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Category: Features

  • Speed Rules in Chef’s DevOps Survey

    Speed Rules in Chef’s DevOps Survey

    DevOps is all about streamlining and accelerating. Organizations that embrace DevOps are driven by a focus on maximizing the combination of efficiency and effectiveness—which explains why speed is the central theme of Chef’s “The State of Enterprise Applications” survey.

    Chef surveyed nearly 350 application and operations professionals in an effort to understand trends in DevOps, identify how the industry is shifting and get an idea of what the future of DevOps looks like. What it found is that speed is one of the primary driving factors for organizations that function at the cutting edge of technology. Chef also found that organizations are eager to adopt new platforms that promise to help them move faster.

    The Need for Speed

    There are a variety of ways to measure success for application development and deployment. You can look at the features and capabilities of the app and whether it delivers the expected functionality, or you can determine success based on user feedback and how satisfied users are with the app experience. According to the Chef survey, 72 percent of organizations are focused on speed as the primary measure of a successful app deployment.

    That said, it generally takes weeks—or even months—to get an app developed and deployed. More than 60 percent of survey respondents shared that it takes days or more to complete an application build, and 55 percent indicated that it takes four or more builds before an app is ready to be deployed. Almost 60 percent said it takes days or more to actually deploy the app once the final build is approved.

    Platforms and Tools to Accelerate App Deployment

    In the quest for speed, organizations are moving to platforms and tools that can help accelerate development and decrease the time it takes to make an app available. According to data from “The State of Enterprise Applications” survey:

    • Only 9 percent of organizations are using public cloud for more than 50 percent of app deployments today, but that is expected to increase to 32 percent by 2020.
    • There is a 144 percent increase expected in the next two years in the number of organizations using container technology for more than 50 percent of app deployments—to 22 percent from 9 percent today.
    • The number of organizations using microservices for more than 50 percent of app deployments is expected to double—to 24 percent from 12 percent—in the next two years.
    • More than 80 percent of survey respondents are adopting a multi-cloud strategy.

    Putting App Deployment in High Gear

    Chef is in the business of automating and streamlining app development and deployment, so it should come as no surprise that the survey included questions related to that as well. The report states, “The most successful software-centric organizations use one consistent way of building, deploying, and managing applications.”

    More than 9 out of 10 (93 percent) of survey participants agreed that an application packaging solution that allows deployment to any environment would be valuable. This is especially true when developers have to deal with hybrid or multi-cloud environments.

    If speed is your primary measure of success for app deployment, you need to make sure you have the tools and processes necessary to develop and deploy applications as quickly as possible. Chef’s report shows organizations are well on their way.

    — Tony Bradley

  • DevOps Experience: Agenda and Speakers Announced

    DevOps Experience: Agenda and Speakers Announced

    DevOps Experience is coming up quickly, offering up the best in DevOps knowledge and capabilities in a completely virtual environment. That means no traveling, no missed or cancelled flights due to hurricanes named Florence, no lumpy hotel mattress, no substandard conference food. All the of the learning, none of the hassle.

    MediaOps—the company behind DevOps.com, Container Journal, Security Boulevard, DevOpsTV and more—and CA Technologies have teamed to present DevOps Experience, a free virtual summit chock full of information and education for the DevOps professional presented in a virtual reality environment. DevOps Experience is a true virtual conference, replete with theaters to view the keynotes and presentations, a conference lobby to chat and socialize and a virtual trade show floor with virtual exhibitor stands equipped with video, downloads and even schwag for attendees. And did I mention it’s free?

    This year’s event, happening Sept. 20, offers up presentations and content from the biggest names in DevOps—Gene Kim, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Kohsuke Kawaguchi and our own Alan Shimel—as well as speakers from well-known companies who’ll be sharing what they’ve gleaned from their DevOps initiatives.

    Besides the whole lumpy mattress thing, some of the benefits of DevOps Experience include:

    • Complete control and access over every aspect of your digital experience.
    • Live and on-demand viewing from your home or office.
    • On the device of your choice (laptop, smartphone and tablet).
    • Digital downloads and presentations for all the sessions.

    And, perhaps most importantly, you will have unlimited playback post-event! (This is for attendees who register by Sept. 20 only!)

    DevOps Experience is scheduled to take place Sept. 20 at a computer or mobile device near you. Visit the website for more information or to register for this daylong event. Registration—did we mention it’s free?—also includes access to the event on-demand. To register, click on the image below or this link.DevOps Experience will feature keynotes from a lineup of DevOps luminaries including:

    • Gene Kim, CTO, researcher and co-author of “The Phoenix Project” and “The DevOps Handbook,” and founder of IT Revolution
    • Nicole Forsgren, founder and CEO at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA)
    • Alan Shimel, editor in chief and founder of DevOps.com and Security Boulevard
    • Koshuke Kawaguchi, Create/lead developer of Jenkins, CTO, Cloudbees
    • Aruna Ravichandran, VP Collaborative Marketing, Cisco; Author of DevOps for Digital Leaders & The Kitty Hawk Venture

