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Category: DevOps Culture

  • Human Transformation Breeds DevOps Skills and Success

    Human Transformation Breeds DevOps Skills and Success

    As part of its mission to advance the human elements of DevOps, DevOps Institute has released its 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report. The year-over-year data builds on the inaugural 2019 project but it’s more insightful and more regional than last year. DevOps Institute is grateful to the 1,300 respondents this past year who took the time to share their insights that allowed us to present this important research to the community.

    One thing that is abundantly clear is that human transformation is the single most critical success factor to enable DevOps practices and patterns for enterprise IT organizations. Traditional upskilling and talent development approaches won’t soon be enough for large enterprises to remain competitive. This is because the increasing demand for IT professionals with core human skills is escalating to a point that business leaders have not yet seen in their lifetime. If there is but one call to action from the report this year is that we must update our humans through new skill sets as often—and with the same focus—as our technology.

    Thoughts on Skills

    What we continue to see is a well-recognized gap between the skills needed for digital transformation and the skills available in new and existing talent. According to 58% of the Upskilling report respondents, finding skilled DevOps individuals is a huge challenge, whereas 48% of respondents say the retention of skilled DevOps individuals is a challenge.  

    Unfortunately, the term “skill” is so broadly generic, which fuels the belief that there is a single stack of competencies that will guarantee enterprise success. That’s simply not true. The modern IT professional has to possess a set of skills across at least four categories: process, function, automation and core/human skills. Within each category, individuals must know which skills are considered must-have, nice-to-have or not as important—which leads to the question: How do you know? Seeking the answer to that question is the genesis of DevOps Institute’s Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report project.

    Additional Takeaways from the 2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report

    • The DevOps journey is difficult for at least 50% of respondents since it changes the traditional structure of IT.
    • The DevOps human must have a hybrid set of skills since process skills and knowledge (69%), automation skills (67%) and human skills (61%) are the top three must-have skill categories in 2020.
    • Upskilling needs attention now since only 31% of respondents had a formal upskilling program while 38% do not,  21% said they were working on standing up a program.
    • Agile, DevOps and ITIL are getting strong competition from Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) which grew by 5% from 2019.  Value Stream Management and Systems Thinking are also gaining traction.

    To learn more, download the Upskilling 2020: Enterprise Skills Report.  The data is very granular and can serve as a waypoint for individuals and enterprises trying to plan their upskilling initiatives.

    — Jayne Groll

  • Better Apps and Better Security When You Shift Left

    Better Apps and Better Security When You Shift Left

    Tens of thousands of people and hundreds of cybersecurity vendors descended on San Francisco at the end of April. While the RSA Conference was the primary draw, there are a number of peripheral events that go on throughout the week as well, such as the Cloud Security Alliance Summit, the CIO/CISO Interchange, BSides San Francisco and the Qualys Security Conference.

    I was able to attend some of the Qualys Security Conference and I had the opportunity to see Alex Mandernack, security solution architect for product management at Qualys, presenting on the need to shift left when it comes to cybersecurity.

    Mandernack outlined some of the issues organizations face today when it comes to security. Migrating to the cloud and embracing DevOps culture means more ephemeral, elastic environments and compressed development time frames. He pointed out that these trends make security more challenging, but also described the opportunity they present to change our approach to streamline and improve security.

    The Traditional Pipeline is Broken

    The traditional model of application development is much more linear. Each app team builds their own image—often in a silo or vacuum disconnected from other teams. Penetration testing is conducted on a sporadic or infrequent basis, and eventually the app is deployed. Vulnerability scans are run on the app in production, and issues or deficiencies are reported back to the developers to address or incorporate into the next build.

    The process is slow and cumbersome. It also has the potential to introduce redundancies that waste resources and make the organization less efficient. As companies embrace DevOps and move to the cloud, the traditional development pipeline simply doesn’t work—especially not for security.

    DevOps, and Cloud, and Containers — Oh My!

    The cloud and DevOps fundamentally change the development lifecycle. Development time frames are compressed, and the process is a self-feeding, iterative circle rather than a repeating linear approach. The traditional approach of identifying and resolving security issues after an application is deployed won’t work in a DevOps environment because by the time issues are identified and fixed, the app itself may have already moved on to the next version.

    Cybersecurity and the development pipeline have enough challenges with the cloud and DevOps, but there is also a newer technology trend that exacerbates the problem—containers. Containers are designed to get code quickly and to operate fast. They are also built for scalability—spawning and spinning down hundreds or thousands of containers constantly to keep pace with demand.

    There is a diverse array of tools and platforms associated with cloud, DevOps and containers. Organizations often employ a complex collection comprised of some combination of AWS, Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift and others. The result can quickly become a black hole when it comes to security—which is why it’s important to push security left into the CI/CD pipeline.

