devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: Features

  • Pulumi Moves to Automate Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning

    Pulumi Moves to Automate Cloud Infrastructure Provisioning

    Pulumi announced today it is expanding the scope of its automation ambitions to make it easier to securely provision cloud infrastructure-as-code.

    Joe Duffy, Pulumi CEO, said the Cloud Engineering Platform enables DevOps teams to use Pulumi Packages to create reusable components for automating IT infrastructure provisioning in a way that can be embedded within workflows and applications using an application programming interface (API) that Pulumi has exposed. IT teams can define a Pulumi Package in the programing language of their choice, Duffy noted.

    The Cloud Engineering Platform is now generally available on the Microsoft Azure cloud, while a preview edition of the offering is available on Google Cloud Platform. Support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) is planned for later this year.

    The platform itself is based on version 3.0 of Pulumi, an open source tool that developers have previously employed to manage infrastructure-as-code. Pulumi is also making generally available a tool for integrating its tools with more than a dozen continuous integration/continuously delivery (CI/ CD) platforms.

    That capability, coupled with existing support for integrated testing capabilities and the tools for managing compliance-as-code based on identities, provides IT teams with a more comprehensive approach to managing infrastructure-as-code, said Duffy.

    Most cloud resources today are directly provisioned by developers using open source tools such as Terraform. The issue that organizations have encountered is that developers are prone to making configuration mistakes that cybercriminals then exploit. Pulumi is making a case for an alternative approach to provisioning infrastructure-as-code that makes it easier to validate configurations using testing tools, while at the same time limiting who can access infrastructure resources by including support for the secure access markup language (SAML) and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities.

    It’s not clear at what rate enterprise IT organizations will be shifting toward platforms that enable infrastructure to be managed as code in a more robust fashion. Developers that don’t always have the greatest appreciation for cloud security issues routinely employ tools such as Terraform to provision infrastructure-as-code with little to no supervision. Cloud resource misconfigurations often result in ports left wide open, and cybercriminals now make use of tools to scan for those types of misconfigurations.

    Pulumi Packages provides a means for IT teams to exercise more control over the provisioning process, using vetted reusable components in a way that doesn’t compromise the rate at which developers can spin up cloud resources, noted Duffy.

    As organizations focus more on software supply chains in the wake of some recent high-profile breaches, it’s only a matter of time before more questions arise about how cloud infrastructure is being provisioned. Much of the concerns organizations already have about cloud security doesn’t stem from the platforms themselves. Rather, it’s the processes employed to provision infrastructure under a shared cloud security responsibility model that results in so many vulnerabilities. Many developers assume the cloud service provider is securing configurations, only to discover later that it was their responsibility to validate those configurations. Security teams, meanwhile, can’t keep pace with the rate at which cloud infrastructure resources are being provisioned.

    Hopefully, there will come a day when DevSecOps best practices leverage automation to resolve this issue once and for all. The challenge is finding the best way to achieve that goal in a way the average developer will accept and embrace.

  • Perforce Adds Synchronization Tool for Cross-Functional Teams

    Perforce Adds Synchronization Tool for Cross-Functional Teams

    Perforce Software has added a graphical tool, dubbed Helix Sync, that enables individuals, such as artists, to take advantage of the version control capabilities provided by its software development life cycle (SDLC) platform.

    Gerhard Krüger, cloud architect and product manager at Perforce, said that as DevOps workflows continue to evolve in the gaming and automotive industries, the need to manage artifacts such as drawings, for example, alongside software artifacts is becoming more pronounced among cross-functional teams.

    Helix Sync gives those end users access to a desktop client that enables any individual to upload artifacts into a system by dragging and dropping them into the Perforce Helix Core SDLC platform.

    Previously, end users that lacked coding skills would need to share files with developers via cloud services such as Dropbox. The Perforce approach removes the inherent friction development teams would otherwise encounter, while at the same time making sure the artifacts being shared are more secure, said Krüger. In addition, end users don’t have to be concerned about file size limitations imposed by file sharing services accessed via the cloud, noted Krüger.

    It’s not clear how many organizations are looking to centralize digital asset management within the context of an application development process, but the fewer places that artifacts reside, the more productive IT teams tend to be. At a time when the number of application development projects within many organizations has accelerated, there’s a lot more interest in reducing the number of steps any developer has to monitor and track.