    In addition, DevOps Experience will include a number of Spotlight Sessions with topics designed to provide even greater value to attendees. Sessions include:

    • In the The Accelerate State of DevOps Report, Gene Kim and Dr. Nicole Forsgren will present early look at the results of the first Accelerate State of DevOps Report conducted in partnership with Google Cloud.
    • In the Superpowers Coming to Jenkins session, Kohsuke Kawaguchi will walk through Jenkins X projects, Jenkins Essentials and Configuration as Code and how they work together and how they make you even more productive.
    • Women in DevOps Panel will feature powerful line-up of women leaders in DevOps, working in consulting and financial industries, airlines, startups and large enterprises. Moderated by acclaimed DevOps author, Aruna Ravichandran.
    • DevSecOps Panel – Is Security the Gordian Knot? will feature an all-star panel led by Alan Shimel, founder and editor in chief of DevOps.com and Security Boulevard.

    Register Today at https://devopsexperience.io/#join-us

    — saleem

  • Keynotes and Announcements at DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018

    Keynotes and Announcements at DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018

    Each year DevOps World | Jenkins World is bigger and better than the year before. This means the announcements at the show also continue to evolve to keep pace with the rate of innovation. With the tremendous growth in DevOps adoption, the event will highlight the contributions of industry leaders and provide insight for attendees to better optimize their DevOps transformations. This year’s conference, taking place Sept. 16-19 in San Francisco and aptly themed “TRANSFORM,” will showcase the ways organizations are transforming software delivery, adopting DevOps and returning business value to their organization from DevOps initiatives.

    CloudBees has already released two big pieces of news for DevOps World | Jenkins World: The first is the name change from simply Jenkins World to denote the inclusion of the larger software development industry, while the second is the addition of a conference in Nice, France, to reach the global community of DevOps practitioners.

    Although most news is top secret until the event, there will be plenty of exciting announcements coming out of DevOps World | Jenkins World from CloudBees, sponsors and the Jenkins community. Attendees will experience keynote presentations on Tuesday, Sept. 18, where all the latest from both CloudBees and the Jenkins project will be announced. This will include news around the growing trend of “as-code,” collaboration between CloudBees and the Jenkins community and serverless capabilities. All announcements will underscore how organizations can adopt modern technology and infrastructure automation processes for accelerated software delivery.

    Along with CloudBees-specific and industry announcements, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, co-founder, CEO and chief scientist at DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), will keynote the conference in San Francisco this year. In addition to her keynote, “The Data Behind DevOps: What Does it Take to Be a High Performer?,” which will cover insights into the key leadership, technical, architectural and product capabilities that drive these outcomes, she will also be hosting a session, “Leading Through Change,” which explores the aspects of leadership that drive successful outcomes.

    Additionally, DevOps World | Jenkins World San Francisco will boast more than 100 sessions this year. With a variety of industry experts covering everything from security, pipeline automation and containers to DevOps adoption and continuous delivery best practices, here’s a few sessions you won’t want to miss:

    With DevOps World | Jenkins World only days away don’t miss your chance to sign up for 20 percent off the cost of registration with this special code just for DevOps.com readers: JWDEVOPSCUST.

    — Heidi Gilmore

  • DevOps Chat: Cloud-Native Security with Twistlock CEO Ben Bernstein

    DevOps Chat: Cloud-Native Security with Twistlock CEO Ben Bernstein

    The rise of containers and microservices has given rise to a need for a different type of security. Ben Bernstein, CEO of Twistlock, believes cloud-native security is the answer. Fresh off another round of VC funding, Twistlock has big plans to advance cloud-native security in the container space.

    In this DevOps Chat, we talk funding, serverless and cloud-native security with Ben. As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Alan Shimel: Hi everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, DevOps.com, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. I’ve got a really exciting chat guest and subject lined up today. I’m happy to be joined by none other than Ben Bernstein. Ben is the CEO founder of Twistlock. Ben, welcome to DevOps Chat.

    Ben Bernstein: Thank you, Alan. I’m really excited to be here. Thanks for inviting me.

    Shimel: Not as excited as I am to have you here. You know, as we were talking off camera, we’ve done other podcasts with Twistlock, but I don’t think we’ve had the pleasure of having you on. It’s a real pleasure. Ben, we’ve got some big news we’re going to break today. Twistlock has raised – is it a round C?

    Bernstein: Absolutely. Yes, round C.

    Shimel: Tell us a little bit about it.

    Bernstein: We’re really excited about it. It’s a $33 million round, which bring us to about $63 million in total money raised. It’s led by Iconic Capital, which is pretty a unique family office that’s probably the largest family office in the world, headed by some of Silicon Valley’s top entrepreneurs, which is a very – something that really made us happy to see that we got the interest of such an awesome funds. So we’re pretty excited about this, and having them join our board. It’s also kind of unique because we sort of reached a growth stage, which is first for me, as a CEO, it’s kind of an interesting to see how the company evolves – sort of the level of maturity we’re starting to hit, which is just exciting. It’s just like seeing your kids go to college or something, I guess. [laughter]

    Shimel: Well, look, my oldest son is leaving Friday for college. I know how that feels, Ben. So $33 million in this round, about $60-something million in total. As we were talking off-mic, I was telling you my experience with raising money. Raising money is never easy per se. When you have a good product, a good company, and the right space, it gets easier maybe, but it’s never totally easy. So congratulations on a sizable round here. It also coincides with a new release for Twistlock. Is that correct?