    Shift Left to Help Security Teams Do Better

    In a DevOps culture, developers and security teams need to think about security sooner. It’s important to get the security tools into the process earlier. Thankfully, with the DevOps lifecycle and the tools commonly used within a DevOps environment, it can be done.

    For starters, companies should build a golden image. Developers shouldn’t have to patch and update the base operating system before they even start developing. The golden image takes a baseline operating system such as Ubuntu or CentOS, and completely patches and configures it so everyone has a standard, consistent image to develop on.

    With the golden image in place, the next step in shifting security left is to implement testing and scanning in the CI/CD pipeline. Put vulnerability information at the fingertips of developers as they’re developing and implement vulnerability gates in the pipeline to ensure that applications that don’t comply with policies and meet minimum requirements are not allowed to be deployed.

    New Role of the Security Team

    Part of shifting security left includes providing tools that make security self-service for the DevOps team. Automating actions with scripting, APIs and CI plugins ensures that security is simplified and streamlined to provide value for developers.

    In this shift left scenario, the security team has to redefine its role in the process. The security team is still vital, but rather than being the police or a roadblock in the development process, the role of security focuses on verifying and auditing the process. The security framework should have dashboards and live data that enable the security team to monitor activity and identify trends that may need further attention.

    Better Security, Faster

    There is often conflict between developers and security teams, but there doesn’t need to be. Mandernack stressed that developers don’t want to create insecure apps either.

    Shifting security to the left into the CI/CD pipeline streamlines the whole process. Ultimately, the result is higher quality, more secure applications that are developed faster.

    — Tony Bradley

  • SauceCon 2020 Speaker Profile: Nikolay Advolodkin

    SauceCon 2020 Speaker Profile: Nikolay Advolodkin

    This is the fifth in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2020. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 27-29 in Austin, Texas, and DevOps.com will be there, broadcasting live.

    SauceCon speaker and automation expert Nikolay Advolodkin says that test automation is insanely hard, and that there are thousands of things we can do to make it really good—or really bad.

    “Learning best practices is a great way to create a solid foundation for test automation success,” said Nikolay. “I want to share all of the things that I’ve discovered through my career to make everyone successful at test automation.” 

    You’d be hard-pressed to find someone more qualified than Nikolay to do that. As a senior solution architect at Sauce Labs and founder of UltimateQA.com, Nikolay educates customers and testing professionals worldwide on testing. Most recently, he was a contributing author to Continuous Testing for DevOps Professionals.

    He was named one of 33 Test Automation Leaders to follow in 2020 by TechBeacon.com. And according to Udemy.com, he is one of the top Selenium WebDriver instructors across the globe, educating more than 50,000 students on the ins and outs of test automation from more than 120 different countries.

    At SauceCon, Nikolay will host a full-day “Best Practices in Automated and Parallel Testing” workshop that takes attendees on a journey through a really poor test that follows multiple anti-patterns. Along the way, Nikolay will help attendees transform this test into a production-ready suite of tests that follows automation best practices: making them extremely robust, fast, atomic and ideal for parallelization. He plans to make this workshop session fun with games that will push the limits of test automation beliefs. 

    When he isn’t teaching people how to be automated software testing masters or revolutionizing the test automation world as we know it, Nikolay is into physical fitness. He said it helps him stay calm and rock in test automation. He also loves animals and the environment and supports both every day with his plant-based lifestyle.

    You can hear from Nikolay and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2020, the fourth annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • Commercial Objectives in the Age of Automation

    Commercial Objectives in the Age of Automation

    When I was 17 years old, back in 1971, I sold orange juice near a busy street corner in New York City. My job was to stand out in front of a fruit stand and dispense quarts of OJ from a machine. It was pretty simple: keep the hopper on the top of the machine filled with oranges and keep the supply of quart jars steady. Then, when a customer came by to make a purchase, I filled a quart jar with juice, took the customer’s money and rang up the sale in the cash register.

    That was my job, rain or shine, in warm weather or cold: keep the machine operational, give the customer the goods and collect the money. Other people had this job, too. Selling fresh-squeezed orange juice to the masses by way of a rather simple piece of automation technology kept us busy.

    But, here’s the thing. If my employer had to choose between me or the machine, he’d have chosen the machine every time. The machine was a gold mine. It made more orange juice in a minute than 10 human squeezers could have done in 10 times the amount of time. In fact, if my employer used humans, he would have lost money. The machine was key to his commercial success selling orange juice.

    Now, hold this thought while I move forward to recent times.

    In May of 2019, the rideshare service Uber went public. In order to issue shares on a public exchange, the company, as prescribed by law, needed to publish a prospectus describing its business model as well as how it intends to use the money it raised through the IPO.

    Every company that’s listed on a public stock exchange publishes a prospectus. Facebook has one, and so does Microsoft. Even World Wrestling Entertainment, the folks that produce action-packed events such as the WWE Super ShowDown and WrestleMania, has one. The prospectus is the way the SEC creates transparency into the finances and commercial strategies of a  company. If you take the time to read one, a prospectus will tell you a lot.

