devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: DevOps and Open Technologies

Editorial Calendar for February 2016

  • 10 Views on What Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Does for DevOps Users

    10 Views on What Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Does for DevOps Users

    The DevOps and open source communities have been in a tizzy all week over the massive $7.5 billion Microsoft acquisition of GitHub. Even as many developers rage on Twitter about the deal and still others are rushing to migrate their repositories to alternative solutions—#movetogitlab has trended heavy this week—for the most part the DevOps community is taking it in stride. As devopsy.kinsta.cloud’s Don MacVittie explained, complaining or planning a move away from GitHub solely due to long-held grudges against Microsoft seems pretty counterproductive at the moment.

    He’s not alone. A lot of developers, evangelists, CTOs and other GitHub users out there doing the work that drives applications into production are looking at this as a potentially great thing. Others are more cautious, but at least believe this won’t set the movement backward. We’ve gathered a few thoughts from these professionals to help balance out the dialogue.

    Ensures GitHub Viability

    “For those developers that may be anxious and thinking about jumping ship, I am sure they also must realize the hard truth that for GitHub to succeed moving forward it needed an influx of cash. Inevitably, there would come a point where GitHub would need to start to actually turn a profit, something it has yet to achieve, before it would have to shut its doors. ”

    —Adam Mansfield, Microsoft practice leader at UpperEdge

    Provides Much-Needed Leadership

    “Satya Nadella has so far done a great job dropping the Windows religion to embrace the reality of the iOS, Android, Linux and multi-cloud world, which he will hopefully continue with the GitHub community. By putting Nat Friedman—former CEO & co-founder of Xamarin—in place as a technical CEO, Microsoft is sending a clear message that they’re committed to GitHub and the larger developer ecosystem.”

    —Jyoti Bansal, former CEO of AppDynamics and current co-founder of DevOps platform Harness

    GitHub Champions in Enterprise Have Easier Sell

    “For one, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see corporate firewalls allowing access to GitHub now that it’s a Microsoft owned property, and perhaps considered ‘enterprise-ready.’ Microsoft knows how to make products that make enterprise architects feel confident, so their blessing and ownership of GitHub could really encourage social coding within enterprise organizations.”

    —Matt Stratton, DevOps evangelist at PagerDuty

    Net Neutral Immediate Impact

    “Developers should not be anxious about this acquisition nor should they be excited. I honestly think this is an ‘oh well’ moment. Unless Microsoft has some crazy plan to sunset features or support for one vendor or another, everything should behave as business as usual for the foreseeable future. The only thing developers should watch is license fees and terms and conditions. Expect Microsoft to monetize the solution better in the coming months and potentially tie usage into MSDN.”

    —Morey Haber, CTO of BeyondTrust

    GitHub Already Had Its Own Problems

    “GitHub is not strong in this area (DevOps) and never has been; maybe if Microsoft made it easy to deploy to Azure it could be seen as an improvement. As a tangent, GitLab which is now the attractive alternative, has its own CI/CD tooling and can also be self-hosted for free. This is a major advantage over GitHub, and I’m wondering if corporate America will start looking more closely to the FOSS alternative to GitHub Enterprise.”

    —Mitch Pirtle, longtime developer and consultant at SpaceMonkeyLabs, former Tech Fellow at Capital One

    Opens Eyes for About Dangers of Centralization

    ” My hope is that – one way or another – this leads to greater competition, more innovation, and less reliance on any one single platform. I don’t feel that centralization around any one platform is good for the DevOps and FOSS communities. I also don’t feel consolidation to larger companies is a good thing, as it creates conflicts of interest and generally a lack of innovation. This consolidation could result in a more decentralized approach to both software development and DevOps integration, which will hopefully drive more innovation. I think that could ultimately be a positive outcome of this acquisition.”

    —Jeremy Steinert, CTO of WSM International

    Expect Better Integration for More Seamless CI/CD

    “Longer term, I expect GitHub’s integration with Azure to expand substantially, enabling some truly exciting developments for one-click code deployment to a Cloud infrastructure. DevOps for smaller companies will gain easier access to Azure resources. For DevOps as a whole, we will see acceleration of seamless code management within the context of actual deployment to containers. DevOps for enterprise has the greatest potential for improvement with this deal. There will be massive investment in improving developer interactions between infrastructure and code.”

    —Clint Wilson, VP of product management at DigiCert

    Here Come Better Enterprise DevOps Features

    “While I think the development community will have mixed emotions about the news, ultimately this is a massively positive moment for GitHub. GitHub is at the center of the developer community, but as a business, they have faced challenges in reaching the enterprise buyer—something Microsoft is extremely well-versed in. With Microsoft’s resources and expertise, GitHub no longer has to wrestle with the internal struggle of being open to the community and being open for businesses, ie. selling to the enterprise. Assuming it’s kept a separate entity and is not beholden exclusively to Azure, this acquisition gives GitHub the opportunity to deliver the features enterprise DevOps and development teams need.”

    —Tal Weiss, co-founder and CTO of OverOps

    Accelerates GitHub’s Servicing of DevOps Market

    “The new Microsoft is not the bogey of the past — VS Code is great; TypeScript is terrific; Microsoft has not merely accepted open source, but become an open source leader through its GitHub contributions. From a business perspective, I think the deal will pay off. Unlike competitors such as IBM and Oracle, Microsoft not only understands developers, but has a proven ability to sell to the SMB as well as to the enterprise market. Microsoft can probably grow the GitHub business substantially by executing better on GitHub’s existing strategic objectives, such as GitHub Enterprise, without alienating users. It may also be able to create significant value by applying its AI technology and VS Code innovation to GitHub’s enormous corpus of code.