    Bernstein: Yes, we actually recently released 2.5, which was a pretty interesting release for us, because it updated some of the – or reinforced our investment in Cloud-Native, which is not just container specific, but also augments our complete suite for Cloud-Native computing. So there were some pretty extensive serverless additions there, AWS Fargate addition there as well as some interesting capabilities around forensics, but overall it was a pretty extensive addition to our suite. So we’re very happy about that as well.

    Shimel: So Ben, you mentioned an interesting thing and that is this concept of the whole Cloud-Native space is exploding. We have the Cloud-Native foundation, and all Cloud-Native tools and so forth. Originally, when I heard Cloud-Native, it was very cloud computing, AWS, Azure, that kind of cloud, but with the advent of containerization and Kuernetes and Docker and so forth, it’s really almost I don’t want to say dominated – or synonymous, but it’s so closely linked. From a security point of view though, Ben, where do you see the overlaps, and then where is the difference from Twistlock’s point of view?

    Bernstein: You mean between specifically serverless and –?

    Shimel: Yeah.

    Bernstein: Yeah, so at the end of the day, I think there are two types of application security companies. There are box companies and there are cloud companies. When you think about cloud, it’s basically – it embeds in it the concept that you don’t own the infrastructure. It embeds in it the fact that the people that get the resources get everything in a box. They get the networking. They get the storage. They get everything with a click, whether it’s a public or a private cloud, and it embeds in it the fact that you’re using microsegmentation. It’s about code reuse. It’s about a lot of good things that we all are sort of learning in the past I’d say 8 to 10 years, unless you’ve been working in Google or some of the companies that probably invented this space in house.

    Everything I just said is not about a very specific technology; it’s about specific concepts. These concepts are very disruptive to the way security is being built, and we at Twistlock, believed initially that _____ be the poster child of how existing security cannot protect containers, but when we’ve seen that, it’s not just about containers. It’s about other technologies that are being used by DevOps teams in modern organizations going through so to speak a digital transformation. We decided that we should really expand what we do to go beyond containers pretty early on, and go to really focus on Cloud-Native, which is a suite of technologies, that even includes VMs, but is all about giving or empowering these groups, DevOps groups, to be able to move fast and still secure their work loads.

    This is something that’s hard for them to do with seven different legacy products, where they’re trying to script their way somehow into putting something on the hardware firewall, plus virtual appliance, plus something that needs to – that has a concept of a server, or was built around a concept of a server, where in reality, it should have protected the app, not the server. But anyway, that’s – and so in this – when you think about it in these terms, serverless and containers, and even VMs, if you use them in a certain manner it’s pretty much similar. If it’s immutative, it’s declarative, it’s predictable, a lot of things that really change even the level of security you could wrap around it.

    Shimel: You know, Ben, I also wanted to make the point that so much of this technology is wrapped around the – it’s intrinsically linked with DevOps and a new way culturally of how companies approach not just application development, but specifically application security. I’m wondering – some Twistlock guys, 2.5 guy, your new version out, how does the whole DevSecOps thing movement manifest itself into real features and functionality that we see in the Twistlock suite?

    Bernstein: So when we created Twistlock, we realized that existing security was sold to say seven different people in the company. You take the storage person and sell him storage security. You take the network person and sell him network security. You take the server person and sell him server security where when in fact, everything you were trying to do is to protect your app. Maybe there were other people who you sold different security solutions. What we’ve seen is these five people are actually one person in the Dev Ops area. It’s one person that does a single click and – or several clicks and gets all these good things, but he’s in charge of that because he gets all these things from a single source – the cloud.

    In our bet, which went beyond just specific technologies, and it is kind of counterintuitive to security in general, we said that security had to actually contain multiple layers of security from the same suite. So there’s no point anymore in getting vulnerability assessment from one vendor and east/west firewalls from a different vendor, and anomaly detection from a third vendor, and _____ from a fourth vendor, obviously unless you have a point in it. Most DevOps team, as long as you could – as long as the product is good, they would be happy to get a suite that allows them to get all of these things from a single source.

    That’s one of the bets that we’re taking. It’s a pretty dangerous bet because security has not been that way so far. Luckily for us, it seems to – it seems to be paying off so far. We have hundreds of customers and are doing pretty well.

    Shimel: To say the least. I think you’re being humble. $33 million dollars more in the bank. The usual thing is you’re going to use it for sales or marketing and engineering and support, but specifically what do you – with this kind of rocket fuel in the tank, what we can we look for from Twistlock?