    So I did. I read the Uber prospectus and I found something very interesting on Page 10: “We are investing in technology to power the next generation of transportation. Our Advanced Technologies Group (‘ATG’) focuses on developing autonomous vehicle technologies, which we believe have the long-term potential to provide safer and more efficient rides and deliveries to consumers, as well as lower prices,” stated Uber.

    In other words, Uber is actively pursuing driverless technology as a key commercial objective. Why? Well, to answer this question let’s go back to my days in New York City playing trusty sidekick to the orange juice machine.

    Back then, in order for my employer to make money selling fresh-squeezed orange juice, he needed both me and the machine working in tandem to fulfill the commercial objective to turn some oranges and a glass jar into money. In terms of his commercial objective, I was the weak link in the chain. I got sick. I had bouts of adolescent unreliability. I moved on to greener pastures when better opportunities appeared. If he could have replaced me with a vending machine that sold fresh orange juice he would have. If I were in his shoes, I’d do the same thing. But at that time, orange juice vending technology was not as advanced as it is today. I was lucky, I guess.

    But, that was then and this is now. So let’s go back to Uber.

    Remember, the commercial objective of rideshare is to turn a moving vehicle into money. Right now this involves a cellphone, a human and a car. The cellphone provides the driver with passenger pickup information and routing instructions to get to a destination. The car provides the transportation. The human operates the car in response to and with the assistance of information coming from the cellphone.

    Right now humans are really good at operating motor vehicles and interacting with the cellphone and passengers very much in the same way I was really good at keeping the orange juice machine full of oranges and dispensing the product to customers. But, just as I was the weak link with the orange juice transaction, so is the human in a rideshare. The cost of a human can vary and things can get sticky in terms of legal matters that go with human employment. Yet, the risk is offset by profit the human produces, for now anyway. But, that can and will change. Take the human out of the equation and the profits go up and the risk goes down, provided the underlying automation technology is advanced enough to meet the demands of the situation.

    If you have any doubt that driverless technology will advance to the point where humans can be replaced, think back to how crappy voice recognition was in 1989. It was really, really bad. Now, voice recognition is really, really good, even in a variety of languages. Getting to that level of technical maturity only took 20 years. Now, imagine how good a driverless vehicle will be 10 years from today. I’ll wager it will be really, really good.

    Yes, some people will point to the current fatalities created by driverless automation to assert that human displacement won’t happen. But, if you have any doubt that it will, keep in mind that the were a lot of crashes early on when the Wright brothers took to the skies in 1903. Yet, by 1919 KLM was flying commercially. That’s a pretty dramatic accomplishment in terms of safety improvement for a technology.

    So the long and the short of it is, just as the owner of the fruit stand would have gladly chosen an orange juice vending machine over me, so too does Uber want to take the human driver out of the car. For all intents and purposes, a rideshare vending machine will be the preferred way to meet the commercial objective at hand.

    So, where does that leave humans?

    The conventional wisdom is that as human labor continues to get replaced by machine automation, there will be new, unimagined jobs for those displaced workers. I think otherwise.

    Consider this: around the 1880’s there were almost 200,000 horses in the City of New York. Now, if you can find 400, you’re lucky. Why? Because that much horse labor isn’t needed anymore. Some have gone onto other jobs, such as being a thoroughbred competitor at Aqueduct Racetrack or a tourist amusement pulling a carriage through Central Park, but as far as being the engine the moves street-cars, carriages and mounted pedestrians, that time has long passed. Horse labor no longer meets the commercial objectives of transportation.

    So too will it be with humans who earn a living driving a motor vehicle. They will be displaced. Only this time there is a very good chance that there will not be the number of new, unimagined jobs created that will meet the needs of the broad segment of the population being displaced. Yes, there will be new specialized work, but not at the scale necessary to absorb the number of those out of work. After all, once the automobile came along, the 200,000 horses left behind in New York City did not go on to become thoroughbred racers.

    The point of the analogy is this: the more specialized the work becomes, the more difficult it is to quickly acquire the skills necessary to do the work. For example, some displaced drivers might be able to become data scientists quickly, but a significant majority will not. To assume otherwise is folly.

    Addressing the issue of worker displacement due to advanced automation is a serious problem, one that deserves significant attention. Hopefully, we’ll figure out some solutions that have long term viability. Otherwise, we’re in for some big trouble because no matter what, businesses will continue to advance and embrace automation to meet their commercial objectives. As the saying goes, “an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.”

    — Bob Reselman

  • The Role of Soft Skills in Building Strong DevOps Leads

    The Role of Soft Skills in Building Strong DevOps Leads

    As an industry, we spend a lot of time talking about the process and technology that make up a good DevOps practice. We have a strong focus on the development, IT operations, QA” and security roles. We debate tools and automation strategies. We wax philosophical about DevOps culture.