    Diagrams and other types of artwork are not the only kinds of artifacts that are finding their way into software development processes. Data scientists are building massive artificial intelligence (AI) models that need to be incorporated into application development and deployment processes. The challenge organizations face is the individuals that create many of these types of artifacts lack the programming skills required to share them via version control platforms typically employed by developers.

    With the launch of Helix Sync, IT teams should assume that, going forward, Perforce will be expanding its overall content management capabilities, Krüger added.

    It’s not clear to what degree workflows will converge as application development continues to evolve. Organizations are starting to appreciate just how dependent they are on software. As that awareness increases, it’s only a matter of time before workflows start to converge around the software development process that are employed to drive multiple digital business transformation initiatives.

    With more of the creators of those artifacts working remotely, the security of those software supply chains has also become more critical. Cybercriminals are becoming more adept at compromising the credentials end users create to access a cloud file service. Software development teams are more likely to employ more rigorous forms of authentication.

    Arguably, there’s never been more artifacts to track during the history of application development than there are today. The thing that makes managing all those artifacts even more challenging is, just like every other piece of software, they are also being continuously updated in ways that aren’t easy to discern.

  • Solving Cloud-Native Challenges in the Rush to the Cloud

    Solving Cloud-Native Challenges in the Rush to the Cloud

    The shift to cloud-native environments away from traditional data center infrastructures continues unabated, but security and complexity challenges remain a struggle for DevOps teams.

    These were two of the main takeaways in a survey and analyst report published by the IT consultancy firm Flexera. 

    The survey, based on the responses of 750 IT professionals, revealed that 92% of the organizations represented in the survey have a multi-cloud strategy, 80% have a hybrid cloud strategy and only a minority (45%) have integrated data between cloud environments.

    The top challenges, according to the survey results, are:

    • security (81%)
    • managing cloud spending (79%)
    • governance, lack of resources/expertise and compliance (75%)
    • comprehending cost implications of software licenses (55%).

    The solution for these challenges largely involves — in addition to implementing the right DevOps culture and practices — adoption of the right tools and platforms, especially for security. However, first-generation cloud-cost management tools “simply are not cutting it” for modern architectures, said Asim Razzaq, CEO of Yotascale, which offers a cloud resource optimization platform.

    “Today’s modern architectures are dynamic, and ownership is transient and not always well-defined. The greatest strength of containers and Kubernetes is the ability to scale on-demand and share cloud resources among multiple applications,” said Razzaq. “Tracking cloud costs in modern architecture requires a strong ability to automate cost attribution — or tag management — for those dynamic resources, and the ability to understand usage at the application level, even for containers that are sharing resource instances.”

    First-generation cloud management tools are, in this way, unable to provide the information DevOps teams require to understand how to automate cost attribution for modern architectures, said Razzaq.

    “[DevOps teams] can’t break down costs into any level of meaningful detail for engineering and finance teams to digest and act upon,” said Razzaq. “Conversely, newer approaches that are focused on Kubernetes cost management lack the ability to understand and break down the costs of non-cloud-native workloads.”

    Indeed, tools are often frustrating to engineering teams because of their static custom reporting, broad and generalized recommendations and no effective workflow for effective collaboration between finance and engineering, Razzaq said.

    “The biggest source of frustration is the inability to drill down and manage costs in a way that matches the way that these teams do business. There may be 10 teams, each with five production applications running in the cloud, for a particular account,” Razzaq said. “Engineers need to see, at the application level, what their resource utilization, costs and cost anomalies are in order to make the best cost/performance decisions for their applications. Without that, they’re flying blind; having to defend their cloud usage without any supporting data.”

    As an example, a misconfigured Kubernetes cluster can “cause a massive spike in costs,” Razzaq explained. “Without detailed cost and utilization reporting at the team and application level, an engineer can spend weeks digging through spreadsheets and logs trying to track down the source of the anomaly. That’s weeks of their time that they aren’t [using to] be productive on new features.”

    cloud-native

    Razzaq said there are a number of solutions DevOps teams can adopt to address these issues, including automated cost attribution and tag management, actionable recommendations and comprehensive observability capabilities.

    Automated cost attribution and tag management “is the foundation of accurate and detailed cloud cost management,” said Razzaq. “Engineers need tools to help them set tag management policies, identify untagged instances and update tags quickly and easily in their cloud environment,” he said. “With this in place, cloud-native workloads can be automatically tagged as they are dynamically created, ensuring that cloud costs are always clearly attributed to the right teams and applications.”