    Bernstein: Well, to be frank, if – I was at the last DockerCon and I saw that people are actually looking for real cloud-native. There’s a real need. If you look at the language, you see that people understand the need for cloud-native security, and what we really want to create is the – a complete solution that people would love and continue to use. So we need to continue to invest in the product. The product is the key. We don’t know how to play golf with executives. We haven’t been very successful at it generally. We really think that what really shines is a good product and a good support team to actually make sure the customers are happy and are using the product right, and that customers are smart, and that they can evaluate things and buy through the channels that they want to use.

    But we’re going to keep doing that, keep trying to make sure that our product is really the most complete solution possible. It gets challenging over time as customers move more workloads into the cloud. They have more demand. We need to excel at doing that, but we’re going to be very focused on making sure our products are – really excels and from that, we believe that given intelligent customers and a supportive team that supports the customer will continue to succeed. So not a lot of huge news there, but just given the demand and given the sophistication of Fortune100 customers, we need to keep – even keeping a product as is requires you to continue and grow just because of the requirements coming from customers over time. We need to do more than just keep the existing product as is. We need to really grow and support new technologies. So anyway, it’s a complex task and we’ll continue at it.

    Shimel: Absolutely. Congratulations, Ben. Over the years, I’ve had a chance to work with many entrepreneurs, VCs, successful business folks. Any one of them will tell you doing what you’ve done here with Twistlock, regardless of where the end game actually winds up playing out at some point, is really something to be proud of. So congratulations to you and John and the rest of the Twistlock team on both the new version as well as the significant new raise.

    As I mentioned to you off-camera, Ben, the time goes so quick where we’re pretty much right on the edge of our time frame here. Wanted to just quickly end up, for people who maybe aren’t as familiar with Twistlock, want to get a little more information, where could they go?

    Bernstein: We have tons of information on our site, Twistlock.com, about use cases, about customers, about cloud-native in general. I encourage people who’d like to learn more to go there.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Well, Ben Bernstein, CEO and founder of Twistlock, thanks for being this episode’s guest on DevOps Chat. Congratulations on all of the good stuff, all of the good news coming out of Twistlock, and continued success.

    Bernstein: Thank you, Alan, for having me. Thanks everyone for listening.

    Shimel: All right, a pleasure. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps.com. you just heard another DevOps Chat. See you soon, everyone.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Education in the Age of Automation

    Education in the Age of Automation

    Automation is changing the nature of education and the ways people learn. More schools are using online learning to supplement in-class activities. In fact, some schools are completely online. Distributed computing on the internet and the automation that drives it makes this possible.

    Everything changes when the formal education process becomes embedded in the internet. Courseware delivery becomes asynchronous; people learn what they want, when they want to. Test administration becomes more about the efficient acquisition of data and evaluation thereof. Human-to-human interaction as a basis for a meaningful educational experience becomes optional. Today, it’s entirely possible to learn all you need to know to make a good living in the modern world without ever needing to sit in a classroom or interact with a human directly. Let’s face it: You can do a lot of learning from YouTube.

    As a result, more people are beginning to question the conventional wisdom of spending four years and thousands of dollars to get a bachelor’s degree—particularly now that companies including IBM, Google and Apple no longer require one to get hired.

    Coincidentally, as companies eliminate the college degree requirement for new hires, we’re seeing significant growth in technical bootcamps. One study reports that this year, 20,000 students will complete a course of study at a coding boot camp and be “job ready.” Considering that the number of students who graduated with a computer science degree from a typical college in 2017 numbered about 93,000, there’s a good case to be made that boot camps are siphoning off a number of students that otherwise would be headed to academia.

    Going to boot camp instead of college is an upward trend: The study projects that the number of boot camps are expected to grow 20 percent this year. The career path for a technical professional does not necessarily involve going college. Going to a boot camp for a year—if not less—will suffice.

    Is this a problem? I’m not sure. On the plus side, I am reminded of the scene in the film, “Good Will Hunting,” when Matt Damon’s character Will Hunting, a genius with a photographic memory who walked the halls of MIT working as a janitor, makes the profound remark:

    “… you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a f****** education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library.”

    There’s a good argument to be made that when it comes to getting a good paying job, the $15,000 median price tag for attending a coding boot camp has a better much better ROI than spending  ~$200,000, the cost of a four-year degree from MIT.

    But then, I am reminded of Aldous Huxley.

    In his book, “Brave New World,” people are grown in test tubes according to a specific formulas, the result of which is a biological caste system. Those in the Epsilon caste are grown to be 3 feet tall and abhor the outdoors. Their job is to work their way underneath the machines on the factory floor to do simple maintenance. Deltas, the next caste up in the hierarchy, do the menial chores—janitors, for example. Gammas are the bookkeepers and data entry clerks. Then you get to the higher levels, Alphas and Beta. Betas are technicians who do very sophisticated jobs, such as mixing dangerous chemical together. One mishap can result in an explosion, killing all. Finally, at the top of hierarchy are the Alphas. Alphas possess advanced analytical skills and a broad knowledge base. They are able to plan and strategize. They have a high degree of creativity. Their role is to run the society.