    What is either lacking entirely or simply glossed over in that conversation is what I would consider the backbone of any good DevOps team–the people. 

    You might assume by “people” I mean their skills with the technology or their expertise with a certain process. Those two things are important, but all things being equal, the people aspect of DevOps I am referring to is really more simple–or even more basic–than that. It all starts with the culture that is defined by the lead.

    As with any cross-functional discipline, teamwork is essential to the adoption and success of your DevOps practice. At its core, DevOps is about collaboration among people from a variety of teams and departments. It brings together multiple disciplines, people and processes with the common goal of high quality and high efficiency output. DevOps relies so heavily on teamwork that without strong leadership, your DevOps culture and the success of your practice are destined for a rocky road at best.

    A strong DevOps leader will need to bring together people in roles that have either been traditionally siloed or are now being done by fewer people. This is no easy feat, however building trust, earning respect, communicating effectively and motivating everyone toward the common goal is paramount to the success of the DevOps team.

    These traits–trust and respect, communication and the ability to motivate–are not unique to DevOps leads, rather they are the key characteristics that make up any strong leader. By putting them in the context of DevOps, the importance of each in the process and culture is irrefutable. 

    Trust and Respect

    Paul Zak, the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies and a professor of economics, psychology and management at Claremont University, led a study to better understand the neuroscience of trust. His team found that the effect of trust on work performance, engagement and loyalty were huge. Respondents indicated that employees with high trust had 106% more energy, were 76% more engaged and 88% said they would recommend their company as a place to work to family and friends. 

    The numbers might not come as a surprise, but how you achieve high trust might. First and foremost, be vulnerable. Do not be afraid to ask for help. This not only exhibits the trust you have in the people on the team, it also demonstrates the sign that you are secure in yourself as a leader. 

    The trust factor for a DevOps lead is multifaceted. The team must trust the lead enough to also trust his/her vision for the process. By showing vulnerability and leaning of the subject matter experts from each discipline for input, you start to build rapport with the team and the process becomes owned by the different functions involved. By asking for help, you invoke the natural tendency to cooperate. That cooperation leads to mutual trust. And by earning trust, you also earn their respect. 

    Communication

    As with any cross-functional team, communication should be viewed as critical an element as your DevOps tools. A successful DevOps lead will be able to understand and speak the languages unique to each discipline. By understanding the nuance and meanings of the words used by the IT operations teams, QA, security and development, the lead can easily help communicate goals, set expectations and establish rules of engagement. Through daily communication, the team will be able to reduce friction and become far more effective as a group. 

    Motivating Toward a Common Goal

    Former Boston Bruins coach Harry Sinden said it best, “Putting on the same jersey doesn’t make a team. You’re still a collection of individuals until you find a common goal.”

    The DevOps lead who motivates the team toward that common goal will find success. But how do you do that? To find out what motivates the people on your team you need to talk to them and get to know them. Involve them in developing the overall strategy. Seek their input and make sure they feel they have ownership of the outcome. 

    Set milestones and celebrate accomplishments. Reward success. Provide feedback and coaching in the moment–both good and bad. 

    The team that feels like they are part of something are no longer a collection of individuals.

    In the end, when you are assessing your DevOps practice and culture, make sure you take a long hard look at the people. They are truly the backbone of any DevOps practice. The need to technical prowess and experience should not be underscored, however, make sure you look for someone who has those skills plus all of the necessary attributes of a true leader. The success of your DevOps practice may depend on it.

    — Sara Faatz

  • Don’t Let ‘Hindsight 2020’ Be Your DevOps Strategy

    Don’t Let ‘Hindsight 2020’ Be Your DevOps Strategy

    The idea of DevOps originated a little over a decade ago with a desire to ensure efficiency in the overall software development and delivery process. Constant operational hurdles that have been hampering flawless and frequent delivery of applications have led organizations to think beyond and to come up with continuous improvements in their processes and tooling. Thus, DevOps has evolved into a solid practice to aid enterprises with an end-to-end feedback enabled framework that spans across various functions and stakeholders to design, develop and deliver quality software.

    The IT landscape over the last few years has changed significantly. Companies are building secure applications and large volumes of workloads are being transformed to the public cloud. Nowadays, firms are actively applying AI technologies to transform their businesses more than they were just a few years ago. Some companies are still investing heavily on building their own complex AI platforms involving expensive infrastructure, but most companies have realized the value in leveraging AI as a service offered by leading cloud providers.

    Digital initiatives and IoT have further increased the use of cloud-based services and the need for automated deployment and delivery of applications and services. Seamless integration of the CI/CD pipeline for on-premise or deployment to the cloud is possible only with a solid DevOps practice. For organizations that are ambitious and striving to get ahead of the game in order to accelerate the growth of their businesses, DevOps is indispensable.