    —Rod Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Atomist and creator of Spring

    Validates Value of What Open Source and Devs Do

    “I think overall this is good for the DevOps movement, and open source in general. It’s a very strong validation of how important open source is not just to open source developers, but also the business world. Developers have a right to be anxious, but there are many viable options for open source hosting in this day and age, so if Microsoft does not prove to be a good steward of GitHub, they have other options. However, Microsoft could very well keep GitHub going.”

    —Logan Abbott, president of SourceForge.net

    — Ericka Chickowski

  • Microsoft and GitHub: The Sky is Not Falling

    Microsoft and GitHub: The Sky is Not Falling

    The consternation seen in some corners of the internet over Microsoft’s agreement to acquire GitHub is overblown and too early.

    For those who don’t follow me normally, I am a developer for Windows, Android and Linux. I am also a user of both GitHub and BitBucket. While I am an advocate, I am more of an IT productivity/tools advocate than a pro/con MS advocate. So pretty much, I am IT. I’ve worked in pretty much every IT environment from developing embedded devices to cell phones to apps for smartphones to a raft of enterprises from financials to utilities.

    Until we know what Microsoft intends with GitHub, it makes no sense to go crazy with plans to migrate away from the platform.

    Oh, I could draw up plans to move my company’s GitHub repositories to BitBucket (or GitLab, or wherever), but honestly at this point there is no reason to do so. We (all of IT) have a limited amount of time available, and is migration away from GitHub the best use of that time?

    I argue that at this point, it absolutely is not.

    Stop. Breathe.

    There are things Microsoft could do that would make my company want to move away from GitHub. I do not expect that any of those things will happen. Or if they do happen, it is because they were going to happen anyway.

    Remember, early rumors of this merger started with, “They were working on joint marketing, and GitHub let slip they needed a cash infusion …” needed a cash infusion. That means something at GitHub needed to change regardless of ownership. You don’t go as long and get as large as it has and need a cash infusion, if you’re doing things right. So change was likely coming, regardless of ownership.

    But until we see what Microsoft has planned, expending energy either complaining about it or planning to move away seems like a bad use of your time. As long as git pull still works, and the terms of service haven’t changed, it is much ado about nothing.

    Stay focused on your customers, and keep a wary eye on developments with regards to all of your back-end tools, but don’t waste energy in potentially unnecessary or fruitless exercises. Think about it, and if it becomes necessary, we can all make careful, planned moves when it’s clear that is the proper course.

    — Don Macvittie

  • Jump-Start Your Kubernetes Journey with JenkinsX

    Jump-Start Your Kubernetes Journey with JenkinsX

    Containers are very quickly being adopted as the stable way of deploying services. More and more organizations are adopting immutable architecture and containers provide an excellent way to achieve that.

    But along with the stability comes the complexity of deployment, along with managing workload, scaling and updating. That’s in addition to having to create a reliable and repeatable process to continuously build and ship these containers to a production ready state. Kubernetes is one option: It provides features to reliably manage production workloads for your services.

    So now developers have to learn Kubernetes, as well as how to prepare their application for Kubernetes and create the pipeline for continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD). Developers also must determine what is the best approach to get this done and where to start.

    JenkinsX: CI/CD for Kubernetes

    JenkinsX is an open source CI/CD solution for the modern cloud platform for developing and managing applications on Kubernetes. It’s the automation that helps an application move to Kubernetes, deploying various services on Kubernetes to manage an application’s CI/CD journey.

    Developers simply focus on their product and its features and JenkinsX will manage the Kubernetes deployment. It’s opinionated yet flexible, and provides extensive customization. Users can create a Kubernetes cluster using JenkinsX on AWS, Azure, Google or even locally on minikube or minishift. Developers who already have their own Kubernetes cluster and its RBAC (Role Based Access Control) enabled can simply install JenkinsX on top of it.

    JenkinsX provides various templates, and, since it’s open source, more templates are added daily. Developers can do a quickstart with a templated version of spring boot application, a golang project, node, open-liberty, python-http and more. It will create a git repo for a template application and then connect to developer’s github account to push this template to a repo. Also, it sets up the required webhooks to talk to Jenkins, which is installed on Kubernetes as part of the JenkinsX setup.

    JenkinsX also creates namespace environments in Kubernetes. By default, it will create a staging and production environment that can be modified.

    Once changes are made to a templated quickstart application and a pull request is created, the process kicks in and pushes the payload using webhooks to jenkins. The pipeline jobs then kick in to start the build process.

    After the application builds in its own container, the next stage begins to create a docker image and push it to the internal docker registry. Helm charts are generated for the application and stored in the internal hosted chart museum. It is then deployed to a preview environment and developers can view or run tests against the application even before the pull requests are merged.

    As the pull request is reviewed and merged to the master branch, a job kicks in to deploy that application on to the environments. JenkinX implements GitOps, so any and every change is triggered from the github repository. It creates a pull request to the environment repository and adds a change to deploy this application in this environment., validates the pull request and automatically merges it, kick-starting the final deployment stage.

    An environment is mapped to a specific namespace, the application container is then deployed in that namespace, a service is created and all the required mappings are configured. Also, a URL is spit out for developers to hit their application.

    Developers then push their changes, grab a coffee (this step is optional) and few minutes later they get the URL to access the application in that environment.

