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Category: Doin’ DevOps

Why Monitoring-as-Code Will be a Must for DevOps Teams

Over the last decade, we’ve seen an increasing number of operations teams and development teams using an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) process for provisioning cloud-based infrastructure. In that model, IaC tools like CDK, Pulumi or Terraform are employed to allow developers to code, deploy and manage cloud-based infrastructure. The advent of cloud services and IaC tools has freed engineering teams from error-prone (and slow) manual infrastructure provisioning processes. The ability to codify your infrastructure next to your version-controlled application code has been a game-changer for many organizations.

An Introduction to Monitoring-as-Code

With IaC becoming an increasingly valuable tool for managing infrastructure, it’s only natural that other parts of the ecosystem follow that shift left philosophy, including how testing and monitoring are done.

Similar to IaC, the monitoring-as-code (MaC) concept allows us to describe a monitoring infrastructure as code. Today, many DevOps teams are employing MaC by using some of the aforementioned IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi—in conjunction with monitoring platforms like Checkly—to create, run and manage their browser and API monitoring regimens. In these examples, monitoring checks can be defined in JavaScript, TypeScript or HCL, and then those can be committed together with application code. Modern MaC matures fast; it does not even require traditional IaC tools but enables MaC without extra tools. Modern platforms enable this by shipping CLIs to achieve this. Making monitoring an integral and companion part of your codebase comes with many benefits and advantages.

Just as IaC has become an integral part of the new paradigm for managing cloud-based infrastructure, here are a few reasons why I believe MaC will also become a must for modern DevOps teams.

The Benefits That Make MaC a Must for DevOps Teams

Flexibility and Programmability
By adopting MaC, your automated testing infrastructure is defined as code and lives next to your application code in your code repository, giving you all the benefits that entails. Testing and monitoring are no longer treated as separate from your application code.

Update Monitoring With Your Code Changes
As mentioned in the previous bullet, MaC places your testing and monitoring next to your application code. So when your application code is updated, your testing and monitoring ships right alongside it, streamlining the process. That makes your testing and monitoring solutions deployable, with MaC giving you the ability to schedule tests on a continuous, around-the-clock basis from distributed locations across the globe.

Monitor and Test on Staging
In the past, synthetic monitoring was primarily meant to run on production: Once your apps were deployed, monitoring kicked in and alerted you when things failed. With MaC, that monitoring can now run locally alongside your application code in a CI/CD flow, allowing that app code to be tested and even monitored continuously on staging before getting deployed on production.

Speed and Automation Efficiency
With monitoring now embracing the “as code” paradigm, new checks can be spun up quickly and in far less time than a non-MaC monitoring approach. All of that increased speed and efficiency will have a real-world impact on dev, ops and QA teams, saving engineers hours now automating once-siloed manual and inflexible work.

Scale as Needed
Finally, given that your tests live right next to your application code, it’s much easier to observe, manage and understand what is being monitored. That insight and visibility also make it much easier to scale your testing and monitoring efforts across teams, organizations and even across the globe. All of that enhanced efficiency frees dev and QA teams to focus on other tasks while simultaneously providing better testing and monitoring support across the organization.

MaC Benefits in Action
As an example, all of the aforementioned benefits are being employed by a large health care provider that recently adopted a MaC workflow. That organization relies on a MaC testing and monitoring workflow—based on tests written in Playwright—to automate its synthetic monitoring efforts. In particular, a MaC approach has enabled the QA and dev teams there to quickly build, validate and deploy an entire suite of checks from their local development environment.

The Future of Testing and Monitoring

With MaC now moving in the same leftward direction as IaC, I believe that the future of monitoring will become increasingly accessible, flexible and frictionless for any modern developer. MaC will also be increasingly based on open source testing and automation frameworks like Playwright, Puppeteer and others, which have been used and adopted for automation and testing for years.

April 11, 2023
Are you Being ‘Nice’ to Your Developers? Think Again

As a developer, you’ve learned your craft. From your fingers comes the magic that builds the applications that run the world. You can literally create something from nothing! And not just software programs. You can create value that means revenue for your company. You’re a revenue machine — no, you’re a god, creating anything that’s needed! That is, you could be if you could spend all of your time writing that magical code. But this dream is not so simple. If you’re like most developers, you’re spending way too much time on other things, such as:
● Meetings
● Dealing with interruptions
● Security hassles
● Operations
● Debugging
● Fighting with infrastructure
● Burnout

Every minute you’re dealing with any of those, you’re not making magic. Because you’re human, that is going to make you unhappy.

If you really are a developer and not just imagining you are, you already know all of this. Now let’s turn our attention to those of you who are responsible for developers. Because it’s your job to make them happy.

Yes, it is, if you want them to keep working productively for you and add value. Luckily, it’s within your reach to do so. It will benefit you, add value to the organization and, most importantly of all, the employees themselves.

Simply put: If you want to get value from your developers, you have to be nice to them. If you expect them to pour themselves into you and into the company, you must first prioritize them and invest in them. Success can only be realized and achieved by a happy balance of developers who are motivated to create.

Do you know who feels more motivated than anyone else? Who will always go above and beyond?

Those who are appreciated.