    To successfully implement some of the current major trends in IT, organizations are required to have a mature DevOps practice in place.  In October 2019, Gartner published its predictions on technology trends for 2020. We’ll pick a few from those to discuss the crucial role that DevOps is expected to play in them, and the critical success factors for companies to be advanced forward.  

    Strategic Trends in IT and the Role of DevOps

    Hyperautomation

    Gartner’s analysis on strategic technology trends for 2020 has hyperautomation as the number one trend. Hyperautomation, which enables organizations to function as autonomous digital enterprises, will be leveraging latest technologies such as 5G networks, intelligent edge devices, advanced data analytics, expanding RPA with AI, etc. Firms aspiring to implement AI and ML on a grand scale will want to take advantage of the diverse range of complex machine learning algorithms implemented on scalable cloud infrastructure and offered as services.

    Instead of recreating everything from scratch, organizations will simply upload their data to the cloud and train algorithms based on their business processes and needs. For hyperautomation initiatives to be successful, organizations need to implement end-to-end fully automated DevOps processes with the relevant tooling to specifically address the varied needs from several perspectives. Speed, agility and ensuring an error-free repeatable process will be basic requirements for hyperautomation.

    On-demand deployment of transient infrastructure on the cloud, driven by infrastructure as code and configuration as code will be a primary requirement for rapid development and testing of artifacts that form components of hyperautomation. Fully automated pipelines for the creation and deployment of containers will become a core requirement not only for hyperautomation but in general for most applications. The involvement of DevOps to manage data virtualization, obfuscation and uploading data to the cloud will become more significant to increase the overall efficiency of the automated CI/CD pipelines for hyperautomation projects. 

    Democratization of IT

    Democratization of technology is about making technology more accessible to common people. Gartner has predicted this to be another major trend for 2020. Smartphones and the internet have already played a major role on this front and have enabled people with the technology, tools and data to help make better decisions. Democratization of technology in the IT world is about enabling the IT community and it gets more and more interesting day by day.

    With container technologies such as Docker Desktop that can run on a user’s laptop, a developer now has access to pre-configured container images of various operating systems and other platforms that can be pulled from container registries within seconds. Cloud services such as IaaS, SaaS and PaaS add to this by providing more independence to the development teams apart from making the entire process agile and faster. Democratization at these levels also leads to setting a different level of expectations on the overall velocity of development and delivery of applications. All these services in isolation, i.e. when not connected together through a strong DevOps process and toolset, will not produce the expected level of agility and speed.

    An end-to-end DevOps process works all the way: from triggering the build of a container image as the code is built, deploying an environment on the cloud, integrating with other components, testing artifacts with automated testing and finally to producing a production-worthy artifact. When IT teams get more democratic, they will run their domain the way they perceive beneficial and produce the best possible outcome with quality and speed to make their teams and the organization successful. DevOps will be the means to achieving that goal.

    Internet of Things

    Edge devices are getting smarter by the day. Mass manufacturing of intelligent controller boards, such as the ESP 8266 and ESP 32, is making it extremely cheap to build edge devices with data storage and processing capabilities locally within the device itself instead of communicating with a cloud based central system for command and control. However, such intelligent devices need to be kept up-to-date on security patches, bug-fixes, firmware updates, etc. A solid DevOps framework that integrates testing of patches/fixes, and deploys tested artifacts to remote edge devices is an absolutely essential component of an organization’s IoT ecosystem.

    Some controller boards run light-weight versions of Linux and have the capability to additionally run a Docker engine. This helps ensure consistency through deployment of updated containers via a DevOps pipeline to the edge devices. Convergence of cloud and digital transformation initiatives, especially in IoT over the last few years, has widened the scope of DevOps. Major cloud providers are already offering several services to integrate edge devices with a full-fledged CI/CD pipeline leveraging DevOps processes and tools. 

    Blockchain

    Application developers and IT managers spend a great deal of time either fixing bugs or recovering systems from breakdowns caused by bugs. If best practices, processes and tools are put to proper use, this wasted effort can be greatly reduced and the entire development and delivery process could be made more efficient. Blockchain demands building a strong foundation in IT and raises the need for higher quality in software development, delivery and IT operations on the whole.

    Organizations have to take a closer look at their current capabilities and process maturity before embarking on a journey involving blockchain. Firms that have faced failures with blockchain can certainly vouch for the fact that the failure wasn’t caused by the concept of blockchain or the algorithms that drive it. Rather they had resulted because the rest of the IT systems weren’t reliable enough to keep up with the strict demands of the blockchain systems. DevOps and automation will certainly help improve the security, quality, reliability and repeatable deployment of applications. When the systems that feed the blockchain application go through such increments of improvement, the net effect is that the organization is getting closer to implementing a solid blockchain solution.