    Thus, I have a concern about the increasing role of technology and  automation education, and the emergence of tech-focused boot camps as the prime post-secondary educational experience for many.

    As more of those entering the workforce forgo a formal college education, we run the risk of creating a society in which most of the technical workforce is Betas. They’re able to do highly complex tasks, yet have no idea why they’re doing them.

    Let me be specific. Let’s talk about Kubernetes: It takes a lot of knowledge and experience to be good at getting Kubernetes to work. It’s a complex, evolving technology that you need to keep your eye on. Companies are spending a good deal of money making sure their IT staff are competent with Kubernetes—as well they should be. One little misstep can result in the digital equivalent of a chemical explosion. Yet, I wonder how many of those “working Kubernetes” are thinking about the bigger picture—for example, the purpose and value of the enterprise using Kubernetes. Are these engineers questioning if the technology they’re working is doing good or harm?

    Or, let’s turn the dials down a bit and ask a question that’s less loaded philosophically. How many of those working Kubernetes today wonder if an alternative orchestration technology such as Docker Swarm might be a better choice to meet the need at hand. Or are they so concerned with getting Kubernetes to run that they don’t have the bandwidth to think about anything else? Do they just defer such critical thinking to “the system architects”?

    Critical thinking, although an acquired skill, is not one that’s new on the cognitive landscape. It’s been taught for thousands of years, since the time Socrates sat under an olive tree asking simple questions that forced his students to transform their assumptions and allusions into thoughts based on reason and reflection.

    Developing the ability to think critically traditionally has been one the aims of a college education. The romantic ideal is that college is the place where students are exposed to a variety of ideas from a variety of viewpoints. The hope is that such exposure, along with instruction aimed at developing one’s ability to engage in higher-order thinking, will create graduates who will contribute to making a better-functioning, more prosperous and more humane society.

    But, that’s the traditional perception of college. The reality is changing. Maybe college is just the place you go to get the skills required to get a good job. If that’s the case, given that a college education is becoming less affordable to more people, maybe the boot camp approach is best. Yet, there is a risk.

    A good while back when I was considering enrolling in a doctoral program, I attended a required orientation at Harvard University. I sat in an auditorium composed of about 50 aspiring doctoral students. One of the department heads on stage said the following, “The objective of our doctoral programs is simple. We want to train you to run the world.”

    Yep, that’s right. And, I can say with a good deal of confidence that this objective is the same today—to create thinkers who have the skills and knowledge necessary to run the world. The Alphas, if you will.

    So, we’re at a crossroads. Automation is a liberating force in education in that it makes infinite knowledge available to anyone who wants it at a fraction of a cost of a traditional college education. All that’s required is the time and desire to take advantage of the opportunity at hand. However, if the result of such education is a workforce in which the concern of most is to ensure that the technology works and does not blow up, then the risk we run is that bigger decisions will be made by those who had the time and money for an increasingly elite education. In other words, as more people spend time focused on turning the dials and setting the levels to make the technology go, a very small minority actually will be determining the purpose and direction of the machine the technology supports.

    Still, the fact is, most of us need to make a buck to survive. This means being good at getting the tech to work. Yet, we will do well to understand that there is a Big Picture and if don’t pay attention to it, someone else who has been educated to run the world will.

    — Bob Reselman

  • DevOps Dozen 2018 – Nominations Are Now Open

    DevOps Dozen 2018 – Nominations Are Now Open

    The DevOps Dozen awards are back and now open for nominations. This fourth annual DevOps Dozen honors the best of the best—the leaders and innovators in the DevOps community. This year’s awards will include 12 categories, with a winner chosen from each. The top four to six nominees in each category will become finalists, who will be selected based upon the number of nominations they received. You can nominate up to two entrants in each category; however, you can make only one nomination per person. In addition, everyone nominating will be required to provide their name and email address; while that won’t thwart any ballot-stuffing, we hope people will be trustworthy during the nomination process. The winners will be selected by our panel of judges.

    Last day to submit your nominations for the DevOps Dozen 2018 awards is Oct 10, 2018. Here’s where to vote: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/devopsdozen

    Who are the judges? This was tough. We couldn’t have anyone who might be eligible for an award. That disqualifies vendors, practitioners and many others. However, I think we have four great judges:

    1. Alan Shimel, founder and editor in chief, DevOps.com
    2. George Hulme, longtime tech journalist and editor at DevOps.com and Security Boulevard
    3. Jayne Groll, CEO and co-founder of the DevOps Institute
    4. Helen Beal, DevOpsologist at Ranger4.

    So what are the dozen categories for the DevOps Dozen this year? That you can get on the site itself, but here they are as well:

    [su_custom_gallery source=”media: 125437,125438,125439,125440,125441,125442,125443,125444,125445,125446,125447,125448,” link=”custom” target=”blank” width=”400″ height=”200″]

    Thank you again for your enthusiastic response to last year’s awards. The full list of 2017 finalists and winners are available to view here.

