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Category: IT as Code

  • Buildkite Acquires Packagecloud to Streamline DevOps Workflows

    Buildkite Acquires Packagecloud to Streamline DevOps Workflows

    Buildkite Pty Ltd today revealed it has acquired Packagecloud as part of an effort to tightly integrate package management tools with its continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

    Buildkite CEO Keith Pitt said the goal is to reduce the level of friction that exists between providers of third-party package management tools and CI/CD platforms that DevOps teams are today required to address themselves.

    There is no shortage of package management tools used to configure, install and update software, but the level of integration between these tools and CI/CD platforms has not historically been very high. The acquisition of Packagecloud will result in a package manager becoming a first-class citizen within the context of a CI/CD platform, said Pitt.

    Buildkite will maintain the existing support Packagecloud provides for platforms such as Jenkins, but the acquisition will streamline DevOps workflows and improve overall developer productivity, he added.

    In the months ahead, Buildkite will also add a range of tools to better enable DevOps teams to achieve that goal, said Pitt. In addition, the company plans to add tools to streamline the management of compliance processes as regulations pertaining to application development are becoming more stringent, he added.

    It’s not clear how much IT organizations are reevaluating their CI/CD platforms to improve developer productivity, but platform engineering as a methodology to centralize the management of DevOps workflows is gaining traction. Those efforts promise to reduce the total cost of implementing DevOps at scale and improve developer productivity by making the scaffolding required to build applications more readily accessible. Today, too many developers are spending time managing developer environments rather than writing actual code.

    The challenge, of course, is convincing developers—who tend to jealously guard their tool prerogatives—to embrace a platform engineering methodology and cede control over the development environment to a centralized team.

    One way or another, developer productivity needs to improve as more organizations encounter economic headwinds. Developers are the most expensive resource any organization has, so improving the rate at which high-quality code is created will always be imperative, noted Pitt.

    Today, organizations depend on software to drive revenue. Investors are assessing senior leaders within those organizations on their ability to deliver quality software in a timely fashion. Each new application and subsequent software update now has a direct impact on the profitability of the organization. As such, tolerance for legacy approaches to building software that require more time and effort is dropping.

    The issue, as always, is that switching from one software development platform to another is an expensive proposition, so many organizations may find themselves supporting a mix of legacy and modern platforms. The challenge becomes defining the pace at which that migration occurs as new applications are created and legacy applications are continuously updated.

  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted to better serve our audience.

    Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.

    Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.

    The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.

    We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

    CareerBuilder.com

    The DarkStar Group
    Fairfax, Virginia
    AWS DevOps Engineer (Security Clearance)
    $250,000

    Indeed.com

    Dutch Bros. Coffee
    Grants Pass, Oregon
    Senior DevOps Engineer
    $139,473 to $161,688

    LinkedIn

    Claravine
    Remote
    DevOps Engineer
    $105,000 to $115,00

    SimplyHired.com

    Motorola Solutions
    New York, New York
    Infrastructure Operations Engineer
    $93,620 to $180,000

    Dice.com

    Scholastic Inc.
    New York, New York
    Associate DevOps Engineer
    $58,500 to $93,500

  • Summit Highlights Open Source Software Security Progress

    Summit Highlights Open Source Software Security Progress

    More than a year after the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) summit kicked off an initiative to better secure open source software-based software supply chains, a lot of progress has been made—but much work remains to be done.

    The OpenSSF this week hosted a Secure Open Source Software (SOSS) Summit 2023 event in Washington, D.C., during which it made available a Secure Open Source Software Vision Brief 2023. The brief describes the various efforts being made to improve open source software security, including, for example, providing maintainers of open source software projects with free DevSecOps tools.

    This week, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) also published an Open Source Software Security Roadmap that defines its role in providing more visibility into how open source is being used and the associated risks.

    However, it’s not clear how much maintainers of these projects are embracing DevSecOps workflows. Many projects are led by a handful of maintainers that often lack the time and skills required to ensure the components they employ have not, for example, been compromised by malware that might find its way into downstream applications.

    Sonatype CTO Brian Fox said the focus of the summit’s participants will be on education and securing public code repositories. While there is a lot of focus on maintainers, he added that there is not enough attention to all the organizations that have not updated open source components within a software build with known vulnerabilities. Many IT teams are reluctant to upgrade components for fear of breaking applications with complex dependencies, but the amount of code that is potentially insecure is massive. “There’s a huge mountain to climb,” he said.