    Actionable recommendations at the cloud-instance level with closed-loop feedback also are an important process “so that engineers can see exactly why the recommendation is being made, and what the cost impact will be of taking that action,” Razzaq said. “The ability to provide feedback on the recommendation and dismiss recommendations that don’t align with business needs ensures that new recommendations are relevant,” Razzaq added.

    Finally, tools that provide a unified view of both cloud-native and traditional workloads that have been shifted to the cloud help to ensure “that engineering and finance have a single source of truth for their cloud costs that enables them to make smarter decisions for their business,” Razzaq said. 

     

  • Seeing the Bigger Picture With BizDevSecOps

    Seeing the Bigger Picture With BizDevSecOps

    Not long ago, if you can believe it, software was shipped on physical floppy disks and CDs. These physical relics contained dense paper instruction books that humans read diligently for hours on end (I guess they had more time to spare back then?). Complexity was a given for computer-based tasks.

    Fast forward past the consumerization of IT to 2021, and you’ll find extremely high standards for technology. End users now expect intuitive apps with instant end value and 100% uptime. If they don’t receive gratification within minutes, they’re likely to trash it.

    In the race to meet digital innovation demands, software companies are increasingly tapping new strategies to deliver iteratively. Thus, disciplines like DevOps, DevSecOps, low-code and SRE have flourished. But are we adequately considering the end value of that work? Some feel business leadership needs a larger seat at the table and more input: enter the newest iteration of these disciplines, BizDevSecOps.

    I recently met with Gregg Ostrowski, CTO at AppDynamics, to discuss how to introduce BizDevSecOps in an organization. For Ostrowski, it boils down to having full-stack observability to connect application performance, security threats and revenue generation. Only by democratizing access to important metrics and identifying runtime weaknesses can business outcomes truly drive production.

    Full-Stack Observability

    Within our new pandemic-first reality, all organizations are amplifying their use of digital services to interact with customers. However, software teams are struggling to keep pace in this new environment — 89% of technologists report feeling under tremendous pressure at work, the Agents of Transformation 2021 report found. This strain has only increased as IT complexity soars amid the pandemic — 83% felt their job became more complex over the past year.

    IT staff is under mounting pressure to perform, and they may not have the correct elements in place to support elegant and profitable applications, said Ostrowski. When it comes to monitoring, in particular, alert fatigue could especially hamper innovation attempts and make it difficult to know what to prioritize.

    Instead, Ostrowski advocates for letting tangible business outcomes, such as conversion rates and performance, drive development. To correlate the impact on revenue more directly, he encourages “giving business leaders a seat at table during the entire CI/CD pipeline.” One aspect to roping in business, security, development and operations is unified observability across the entire stack.

    The Pendulum Swings

    But wouldn’t it be challenging to give business leaders a seat within a technical software delivery process? Well, this wouldn’t be the first time business has directed technological change.

    Ostrowski recalls the mid–2000s and the dawn of the mobile market. During this period, IT became consumerized for laypeople, with glossy apps and impressively intuitive experiences. He recalls a general loss of faith in IT staff, as workers often had “better tech at home than they did in the office.” This drove business leaders to invest heavily in modernizing their companies.

    In the following years, cloud solutions quickly re-empowered IT with new computing models, emboldening them to compete using the same tools as tech companies. However, simple deployments using a single server quickly morphed into arranging multiple workloads on various cloud service providers (CSPs). Virtualization, serverless and microservices architectures also brought novel complexities into the stack.

    “The IT staff is being asked to do jobs they’ve never done before,” Ostrowski said. He explained that SREs, for example, must understand networking, infrastructure and security — a vast portfolio for a single person and role. Supporting many disparate paradigms is simply beyond the scope and scale of what a single person can do, meaning new automation must be constructed — because “if you’re too busy debugging, you can’t innovate,” says Ostrowski.

    Amid mounting complexity and the burden of rising cloud costs, it appears business leaders again have a role in directing and prioritizing technological efforts.

    Getting Busy With BizDevSecOps

    According to Ostrowski, connecting IT and business with BizDevSecOps all hinges on collaboration. “If you don’t get to a point where you can collaborate with all these pillars, you’ll degrade your business,” said Ostrowski.