    There are so many great companies and people involved in DevOps that it’s always difficult to pick the winners. We know some worthy choices will not be voted tops in their category; however, acknowledging them in our awards process helps show how important they are in the DevOps space.

    As stated earlier, the top four to six nominees in each category will be designated as finalists, who then can submit a presentation on why they deserve the award to judges@devops.com. Finalists will be announced the second week of November and the winners, who will be chosen by our panel of judges, will be announced in December.

    If you have questions, send them to DD@devops.com. Voting for finalist nominees is open for three weeks, so don’t waste any time—nominate your favorites today. Good luck to everyone vying to be one of the DevOps Dozen 2018!

    — Alan Shimel

  • How to Convince Your Manager to Send You to DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018

    How to Convince Your Manager to Send You to DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018

    The largest gathering of Jenkins users and DevOps practitioners is less than a month away. DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018 will be held in two locations this year, Sept. 16-19 in San Francisco and Oct. 22-25 in Nice, France. With exciting keynotes from industry influencers including Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief data scientist at DORA, and James Governor, analyst and co-founder of RedMonk, there will be tons of learning and networking opportunities. There will even be a “Westworld” themed party, making it an event you do not want to miss.

    So now that we’ve convinced you to attend, you need to convince your manager why they should send you to DevOps World | Jenkins World 2018. Don’t worry: There are lots of good reasons why attending would be beneficial to you and your company. Once you have successfully convinced your manager to attend DevOps World | Jenkins World, don’t forget to register! To sweeten the deal, you can enter the promotional code just for DevOps.com readers: JWDEVOPSCUST. That code gets you 20 percent off your registration.

    Keep Learning

    With more than 70 sessions offered in San Francisco and 50 sessions in Nice, all presented by DevOps and Jenkins experts, DevOps World | Jenkins World provides a chance to learn from DevOps leaders. Be sure to emphasize to your manager the importance of learning from the very best in the DevOps community, in training and workshops and, of course, in the breakout sessions. From Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi to CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey and the aforementioned industry influencers, your manager will greatly appreciate the knowledge you bring back to the office from experienced industry experts.

    You should definitely take advantage of some outstanding training opportunities to enhance your continuous delivery, Jenkins and DevOps knowledge. Available training sessions include Jenkins Certification Training, Jenkins Fundamentals, DevOps Leader Certification Training, CloudBees Core Fundamentals, CloudBees Core on Kubernetes and Value Stream Mapping for DevOps. Additionally, you will receive a free Jenkins exam with the purchase of a full conference registration. That is a huge value-add for both your resume and your organization!

    Build Your Network

    DevOps World | Jenkins World brings together thousands of software development experts, thus providing numerous networking opportunities. The conference gives you the opportunity to learn of challenges other organizations in the industry have faced and how they’ve overcome them. If they have already solved a challenge you are just starting to tackle, you could walk away with knowledge that more than pays for the cost of the conference. Conference attendees can also share success stories that may inspire your organization’s next big win. Make it known to your manager that you will be exposed to people like you, who have similar business needs and challenges, whom you will be able to connect with and learn from.

    Invest in Your (and Your Company’s) Future

    As we previously mentioned, with the industry continuing to innovate and evolve, having the skill set to keep up with these changes help make you a valuable asset to your team. When convincing your manager to let you attend, make sure you also present how this knowledge will help push you and your team forward, ultimately propelling your entire organization forward. Highlighting the potential ROI of this opportunity will help your manager better justify the cost to send you to DevOps World | Jenkins World. Detail exactly how much airfare and lodging will cost, but also note what kind of impact it will have on the organization’s bottom line. The ROI will be evident—make that clear!

    We would like to think we have provided some pretty solid justifications for you, but if you still need an extra boost, we have also created an email template to use when sending all this over to your manager for review. Once your boss gives you the green light, go register!

    — Alan Shimel

  • VMware Extends DevOps Reach via SaaS Apps

    VMware Extends DevOps Reach via SaaS Apps

    VMware, at the VMworld 2018 conference today, announced it will be delving deeper in the realm of DevOps with the launch of a continuous delivery pipeline dubbed Code Stream.

    In addition, VMware announced Cloud Assembly, a set of declarative tools that enable IT organizations to spin up a cloud in as little as 10 minutes by managing infrastructure as code, and Service Broker, a catalog through which services residing on multiple clouds can be published, governed and secured.

    Milin Desai, vice president and general manager for the Cloud Services Business Unit of VMware, said these offerings extend the reach of VMware’s Cloud Automation Services that are all invoked as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

    VMware also today announced a beta release of Secure State, a set of tools for tracking security alerts across Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure that also can be used to investigate when changes to those environments were made. Secure Slate is based on the technology the company gained by acquiring CloudCoreo earlier this year. What’s more, VMware is updating the Wavefront by VMware monitoring service to add support for deeper support for containerized workloads running on Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS). Wavefront also now supports the Amazon Lambda serverless computing framework made available by Amazon Web Services (AWS).