    The challenge is determining which code to upgrade first in a way that will have the most impact in terms of improving application security, added Fox.

    Shawn Ahmed, chief product officer for CloudBees, also noted that organizations should evaluate the DevSecOps processes being applied by maintainers of open source software projects. CloudBees, for example, reviews the plugins provided by the open source community for the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for vulnerabilities every month, he noted.

    It’s also critical for organizations that consume open source software to contribute code to improve the security of open source software, added Ahmed. Too many organizations are focused on open source software security without devoting resources that would help resolve the issue. he added. “We need to make sure open source software is not a vulnerability threat,” said Ahmed.

    Moran Ashkenazi, chief strategy officer (CSO) and vice president of security engineering for JFrog, said on the plus side, there is a lot more awareness of open source software security issues since the disclosure of a zero-day vulnerability in the Log4j shell tool widely used to manage logs in Java applications. But added that this issue is not going to be resolved overnight. “That was a wakeup call,” she said.

    Tapabrata Pal, vice president of architecture for Fidelity Investments, noted that the fundamental problem is that cybercriminals have become more adept at injecting malware into software supply chains, so no one knows whether their application environments might be compromised. “It’s a serious issue,” he said.

    It’s not known whether the open source software that many developers routinely incorporate into their applications might contain vulnerabilities that could be exploited, but the level of technical debt that has accrued over the last several decades is considerable. The issue is finding a way to address it without becoming overwhelmed by the enormity of the task.

  • ngrok Adds Load Balancing to Programmable Network Service

    ngrok Adds Load Balancing to Programmable Network Service

    ngrok today added a global server load balancing capability to its service for managing ingress via an application programming interface (API).

    Alan Shreve, ngrok CEO, said the ngrok Global Server Load Balancing (GSLB) service reduces latency and increases overall resiliency by automatically rerouting traffic across a global network of points-of-presence ngrok manages.

    The overall goal is to provide a higher level of abstraction for managing network operations (NetOps) that can be programmatically invoked. NetOps takes the place of what are essentially the equivalent of Assembly programming tools to provision networking equipment, he added. The long arc of computing is moving toward higher levels of abstraction to make IT capabilities more accessible, noted Shreve.

    That approach eliminates the need for IT teams to assign network operations teams to manage appliances in favor of a service that also provides a demilitarized zone (DMZ) via a service that accesses reverse proxies and firewalls, noted Shreve. The ngrok service ensures unauthorized requests are instantly blocked.

    The ngrok service provides a programmable approach to managing network services that makes it simpler for DevOps teams to invoke them. Instead of waiting for a network operations team to provision networking equipment, an API makes it possible to integrate the provisioning of networking services within the context of a larger DevOps workflow.

    One of the challenges that IT teams continue to encounter is that while virtual machines can be spun up in minutes, the provisioning of network services can require anywhere from minutes to days, depending on the age of the networking equipment. The ngrok service doesn’t eliminate the need for network professionals, but it does make it simpler for them to collaborate with application development and deployment teams, said Shreve.

    It’s not clear if NetOps teams will one day simply become an extension of a DevOps team, but as applications become more distributed, the need to minimize network latency is becoming more critical. A service like ngrok makes it simpler for DevOps teams to ensure the appropriate level of bandwidth is available so distributed application performance doesn’t slow to a crawl.

    Of course, the bigger challenge will be bridging the cultural divide that currently exists between many NetOps and DevOps teams. Both groups have their own distinct nomenclature for describing services that, in many cases, the other simply doesn’t comprehend. As distributed application development accelerates, each organization will need to determine how to demolish those silos so both teams can more easily achieve a common goal.

    In the meantime, IT leaders might to reconsider their strategy as networking services become increasingly programmable via APIs. Most modern networking equipment today is software-defined in the sense that network operations teams have access to graphical tools to provision networking equipment. However, as APIs become more accessible, the need for those graphical tools may not be nearly as high as it is today as networking becomes just another service to be managed as code.

  • CloudBees Unfurls Dual CI/CD Strategy at DevOps World Event

    CloudBees Unfurls Dual CI/CD Strategy at DevOps World Event

    During a DevOps World event, CloudBees took the wraps off the first major update to the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform made in the past several years.

    At the same time, the company also unveiled a proprietary DevSecOps platform based on Kubernetes that is optimized for building and deploying cloud-native applications based on portable Tekton pipelines.