So let’s get started.

Increased Productivity and Value

The most obvious issue is productivity. The reality is that software development can be an arduous mental task, and when developers are unhappy, it will inevitably affect their productivity—especially when they spend mental cycles on things that are not directly related to the task at hand.

Even if they’re not spending work time searching for another job (or quiet quitting), they’re probably thinking about what could be different and mentally grumbling about it every time something comes up that irritates them.

By treating developers well and eliminating those annoyances as much as possible, you prevent that problem and get 100% of their attention.

And there are other productivity benefits, as well. When developers trust their company and their co-workers, it fosters greater collaboration between those developers and business stakeholders. It also engenders greater creativity, which can lead to innovation and value above and beyond what you are expecting them to deliver.

Retention

The most obvious issue when it comes to developer happiness is, of course, retention. After all, if you’re not nice to your developers, you should expect them to leave for other jobs. If the Great Resignation taught us anything, it’s that it is human nature to move along if dissatisfied.

That may not seem like a big deal to you, but think about the implications if your developers are leaving in droves. Never mind the turnover costs, what about the inevitable delays as you bring new developers up to speed? Hiring and training are arduous, time-consuming endeavors. And if turnover is bad enough, you may never be able to actually complete anything because nobody ever gets a chance to build up a good head of steam.

Compare this to a company with a dedicated team of happy developers who are motivated to grow and innovate for themselves, their team and your organization.

Which organization do you think is going to come out on top? Yes—the organization with the happier team of developers is probably going to have a competitive advantage—and a big one!

When developers are happy, they are likely to be loyal to your company. That loyalty means they stay long enough to become experts in what you do, making them more likely to create the kinds of innovations that move the company forward for added value.

But most of all, can you really afford to have your best employees leave and take all of the knowledge they’ve gained with them, potentially to a competitor? Probably not.

Maintaining a Good Reputation

All of this adds up to reputation; get a bad reputation in the developer world and it is going to be hard for you to attract top talent. In a world where technology changes so fast, it’s already difficult to find developers who have stayed with one technology long enough to become experts. You need to take advantage of every tool you can to make it easier. Your reputation can be one of them—if you treat your developers right.

But there’s another reason to protect your reputation among developers: It could easily bleed over to your reputation among your customers. If you’re a big company, word of your treatment of developers may spread. If you’re not so big, and you have enough developer turnover, some of your former employees may work for prospective customers or know someone who does.

Today, customers are trying to be socially responsible by buying from companies that ‘do the right thing.’

Without much effort, you can be one of those companies by trying to foster developer happiness. Ultimately, it’s not that difficult.

How to be Nice to Your Developers

Fostering developer happiness doesn’t have to be a hugely expensive proposition. It’s not always about huge paychecks (though they do help smooth out some rough edges). Some things you can do to be nice to your developers include the following.

1. Provide what they need: Developers should be able to spend as much of their time as possible actually coding; make sure they have the tools that they need so that they’re not having to improvise or struggle with creating infrastructure. For example, engaging a ZeroOps partner can take some of this off their plates.

2. Eliminate distractions: Even in ideal situations, it can take as long as 20 minutes for a developer to get back into their train of thought every time they’re interrupted. Try to provide an environment with as few distractions as possible.

3. Foster a training-centric culture: Developers need to feel as though you have their best interests at heart, and one way to do that is to help them learn new skills. And there are multiple benefits for you: For one, it’s much easier to train your existing people in an in-demand technology (such as Kubernetes) than it is to hire someone who already has those skills. For another, training your entire team in these new technologies can unlock creative ways of solving problems.

4. Help developers understand how their work relates to the customer: While it can be tempting to expect developers to simply do what you ask them to, when they understand why they’re doing it, they’re much more likely to feel invested in the work.

5. Listen to ideas: Your developers are at the heart of what you’re trying to do. It’s very possible that they have a new way of doing something or an idea for something that could help your company. Even if you don’t end up going forward with the idea, your developers need to know that you respect them enough to listen.

6. Respect work-life balance: Developers have a reputation for working long hours and many even take pride in it. But it’s not always the most efficient way to get things done. A tired developer works more slowly and makes more mistakes. Be flexible and make sure that you’re not overloading your people with more than they can reasonably accomplish. If your developers have to work 70, 80 or 100 hours a week to meet deadlines, you either need to hire more people (if you can find them) or find a way to partner with other organizations to take things off their plate. (See number one).

All of these things make for a positive work environment that enables your developers to work their magic for you, day in and day out, making something from nothing and moving you forward the way nobody else can.

April 6, 2023
How To Keep Engineers Happy and Reduce Burnout

Software development can be a mentally taxing profession. It requires intense mental focus, often under heavy workloads, with unclear job expectations and a lack of control. And with recent labor shortages due to layoffs and resignations, teams may also be understaffed, making matters more complicated. These issues can compound and lead to prolonged excessive stress—that’s when burnout hits.

In fact, one report found that 82% of developers surveyed indicated that they had experienced burnout in the last six to eight months. Some top causes of burnout include increased workload, a poor work culture and personal reasons. But whatever the cause, for 73% of these developers, burnout is negatively impacting their productivity or personal life. So, what can leaders do about it?