    BizDevSecOps also could help connect the dots to comprehend anomalies. For example, suppose a commerce application is experiencing a 15% conversion rate, but it drops to 7% after an upgrade. In this scenario, collaboration is crucial to identify usability bottlenecks in production and adjust accordingly.

    Tracking business outcomes can align development around improving the user experience. If broken features are hurting conversion rates, all stakeholders need to know to adjust accordingly. “User experience is the golden gem,” said Ostrowski.

    Other benefits of a BizDevSecOps approach may include:

    • Correlating activity and revenue: Ensuring spikes of activity are associated with revenue generation and not attacks or faulty instances.
    • Workload optimization: Monitoring business outcomes can help adjust the scope and size of machines as needed.
    • Before and after: Comparing financial results before and after migrations, new versions or new feature additions.
    • Postmortems: Pinpoint and correlate data when conducting postmortems.
    • Progressive delivery: A more rapid release frequency helps a business retain agility and pivot when needed.

    Visibility Enables BizDevSecOps

    DevSecOps is now a common philosophy — it promotes development with security baked into the application. Now, BizDevSecOps could be the next iteration; a collaborative approach that considers additional perspectives. BizDevSecOps is a vital method to “continue to build trust and collaboration so everyone has a seat at the table,” said Ostrowski.

    Ninety-six percent of technologists agreed that monitoring the entire IT stack to connect technical performance to business outcomes will be important in 2021, the Agents of Transformation Report found. To enable this, business, security and development must inevitably de-silo. According to Ostrowski, adopting BizDevSecOps depends on a window into performance management and business intelligence, because “when changes happen and no one knows about it, it’s a serious problem,” he added.

  • Survey Shows Mounting DevOps Frustration and Costs

    Survey Shows Mounting DevOps Frustration and Costs

    A survey of 400 developers and DevOps team members in the U.S. and Europe found, on average, 15 hours a week are being spent managing tasks such as debugging pipelines and waiting for tests and builds to complete.

    Conducted by the market research firm Vanson Bourne on behalf of Garden, a provider of a platform for automating application development and deployment tasks in Kubernetes environments, the survey finds more than three-quarters of respondents (76%) said the time spent on these and other manual DevOps tasks is generally being wasted.

    Garden CEO Jon Edvald said, all told, 39% of a 40-hour workweek is typically devoted to these tasks. When the number of developers and DevOps specialists that are employed today are factored into that equation along with their salaries, as much as $61 billion is being wasted on these tasks in the U.S. alone, he noted.

    The top sources of DevOps frustration cited by survey respondents are waiting for pipelines to run (76%), waiting for builds and tests (74%) and setting up, maintaining and debugging pipelines/automation (71%). In fact, only 11% of all respondents are completely happy with their development setups and workflows.

    Those hidden costs may even increase as organizations bring on additional DevOps expertise. A full 83% of respondents said their organizations are planning to hire more staff or increase their use of freelancers/outsourcing into DevOps roles in 2021. Three quarters (75%) said DevOps budgets have increased or will increase compared to 2020.

    In addition, the adoption of more complex platforms, such as Kubernetes, may also conspire to increase costs, noted Edvald. Respondents at organizations not yet using Kubernetes spend an average of 14.3 hours per week on low-level DevOps tasks, as compared to 16.5 hours a week for those who are already using Kubernetes. Nearly two-thirds of respondents (62%) said their organizations are already using Kubernetes, while 31% are currently evaluating it, to varying degrees. A full 95% of respondents using Kubernetes have faced challenges after rolling it out, including training and onboarding (37%) or complexity of setup/configuration (35%).

    Of course, not all the time that might be saved is going to be applied to tasks that increase overall productivity; nearly half of respondents (49%) said if they had it, they would spend more time developing new products and services.

    Specifically, 46% said they would improve speed and delivery of existing products and services, while 44% said they would focus on improving security for existing products and services.

    Edvald said the survey makes it clear there’s still plenty of opportunity to automate repetitive DevOps tasks. Organizations are spending too much time on the care and feeding of DevOps platforms that takes time away from building and deploying applications, noted Edvald.

    Less clear is when organizations will reach some type of DevOps breaking point. Garden is betting that the transition to cloud-native applications based on microservices will eventually force the DevOps automation issue. However, in organizations that only know the DevOps processes they have used for years, change may be a long time in coming.