    Shawn Ahmed, chief product officer for CloudBees, said the updates to Jenkins make it possible to horizontally scale Jenkins controllers while at the same time ensuring high availability. The latest update also provides a workspace caching mechanism to simplify sharing them across multiple jobs in a way that significantly reduces the amount of compute and storage resources consumed, he added.

    CloudBees also added a Baseline capability to the Jenkins repository to improve startup times without causing build storms.
    Collectively, those capabilities will increase the number of jobs that can be simultaneously executed to improve overall productivity, said Ahmed.

    CloudBees has also added a Pipeline Explorer tool in the cloud-based edition of Jenkins that enables DevOps teams to visually debug and troubleshoot pipeline jobs. That tool will also provide the foundations for self-healing and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that CloudBees plans to add to the Jenkins platform later this year and into 2024, added Ahmed. For example, AI tools will surface suggestions on how to fix a problem in a pipeline, he noted.

    The DevSecOps platform, meanwhile, leverages Tekton pipelines to provide DevOps teams with more granular control over how pipelines can be orchestrated, said Ahmed. It also provides access to GitHub Actions-style domain-specific language (DSL), support for feature flagging, security, compliance, pipeline orchestration capabilities, analytics and value stream management (VSM) tools that can be deployed by an internal IT team or accessed via a single or multi-tenant managed cloud service.

    Those built-in capabilities will make it simpler for platform engineering teams to centrally manage building and deployment of cloud-native applications by enabling developers to self-service their own engineering requirements via an internal developer platform (IDP), said Ahmed. The overall goal is to provide a more integrated approach that breaks down software engineering silos that exist in many existing DevOps workflows, said Ahmed.

    Each DevOps team will need to decide for themselves to what degree to move forward using Jenkins to build and deploy applications versus opting for a more modern alternative in the form of the DevSecOps platform. CloudBees, however, is committed to providing plug-ins and integrations across both platforms to enable DevOps teams to protect their investment in existing tooling, noted Ahmed.

    The status of Jenkins X, an open source CI/CD platform based on Kubernetes that CloudBees previously donated to the Cloud Delivery Foundation (CDF), is not immediately clear. Regardless of the approach, however, there is a clear opportunity to revamp DevOps workflows by upgrading Jenkins or switching to a more modern platform such as DevSecOps. The challenge, as always, is determining the pace at which any such transition might be made.

  • Nitric Adds Support for Additional Languages to IaC Alternative

    Nitric Adds Support for Additional Languages to IaC Alternative

    Nitric today announced it has added support for the Go and Kotlin programming languages to its application framework. The framework automatically creates code to provision infrastructure based on the way the code used to write an application has been developed.

    Rak Siva, vice president of engineering for Nitric, said that approach eliminates the need to rely on developers using infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools to configure platforms.

    Nitric previously supported JavaScript, Python and C# along with frameworks such as Express, Fastify and Nest.js to enable infrastructure to be automatically configured based on an intent expressed in the codebase enabled by a software development kit (SDK). In effect, Nitric infers how to optimally configure infrastructure. DevOps teams can then choose to either rely on the configurations created by the Nitric framework or customize it to add support for their own policies, said Siva.

    While IaC tools have played a major role in streamlining the application development and deployment process, they are also the root cause of many cloud security incidents. Developers that use these tools typically have limited cybersecurity expertise, so the probability that cloud infrastructure will be misconfigured in a way that cybercriminals can exploit is high.

    Nitric is attempting to take the concept of managing infrastructure-as-code to the next logical level by automating the process so it can be consistently applied and managed, said Siva. That approach provides the added benefit of improving the overall developer experience by eliminating a task that most developers view as a means to a larger end, he added.

    It’s not clear how much of the cloud infrastructure that DevOps teams are relying on to build and deploy applications is misconfigured, but given the varying levels of skill among developers, there are very few organizations that have not encountered a cloud security issue. The challenge is not so much the security of the underlying platforms as it is the shared responsibility model relied on to secure these platforms. Cloud security platform providers assume that organizations that programmatically invoke infrastructure have the expertise required to securely provision it. However, very few organizations can achieve that goal 100% of the time, which results in organization having to make considerable investments in additional tools and platforms to monitor and enforce cloud security policies.

    As more organizations focus their efforts on securing software supply chains, many of them will be revisiting how cloud infrastructure is provisioned. In fact, one of the reasons platform engineering is gaining traction as a DevOps methodology is to improve the developer experience and strengthen application security.