I recently talked with Randall Degges, head of developer relations at developer security company Snyk, to learn how to address ever-present burnout issues in software development teams at scale. Snyk, which provides popular automated vulnerability detection tools, recently closed a staggering $196.5 million series G funding at a $7.4 billion valuation. With that kind of momentum, they must be doing something right. According to Degges, there are a handful of tactics to consider to prevent burnout, like ensuring developers are heard, not assigning tasks without context and making improvements to the DevOps workflow.

Understanding Burnout

Burnout is an ever-present issue, explained Degges. It’s common within any high-stress job where you’re on the hook for constantly delivering new features to support the business. Specifically, in software development, burnout can quickly arise when developers don’t feel they have a voice. Or worse, when they’re tirelessly producing software they know won’t ever see the light of day.

A paper entitled Burnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping study took an interesting systematic approach and analyzed decades of research into burnout in software engineering. It found the following qualitative work-related factors to be most correlated with burnout. (Interestingly, the paper suggested machine learning might soon help produce more quantitative indicators of burnout.)

Causal-relationship of burnout, taken from ‘Burnout in software engineering: A systematic mapping study.’ (Deciphering this diagram gives me burnout!)

7 Ways to Fight Burnout

Since we know burnout is a pervasive problem, how can engineering leaders minimize the issue? Below, we’ll outline some specific strategies to consider and how they might help.

1. Give Developers a Voice

First, Degges encouraged leaders to ensure developers have a say in what they’re building. He recalled working within a large enterprise, sitting in a cubicle and having absolutely no say in the features his team was working on. This often included code they all knew would never make it into production.

Slaving away on irrelevant work is never motivating. Instead, a good internal culture provides a comfortable atmosphere where developers can raise issues early on, said Degges, hopefully before leadership puts targets destined to fail on the roadmap.

2. Provide More Context

On that note, when decisions are made, don’t throw orders over the wall in a vacuum. Instead, Degges recommended providing more context into what you’re all creating. Giving visibility into the reason behind decisions will align everyone on project roadmaps and create a shared purpose. This helps foster a culture of empathy and listening to others, said Degges. (David Shackelford affectionally calls this attitude HugOps.)

3. Optimize Communication Patterns

Optimizing communication patterns for your working environment is also vital to encourage a healthy culture, said Degges. For example, this could equate to optimizing for the physical reality of distributed teams—no one should have to clock into daily standup at 4:00 a.m. If you are working under timezone constraints, Degges recommended adopting more asynchronous communication.

For instance, his team relies heavily on Slack and provides dedicated channels for sharing ideas. They’ve also incorporated automation to summarize verbose Slack communications with a recap of conversations. In general, removing unnecessary meetings and optimizing communication patterns could greatly reduce the baggage an engineer might carry in their day-to-day work.

4. Practice Internal Developer Relations

As they say, practice what you preach. Many tech-driven companies have adopted a developer relations (DevRel) division to build a community with external developer consumers. But are you practicing DevRel internally? According to Degges, DevRel teams should act as a bridge between external and internal teams.

“Our goal is to not only to think and empathize with customers but also to encourage internal people to be authentic community members themselves,” said Degges. This can equate to empowering internal employees with resources like mentoring, blog writing or speaking opportunities, he said.

Additionally, other groups are emerging to help increase internal developer satisfaction. For example, platform engineering and developer productivity engineering (DPE) are being applied by many organizations to improve developer experience around internal tools and processes. Naturally, this will require working closely with internal developers to source feedback and make quality improvements.

5. Automate Away Security-Related Toil

Another method to upkeep engineering morale is through automating away toil. And security vulnerability discovery is one area full of painstaking manual tasks. Half of applications have high-risk vulnerabilities, and new exploits in open source libraries are being discovered almost daily.

As more software supply chain risks emerge, it’s challenging to keep up with the pace of vulnerability discovery and necessary software patching. Therefore, implementing real-time automated vulnerability detection, said Degges, can help remove many manual processes and free up energy to devote to other areas.

6. Hire Based on the Work, Not the Interview

Before developers even get the job, they can be put through high-stress on-the-spot tests during the interview process. Experiences here can set the tone for the entire engagement with the company. But activities like white-boarding algorithms are pretty disconnected from day-to-day work, said Degges. In his opinion, engineers should instead be hired based on the quality of their past performances and the work they’ve produced. This could be artifacts like their personal blog or contributions to open source projects.

7. Apply Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Lastly, what’s a tech blog post in 2023 without a mention of AI? Generative AI like ChatGPT has rocked the programming world and is being integrated into more development environments and engineering workflows. The future of AI looks very bright and is poised to help developers produce more with less time and resources.

Of course, automated code generation will require sanity checks, but these tools can certainly help many ancillary functions. For example, Degges’ team is using ChatGPT to spin up content outlines and automate keyword research, helping support their educational content production.

Soothing the Burnout

Even with new tools emerging and a newfound emphasis on developer experience, burnout is still prevalent. A full 58% of developers and security professionals said they are currently experiencing burnout, according to a 2022 Cobalt study. This is, perhaps, due to the rapid release cadences of today’s software delivery.