    That’s the standard workflow. As you might have noticed, JenkinsX is very different from the traditional Jenkins approach. Jenkins provides complete flexibility, whereas JenkinsX provides an opinionated approach. Given everything is in the template repo it creates, you can always modify them to your requirements.

    A Jenkinsfile is created for the pipeline jobs that can be edited to add another stage. Helm charts are created and can be updated if required. Users can disable the default environment it creates the first time and have their own set of persistent or disposable environments.

    This is a great approach toward automating of various different tools we use today to build and deploy our applications on Kubernetes. There are a few features I would love to see added, such as different deployment strategies, support for internal docker registries and maintenance features to clean up obsolete images. That said, JenkinsX removes much of the learning curve and jump-starts your Kubernetes and container journey.

    — Saurav Sen

  • Securing Third-Party and Open Source Code Components: A Primer

    Securing Third-Party and Open Source Code Components: A Primer

    The increasing popularity of open source code continues to be a boon for developers across the industry, allowing them to increase efficiency and streamline delivery. But there are security risks to be considered when leveraging open source and commercial code components, as each carries with it a significant risk of becoming the enemy within, creating a vulnerability in the program it helps build.

    Sacrificing Security for Ease of Use

    While the many benefits of open source have been well-touted, the sheer prevalence of code components (open source and commercial) across industries is underestimated. CA Veracode recently found that 83 percent of developers use code components to build web applications, with the average number of components per application at a whopping 73.

    Considering the fact that the vast majority of developers build applications with code components, the number of those familiar with the risks of doing so is startlingly low. A mere 52 percent of companies reported they provide security fixes to components when new security vulnerabilities are discovered. Despite an average of 71 vulnerabilities per application introduced through the use of third-party components, only 23 percent reported testing for vulnerabilities in components at every release.

    Furthermore, only 43 percent of developers reported being aware of the industry-accepted OWASP recommendations for preventing the use of components with known vulnerabilities.

    Where Does Responsibility Lie?

    One clear issue in this software development practice is that responsibility for securing code seems to fall on everyone—and, sometimes, no one. Forty-four percent of respondents claimed that developers are responsible for the continued security of code components, while 31 percent reported that they expect security to handle this task.

    This lack of preparedness and miscommunication leaves the door wide open for bad actors to swoop in and take advantage of vulnerabilities that could so easily be fixed.

    How, then, can teams ensure the security of applications built with code components? The solution lies in three key steps:

    • Start with education: Software development teams must have the tools and training necessary to ensure the code they write is secure. Educating developers on the risks associated with open source and commercial code components is a start, but prioritizing security training and ongoing education is the key to long-term success. Tapping the security team to lead trainings for their developer colleagues is a good way to embrace peer knowledge-sharing and break down silos between the two teams.
    • Introduce clear processes: To alleviate miscommunication and confusion, organizations must implement clear processes for secure software development. Knowing what an application is built of is the first step, as teams can’t secure what they don’t understand. This may seem obvious, but CA Veracode found that only half (53 percent) of organizations keep an inventory of components. Code components should be thoroughly vetted before being worked into an application and then should be added to a working inventory. Managers should be sure each part of the maintenance process has a clear owner on the team so responsibility is always clear. Consistent testing and patching are also best practices when it comes to security.
    • Drive innovation with DevSecOps: All of this comes back to integrating security into the entire software development life cycle (SDLC) and implementing DevSecOps, because a team that operates in silos will never be able to push out secure code. The development, operations and security teams each provide their own unique and critical contribution to the software development process, and combining forces will result in the best possible product.

    While taking the time to secure applications from the perils of code components may slow down development in the short term, safeguarding your organization and its software assets is invaluable in the long term.

    — Pete Chestna

  • How DevOps Can Create Smarter, More Agile 5G Telecom Networks

    How DevOps Can Create Smarter, More Agile 5G Telecom Networks

    There is no doubt DevOps revolutionized software development with its introduction of lean and agile techniques. By applying continuous deployment and continuous integration methodologies into software development, enterprises can build, test and deploy applications and release new services more rapidly. In this article, we will see how the DevOps approach is being utilized in 5G telecom networks with the rise of software-defined systems.

    Emergence of Software in Legacy Telecom Networks

    In last few decades software has changed our lives in myriad ways—mostly for the better. Now, software is starting to disrupt the telecommunication industry with the eagerly anticipated 5th generation of telecom network, also known as 5G. It is expected to provide low latency and high bandwidth network connections to serve use cases including artificial intelligence, smart city, 3D video, industry automation and self-driving cars, and to provide end-to-end real-time experiences such as virtual reality and augmented reality. A variety of these use cases have different network requirements and dependencies, and 5G is expected to provide such flexibility along with agility.

    Software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) form the backbone of the upcoming 5G network, enabling service providers to deliver lucrative services to their customers and realize a competitive advantage. SDN makes the network programmable and centrally controlled, while NFV replaces dedicated network appliances with software packaged in virtual machines on top of high-performance servers. SDN and NFV enables:

    • Better control over overall network.
    • Reduction of manual network configuration processes.
    • Lower CAPEX.
    • Network resiliency.
    • Orchestrate network dynamically.
    • Faster time to market, i.e. faster introduction of new services and features to customers.

    Application of SDN and NFV technologies in 5G telecom networks indicates the use of software in the legacy telecom network, wherein many network functions including firewall, content delivery network (CDN), network address translation (NAT), routers, deep packet inspection (DPI) and broadband remote access server (BRAS) can be virtualized and serve as virtual network functions (VNFs) in NFV architecture. This stands as the core feature of upcoming 5G networks, as most of hardware-dependent operations will be performed by software, providing higher performance with tons of benefits to end users.

