finding methods to better support developers is key for long-term sustainability.

At many organizations, a greater DevOps investment equates to operationalizing and automating processes for areas like microservices CI/CD, and networking and zero-trust security. It could also mean supporting developer workflows with some-code tooling. Other institutions are even introducing low-code tools to democratize the development process, intending to relieve some burden from professional engineers.

Invest in Developers, Invest in Smooth Operations

On average, development teams grew by 20% in 2020. As expectations for developers rise, so will investment in developers and the processes that support them. As teams move forward, it will be critical to gather feedback and understand what’s causing gridlock so that developers maintain agility and avoid burnout.

In this competitive climate, choosing the correct people and systems to support new digital advances will be a competitive advantage. “Investing in [developers] in the right way will help them play to win,” said Yen.

Since 2017, Couchbase has surveyed IT decision-makers on the challenges they face throughout their digital transformation efforts. Here, I highlighted the major takeaways from the 2020 report. You can view the full findings here.
February 8, 2021
Using Automation to go All-Digital, Fast
Before the pandemic, digital transformation was a five-year plan for many companies — or in some cases, a distant vision that kept getting kicked down the road. Now, companies in every industry face an urgent imperative to adapt to an increasingly online-first world: If you don’t go digital, fast, you’re simply out of the game.

Increasing productivity has been critical for companies as they make this shift. But too often, speed is hindered by time-consuming and repetitive processes that companies can and should easily automate. By automating mundane tasks, employees and businesses can focus on what really matters — increasing scale in today’s work-from-anywhere world, and improving experiences for both employees and customers.

The Benefits of Automation

Fundamentally, automation is about digitizing existing business processes to streamline results, and it will be a key element in helping businesses survive and get back to growth. Until now, many companies have focused on applying these tools to the front office: sales, marketing, commerce and supply chains. With most employees now working remotely, it’s harder than ever for team members to do their jobs efficiently. Automating the back office and improving the employee experience is key for businesses to achieve the speed they need to thrive right now.

Here are three key advantages of bringing automation to the back office:
1. It improves productivity.In virtually every industry and role, employees are still spending hours every week on mundane and labor-intensive tasks, such as data entry. Automation can speed up these repetitive tasks and streamline lengthy processes, freeing employees up to focus on the “human” aspects of their jobs, like interacting with customers, planning ahead, making decisions or learning new skills. By taking over routine tasks and allowing employees to concentrate on what matters most, automation makes workers more efficient and productive.
2. It increases scale.There’s only so much an employee can do manually. The time-consuming processes that worked yesterday can’t scale to meet the demands of an all-digital environment. Automating repetitive tasks means that employees can achieve more in the same amount of time, allowing them to scale their workloads. With time-consuming tasks being taken care of in the background, workers can spend their time on more meaningful work and customer relationships.
3. It enhances employee experience.Nobody enjoys entering numbers into a spreadsheet. An often overlooked aspect of automation is that it leaves employees more satisfied and engaged with their companies and their jobs. Having fewer tedious tasks on their plates gives employees the chance to tap the skills that machines aren’t as good at, like creativity, communication and decision-making. This is especially beneficial at a time when most employees are juggling more responsibilities at work and at home. Making a more valuable contribution and more meaningful connections is not only rewarding for employees, but also translates to higher satisfaction among the customers they interact with.
Real-World Examples

Not everything can be automated, but there’s a lot of room to take the drudgery out of most roles. Take onboarding, for example. Traditionally, when a new hire started, everything happened in person: They attended an orientation, picked up their laptops at the tech bar, met with benefit providers — all of which required orchestration on the part of human resources. With automation, all of this manual coordination can be replicated with an intelligent workflow capable of guiding employees through an onboarding process customized to their specific role and location.

In another example, HR departments are facing an unprecedented volume of queries about policies around caring for children and other dependents. Using low-code development, companies can easily set up automated, online bots to handle frequently asked questions and guide employees through processes needed to enroll in new services. Automating these queries with bots not only makes the employees themselves more productive, but it also delivers better experiences for both the HR team and the employees seeking answers.

Automation is Here to Stay

In today’s world, there is no alternative to a digital business model. Automation is the recipe that will help companies achieve the speed they need to survive now and the edge they need to thrive in the future.

And there is no turning back — automation is here to stay, regardless of the trajectory of the pandemic. The process of change is never easy, but done right, automation not only leads to a more agile workforce, but also to a happier one.
February 4, 2021
CloudBees Appoints New CEO to Drive Next Level of DevOps Growth

CloudBees announced today the appointment of Stephen DeWitt as its new CEO, taking over from Sacha Labourey, who will become chief strategy officer.

Labrourey said after leading the company for the past 10 years, and after a banner year that saw the company generate more than $100 million in revenue, the time was right to appoint a new CEO to take the company to next level. The move also allows Labourey more time to focus on product development.

Stephen DeWitt, CloudBees CEO

DeWitt most recently served as chief strategy officer for Automation Anywhere, a provider of a robotic process automation (RPA) platform. DeWitt previously served as the CEO of WorkMarket, a labor automation platform for enterprises, Azul Systems, a provider of platform for running Java applications and Cobalt Networks, a provider of Linux servers.

Without committing to a specific initial public offering (IPO) date, DeWitt said the ultimate goal is to put the processes in place that will enable CloudBees to grow to $200 million in revenues and beyond.

Achieving that goal will also require tighter integration across what has become a diverse portfolio of DevOps platforms, DeWitt said. The challenge is providing IT organizations with all the benefits of that integration without locking them into any specific component, DeWitt added.

Going forward, DeWitt said IT teams should expect to see CloudBees invest more in artificial intelligence (AI) to further automate DevOps processes. There are many low-level DevOps tasks that could be automated using machine learning algorithms to reduce the level of friction DevOps teams often encounter.

Becoming a $200 million company, however, is more difficult than becoming a $100 million company, DeWitt said. Not only does the company have to put the processes in place to grow, but CloudBees today faces more viable competition than it did when it first pioneered the adoption of DevOps best practices.

The number of organizations adopting DevOps best practices is not only increasing, but organizations that have implemented continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms also are employing them more widely. Instead of only being employed by pockets of development teams, entire enterprises are now using DevOps best practices and standardizing on a CI/CD platform. Many of those decisions are being driven by the need to accelerate digital business transformation initiatives in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

As the application development stakes rise, C-level executives are also getting more involved in application development and deployment decisions, DeWitt said. Those executives not only want to accelerate the rate at which applications are built and deployed, they also want greater visibility into processes that now have a direct impact on revenue streams, DeWitt said.

It remains to be seen just how quickly DevOps platform providers, as a whole, will grow, but with more venture capital pouring into the sector by the day, there is no shortage of fuel to throw on the proverbial DevOps fire.

February 3, 2021