“In the past, it took months or years for new software updates to roll out. Now, developers only have a matter of weeks,” wrote Bill Mann, CEO of Styra, on Forbes. “Suffice it to say the stakes are high for today’s software teams.”

Burnout is psychologically taxing and can negatively affect employee happiness and retention. Therefore, it’s an excellent idea for engineering leaders to take it seriously and consider what positive cultural changes they can make.

April 6, 2023
Creating a Growth Loop for Your Open Source Project

Every open source project hopes to achieve escape velocity, attracting enough users and contributors to become a successful, sustainable project that expands over time. But how do you attract developers and create the cycle of adoption that can lead to a thriving ecosystem?

It obviously starts with building a great product that developers love to use, and there’s an element of luck in finding this sweet spot and breaking through. But there’s also a lot that you can control. I was fortunate to have helped create an open source project, Streamlit, that expanded quickly and our company was acquired last year. I wanted to share what worked for me in the hope that it also can be helpful for you.

My guiding principle is to meet developers where they are and make it as simple as possible, at every step in the journey, to discover your project, learn how to use it and build great products. Depending on the type of open source project you’re creating, providing a simple way to share artifacts and use cases built from your code—in our case, this was applications—can also be a powerful way to raise awareness.

I think about this in terms of a “growth loop” with multiple points of entry where developers can get interested and get started. These entry points include developer forums, source repositories, your documentation page, learning assets, your website and more. The point is to eliminate friction at every point in this loop and make it as easy and fun as possible to start building and sharing with your code.

For organizations trying to get their open source project off the ground, here are some key learnings about what worked for my company in building this growth loop and some tips for driving continued adoption and innovation.

Be Visible in the Open Source Community

We made it a point to go where developers are already at, including forums like Reddit and Stack Overflow and conferences like ODSC and FOSDEM. Engaging with developers to understand what they really need from your project and how to reduce points of friction is key. We were always grateful when people gave us feedback and we reached out to any developer who engaged with our product, whether they had 10 followers or 10,000. I’ve found that developers really appreciate it when you “show up,” and you learn an incredible amount that can help your project succeed.

Give Developers What They Need

Don’t hold back features or functionality that developers will find useful. Developers should have access to everything they need and feel confident that they won’t run into a significant paywall that prevents them from scaling. Building a successful open source project is a bottom-up process, and that means eliminating barriers to entry and making your code as easy to use as possible.

Where developers go, enterprises typically follow. If you can build a tool that developers love so much they’re coding with it in their free time, they’re likely to take it into the workplace. If your goal is monetization, this is where you’re most likely to have an opportunity to recoup your investment.

Enterprises require particular features around security, access management, IT support, scaling, service level objectives (SLOs) and other areas—capabilities they are often willing to pay for. So, consider a model where you give developers everything they need to become super users and look for adjacent areas where you can charge for enterprise-type features or enterprise implementations that businesses need.

Make Sharing Incredibly Easy

If developers build great things with your code, it’s helpful if they can share those things with the community to show what’s possible and drive interest. You can think of this as a type of advertising. Most developers aren’t won over by traditional ads, but discovering cool things that other developers have done with your code can be a great way to attract new users and fuel the cycle of discovery and adoption.

So think about the natural output from your project that developers could share with the community. Can they put code on GitHub? Share an app or visualization they built? Post a speed comparison? What can they put on Twitter if they love your project and want to show what they’ve achieved with it?

Our project is for building data apps, so early on, we added a feature that allowed people to take a screen recording and share their work on Twitter so others could see it in action. Later on, we added a free cloud offering so they could directly share apps with the community. Think about what works for your project and how you could make sharing easy.

Create Amazing How-Tos and Tutorials.

These can be important entry points on your growth loop, and it’s best to provide them through developers’ preferred channels. YouTube is a go-to for tutorials of all types, and you can also leverage Coursera, Educative and other e-learning platforms. Someone on my team created a Coursera course for our project that has more than 20,000 enrollees, and one of our Code Camp videos has been viewed over a million times.

Get creative. If your project is starting to see traction among students, think about providing educational materials that professors can use in the classroom. Online interactive courses are not only a great way to learn programming, they make it easier for educators to manage coursework and see who’s keeping up. This is an excellent way to promote your project and capture new developers.

Documentation is another important entry point. Our documentation page is starting to look like an e-learning course itself, with guides for getting started, sample code and sample apps. Documentation pages can be listed by search engines, and we found it was worth the engineering time to make this happen.

Contribute to Other Open Source Projects

Giving back to the community is a good practice for anyone who cares about software, but it can also benefit your project: Contributing to open source projects helps ensure that your software will be compatible with the tools your target developers use. As well as ensuring interoperability, this can help raise awareness of your project in relevant developer communities.

Reaching critical mass with an open source project is about understanding what your target developers need, being smart with your resources and removing friction wherever you can. This concept of a growth loop worked for our project, and I hope it helps you to achieve success with yours.

April 5, 2023
Database Virtualization – Driving the Next Big Transformation

Data is both the most important asset and the biggest challenge for most corporations. It impacts every aspect of the business from financial considerations to AI/ML training. Data is used by development and DevOps teams, engineering teams, quality assurance, business intelligence teams and database administrators. Despite its central role in operations, traditional forms of database delivery remain complex, costly and time-consuming.