  • Survey Finds Digital Transformation Outcomes in Doubt

    Survey Finds Digital Transformation Outcomes in Doubt

    The COVID-19 pandemic forced organizations, both large and small, to either launch or accelerate digital business transformation initiatives that, to varying degrees, depend on their level of DevOps acumen to succeed. Value stream management platform provider Digital.ai today published the results of a survey of 200 IT decision makers, 200 security decision makers and 200 business executives in organizations with at least 500 employees which suggests that, while there’s a lot of confidence in those initiatives, the business outcomes those efforts are intended to enable are still very much in doubt.

    The survey finds 95% of respondents believe their digital transformation initiatives are going well, with 22% reporting they have been completed. Just under a third (32%), however, said they still have a lot to accomplish. Just under half (49%) said they have yet to see the results they expected. In fact, more than half of respondents (56%) also noted they are concerned about the return on investment (ROI) of those initiatives.

    Overall, the survey suggest optimism continues to prevail. A full 92% of respondents said they are creating new value for the business, with 93% claiming the business as a whole remains competitive. However, more than half (57%) are concerned that business, IT and security goals might be misaligned. More than half (54%) are concerned about meeting customer needs. Nearly two-thirds are concerned about software vulnerabilities.

    More challenging still, 94% of respondents need software development and delivery to be better aligned to business objectives. Only 54% claim to be strategically aligned. Almost every respondent (99%) needs more visibility into business planning processes, with just over a third (34%) noting they are not especially good at attaining that visibility.

    Not surprisingly, a full 91% said they still need more time to work on their digital business transformation initiatives.

    Derek Langone, head of strategic transformation for Digital.ai., said the survey makes it apparent there is a much greater need for a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) for IT teams that are tied to specific business objectives. As organization of all sizes realize how dependent they have become on software, any delay can have a major impact on revenue and profitability projections, noted Langone.

    Of course, not every digital business transformation project is going to succeed, no matter how optimistic business and IT leaders may be. Many initiatives were hastily conceived during the early days of the pandemic. Others were simply accelerated without enough due diligence. Digital.ai is making a case for a value stream management (VSM) platform that enables organizations to first understand the true status of these projects by synthesizing all the data residing in various DevOps platforms, and then assessing the impact any delays might have on the business.

    It’s not quite clear how many organizations have managed to get as far as they have without at least some VSM platform equivalent. However, as software development continues to become more complex, it’s also apparent that without a VSM capability, the odds various digital business transformation initiatives currently underway will eventually be derailed are substantially higher than many IT and business professionals would like to admit.

  • 1Password Extends Encryption to Automate Secrets Management

    1Password Extends Encryption to Automate Secrets Management

    1Password this week added a Secrets Automation platform to its offerings that enables IT organizations to more easily encrypt, manage and orchestrate credentials, application programming interface (API) tokens, keys and certificates.

    In addition, the company revealed it has acquired SecretHub, a provider of a separate secrets management tool. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

    Carson Brown, senior product manager for 1Password, said the SecretHub team will now focus on the development of the 1Password Secrets Automation platform based on encryption technology previously created by 1Password.

    Finally, 1Password this week also announced an alliance with GitHub under which it will, at some future date, enable DevOps teams to employ SecretsHub to encrypt secrets used to access the source code repository. 1Password already provides integrations with HashiCorp Vault, Terraform, Kubernetes and Ansible, in addition to client libraries written in Go, Node and Python.

    The 1Password platform for managing and securing passwords is already in use by more than 80,000 businesses worldwide. The Secrets Automation platform now extends the reach of the company’s core encryption technology into the realm of DevSecOps best practices, said Brown.

    It’s still early in the cycle of DevSecOps best practices adoption, but it’s clear an initial focus will be secrets management. In the wake of recent high-profile breaches involving software supply chains, there’s now increased scrutiny of secrets management. Cybercriminals have become more adept at scanning for secrets left exposed as plain text. The challenge organizations face is that developers, while building applications, tend to copy secrets for the sake of convenience, which they often forget to delete after an application is deployed in a production environment.

    In response, many IT teams vacillate between overly restrictive and overly permissive access controls that are rarely implemented consistently.

    Of course, it’s now also only a matter of time before auditors start citing all those unencrypted secrets as compliance violations, Brown noted. A set of DevSecOps best practices based on automatic encryption of secrets eliminates those compliance concerns in a way that is transparent to application developers, noted Brown.