    Code Stream is designed to track code across multiple platforms and comes with pre-built plug-ins for Wavefront, Harbor, Nexus, Pivotal Kubernetes Service (PKS), Ansible and Slack. VMware is also committed to providing integrations with continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platforms such as Jenkins, Desai said.

    VMware has previously made extensive investments in software-defined data centers (SDDCs) based on a layer of management software deployed on top of VMware vSphere. As part of that effort, VMware today announced version 6.7 of VMware vSphere, which adds tools for verifying the state of a virtual machine, and a new Platinum edition of the platform that includes VMware AppDefense, to secure application workloads running on VMware vSphere.

    Beyond the virtual machine level, the scope of VMware’s DevOps portfolio has been limited. By adding a range of DevOps tools that are made available as SaaS applications, VMware now can provide tools spanning just about everything, from cloud orchestration to code delivery, Desai said.

    The expanded push into DevOps comes at a time when VMware is also extending the scope of its alliance with AWS. The company earlier this week announced it has lowered the cost of entry of VMware for AWS by 50 percent for a limited time and is making available a three-node configuration option. Previously, VMware required customers to set up a minimum four-node configuration. VMware will enable IT organizations to configure a three-host software-defined data center (SDDC) for the cost of two hosts.

    The company is further helping to reduce costs by make it possible for IT organizations to also specify the number of processor core counts for Oracle and Microsoft applications running on AWS, along with new options for deploying NSX network virtualization software.

    It’s unclear to what degree VMware will be able to leverage its historic strengths in server virtualization to become a significant force in the realm of DevOps. The acquisition of Wavefront in last year was clearly a significant step in that direction. But the individuals with an IT organization who decide what virtual machines to employ are not necessarily the same individuals selecting DevOps tools. VMware is clearly hoping that as more IT organizations embrace DevOps processes spanning multiple clouds, many more of them will view the company’s growing portfolio of SaaS applications as a natural extension.

    — Mike Vizard

  • When DevOps and ITSM Collide: Mistakes to Avoid

    When DevOps and ITSM Collide: Mistakes to Avoid

    In many ways the DevOps movement evolved as a reaction against the worst elements of IT service management (ITSM). IT leaders wanted to get from under the yoke of overly complex processes, bureaucracy and red tape to speed up software delivery, and to just get stuff done. Now that DevOps has kicked into full gear at so many organizations, the question remains: What do we do about ITSM?

    While the instinct in some may be to completely ditch ITSM or to just let the ITSM team operate in a separate orbit from DevOps practitioners, experts say that would be a big mistake.

    “DevOps aims to deliver high-quality software to the business faster and in shorter cycles,” explained Krishna Mohan Reddy, vice president and deputy global head of Cognitive Business Operations at Tata Consultancy Services. “However, it still does not eliminate the need for controls.”

    In many ways ITSM is the yin to DevOps’ yang—the two operating philosophies do offer contrasting viewpoints but when the operate in a single system they can be extremely complementary and synergistic.

    “Maintaining the proper balance between the ITSM and DevOps helps the organizations to scale and grow and become more organized,” said Sachin Agarwal, DevOps engineer and solution architect for Mantra Labs. Operating at DevOps speeds with ITSM frameworks in place keeps finger-pointing at a minimum and reduces the risks of failed deployments. “Both in harmony will increase the efficiency and reduce the blame-game within the organization.”

    As organizations try to figure out how to achieve that harmony, here are some pitfalls they should seek to avoid:

    Letting Each Tribe’s Preconceived Notions Hold Back Overall IT Progress

    It can be easy to get wrapped up into dogmatic fervor that your particular philosophy is the One True Path for IT success, but that really does nobody any favor. Organizations that want to pick up the best of both ITSM and DevOps need to encourage stakeholders to approach the table with an open mind.

    “You need to compromise. A lot of the new, young practitioners in DevOps and Agile will pretty much automatically discount opinions coming from people who have got ITIL certifications,” said Andi Mann, chief technology advocate for Splunk. “And vice versa—a lot of traditional operations and development teams will look at the people in DevOps and Agile and think they’re all cowboys. But they all have something to learn from each other.”

    For DevOps practitioners, it’s important to keep in mind that ITSM controls such as service requests, change management or structured management of incidents and problems don’t have to stop a team from delivering quality software at speed, said Troy Vetter, COO of Coda Global.

    “In fact, speed and quality are actually helped by being closely monitored. In IT, just like in science, if it isn’t seen, measured, and “reproducible, it doesn’t really count,” he noted. “So, ITSM is actually the perfect complement to DevOps because it aids in the visibility, measurement and reproducibility of key DevOps processes.”

    Failing to Address the Elephant in the Room: Change Management

    Analyst Roy Atkinson agrees that ITSM has a lot to bring to the table for DevOps workflows. ITSM’s rich history in thinking about and tracking operational best practices offers tons of value in improving the customer experience with the software being delivered. But on the flip side, ITSM teams can’t continue to operate as they did in the past. They need to compromise and learn new ways of accommodating DevOps approaches—particularly in the area of change management.