In many cases, enterprise data is growing exponentially, increasing management challenges and driving up the cost of data storage. Duplicating data to each new environment as use cases arise is overwhelming DBA teams and incurring a significant storage footprint. This has resulted in data becoming a significant bottleneck for DevOps teams, highlighting the importance of finding a quick and automated solution for the replication process across non-production environments.

What’s Changed?

In the past, development teams would work with the same dataset for upwards of six months. This left DBA teams with plenty of time to meet all database delivery needs. However, as technology became more sophisticated and consumers grew more demanding, the data delivery life cycle was cut down dramatically. Today, with agile development, new features may be added every few days, if not hours. Coupled with QA teams’ requirement for testing data continuously, AI/ML teams requiring millions of data points for accurate training, and data analysts constantly needing fresh data for organizational growth, this means DBA teams are flooded with demands they are incapable of managing.

What Now?

Database virtualization is an automated and easy solution to the dataset bottleneck. By simplifying the creation and distribution of database replicas, DevOps teams will be able to create fully functioning virtual environments via a self-service process–allowing DBA teams to focus on more critical duties relating to production databases.

Speed Up

The first—and most obvious—advantage of this approach is the increased speed at which data is delivered. To keep DevOps teams productive and avoid the use of old, stale data, new environments need to be produced on demand. By integrating the production of new environments into the CI/CD pipeline, enterprises will be able to automate the process and provide DevOps teams with full autonomy. By cutting out the dependency on the DBA, teams will be able to access the data they need, when they need it.

Scale

Agility is fundamental to the success of database management. Each team requires an independent environment, unaffected by other use cases. The creation and supply of virtual databases allow for quick provisioning. Once created, these databases look identical to the original physical database and function completely independently of each other. Any changes made to a vDB remain unique to the environment it’s in.

Save

As the need for data grows, so does the cost of storage. Creating a physical copy for each team and use case results in a significant storage footprint. This means that these datasets come with a hefty cost. However, the creation of virtual databases led to a dramatic decrease in storage needs. Where traditionally, physical datasets can weigh upward of several TB, vDBs only weigh a few hundred megabytes. Further, virtualization solutions also compress the weight of physical copies – such as the golden copy – actively decreasing the weight and cost of storage across all fields.

Secure the Database

Even after the database delivery problem has been solved, enterprises are faced with another major issue – security. With so many different teams accessing data in virtual and low-level testing environments, the risk of ransomware and other cyberattacks increases dramatically. Generally, the investment in securing non-production environments is significantly weaker than in production.

A common approach to address this issue is masking sensitive data so it is rendered useless to outside sources. However, traditional masking requires a data expert to manually sift through all existing data and implement data masking algorithms on any sensitive information found. This time-consuming solution creates a new data bottleneck. By automating the process and applying it to the golden copy, corporations can be confident that all vDBs created are completely secure and privacy compliant.

Looking Ahead

Database virtualization is the future of database replica management. Virtual databases are delivered in a matter of minutes, significantly accelerating the speed of delivery. These environments are easy to use, independent, and can be maintained via a self-service portal. The ongoing sync between the original database and the vDB ensures continuous access to the latest data without the need for timely or expensive processes.

Effective database virtualization will allow well-established enterprises to more easily compete against those agile startups that face significantly fewer barriers to entry.

Image Source: joshua-sortino-LqKhnDzSF-8-unsplash

April 4, 2023
npm is Scam-Spam Cesspool ¦ Google in Microsoft Antitrust Thrust

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

This week: The npm registry suffers spam infestation, and Microsoft makes Google sad. (more…)

March 31, 2023
5 Key Performance Metrics to Track in 2023

It’s never a bad time to adopt healthy new habits for the mind and body, and for developers, it’s always a good time to consider new best practices at work. As 2023 rolls on, I’ve been thinking about some key performance metrics that help to ensure critical applications and websites perform optimally throughout the year—especially during unpredictable spikes.

To see why this is important, just look at the problems Ticketmaster had in November 2022 when Taylor Swift’s concert tickets went on sale. Fans of the pop idol (including me!) swamped the Ticketmaster site and brought the system to its knees, resulting in frustrated customers and a wave of bad publicity for the company.

These usage spikes and the problems they can produce are not uncommon. The holiday sales period, starting with Black Friday and Cyber Monday, is notorious for technical issues that can cost retailers millions due to lost sales and other problems. And it’s not just retail. A few years ago, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) had to extend its tax deadline after a rush of last-minute filers knocked its systems offline.

Fortunately, developers can mitigate these problems with the right planning and practices in place. There are key performance metrics that developer teams should monitor, especially in times of peak traffic, to avoid application crashes, long wait times—and burnout for the teams who have to fix these problems when they arise.

Here are the five performance metrics developers should be tracking in 2023—especially on their busiest days of the year.