    It’s not immediately clear whether it will be DevOps teams that lead the charge to automate the encryption of secrets, or whether cybersecurity teams will take the lead. Regardless of which team assumes responsibility, the number of secrets that need to be tracked keeps expanding as the number of platforms employed increases. Manually keeping track of all those secrets is no longer feasible. Centralizing secrets management is the first step toward regaining control over an IT environment, said Brown.

    Secrets management may not always be the first thing that comes to mind when organizations begin their DevSecOps journey. As it turns out, however, securing secrets may very well turn out to be the first order of business as senior business and IT leaders review their entire software supply chain. After all, once it becomes apparent just how dependent organizations are on software, they quickly realize how much of their intellectual property is one compromised credential away from being stolen.

  • 4 Ways SASE Fuels DevOps Productivity

    4 Ways SASE Fuels DevOps Productivity

    Many enterprises are adopting secure access service edge (SASE) solutions as part of their digital transformation efforts. SASE, in a nutshell, merges together SD-WAN and security stacks to deliver secure networking and improved WAN performance, making it a logical choice for cloud-enabled businesses going through the throes of digital transformation. However, SASE offers other benefits, which may be of particular interest to DevOps teams.

    Let’s take a look at four ways SASE can enhance the productivity of DevOps teams.

    Reducing Collaboration Challenges

    SASE reduces the challenges associated with team collaboration. SASE, by design, integrates WAN optimization with cybersecurity. Today’s DevOps teams need to work together, despite being physically separated, and must have reliable, secure connectivity amongst the team. “DevOps are all about time-to-market, and DevOps teams are looking for ways to shorten their  CI/CD cycles. A critical part of that process is reducing their dependency on the networking and the security teams,” said Boaz Avigad, director of product marketing, CATO Networks. “Since SASE solutions already provide optimized performance and robust security, DevOps [teams] are free from waiting for infrastructure teams to provision the necessary resources. SASE provides DevOps the control and operational cadence they need without compromising performance or security.”

    SASE Improves Networking

    SASE improves overall network performance with integrated load balancing and failover capabilities. DevOps teams cannot afford to lose connectivity, especially when rolling out new iterations of software or resolving bugs. “For DevOps teams, fast and reliable application performance is critical,” said Avigad. “SASE architectures free DevOps [teams] from worrying about the infrastructure by connecting all the company’s edges, data centers, mobile users and cloud resources, with the same self-healing, secure and fully optimized global network. Should a line fail or a route become congested, SASE automatically switches to an alternate path.”

    Better Security Built In

    SASE helps to secure DevOps projects with native cybersecurity capabilities. When properly implemented, SASE integrates numerous security technologies directly into the network stack. “DevOps teams worry about information interception and protecting their applications from threats. All security services share a single, unified context, improving insight and closing the gaps in legacy security architectures; gaps attackers often exploit,” said Avigad. “SASE not only includes NGFW, IPS, SWG, AV and MDR services, it also converges them together into a single-pass architecture.”

    SASE Removes DevSecOps Burdens

    SASE secures internal applications, along with the interactions with those applications, which in turn helps to reduce the burdens on DevSecOps team members. Applications that run over SASE/SD-WANs are further secured by zero-trust network access (ZTNA) and software-defined perimeter (SDP), technologies that help to keep all interactions between an endpoint and an application secure. “Many proprietary applications are too sensitive to run over the public internet. SASE protects those applications by obfuscating traffic, protecting all entry points with a NGFW and restricting access with its zero-trust architecture,” said Avigad. “All internal application traffic is also continuously inspected for threats.”

    Adopting SASE for DevOps teams is beginning to make a lot of sense. The technology addresses many of the pain points that DevOps teams experience as businesses drive toward digital transformation. What’s more, the security benefits offered bring forth additional productivity, while also unifying the security stack. 

  • Agile Divide Between IT and Business Is Narrowing

    Agile Divide Between IT and Business Is Narrowing

    A global survey of 1,350 business and IT executives conducted by Jigsaw Research on behalf of NTT Ltd., a provider of IT services, suggests organizations are a lot more agile in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s still a significant gap in terms of prioritizing agility.

    A full 89% of business and IT leaders agree COVID-19 has caused significant changes to their operating processes, with 87% also agreeing it has accelerated their digital transformation strategy. A third of respondents (33%) also noted they pivoted their technology focus to take advantage of a market opportunity or scale their operations.