    Cultural change, of course, is difficult. IaC tools such as Terraform are deeply embedded within many DevOps workflows, so any alternative approach to provisioning infrastructure will require time to take hold. However, as regulations that hold organizations more accountable for application security become increasingly more stringent, it’s now a question of when rather than if change will come to how cloud infrastructure is provisioned.

  • Survey Surfaces Spike in Generative AI Usage Across IT

    Survey Surfaces Spike in Generative AI Usage Across IT

    A survey of 800 DevOps and application security operations (SecOps) leaders published today found nearly all (97%) are making use of generative artificial intelligence (AI).

    Conducted by the market research firm Sago on behalf of Sonatype, the survey found that beyond writing code, a full 45% of the 400 security operations professionals have already embedded generative AI into their workflows compared to 31% of the 400 DevOps professionals.

    Security operations teams also reported greater time savings than their DevOps counterparts, with 57% saying generative AI saves them at least six hours a week compared to only 31% of DevOps respondents that saw the same benefit.

    The top benefits cited by security operations teams is increased productivity (21%) and faster issue identification/resolution (16%) compared to faster software development (16%) and more secure software (15%) cited by DevOps professionals.

    It’s still early days as far as embedding generative AI in workflows is concerned, but it’s clear the ability to write code faster is trumping concerns about the increased number of vulnerabilities that might find their way into application environments. The most widely used generative AI platforms are trained on a massive corpus of data that includes code of varying quality. As such, a lot of the code generated by a general-purpose AI platform will likely have as many errors, including vulnerabilities, as the code used to train it.

    The level of faith organizations will place in that code will be heavily influenced by use cases. A script used to automate DevOps workflows that are not externally facing may be one example of where a general-purpose AI platform can boost productivity. In other instances, code that contains vulnerabilities that find their way into a web application might be much more problematic.
    Despite those concerns, however, the survey finds nearly three-quarters (75%) of all respondents feel pressure to use generative AI.

    There are, of course, already large language models trained on code that has been vetted by software engineers. In the months ahead, the code generated by AI platforms specifically designed for that purpose should significantly improve.

    Sonatype CTO Brian Fox said it’s only a matter of time before IT organizations focus more on ensuring the generative AI platforms are tuned for specific tasks. In the meantime, however, application security may get worse before it gets better, with more than three-quarters of DevOps respondents noting that generative AI will result in more vulnerabilities in open source code. Only 58% of security operations professionals are similarly concerned.

    It will be up to the engineers that make up these teams to bring discipline to code quality practices and make sure the code running in a production environment is of high quality, regardless of how it was created, noted Fox. For the moment, the issue is that AI augmentation is now occurring at a faster pace than the AI advances that should one-day help DevOps teams cope with increasingly larger codebases, he noted.

    Survey respondents are also concerned about who might own the code generated by AI. A total of 40% said developers or the organizations they work for should own the copyright for AI-generated output, and most of them agreed developers should be compensated for the code they wrote if it’s used in open source artifacts in LLMs (DevOps 93% versus SecOps 88%). A total of 42% of DevOps respondents and 40% of SecOps respondents said a lack of regulation could deter developers from contributing to open source projects.

    DevOps and SecOps leads both want more regulation: Asked who they believe is responsible for regulating the use of generative AI, 59% of DevOps leads and 78% of SecOps leads said both the government and individual companies should be responsible for regulation.

    At this point, the proverbial generative AI genie is out of the bottle, so there is no going back. The issue that remains to be seen is how DevOps and security operating teams will adjust to that new reality.

  • Oracle Bill is 5x Client’s Budget ¦ Toyota Out of Space

    Oracle Bill is 5x Client’s Budget ¦ Toyota Out of Space

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

    This week: Birmingham looks like the Detroit of the UK—is it Oracle’s fault?
    Plus: Was Toyota’s factory failure caused by running out of disk space? (more…)

  • Broadcom Survey Surfaces Drive to Consolidate Automation Platforms

    Broadcom Survey Surfaces Drive to Consolidate Automation Platforms

    Broadcom this week published a global survey of 535 IT leaders that found more than three-quarters (78%) are moving to consolidate cloud automation tools and platforms. However, thus far, only 8% of respondents said they had completed that effort.

    Overall, the survey also found more than 81% already have multiple cloud automation solutions in place, and 70% noted this issue had created significant challenges, including increasing time to automate (59%), time to report (52%) and time to remediation (52%) and higher costs (49%). In addition, 46% noted it’s more difficult to troubleshoot IT environments, while 41% noted multiple tools increase compliance risks.

    IT teams also find that having multiple automation tools slows down software delivery (37%) and contributes to the over-provisioning of IT environments (32%).

