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Category: Features

Atlassian Extends Open DevOps Ambitions

At an online Atlassian Team 2021 event this week, Atlassian launched a two-pronged effort to provide organizations with more insights into software development workflows constructed using tools from multiple vendors.

Suzie Prince, head of product for Atlassian, said an Open DevOps initiative will tighten integration between the Jira project tracking and management tools provided with Atlassian and a wide range of tools commonly employed by DevOps teams. The goal is to not only make it easier to correlate issues that are listed in Jira with artifacts found in various software platforms, but also to collect data from DevOps tools to automatically update Jira.

That data will then be employed to inform the key performance indicators (KPIs), based on graphs that Atlassian provides within Jira, to keep track of value streams. Rather than having to acquire a separate value stream management (VSM) platform to track software development progress, the insights needed to understand the impact of, for example, a delay to one project becomes a dividend of using Jira.

At the same time, Atlassian is moving to making it easier for other stakeholders in an organization to track software development projects. A Jira Work Management application is specifically designed for business users that require a higher-level tool to track projects. At the same time, Atlassian revealed this week it has acquired ThinkTilt, a provider of low-code application development tools optimized for Jira.

Atlassian for the first time this week revealed that half of Jira users are not software developers. As organizations increasingly appreciate the degree to which they are now dependent on software to drive digital business transformation initiatives, Atlassian is adding a set of project tracking applications designed specifically for users that need to consume Jira data in a more intuitive fashion.

Prince said Atlassian is committed to making it simple to replace one DevOps tool integration for another with a single click. Rather than requiring organizations to standardize on a single DevOps platform, Prince added that developers will be able to continue to rip and replace tools and platforms as they see fit without compromising visibility into application development workflows.

In addition, the integrations being provided by Atlassian will reduce the time and effort required to configure all the tools that make up a DevOps workflow, from roughly 60 steps today to about six.

As DevOps workflows become more pervasive, the way organizations operate is fundamentally changing. Formal product launches are giving way to a steady stream of software updates that add new capabilities to any platform with little to no fanfare. End users ranging from sales teams to custom support personnel now need to track updates to platforms more closely as new capabilities are continuously added.

Of course, not every organization has the same level of maturity. However, as competitors start to add new features to rival offerings, it is now only a matter of time before most business processes – that increasingly revolve around software updates – begin to evolve and change. As the pace of software development continues to accelerate, the pressure on legacy business processes will only continue.

April 30, 2021
Successful Digital Transformation: It’s About Strategy

While having a mature digital enterprise helped organizations to better survive – and even thrive, in some cases – the pandemic, that’s not the primary reason why organizations will continue to invest in their digital transformation efforts. According to new research from consultancy Deloitte, businesses will continue to invest in their digital transformation capabilities to innovate rapidly and to survive competitive battles in the marketplace.

Deloitte’s survey found that enterprises believe such ongoing investments in digital transformation will continue to deliver benefits, such as enabling them to innovate more quickly, modernize their business-technology systems and become more resilient. The pandemic proved an unfortunate test of such business resilience, with more than 75% of respondents saying that their digital capabilities helped them better meet the business challenges posed by the pandemic.

The survey also found that enterprises plan to increase their digital investments and to do so considerably. Respondents indicate, on average, planned investment of nearly $13 million on digital transformation in the next year — a 15% increase from the prior year’s spend.

These findings mirror those of another survey released this week from software provider Rimini Street, which found digital transformation is one of the top five priorities among CFOs, and that 71% of CFOs believe that such investments are essential to the success of their businesses. Further, 77% of CFOs said they would work with their CIOs to help find funding for digital transformation efforts — if there was a strong ROI demonstrated.

Perhaps most noteworthy from the Deloitte survey is that, while digital platforms and digital transformation efforts are essential, they are not a competitive advantage by themselves. It’s what businesses do with those platforms that matter.

Additionally, most Deloitte respondents see plenty of competitive upheavals ahead: most respondents feel it is most likely that their main competitors will be a startup or current digital native competitor in as little as five years. Less than one-third of respondents believe that their current competitors will remain competitors five years from now.