    Success Factors

    Firms are moving fast toward the cloud for IaaS and PaaS services. As DevOps, CloudOps and SecOps are converging, CIOs are becoming conscious about building organizations that encapsulate these functions under one leadership in order to set shared goals and ensure synergies across these functions. Organizations with strict compliance requirements and governance would need to involve their operations teams to lay the rules regarding using cloud services.

    Application development teams and users are still dependent on several operations teams to design and implement secure cloud connectivity and to establish the rules around using cloud services. While a strong governance is absolutely essential, there is a high possibility for firms to lose their agility and get caught once again in a mess if these operational processes are not smoothen and streamlined. For the strategic initiatives on implementing the new trends to succeed, it is vital for DevOps to be able to operate without any hurdles.

    Below are a few critical success factors worth considering.

    Dev and Ops in a Box

    Organizational structure plays a key role in determining the success of DevOps. Keeping applications development, DevOps and infrastructure operations very closely aligned with overlapping goals, KPIs and roadmaps is a key to success. Companies that operate these functions independently without proper alignment fail to establish an organization-wide DevOps culture and rarely reap the full benefits of DevOps.

    Full-Stack Engineers for DevOps

    It is important to develop a DevOps culture across the company. At the same time, it is equally important to bring in experts who can evangelize DevOps and take a completely fresh look at how things are done. Experienced DevOps professionals can pin-point areas for improvement, and additionally help accelerate the adoption rate of DevOps. Settling for high-quality resources that have full-stack experience is absolutely essential if you are in for a long run with DevOps. Global companies should seriously consider placing such experienced resources close to the development and operations teams. While it may be cost-effective to recruit resources offshore, that may not be such a good idea if your active development and infrastructure teams are onshore. 

    Trained Internal Resources

    Training internal resources are extremely important in order to carry out the recommendations from experts and to make DevOps a habit. Trained resources have to be deployed immediately to work on DevOps initiatives alongside the experts. To establish synergy and increase collaboration, it is a good idea to send development and operations resources to some common training courses and sessions.

    Wrapping Things Up

    Research organizations are closely observing the direction in which most organizations are moving toward in order to improve their speed, efficiency, agility and their overall ability to provide services that are secure and reliable. Business strategy and technology feed each other and as a result, some key trends in technology emerge from time to time.

    We looked at some of the trends that are going to be prominent in 2020 and the role that DevOps would have in implementing these technologies. Regardless of any specific technology, it is important to automate the integration and delivery of applications. DevOps processes and tooling will help a great deal in accelerating the pace of implementing new technologies and leveraging them in business applications.

    The organization of IT teams and a focus on recruiting the right talents will determine the overall success of DevOps. Training internal staff would help sustain the culture of DevOps in companies and fuel further growth in this space. DevOps will not be an optional function any more. It will be an essential component of the culture, and firms that adapt themselves sooner to this culture will be the ones most successful in implementing the current and future trends in technology.

    — Sridhar Asvathanarayanan

  • Survey Finds IT Modernization Efforts Reap Significant Benefits

    Survey Finds IT Modernization Efforts Reap Significant Benefits

    When it comes to the state of IT, few questions weigh more substantially on the minds of CIOs and other business-technology leaders than the degree of success they see in their digital transformation efforts, and foundational to that their efforts to modernize their technology stack.

    In a survey recently released by market research firm IDG, and commissioned by services provider Insight, those enterprises that have managed to reach their initial modernization goals report (25% in this survey) success they say that they can quantify in such areas as cost efficiency, availability and customer experience. Sixty-seven percent of respondents said that their modernization efforts are essential to their digital transformations.

    There were 26% of respondents who said they are at the beginning of their modernization work. Even still, many reporting significant business benefits including improved quality of service (65%), better customer experience/satisfaction (52%), cost savings (50%), uptime (44%) and the creation of revenue-generating products and services (42%).

    The “The State of IT Modernization 2020” survey questioned 200 IT executives at organizations 29,000 employees on average and within a range of industries. The survey examined the maturity of efforts to mature IT operating environments, cloud strategies, applications and processes.

    Of those respondents who stated that they reached their initial modernization goals, 19% report having made moderate progress on those goals and 31% said their development has been significant. Twenty-five percent said they’ve hit their initial goals and are optimizing where possible.

    Despite 59% of respondents reporting moving forward with their modernization efforts, 41% said they have delayed or abandoned those efforts. According to the survey, they did so due to competing priorities (46%), poor roadmap (45%), concerns about data privacy and security (39%), lack of skills (38%), didn’t or couldn’t budget appropriately (30%), and unexpected challenges (30%).

    Not surprisingly, the vast majority of organizations cited cloud optimization as a central part of their modernization efforts and ranked nearly ubiquitous. These included application modification (93%), increasing public cloud workloads (92%) and private clouds (91%), and moving to multi-cloud (87%) or a hybrid-cloud model (89%).