    Cloud-Native Enables DevOps

    Virtual network functions (VNFs) are the software representation of network function appliances in NFV environment and a core element in 5G networks. Services can be provided by chaining different VNFs developed by different vendors. There are complexities associated with having multivendor VNFs, as each VNF has its own performance and operational issues including manual integration in NFV infrastructure, utilization of NFV hardware resources, lack of interoperability and multitenancy. For a 5G network to deploy successfully, each VNF must be configured and managed in automated way.

    As software becomes part of telecom network, the term “cloud native” becomes part of the vernacular for VNFs.

    By harnessing a cloud-native approach—including containerization, microservices-based architecture and dynamic orchestration—VNFs with their own life cycle enable:

    • Decomposition of sub processes into microservices—resources required will be automatically scaled and communicated with other services using APIs.
    • Management and simplified orchestration of VNFs.
    • Deployment within containers and connected by APIs.
    • Orchestration by container scheduler—manages provision into service and lifecycle management.
    • Portability to different NFV environments.

    More importantly, a cloud-native approach allows VNF vendors and service providers to impose DevOps (continuous deployment and integration) methods to automate process of building, validating and deploying VNFs into NFV environments.

    A DevOps approach in 5G networks brings benefits for overall network operations, enabling deployment automation and management of service chains and 5G network slices. Complete automation is required, especially for 5G network operations, which may increase operational efficiency and decrease human error, saving OPEX and decreasing expensive downtime.

    For 5G networks, requirement of DevOps methods in VNF can be for:

    • Automated onboarding and deployment of VNFs in NFV environment.
    • Automated performance testing and benchmarking for VNFs.
    • Enabling self-scaling of VNFs—automated resource provisioning for VNFs.
    • Rnabling self-healing after an error in VNFs residing in VMs or containers.
    • Real-time monitoring of VNF activities for analysis.

    More ‘Intelligent’ Network

    Cloud-native capabilities and a DevOps approach opens the possibility of incorporating artificial intelligence in 5G telecom network operations analysis and real-time monitoring. Cisco Systems has already introduced its solution based on machine learning, which it calls Intent Based Networking. We can imagine a network operation having “zero touch” feature by just providing an intent to complete network for any configuration or specific network-based instruction. The collected analysis data can be used in the management and organization of NFV for corrections of network errors, adjustments in VNF and NFV elements configuration and self-healing/scaling of network functions.

    Summary

    Development of 5G network is still in process. By taking into account a revolution in SDN, NFV, cloud native and DevOps, it is expected that we will have 5G networks by some of leading players Verizon, AT&T, Telefonica and Vodafone reasonably soon.

    — Sagar Nangare

  • Transition to DevOps Increasing Across IT Firms

    Transition to DevOps Increasing Across IT Firms

    Demand for faster product development and quick market release created a need for increased collaboration between Development (Dev) and Operations (Ops) teams, which eventually led to “DevOps.” With this, transition to DevOps has become one of the key points of discussion across many IT firms. This article gives you an overview of the demand and trend for organizations to transition to DevOps.

    Rise in IT innovation and burgeoning digital revolution have led to the demand for faster development and quicker releases to stand out in the IT competitive scenario. This transition eventually led to a new culture that saw collaboration between two key IT teams, development and operations teams, which the industry calls DevOps.

    DevOps established a new style of IT functioning, easing different phases of software process from product development to testing and final market release, all in a rapid and reliable way.

    Why DevOps Transition?

    Rapid delivery of independent software components and continuous integration of the same with production systems forms the key principle behind DevOps functioning.

    DevOps is often confused with Agile methodology. Though they share similarities in providing improved IT performance through rapid development, DevOps stands apart from Agile because of its efficacy in the software deployment phase, ensuring a constant communication between the two teams. Thus, DevOps is often termed as a successor to Agile.

    A collaborative approach, key for information exchange across the line, is one of the major factors driving firms to undergo DevOps implementation.

    Though DevOps is well-known as a merger of development and operations teams, an effective DevOps model extends beyond that to other key functional areas of organizations.

    Breaking the old trend of limiting individual teams to their respective work domains, DevOps brought in a scope for knowledge-sharing among them, wherein developers can extend themselves to testing and deployment and operations team members can upgrade their skill set, learning new languages, architectures and tools.

    Increased Demand for DevOps Resource

    Transition to DevOps holds a key demand in the fast-growing IT market, wherein managing with the existing infrastructure or resource plays an almost equal role as coming up with something new.

    Greenfield projects aside, DevOps deployment is most often seen in brownfield projects that encourage building on the existing resources.

    With this situation in place, there is also a lot of demand for DevOps resources across firms. The “2017 Open Source Jobs Report” from the Linux Foundation shows 60 percent demand for DevOps human resources among more than 2,000 IT open source professionals and IT hiring managers.

    This clearly shows the level of demand that transition to DevOps is holding in the IT industry.

    “If there isn’t an existing DevOps role within your company, software developers should spend time sitting with the operations team or vice versa to understand how their processes work and how they can be improved through collaboration,” said Mike Durney, CEO of the job-hunting site Dice.

    The report found:

    • Nearly 50 percent of hiring managers are keen about those DevOps resources with professional credentials such as relevant certifications
    • More than 47 percent of the companies are ready to fund certification programs for their existing personnel
    • 42 percent of companies are keen on adding DevOps skills to their hiring portfolio
    • “DevOps Engineer” profile ranks second in Glassdoor’s Best 50 jobs in America

    Despite its advantages, however, DevOps has a few challenges to overcome related to application integration, test automation, budget and skill set, among others.