    Aline Gerew, head of automation for the Agile Operations Division at Broadcom, said the multiple islands of automation that have evolved on various cloud computing platforms now need to be centralized to reduce the current level of friction in the cloud. Those efforts need to start with platforms capable of unifying observability across all the platforms employed, she added.

    The amount of consolidation that any IT organization can implement depends on the amount of political capital they have. In many cases, the applications and associated automation tools running in any given environment have been adopted by a department or business unit that exercises a lot of autonomy regarding IT. The issue that creates is multiple tools and platforms increase the total cost of IT. At a time when many organizations are experiencing economic headwinds, the need to reduce the total cost of IT naturally becomes a more pressing concern.

    Rather than consolidate automation tools and platforms, the simpler option is to deploy an automation framework that is designed to be integrated with the various tools and platforms that are already in place, noted Gerew. That approach enables automation to be applied at much higher levels of scale to reduce costs without forcing every arm of an organization to standardize on the same tools and platform, she noted.

    The survey found that, when it comes to cloud automation, the most important consideration factors are operational costs (62%), performance (53%) and operational efficiency (49%).

    Responsibility for cloud automation will naturally vary from one organization to the next, but the survey noted that 67% of respondents currently have a cloud architect on staff and another 33% are planning to hire one.

    That role is increasingly required as organizations find themselves managing a wide range of cloud computing environments, including software-as-a-service applications (57%), legacy applications that have been lifted into the cloud (56%), new cloud-native applications (46%) and legacy applications that have been refactored for the cloud (41%).

    It’s apparent that cloud computing environments are becoming more complex with each passing day. There may come a day when artificial intelligence (AI) helps reduce the level of complexity; in the meantime, IT organizations need to find ways to streamline the management of cloud computing environments. Today, those environments are made up of applications based on a wide range of increasingly divergent architectures as the rate of application deployments exceeds the retirement of legacy apps.

  • Cisco Aligns With Nutanix on Hybrid Cloud Computing

    Cisco Aligns With Nutanix on Hybrid Cloud Computing

    Cisco and Nutanix this week announced a strategic partnership through which the two companies will collaborate to advance hybrid cloud computing.

    As part of that agreement, Cisco is committing to making AHV virtual machine software from Nutanix available from the edge to the cloud, starting with the Cisco Unified Compute Systems (UCS) rack and, soon after, blade servers.

    Jeremy Foster, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco Compute, said via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Cisco will be able to centrally manage virtual machines from Nutanix alongside the other major virtual machines it already supports.

    In addition, the partnership will enable Cisco to apply multiple forms of artificial intelligence (AI) across a hybrid cloud computing environment, he added.

    Thomas Cornely, senior vice president of product management for Nutanix, said the goal is to provide IT teams with an opportunity to consolidate infrastructure across a hybrid cloud computing environment. In effect, Nutanix and Cisco are working toward converging the control planes across their entire respective portfolios, he added.

    The goal is to enable IT teams to streamline the number of platforms that need to be supported as part of an effort to reduce the total cost of IT, said Cornely.

    The issue that IT organizations regularly encounter is that each platform requires hiring additional IT personnel to manage. At a time when many organizations are encountering economic headwinds, there is a natural inclination to reduce the number of platforms as the size of the IT staff is reduced. Despite advances in automation, IT labor costs still represent the largest overall segment of any IT budget.

    It’s not clear how aggressively IT teams are consolidating IT infrastructure to reduce costs, but after more than a decade of continuous investments in IT, many organizations are discovering they are supporting a wide range of platforms. During a downturn, however, IT teams tend to more aggressively eliminate “snowflake” platforms that require unique skillsets to manage, noted Cornely.

    In the meantime, IT environments are also becoming more distributed as more workloads move to the network edge. Those workloads are not replacing applications running in on-premises or cloud computing environments, so the overall IT footprint will continue to increase. Given the chronic shortage of IT skills, the only way to effectively manage that IT estate will be to rely more on automation frameworks increasingly infused with AI.

    Each IT organization will need to determine for itself what level of automation to embrace, but Cisco is betting most will opt to rely on a SaaS platform provided by a vendor versus building and maintaining an IT management platform themselves. Regardless, legacy approaches that depend heavily on manual processes will increasingly give way to cloud-based platforms that can more easily manage workloads wherever they happen to be deployed.

    The issue now, as always, is funding the transition to new platforms to bring the total cost of IT back under control and eventually pay for themselves.