    Further, and what highlights the difficulty some organizations have when finding the optimal home for all of their workloads, 84% said they transferred specific workloads from a public cloud to a non-cloud location. These transitions may have been driven, in part, by the 69% who found their cloud costs to be 62% higher than they expected. The underlying causes of those cost overruns range from “data egress charges for shared persistent data, unplanned cloud adoption, and mergers and acquisitions to failure to take advantage of vendor volume discounts, over-subscription and failure to optimize workloads to extract maximum value from cloud platforms,” Insight said in a statement.

    Finally, the survey found that 95% of respondents are outsourcing at least some facet of their operating environments to a managed services provider. Eighty-four percent said they are outsourcing cloud management.

    Going forward, the most commonly cited priorities include better managing workloads based on their use (39%), improved design to size services to need (38%) and the implementation of additional policies that will restrict the type and size of cloud services made available internally to their organization.

    — George V. Hulme

  • The DevSecOps Landscape is Maturing — We Want to Hear About Your Journey

    The DevSecOps Landscape is Maturing — We Want to Hear About Your Journey

    The race to out-innovate one’s competition has led to high performing organizations chasing increased deployment velocities but often ignoring the quality of parts being used to manufacture their applications.

    It was 2003 when Bruce Schneier penned, “Today there are no real consequences for having bad security, or having low-quality software of any kind. Even worse, the marketplace often rewards low quality. More precisely, it rewards additional features and timely release dates, even if they come at the expense of quality.” Seventeen years later and it can sometimes feel like we haven’t grown enough. 

    As nimble organizations aim to deliver new innovations faster, using DevOps principles, the question of how and where security fits into the equation has spawned bigger conversations around what DevSecOps really means. And, in some circles where DevSecOps is even a different principle—security should already be a part of DevOps.  

    This is why we do the DevSecOps Community Survey every year—to better understand how organizations are adapting, what previous challenges were overcome, what new challenges may have popped up and to examine what approaches are being prioritized within teams to better identify risks. These questions, and many others, are extremely important and it’s why we’re embarking on the seventh annual DevSecOps Community survey. And, we’re looking for you to help us understand that state of DevSecOps. 

    Sonatype, DevOps.com, Security Boulevard, Cloudbees, Carnegie Mellon SEI, DevOps Institute,  NowSecure, Verica, All Day DevOps and DevSecOps Days, launched the annual DevSecOps Community Survey earlier this month. Since then, we’ve already received over 5,000 responses. But, we have high ambitions and want this to be the most in-depth and comprehensive studies to date—and we need your help to do that.

    Since we first started this survey, seven years ago, we’ve seen a consistent maturation of DevOps practices and the combination of automated security. More and more respondents highlight that their practices have evolved and adapted to a DevSecOps mentality—or, that they have the ambition to do so.

    That said, we know we’re still in the early stages of so many DevSecOps transformations and while people may recognize the need for governance policies with DevOps, the theory doesn’t always make it into practice. The insights we gain from this survey allow us to provide concrete information back to the community on what those who have successfully transformed themselves are doing well—and what their journey looked like. 

    For instance, from over 5,500 respondents who took last year’s survey, we saw that more than  47% of them were deploying changes into production multiple times per week. This meant that as adversaries are getting faster at exploiting vulnerabilities, DevOps organizations that can identify cybersecurity risks and remediate them sooner can better defend themselves. 

    While we’ve learned that security is difficult to ignore when it’s embedded where developers already are, there is a lot more to understand about current practices. The voice of the community these past seven years has been invaluable, and we recognize that the experiences of those in the community can help us learn what resources are needed in order to support this ongoing cultural shift.

    In this year’s survey, for the first time, we’re also aiming to understand how responders feel about their jobs and the environments they work in. DevSecOps is a culture and we want to better understand the cultural attributes the elite DevSecOps practices employ. 

    Please take a few minutes to fill out the 2020 DevSecOps Community survey today; help us help the industry by better comprehending how the DevSecOps community has matured over the past year. And, you may even win one of our prizes—a Macbook, AirPods Pro or an Oculus Quest. Everyone who takes the survey will also receive first look at the results.

    — DJ Schleen

  • SauceCon 2020 Speaker Profile: Hugh McCamphill

    SauceCon 2020 Speaker Profile: Hugh McCamphill

    This is the fourth in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2020. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 27-29 in Austin, Texas, and DevOps.com will be there, broadcasting live.

    As test engineering manager at ShopKeep, a point of sale solution provider, Hugh McCamphill leads the company’s internal tools and test improvement team and works to further the test and quality focus of the company as a whole.

    Every year, thousands of small businesses rely on ShopKeep to track inventory and sales, and ring up millions of customers. Because of that demand, testing is critical.