    — Veritis

  • Malicious Intent: Open Source Developers, Please Protect Your Users

    Malicious Intent: Open Source Developers, Please Protect Your Users

    For the second time in just a few weeks we’re seeing the fallout of missteps taken by publishers of open source components. It was just recently that I wrote about the GitHub id of go-bindata being highjacked. We don’t know for certain if the intentions were malicious, but the risk was obvious.

    Even more recently we find that credentials were compromised for an npm component called conventional-changelog and a malicious version was uploaded that allegedly included a Monero cyptocurrency miner. Anyone who built or installed an npm package depending on the malicious package is now potentially running a miner and worse, potentially distributing it to their downstream users or customers.

    A few months ago people were laughing at a parody of a similar situation describing credit card harvesting via a compromised package. It’s not so funny anymore, is it?

    Open source developers typically thrive in creating something used by millions or billions of other people. This is the fuel that drives us and knowing that you’ve contributed, even in some small part, to the lives of millions of users is amazing.

    Conversely, knowing that you’ve accidentally inflicted harm on those users through careless practices is probably devastating. Yet, seemingly not enough people are thinking about this beforehand while it’s preventable.

    We open source developers and package maintainers are finding ourselves at the frontline of the new battle. Attackers have recognized the power of open source in terms of broad distribution and are seeking to use that against us.

    We must not let them ruin the reputation of the things we’ve built—or, worse, the entire open source ecosystem.

    If you’re an open source contributor or package maintainer: Pay attention to your own digital security as you would if you were protecting millions of others. Because you are.

    — Brian Fox

  • DevOps Chat: Concurrent DevOps with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij

    DevOps Chat: Concurrent DevOps with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij

    In this DevOps Chat we speak with GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij. Sid has guided GitLab as a co-founder to the heights of the DevOps market. Joining Sid and me is Ashish Kuthiala, who recently joined GitLab. I have always been impressed with the completeness of GitLabs’ vision of the DevOps toolchain and what the company wants to offer. Sid’s vision for this is something he calls Concurrent DevOps. You will hear more about Concurrent DevOps in our chat, as well as in the months to come.

    Another thing about GitLab is is an open source-based company, which allows for a lot of transparency. With hundreds of thousands of organizations using GitLab and thousands of paying customers, GitLab is a great example of a DevOps success story.

    As usual, the audio of our conversation is immediately below, followed by a transcript of our conversation.

    Audio

    Transcript

    [su_pullquote align=”right”] [su_custom_gallery source=”media: 120255″ link=”post” target=”blank” width=”200″ height=”200″ title=”never”]Sid Sijbrandij
    Sid saw the first ruby code in 2007 and loved it so much he learned to program and made this his profession. Before that he was engaged in various businesses, from selling programmable infrared receivers to starting a recreational submarine company. He is always looking to publicly document an answer or to make a process more efficient. He was never good at sports but tries to make it up in quantity by hiking, sailing, skiing, snowboarding, speed skating, dancing Zouk, squashing, and running. In love participating in conversations on Hacker News, and reading Marc Andreessen’s tweets (now that Marc stopped this greatly increased his productivity).[/su_pullquote]    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, and it’s time for another DevOps Chat. Our DevOps Chat episode today is gonna be all about GitLab, and we’re joined by two GitLab folks. First joining us is the co-founder and CEO of GitLab, Sid Sijbrandij, and I hope I did that justice. Sid, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Sid Sijbrandij: Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: Thank you. And joining Sid and I is a friend of mine, recently joined the GitLab team, Ashish Kuthiala. Ashish, I didn’t mess that up too bad, did I?

    Ashish Kuthiala: No, you didn’t. No, that was perfect.

    Shimel: Alright! Well, one of the nice things about tech is, I get a lot of experience. Not a lot of Smiths in the group. [Laughter] And as I said, this is Alan Shimel, and we’re here with DevOps Chat.

    So, guys—GitLab. You know, first of all, Sid, I’m sure you’ve probably heard this before, but I’m sure there are people in our audience who still have to ask themselves, “GitHub, GitLab,” right? And as silly as it sounds, they may confuse them sometimes.

    So, let’s set it straight in terms of GitLab. Sid, you co-founded it. What exactly is GitLab and how does it differ, let’s say, from GitHub, and we’ll go from there.

    Sijbrandij: Yeah, so GitLab started off as an open source alternative to GitHub, where you could have Git repositories, do version control, do some issue management, and it’s now grown a lot as a company and as a project. We now do the whole DevOps life cycle. So, anything from planning to rolling out what you’ve made—CI/CD, packaging, monitoring—all in a single application.

    Shimel: Great. And I think you’re being modest, actually. GitHub is certainly—when you say branched out, it’s branched out, I mean, from what I know, and I’m no expert, obviously, the breadth of the vision is pretty dynamic. So, congratulations with that.

    Sijbrandij: Thank you.

    Shimel: Ashish, you were—thank you. Ashish, you recently joined GitLab, and why don’t you give us out, what’s your position there?

    Kuthiala: So, Alan, I think you and I have known each other for a while, and I am very passionate about the promise of DevOps, especially at large scale enterprises, right? Not smaller teams or not those who had the luxury of building out their infrastructure and teams to adopt DevOps and realize the promises of that.