Web Vitals

The largest contentful paint, or LCP, measures the load speed of a webpage. Having a fast LCP is a clear sign that a customer’s experience is optimal as they toggle between pages. In tandem, the cumulative layout shift, or CLS, scores how a user is experiencing unexpected layout shifts. This plays out on busy shopping days: Typically, these pages have ad and sales notifications that affect a brand’s main page layout, potentially causing shoppers to experience unexpected shifts. This can reduce their ability to shop and becomes a hindrance if a developer cannot quickly access and address the issue.

Error Count Vs. Error Rate

Error counts typically increase alongside site traffic as more people flock to a website—that’s a natural occurrence. The error rate is more telling because it reveals if a greater proportion of users are experiencing issues with your application or website. Developers who see an increase in this metric should investigate and take action.

Mobile Monitoring

More and more consumers are using their mobile devices to shop and manage all aspects of their lives. For example, mobile accounted for 45% of sales during the holiday shopping period in 2022 from October to December. Mobile performance metrics are critical to understanding what is happening on your users’ devices during these busy times. Vitals like frozen and slow frames or cold and warm starts when an app opens provide visibility into how fast views are loading for your users. As became obvious with the Taylor Swift incident, a slow shopping experience can lead to an outcry and a lot of upset customers.

Outside of vitals related to mobile performance, it’s important to monitor mobile changes through application release health. Developers can see this in the rate of crash-free sessions and crash-free users as traffic to an application increases—which helps to identify abnormalities in the overall health of the app.

Slow Database and HTTP Ops

During sustained traffic spikes, database queries and HTTP requests that take too long to execute harm the user experience. Hitting a slow checkout process, or seeing the dreaded spinning beach ball after adding a product to the cart, confuses shoppers. They don’t know if they should refresh the page, and often they will abandon a purchase completely.

What’s more, if a developer is working on a backend framework, slow database and HTTP ops could also be a sign of an N+1 query problem. At that point, an application is making database queries in a loop and causing performance issues for the purchaser.

User Misery

This is a homegrown metric we use at Sentry; tracking user misery helps developers understand a customer’s experience with an application. It is a ratio of unique users who have experienced load times at 4x a configured threshold in a Sentry project and thus serves as a proxy for customer frustration. With this user misery score, our developers can see which transactions have the highest negative impact on users and prioritize fixing them.

Providing a smooth end-user experience is table stakes for businesses throughout the year, but especially during high-pressure, culturally-driven spending moments. In any of these scenarios, developers behind the scenes often work long and odd hours to address performance issues and ensure the most seamless experience. You can’t prepare for everything that can possibly go wrong, but you can be equipped with the right tools and metrics to quickly identify and remediate any problems that occur.

March 31, 2023
The Business Case for DevOps Culture

Culture is nebulous. It encompasses all the behaviors and attitudes of an organization, from overarching business values down to the individual actions of an employee. Because culture is transient, it’s unique to every business, feels difficult to change and is even harder to measure. This can make it frustrating to see DevOps research continuously name ‘culture’ as the critical factor for DevOps success.

Many teams are left wondering what a ‘successful’ culture looks like and struggle to pinpoint what changes they should make. While there isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach to cultural transformation since every business is different, there are three key traits of high-performing DevOps teams: Buy-in to the DevOps process, collaboration and continuous improvement.

But even once you’ve identified how your team can embody these traits, it can still be difficult to put forward a case for improving culture when it’s so difficult to measure its returns. By linking each of these traits to measurable impacts on the wider business, it’s possible to make a strong business case for improving your DevOps culture.

Buy-In Makes Your Business More Resilient

No organization can foster a successful DevOps culture without buy-in from the whole team. Buy-in not only encompasses an understanding and acceptance of the DevOps process but is also a commitment to getting it right.

Without cultural buy-in to the DevOps process, team members are more likely to circumvent established procedures. Following a DevOps process should overcome unnecessary downtime and failed releases, but neglecting the proper release management strategy will stop your team from seeing these improvements and hinder your ROI.

Team buy-in to DevOps makes your release process far more resilient. With a common appreciation of and investment in DevOps, teams are far more likely to follow the planned and robust process. This attitude allows businesses to see far higher ROI. For example, Veolia, the energy and utilities giant, secured a 500% return on their DevOps investment within one year of buy-in to a new approach. Team buy-in is the first step you need to take in improving your DevOps culture—it’ll ensure the technical resilience of your processes necessary to secure ROI.

Collaboration Makes Your Business More Efficient

DevOps doesn’t just encourage collaboration between Dev and Ops teams—it encourages all team members to work together across functions and share responsibility.

When only one team member has the expertise or responsibility required to move through a stage in your DevOps process, there’s a single point of failure. If this team member doesn’t have the capacity to unblock others, then the process is slowed and time is wasted. Collaboration and knowledge-sharing can overcome this bottleneck by empowering team members to handle a greater scope of the process. This avoids the significant costs that come with increased labor and missed opportunities by removing the pressure on individuals and drastically increasing the efficiency of the whole system. You’ll see an accelerated project delivery, which will be faster in getting value to your end users and see quicker ROI.