    However, well over a third of operational executives identified speed and agility as a core component of technology strategy, while only just over half of IT executives agreed (53%).

    Overall, the survey found there is a consensus IT remains a key enabler of business efficiency. A total of 91.4% respondents agreed that enabling business efficiency is a key driver for their technology strategy, with 92% of IT respondents saying their overall technology strategy is aligned either fully or partially with the organization’s business strategy needs.

    However, there’s a significant divide in terms of the importance of IT’s role in driving business efficiency. A technology strategy that drives business efficiency opportunities is seen as being most crucial by 70% of operations teams, yet only 48% of IT teams said the same.

    Sanjay Lakhani, a principal consultant for NTT and head of the IT service management (ITSM) practice for the Americas region said that while the alignment between business operations and IT is not as close as it could be, a lot of improvement has been made. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the divide between IT and the rest of the business was generally wider, noted Lakhani.

    Now that more organizations are realizing how dependent they are on software, there’s a lot more focus on application development with business units, he added. There’s also more pressure on IT operations teams, which are being asked to keep pace with the rate at which digital business transformation initiatives have accelerated, added Lakhani.

    Unfortunately, the survey also highlighted an emerging technology gap. The survey found 92% of business and IT leaders agreed emerging technology is crucial for their technology strategy, but only two-fifths (41%) believed they have the technology to meet their organization’s immediate objectives. Those result suggest a significant transition is underway, both in terms of how software is constructed and the type of IT infrastructure required.

    In the meantime, it remains to be seen to what degree the COVID-19 pandemic has fundamentally altered the DNA of IT operations teams, but it’s apparent enterprise IT will never be the same. Most IT teams have embraced, to varying degrees, agile application development methodologies along with DevOps best practices. The challenge now is aligning the operational cadence IT teams follow with that of the rest of the business in the wake of the pandemic.

  • RapidAPI Adds Library to Invoke Kafka via API

    RapidAPI Adds Library to Invoke Kafka via API

    RapidAPI announced it has added support for the open source Kafka messaging software as another type of application programming interface (API) that DevOps teams can centrally access.

    An open source library provided by RapidAPI, available in beta, makes it possible to discover Kafka clusters and topics, view schemas and test and consume records from a browser via either the RapidAPI Marketplace or the RapidAPI Enterprise Hub. The library is based on Apache Avro and Confluent wire formats found in the open source confluent-schema-registry library. RapidAPI extended that library to add support for JSON and a protocol buffer, which is now being shared with the open source Kafka community.

    RapidAPI CEO Iddo Gino said DevOps teams can now discover all available Kafka clusters and instances in the same location where they find, test and connect to microservices based on REST, SOAP and GraphQL APIs. That effort is designed to complement initiatives, such as the AsyncAPI specification, that is now being advanced under the auspices of the Linux Foundation, Gino noted.

    RapidAPI is adding this capability because usage of Kafka to enable asynchronous communication across event-driven applications has significantly increased, Gino said. As the number of digital business transformation initiatives increased in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, Gino said reliance on asynchronous messaging platforms such as Kafka became a requirement. In many cases, synchronous communications across highly distributed applications simply isn’t feasible, Gino added.

    That doesn’t mean asynchronous requirements will replace the need for traditional synchronous APIs. Rather, developers will find themselves incorporating a greater mix of both as enterprise IT environments become more distributed, noted Gino. Applications are increasingly become one large puzzle that developers need to construct using various classes of APIs, added Gino.

    The library created by RapidAPI is expected to be generally available in the third quarter. In the meantime, adoption of Kafka continues to accelerate. The open source community that oversees development of Kafka, under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, claims more than 80% of all Fortune 100 companies are using the platform for everything from constructing data pipelines to running streaming analytics applications. In some cases, data is being queried directly while in transit versus waiting for it to be stored on-premises or in the cloud.

    Regardless of how Kafka is employed, developers are rediscovering event-driven architectures, that can trace their lineage to the 1980s, for building applications. The difference now is there an open source framework for handling the asynchronous communications required to build and deploy those applications at scale.

    It’s not quite clear how the rise of event-driven applications will impact DevOps workflows, as event-driven applications become more commonly built and deployed. However, as the APIs become more widely employed within the context of these applications, it should become simpler to incorporate them.

    The challenge is event-driven architectures typically requires developers to think differently about how their applications are structured, so it might be a while before Kafka – and other similar platforms – are pervasively employed across the enterprise.