    We still a lot of the larger enterprises struggle with adopting and realizing the promise of DevOps as it is. I mean, a lot of them are achieving results, but a lot of them are still in the journey and trying to figure out how to get there.

    So, and I had heard about GitLab, I knew that they were building out a solution for this, but I think it was in the last DevOps Enterprise Summit, you, I, and Haydn ran into each other. And I started talking to Haydn and I learned more about the company, and I think it’s just the right product at the right time. Because if you look at all the challenges that exist in the big enterprise, there’s massive transformation needed, and there’s several things that prevent this from moving forward at the speed that everybody would like, whether this is different organizations within the large organizations to get them to collaborate together, whether this is stitching together the different toolset chains to kind of make this seamless.

    And I think GitLab has really built something from ground up that addresses this problem. And the good news is that the velocity at which we are adding functionality, we are adding the needs that need to be addressed. Because we are an open source company, we are completely open and transparent, right? We gather input from everybody, a road map is opened. We take the input, we take contributions, and we build the right thing for solving today’s problems. And as needs change, I see this model as something that can really adopt to that, right?

    Because the world of DevOps is changing very rapidly, and often there’s a fear of getting locked in with a vendor, too. With our solution, I think the openness of it and the direction it can go to solve problems as they change is a great promise, and we’re already solving a lot of problems. So, that was a big thing for me, you know, that I considered in joining GitLab.

    And the other thing is the culture and open transparency that Sid and the company have built in the company. It’s just phenomenal for me, right? I mean, that was just an eye opening model of how everything we do is open to the world. It’s open within the employees. Anybody can contribute, anybody can look at everything we do and how we move forward to help our customers.

    So, these two are the main things for me that really inspired me to join GitLab.

    Shimel: Great. So, Sid, I’d like to come back to you. Certainly, we can all have vision, but execution is what kinda separates winners from losers in the market. And I’d like to ask you, as the CEO, what’s the secret, if you want to share it with us, right? How do you translate this vision that attracts someone of Ashish’s quality and character and then translate that into an execution that actually translates to success in the market?

    Sijbrandij: Yeah, I’d love to talk about that. We’re biting off a lot, so I think we’re now—GitLab offers a great solution for 10 different product categories. So, that’s massive. There’s a lot of engineering effort. For example, we have a CI/CD team that is just 10 people, and that they have to compete with people that are 100 times bigger. So, how do they do that? First, they’re just selected. GitLab CI is the leader in this space. There’s GitLab CI on the top right and then whole lot of nothing.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Sijbrandij: So, how do you do that with 10 people? Well, there’s a couple of secrets. The first one is—you don’t do that with 10 people, you do that with 1,800 people. So, we’ve got over 100,000 organizations using GitLab, and over 1,800 people contributed to the product. So, in the release that will go out in a week from now, there’s not just 1 contribution, there’s not 10, there’s 93 features that people contributed that aren’t paid by GitLab.

    So, we see it as, instead of having a tool chain where you have to make the integrations yourself—and that’s not just a few, we identified over 24 integrations you have to make in a standard DevOps tool chain. Instead of making them all yourself with your DevOps tooling team, you work together with 100,000 organizations and 1,800 people to do that.

    So, that’s the big secret. It’s open source. We work together. Then there’s some small secrets, and one of them is iteration. Iteration is one of our six values, and it’s something that everyone is super excited about when they join, but they all kind of don’t understand how painful it is, because it’s very, very painful to do the minimal thing. We’re now in a call with Ashish that Ashish will probably not like that we’re gonna probably change the header on our home page today, because we thought of something better. He’s probably gonna say no, but give me a month, I can think of something even better. And I will be like, “That’s great, Ashish. Think of something even better and then change it again.”

    Shimel: Yep.

    Sijbrandij: It’s very, very painful, and we do that throughout the company, and in product, it’s a very painful thing. My previous call was with Martin, and they’re working on a cloud native chart for GitLab, and we have a thing with uploads and we probably are gonna ship a chart with an NFS server as a part of that. A very clumsy thing, but it unlocks everybody else, and we can keep shipping. And one of our other subvalues is boring solutions, and I love that, because it’s so obvious. You say “boring solution” and people understand what you mean. We don’t go for the shiny toy. Our mission is, everyone can contribute, and people can only contribute if there’s a stable environment to do that, if they understand what you’re doing.

    So, when I saw the GitLab code base a year after Dmitri created it, I expected to see a hobby project. Someone super passionate, but doing this outside of work, like, putting some new development paradigms in it and having something that is hard to comprehend, especially since 300 people already contributed in that first year.

    And instead, I opened up the code base, and I saw a pristine Ruby on Rails application. Totally idiomatic, like, exactly how it should be, and we kept that. We don’t allow anyone to do anything that isn’t boring, and that enables everyone to contribute. That enables us to make forward progress, and we adopt the best of what’s out there. We embrace Kubernetes, we embrace Prometheus—really great, rock solid open source solutions that we can build for later on, and that’s been a big success.

    Shimel: Absolutely. You know, Sid, that was a mouthful in more ways than one, right? So, let’s hit on a couple things. First of all, harnessing the power of open source, right? Right out of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, you know, the book, and what’s gone on is, I mean, the false multiplier there is amazing. Of course, there’s a certain amount of a herding cats element to it, right, in getting everyone moving the same way. But if you can, harnessing that power is just—you know, it’s amazing.

    No. 2, you know, you spoke about iterations and sort of feedback loops and constant change, right? This is core to DevOps, right? This is DevOps 101 kinda stuff.