Further, collaboration across the entire release process encourages all team members to remain mindful of compliance, which ensures you’re practicing DevSecOps at each stage of your release. Rather than handing development over to the dedicated compliance team once it’s complete, shared responsibility ensures that it’s baked into the DevOps process, saving time that could be needlessly spent at the end of development reworking to meet compliance stands. In the 2022 State of Salesforce DevOps Report, teams who self-reported as ‘excellent collaborators’ managed to avoid data and metadata loss in that year’s DevOps process, whereas only 25% of very poor collaborators could say the same. Excellent collaborators were much faster to restore when needed and significantly more likely to state that backups were their responsibility.

To sum up, collaborative development teams are better at supporting the business growth needed to draw in customers. You’ll be able to sustain this growth, as efficient and secure releases will improve customer retention.

Continuous Improvement for Your Team and Business

Many teams only think about digital transformation when their process begins to fail, meaning the necessary changes require a disruptive overhaul of their whole system. Teams that nurture a culture of continuous improvement will make incremental improvements to their system, which avoids drastic ad-hoc changes and ensures the business will see continual value from gradual tweaks.

It’s difficult to identify a singular ‘best DevOps system,’ as best practices are constantly shifting, but it is easy to realize that something could work better. Teams that reflect on their own systems and keep abreast of the latest tech trends can continually implement process improvements that amount to significant adjustments in the long term. This ongoing optimization of the DevOps process means no stasis and no need for disruptive and costly upgrades every few years.

Developing your own team members not only creates a better DevOps process but also empowers team members to fill knowledge gaps, lessening the need for costly expert hiring or consultancy. Further, hiring and onboarding is a huge cost, which can be reduced by the morale and retention boost that comes with upskilling and collaboration. This will be critical as companies look at hiring freezes in the upcoming recession.

Proving that small behavioral shifts can help maximize DevOps ROI will strengthen your business case for DevOps culture and create an agile team that can adapt as the landscape changes. Eventually, your DevOps ROI will become synonymous with your culture.

March 30, 2023
The Power of Observability: Performance and Reliability

Observability has become an essential aspect of modern IT, and its importance is only expected to increase in the years to come. The ability to monitor and understand the behavior of systems in real-time provides organizations with a wealth of information that can help them improve the performance, reliability, and overall health of their networks and applications.

By collecting and analyzing data from a variety of sources, observability enables organizations to proactively address issues before they escalate into major problems. This proactive approach to problem-solving can help businesses avoid costly downtime and lost productivity, ultimately leading to increased customer satisfaction and business growth.

Current Challenges Facing Today’s Organizations

Despite its many benefits, achieving proper observability can be challenging, particularly in today’s complex and highly dispersed technology landscape. The sheer volume of data generated by siloed networks and applications can overwhelm even the most sophisticated monitoring tools. However, with the right approach, tools and processes, organizations can overcome these challenges and fully realize the potential that observability has to offer.

One of the biggest obstacles to achieving comprehensive network observability is the fragmentation of data sources. Logs, metrics, events and other types of data all require different tools to collect and store them, making it difficult to get a complete picture of network performance. To overcome this challenge, organizations must adopt a holistic approach that integrates the right tools and processes to collect and analyze all relevant data.

This holistic approach involves the use of advanced monitoring tools that can collect and analyze data from multiple sources, as well as the implementation of best practices for data management and analysis. By taking a comprehensive approach to observability, organizations can gain a deeper understanding of their networks and applications, identify potential issues before they become major problems, and ultimately drive business growth and success.

Best Practices for Performance and Reliability

First, proper tooling is crucial for organizations to perform a comprehensive analysis of data. This enables cross-domain correlation to achieve meaningful insights. A data-centric approach relying on contextual information can help organizations “connect the dots” and make informed decisions. In addition, organizations must also prioritize data quality to ensure that they are analyzing accurate and reliable data. Poor data quality can lead to incorrect conclusions and poor decision-making, which can have negative impacts on network performance and business outcomes. To ensure data quality, organizations must invest in proper tooling and processes that can validate and verify data accuracy, consistency and completeness.

Second, having a network data source of truth is crucial for organizations to effectively analyze and make informed decisions based on their data. The ability to extract metadata from existing sources to provide contextual information is also vital to “connecting the dots” across multiple domains to uncover valuable insights. The metadata serves as the ultimate enabler in this process, allowing organizations to gain a comprehensive understanding of their data to make informed decisions. By establishing a network data source of truth and extracting the necessary metadata, organizations can effectively analyze and use their data for more meaningful insights.

Third, it is important to ensure that observability is incorporated into the entire development lifecycle to support end-to-end visibility. This means accounting for instrumentation as part of the design and planning phases, as well as testing, deployment and ongoing maintenance. By making observability a central part of the development process, organizations can identify and resolve issues before they become major problems. Additionally, incorporating observability into the development lifecycle can also improve the overall performance of the system by identifying bottlenecks and areas for optimization. It can also help to improve the overall security of the system by detecting anomalous behavior and potential vulnerabilities. Moreover, having observability throughout the development process can enable teams to make informed decisions based on real-time data and analytics, leading to more efficient and effective development practices.

The fourth best practice is to use a centralized observability platform that allows for the collection and analysis of data from all systems and infrastructure. This platform should be able to collect data from all parts of the organization’s technology stack, including databases, servers and applications. Additionally, the platform should be able to correlate data from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive view of the organization’s operations. This centralized approach ensures that all stakeholders have access to the same information, reducing the likelihood of miscommunications and ensuring that everyone is working towards the same goals.