    With over 15 years of testing experience, Hugh is up to the task. He started out on an agile team, working closely with developers doing testing and writing end-to-end UI tests.

    “People have always struggled with how long end-to-end tests take to run,” said Hugh. “It’s become less of a problem in the desktop space, but tests created in Appium can be slower and harder to distribute.”

    That’s what drove Hugh to his presentation topic for SauceCon 2020: “Not Just Accessibility IDs: Speed Up Your Appium Tests for Faster Feedback.”

    “I wanted to share what we have done with improving the speed of our own Appium tests and suites so that we get more feedback sooner. We no longer rely solely on running tests overnight, we have Appium tests running on every pull request to the app,” he said. 

    During his presentation, Hugh will help SauceCon attendees better understand the time-consuming aspects of a test and demonstrate some options to reduce test time when interacting and asserting against elements. He will also explain why it’s important to understand the abstractions that you are using (as they might be slowing you down), why to be careful when querying multiple elements and show some of the capabilities that exist to speed up Appium tests.

    Throughout his career, Hugh has developed deep expertise in test automation across a range of languages, APIs and tools, and loves sharing this knowledge with others at speaking engagements. He has also been the organizer of the Belfast Selenium Meetup for the last several years.

    When he’s not talking about testing, he loves traveling with his family and two young children, playing squash and watching football—or what we in the U.S. would call soccer.

    You can hear from Hugh and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2020, the fourth annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

    — Rebecca Cramer

  • What Makes Digital Transformation a Success?

    What Makes Digital Transformation a Success?

    Despite more than $5 trillion having been spent on digital transformation efforts, survey after survey shows that successful digital transformations are far and few in-between. By many estimates, more than 50% of digital transformation efforts failed in recent years.

    While a recent survey conducted by Hanover Research and commissioned by AHEAD, the State of Enterprise Digital Transformation, found that 93% of enterprises are undergoing some digital transformation as they seek to cut costs (77%) and improve customer experience (71%). The survey found 42% of enterprises struggling to reach success as their efforts fall behind or stall.

    This survey found many challenges, both demanding and typical among enterprise digital transformation efforts, including hurdles created by legacy systems (36%) and technical debt (24%). With that in mind, it’s no shock that 67% cited infrastructure as a critical part of their digital transformation efforts.

    Additionally, the survey found that improving operational efficiency and cost-cutting are motivators in 77% of digital efforts. Those needs beat improving the customer experience, at 71% of enterprises.

    When it comes to results, this survey found more optimistic results. According to the survey, 58% of those surveyed said their digital transformation projects are on target or even ahead of schedule, with only 42% citing faltering progress.

    The State of Enterprise Digital Transformation survey found six core factors of success:

    1. Dedicated Leadership: The survey found that 83% of digital transformations that are on track or ahead of schedule are led by a CIO, CEO, CDO or CTO. As digital transformation touches every part of an enterprise, the company-wide buy-in is critical. While 27% of organizations have a CIO leading their transformations, only 8% of organizations have a chief digital officer leading the transformation efforts. Chief technology officers are leading the efforts at 16% of organizations.
    2. All-In Approach: Transformations that are on track are 30% more likely to be structured as full-scale change initiatives. Because digital operations are often so interconnected, piecemeal and partial transformations can often be siloed and result in limited impact on the factors driving the transformation.
    3. Defined Digital Roadmap: Ninety-two percent of transformations that are on target or ahead of schedule have a defined strategy and roadmap that includes IT infrastructure and operations.
    4. Alignment Between Infrastructure and Apps: Enterprises powered by an integrated DevOps approach are 43% more likely to see success in digital transformation efforts. To avoid bottlenecks, enterprises should audit DevOps functions before undergoing digital transformation.
    5. Platform Mindset: Businesses that include IT infrastructure as a big part of their digital transformation are 36% more likely to have a successful transformation. As the backbone of a digital change initiative, an enterprise’s infrastructure determines how far the transformation will go and its limits.
    6. Commitment to Intelligent Operations: Companies that monitor IT performance in real-time and remediate issues quickly are 24% more likely to undergo a successful digital transformation. Further, the survey found that enterprises are more likely to see success in digital transformation if they have confidence in their abilities to perform highly in areas of automation, monitoring, hybrid cloud models and integrated security.

    Last year, in Digital Transformation: Coming from Behind, we cited research from the consultancy McKinsey & Company found that less than one-third of transformations are successful. While this survey from AHEAD finds more optimistic outcomes, most previous surveys and our interviews with transformers echoed AHEAD’s survey findings, with the need for leadership, dedication to platforms, defined strategy and proper alignment all being essential to success.

    The State of Enterprise Digital Transformation survey was conducted by Hanover Research through September and October 2019. The survey is based on the responses of 293 IT decision-makers with a direct influence on IT spend at companies based in the U.S., and with more than 1,000 employees.

    — George V. Hulme