    Sijbrandij: It really is. This is exactly what we deliver to customers.

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Sijbrandij: Organizations adopt GitLab because we can make their DevOps life cycle three times faster, but you still have to work between the tools. They had these handles between the tools, they had these integrations that weren’t transparent, that weren’t seamless.

    With GitLab, they can work concurrently. As soon as you push your change, QA is gonna run, security tests run, production is gonna have the first review up out there. There’s not a sequence to it. It is, you paralyze the whole process and you gain tremendous speed and you reduce your time to value, and you allow to get feedback and to improve based on that. That’s the value we bring as a product and of course, we try to practice that ourselves.

    Shimel: Yeah. Well, so, but you more than practice it yourself. I think, you know, Sid, I’m a little different. You’re the CEO of this great company, GitLab. I’m an observer, I’m a fly on the wall of many DevOps companies, of many DevOps transformations, and I will tell you, the DevOps tools providers who do it best are those who eat their own dog food, who are practicing DevOps themselves. If you can’t do DevOps internally, don’t try to tell other people how they should do it or, you know, what they should be doing.

    It’s not a case of “do as I say, not as I do.” You have to live that, you have to talk the talk, walk the walk in order for you to truly understand it well enough to get other people to buy into it and be successful. So, kudos to GitLab for doing that.

    You guys recently announced an acquisition in the securities space. We’re kinda running low on time, but I wanted to just touch on that. Sid, your take on it?

    Sijbrandij: Yeah, we acquired a company called Gemnasium, and I think they’ve done the best job of any company of assessing all the different libraries, all the dependencies that are out there and saying which ones are vulnerable, which ones contain a problem. And that is functionality that’s gonna, that’s part of the DevOps life cycle, so we want them to be right in the product.

    So, we’re really happy to join their team, and I’m super proud of them for embracing our values, because they joined us, and within three weeks, all the Gemnasium functionality ended up in GitLab, so.

    Shimel: That’s cool.

    Sijbrandij: We know we hired the right people, they’re amazing, so congrats to Philippe and his team.

    Shimel: Yep. Congratulations to them. And look, we see it here, you know, this whole DevSecOps thing, if you will, if you want to call it that, is probably, along with testing, two of the hottest areas within the larger DevOps community.

    Ashish, we’re almost out of time. Let me come back to you, though. So, you joined this fantastic organization. We’ve heard from Sid a little bit of a peek into what’s making this engine roar, this rocket lift off. What are you gonna bring to the table? What are we gonna see from you, Ashish?

    Kuthiala: I think we need to take this message out to the marketplace, like, you know, a couple of things you talked about when people hear GitLab, they sometimes confuse it with the Git community and other Git offerings like GitHub, for example. So, we really need to tell the world what we are doing, and we are much more than just a repository engine, right? We do a lot more.

    And now that, you know, we are out there trying to help other customers with their DevOps challenges, it’s actually a little bit more than what Sid mentioned here; he is being humble. So,  not only are we practicing our own DevOps methodology to develop and roll out our application, but we actually use DevOps in every single aspect of running the company, right? Right from the hiring process when I joined to everything that I do in the company adopts a pipeline—you know, you create an issue and you run it through the pipeline and you merge that issue and it goes to production. If something is wrong, you know, it comes back.

    Amazingly, everything, between signing for benefits to updating the webpages to running our tracking of issues of what we do, it’s all run through pipelines. And I think I see that as a future. You know, DevOps is not just to be applied to delivering IT value, but you know, it is a methodology that can be applied across running your company for all functions.

    So, I think the version of GitLab is much bigger than just helping companies deliver efficient software really fast out there with feedback on the DevOps methodology. It’s almost to pivot and change the way we think about delivering value to our customers, in every aspect of running the company that we do. And I want to be part of that. I think it’s really exciting. I can’t wait to kind of start talking about this to everybody and, you know, seeing how we go down this journey.

    Shimel: Great. Sid, we’re over time, but I want to give you the last word, so I’m gonna ask one last question for you. What can we expect to see next from GitLab?

    Sijbrandij: We detail a really ambitious vision, and the vision is called Complete DevOps. And we said we’re gonna realize that this year, and we’re executing on that. We’re really proud, we integrated a complete web IDE in GitLab, so VS code running in GitLab. No need to check out this autocode base, you can just edit right there and then.

    But it consists of a lot of parts. We’re gonna have real time editing of issue and merge request descriptions. We’re gonna add logging to GitLab. You can already do monitoring, but we’re gonna add something for your logs, we’re gonna add application performance monitoring. Lots of other things that we think are needed to have a complete solution.

    So, if you started a startup, the only things you have to do is incorporate it, get a Kubernetes cluster, and install GitLab on it—job solved. Like, you’re up and running, you don’t need any other tools, and the only thing you have to do is, you push your code and already today, GitLab detects what language is it, it builds your code, it tests your code, it tests for all the security issues that might be there, it tests your code quality. It gives you all that. It gives you a review app to work with, kind of a staging app. That already works in GitLab today and we’re expanding on that, and I’m super excited to deliver that to the market this year.

    Shimel: DevOps complete. Thank you. Ashish, Sid—thanks so much for being our guests on this episode of DevOps Chat. Continued success with GitLab. We’ll be checking in—actually, I’ll see some of the GitLab folks at IBM Think in a few weeks, and we’ll get an update there, but Sid, you’re always welcome to be a guest here, don’t be a stranger, and congratulations.

    Sijbrandij: Thanks so much. Thanks for having us. I enjoyed this. Looking forward to coming back.