Last is the democratization of data. This is crucial for organizations as it empowers teams from multiple functions to access and use data effectively. This leads to increased transparency and collaboration, allowing organizations to make data-driven decisions and drive innovation. Democratization also helps to break down silos, increase visibility and facilitate faster problem-solving for improved decision-making. The key to achieving comprehensive network observability is collaboration between teams. Siloed teams and processes can lead to gaps in data collection and analysis, as well as delays in issue resolution. Therefore, organizations must encourage cross-functional collaboration between teams responsible for network infrastructure, application development and operations to promote a shared understanding of network performance and enable faster problem resolution.

Observability is a Key Discipline

In conclusion, observability is a key discipline that can help organizations achieve superior performance and reliability in their systems. By following the best practices suggested above and embracing a comprehensive approach, organizations can overcome the challenges of data fragmentation and unlock the full potential of observability. As technology continues to evolve and become more complex, observability will only become more important, making it essential for businesses to prioritize this aspect of their IT strategy.

March 29, 2023
Don’t Make Big Tech’s Mistakes: Build Leaner IT Teams Instead

One of the biggest narratives in the U.S. concerning the current wave of tech layoffs is the fact that ‘traditional’ sectors have a prime opportunity to snap up new tech teams and IT talent. This has always been a significant challenge for sectors such as banks, insurance and manufacturing that compete with big tech for talent. In 2022, a majority of CEOs (71%) identified skills and labor shortages to be that year’s biggest business disrupter.

And they were right to be worried. According to Salesforce, three in four workers do not have the digital skills needed by businesses to prepare for the future of work. The temptation in this environment for many traditional organizations is to enter the labor market to build larger tech teams to help drive their modernization programs. However, this may be a mistake.

Building large, expensive, bloated tech and IT teams is not always the answer. It’s critical that traditional companies learn this lesson from big tech.

Instead, traditional organizations should consider other avenues to drive their digital transformation ambitions with their lean resources. What does this look like?

What is the Real Challenge you are Trying to Solve?

Since COVID-19 hit, U.S. companies have been forced to reevaluate how they work, with remote working becoming commonplace–even for companies who couldn’t imagine themselves working remotely.

And the challenges have grown as U.S. businesses seek growth to recover lost gains from the last few years. Evanta’s 2022 CIO Leadership Perspectives study found that CIOs rate data and analytics as their second top priority within the IT function. It is clear that business leaders see advancing organizational use of data, analytics and automation as key to reaching enterprise objectives.

For many organizations, the biggest challenge they face is the unprecedented amount of data generated. Critically, more than 80% of all new data is unstructured and messy. This makes it difficult for data-driven companies to accurately review, gather, analyze and rely on what is mission-critical information.

Traditional industries such as health care, banking, insurance or the public sector, have even larger concerns because data is increasingly critical to how they build value and deliver services for customers. So, it is important for their IT teams to create a single source of truth and data governance framework across their organizations to ensure the right people and senior leaders have the most accurate information to make smarter decisions.

For instance, in the manufacturing industry, no-code database platforms can be leveraged to structure daily operational data and visualize insights through digital dashboards for quality assurance, continuous improvement and health safety.

Additionally, at Baserow, we work with treasury customers at some of the biggest international banks that use no-code platforms to keep track of local legislation around the world by centralizing information in real-time databases available to relevant teams, including compliance.

Modern organizations depend on their IT teams to accomplish a lot of their goals. So, it is important to provide them with the tools to focus on more complex development projects. No-code tools free your non-technical teams to address their pressing needs themselves without having to wait for budget or resource availability in the IT department.

Have you Also Considered Upskilling Your Current Team?

We know from the Salesforce survey that the vast majority of U.S. workers lack the digital skills to support their organizations’ ambitions and needs. This suggests that there is a wider issue within most companies at large. Do businesses need to prioritize upskilling their current team instead?

A U.S. Gallup report found that 72% of workers are overwhelmingly interested in pursuing additional digital training to prepare them for an increasingly digitilized workplace. Is there room for no-code technologies to supplement the digital capabilities within companies?

Enterprises are already expanding the responsibilities of application development outside their IT teams as well as increasing the productivity of their existing IT resources by automating and abstracting repetitive developer tasks. Gartner predicted that by 2025, 70% of apps will employ low-code/no-code technology. This trend aligns neatly with the business needs, such as the development of organization-specific applications and tools, because every business’s requirements are different.

Furthermore, no-code/low-code technology enables companies to drive innovation and shorten the idea-to-market cycle times. The technology’s pre-built components make it easier for end-users and workers to intuitively assemble the templates that solve their complex needs.

In Conclusion

U.S. companies that need to fill the IT skills gap should consider how technology can be leveraged to boost productivity and accelerate the speed of innovation while accepting that new technical resources will continue to be expensive and scarce.

These organizations are better off taking the lead in the democratization of IT within their teams. Only then can they keep up with the speed and agility required in today´s competitive environment.

March 27, 2023