    “Change management has often been where DevOps and ITSM collide,” said Atkinson, who analyzes the service management market for HDI. “The stereotypical Change Advisory Board must radically revise its approach to be in sync with the enormous amount of change that DevOps can produce in a day.”

    The good news is that thought leaders in the ITSM world have been thinking hard about this issue and have been evolving practices so they can embed change management controls into a DevOps framework without holding back continuous delivery.

    “There is some excellent recent thinking in the ITSM world about how change management can serve its intended purpose without being a roadblock by acting as an enabler of change and being involved all along the way, rather than a bolt-on quality check at the end of the line before the production environment,” Atkinson said.

    Maintaining Separate Toolchains

    Often times one of the big reasons ITSM will remain a roadblock for DevOps isn’t because the ITSM folks aren’t willing to collaborate, but simply because each team relies on completely separate toolchains.

    “You might have a tool that developers use for tracking bugs or product backlog and then there’s a completely separate IT service management tool,” said Donna Knapp, curriculum development manager for ITSM Academy and author of the DevOps Institute’s course on ITSM for DevOps. “So what you end up doing is forcing developers to use some process that’s outside of their norm in order to address issues.”

    As Vetter explained, a lot of the knee-jerk DevOps reaction against ITSM has to do with an aversion to the historical view of ITSM requiring manual inputs in monolithic ticketing systems. But the technology of ITSM controls has advanced—it just needs to be appropriately implemented.

    “Self-service requests, automation flows and IT orchestration are now our front door to actions, and IT service management can and should be happening in the background, automagically created, maintained and measured by our DevOps tools,” he said.

    — Ericka Chickowski

  • Automated Management with Modern Architectures

    Automated Management with Modern Architectures

    We’ve come a long way. Just five years ago, with virtual machines (VMs) and decent monitoring, I would never have considered active automated system repairs for the average organization.

    There were many reasons for that. Monitoring was spread out and required a lot of work to spin together. The volume of logs from monitoring was generally huge once logging was consolidated, and that was the best source of automated recovery information. The time it takes a VM to start up and the space that a fully installed VM took up on disk were both negatives to doing automated response.

    But that was then, this is now. And the world has changed. A lot.

    Most companies using cloud or container based architectures with DevOps are doing monitoring. Tools such as DataDog and ExtraHop between them monitor the application side of performance and the networkwide responsiveness of the application infrastructure. Most container-based architectures are using one or both with alerting to keep track of their system’s and instance’s performance. Add in container management systems, and the infrastructure to support systemwide automation is starting to look pretty darned complete.

    Beyond Monitoring

    The most advanced DevOps and automation shops have gone a step further and are using these tools to do automated management on top of monitoring. While tooling varies—and I do not mean to use the above two as the only solutions—they show well the two sides of monitoring: application and environment (in the case of ExtraHop, networking). Most organizations have a wider selection, including in-source tooling and other monitoring systems. But a few have stepped up to basing the decision to auto-correct on these tools. If ExtraHop is showing extreme response times from an instance, but other instances are responding just fine, that scenario can trigger spinning up a new instance and taking the old one down. The same is true if DataDog shows one instance is taking forever to process requests, while other instances are performing admirably. If the overall system response time is lagging, new instances can be automatically added, either by directly spinning them up or making a call to the container management system to do so.

    In the case of the failing machine, companies that have been doing this for any length of time will happily tell you to keep the instance taken offline so you have a record of what went wrong and can fix it. Heartbleed would have been a different beast had this been followed, and others will give you the same story of, “It’s hard to troubleshoot when the evidence is destroyed.” So while many companies tend to think along the lines of, “If we pulled it down and replaced it, we don’t need it anymore,” what should be done is, from the start, set up to keep the container and take time to look at it to help determine what went wrong before it goes wrong again on a different instance.

    No Muss, No Fuss

    The idea of the “self-healing network” is certainly nothing new. The difference is that machine speed, monitoring tools, management tools and platform have all evolved to a point where all of us can implement it. That doesn’t remove work around problems with responsiveness, but it does offer a stopgap that will keep many applications up and responsive while you figure out why they’re having issues.

    One key is to have an alert system that lets the team responsible know what has happened. If automation replaces an instance, the team needs to know which instance it took down so it can grab the files and figure out what happened. If three of those notices come across in 10 or 15 minutes, you have a definite problem that needs more proactive interaction.

    For clarity: My caveats every time I say “this works” are simple—network issues (inside or outside your network) may be causing perceived performance issues, and these systems can’t do much about that. Hardware failures are not resolved by dropping an instance and spinning up a new one, etc. But until monitoring and management alerts reach alarming stage, the application is likely humming along. And the team can focus on enhancements, not spinning up replacement instances. The larger the server base, the more important this is.

    New products, enhancements to existing products, fixed bugs, improved architectures—concentrating on these issues instead of keeping the system live is always a win.

    So if you’re not using automated management, it certainly is worth a look. Your environment is unique, and it fits better in some than others. So I’ll leave it to you to evaluate in light of your architecture. But if you can free up time, I highly recommend you do.

    — Don Macvittie