    Shimel: Alright, Ashish—

    Kuthiala: Thank you, Alan, for having us.

    Shimel: – good luck, my friend. Be well. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat, and we’ll see you soon on another DevOps Chat, everyone.

    — Alan Shimel

  • HashiCorp Adds Terraform Workflow Tools for IT Ops

    HashiCorp Adds Terraform Workflow Tools for IT Ops

    HashiCorp this week moved to templatize automating IT operations by making it easier to share Terraform configuration files which make it simpler to programmatically invoke infrastructure that exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) without knowing how to code.

    Available in an on-premises edition or as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise is intended for use by IT operations teams. A HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Module Registry function has been added to enable IT operations teams to implement a publish-and-subscribe mechanism for Terraform configuration files.

    Company CTO Armon Dadgar said HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise is designed to enable IT operations teams to respond faster to requests from developers for infrastructure resources without requiring them to develop programming skills. It’s unlikely developers working for traditional enterprise IT organizations will be taking over control of IT infrastructure anytime soon, he said, and Hashicorp Terraform Enterprise allows IT organizations to inject a level of agility into their workflow processes without requiring IT operations teams to completely re-engineer existing processes.

    The HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Module Registry extends that capability further by making it easier for IT operations professionals who have developed expertise employing declarative Terraform configuration files to share those files with other members of the team, Dadgar said.

    Related Content:

    HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Empowers IT Administrators

    Operations Management Puts the ‘Ops’ in DevOps

    At the same time, IT operations teams that want to build workflow applications on HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise can use a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that HashiCorp has exposed. In addition, the company has revamped the user interface for Terraform—workspaces now can be created by combining Terraform files into modular components that can be assigned to specific IT teams. Permissions to access are provided via support for the secure access markup language (SAML) as well as the Sentinel policy management software developed by HashiCorp.

    The HashiCorp approach to automating IT operations strikes at the core of the DevOps debate in the enterprise. While web-scale companies typically can afford to hire IT professionals with programming skills to manage IT infrastructure, the average enterprise IT organization still relies on administrators to manage servers, storage and networking. Not only are IT administrators in short supply, most of them would not be in IT operations if they knew how to program—they’d be writing and testing applications instead.

    Rival approaches to automating the management of IT infrastructure, despite being around for years, have yet to gain mainstream acceptance, mainly because they require programming skills. Declarative approaches allow IT infrastructure to be managed as code still, with less resistance from IT operations teams that tend to be more comfortable employing declarative tools. In fact, there’s long been a chicken-and-egg debate over the degree to which the transition to modern DevOps practices requires organizations to acquire new tools first or vice versa. The HashiCorp approach strikes a middle ground by providing tools that enable IT operations teams to first become more efficient, which ultimately should enable them to implement new processes that often is much less disruptive to the existing IT culture.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Subtree Rises to Microservices Data Management Challenge

    Subtree Rises to Microservices Data Management Challenge

    Fresh off raising $10 million in funding, Subtree has emerged from stealth to launch a service based on the dotmesh open source utility for microservices to enable DevOps teams to capture the entire state of applications.

    Dotmesh captures application state as a series of units known as datadots, and captures and tracks all versions of all the databases, files and other data in any application based on a microservices architecture, said Subtree CEO Luke Marsden. That utility exposes a command line interface (CLI) through which data about the application captured by dotmesh can be collected, and a dotmesh server component stores all the datadots.

    Marsden said the dotmesh utility can be applied to any microservice regardless of what runtime or class of containers is being employed.

    Once captured, that information can be shared via a dothub repository managed as a service by Subtree. Marsden said there’s no requirement to use dothub as the repository because the dotmesh utility is available as open source code. But dothub is designed to be the most efficient way to share data about the state of microservices applications distributed across the enterprise, said Marsden.

    The goal, he said, is to provide the equivalent of the service for source code that Github makes available and designed specifically for sharing information about the state of microservices applications deployed in production environments.

    Related Content:

    Red Hat Survey Sees Broad Adoption of Microservices

    Flexera Extends Scope of Open Source Scanning Tools

    In effect, the combination of dotmesh and dothub creates a new type of service mesh for tracking and managing data, Marsden said.

    He noted that microservices create a significant data management challenge because best practices call for each one to have access to its own database. Managing applications made up of microservices that are tethered to larger numbers of databases makes it difficult to ascertain the state of an application built on top of multiple microservices, Marsden said. If one microservice should fail, for example, the DevOps team often has to stop the application because of all the dependencies between them. However, dotmesh utilities tethered to the dothub service via application programming interfaces (APIs) make it easier to determine the relationship between all those microservices and their data sources, he said.

    Subtree envisions DevOps teams employing both dotmesh and dothub together to create workflows that specifically address data management in a microservice environment. The degree to which IT organizations are currently challenged by data management varies according to the number of microservices they are attempting to manage. At some point, however, just about every IT organization that embraces microservices will need to address how the data attached to each microservice gets managed, especially within the context of a larger stateful application.

    The impact of a lack of data management that is designed for microservices is already being felt. Many organizations are unable to effectively test a microservices-based application because the tests don’t accurately reflect the true size and scope of the application.

    Pricing for the dothub service is $10 per month for 5GB of storage. There’s also a free tier of storage provided for up to 1GB of storage.

    It’s still not quite clear who inside IT organizations will manage the data being accessed by what inevitably will become thousands of microservices. But it is clear that currently, the tools for managing all that data are, for the most part, nonexistent.

    — Mike Vizard