To win funding for digital transformation and innovation initiatives, the Rimini Street survey suggests CIOs will most likely succeed by not pushing innovation for its own sake, but by seeking out initiatives that will generate a strong return. In that survey, CFOs made it clear that optimizing existing technology, revenue-generating endeavors and improving processes and staff efficiencies were their top three priorities.

In that race to continuously optimize business technology systems, many CIOs in Deloitte’s survey also see a downside. More than half of those questioned said that the rapid pace of change is harmful to both their organization and their customers, and 75% said the rapid change had created significant upheaval in business leadership or their board during the past 24 months.

Whether enterprise business and technology leaders want a world with such rapid change doesn’t matter: it is the world in which they must compete. And those enterprises that succeed in the next few years will be those that not only make the right investments in digital transformation, but those that figure out the best ways to innovate and connect with customers by leveraging those investments.

April 30, 2021
JFrog Tightens Integration with Cloud Edition of Jira

JFrog this week announced that its DevOps platform, delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS), can now be integrated with the Jira project tracking and management application, delivered as a cloud service, from Atlassian.

Casey O’Mara, vice president of worldwide business development for JFrog, said this bidirectional integration makes it possible to link a Jira issue, such as a bug fix, to the binary or build residing in the JFrog Artifactory repository that is part of the JFrog DevOps Platform.

Available via an application that can be downloaded from the Atlassian Marketplace, this integration extends an existing alliance between the two companies, said O’Mara. There is, for example, already an integration between Atlassian Bitbucket Cloud for continuous integration and JFrog Artifactory repository.

Creating a link with a Jira issue will make it easier to collaborate by, for example, making it easier to understand why a specific version of an artifact, such as a container image, was created, added O’Mara.

Artifactory is already able to collect issue key messages from Git that logged alongside builds. The Artifactory dashboard for build information displays a link to each of the referenced Jira issues in the Issues tab. Now, users of Jira can link to the builds in Artifactory.

Jira remains the dominant project tracking and management application for software development. As more organizations appreciate the degree to which they now depend on software, O’Mara noted the number of stakeholders in an organization using Jira is starting to increase, as application development schedules are tracked more closely. Atlassian is now making Jira more accessible as a cloud service to help foster that increased adoption, noted O’Mara.

Atlassian is now making a case for transitioning its customer base to the cloud. In the third quarter of this year, it plans to discontinue new server license sales in addition to increasing prices for on-premises products. Ironically, the company reported preliminary results for its most recent third quarter that indicate revenues of between $566 million to $572 million. That’s $85 million more than originally forecasted, because demand for on-premises products has increased in anticipation of their unavailability later this year.

In general, both Atlassian and JFrog are strong proponents of a best-of-breed approach to DevOps. JFrog, in its most recent quarter, reported $42.7 million in revenue, representing a 39% gain. Cloud revenue in that quarter grew 69% to $9.8 million, representing 23% of total revenue.

It’s unclear at what rate organizations are shifting to the cloud. The number of workloads moving into the cloud has certainly accelerated in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the bulk of data continues to reside in on-premises environments, and many organizations, because of performance, security and compliance concerns, don’t have any immediate plans to migrate all their applications to the cloud.

Regardless of where DevOps platforms reside, there will always be a need to integrate them. It just may be easier to achieve that goal when all the tools that make up that workflow are running in the cloud.

April 29, 2021
IBM Unifies Cloud Services to Simplify App Dev

IBM announced today that an IBM Cloud Code Engine service that unifies the cloud platforms on which applications are built and deployed is now generally available.

Built on top of a serverless computing platform, IBM Cloud Code Engine is a managed service that unifies access to a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment, a container-as-a-service (CaaS) environment and batch workloads, that run on traditional virtual machines, to a single platform.

At the core of that managed service is an instance of Kubernetes running Knative middleware for invoking an open source serverless computing framework, the Istio service mesh and Tekton pipelines for building DevOps workflows.

Jason McGee, CTO and vice president for IBM Cloud Platform, said the goal is to eliminate the artificial constructs that developers are forced to navigate in the cloud today that can each trace their lineage to a different era of software development. The IBM Cloud Code Engine unifies the developer experience in a way that makes it simpler to build and deploy applications on the type of cloud service that best makes sense for a specific application workload, McGee said. Developers no longer need to configure code for a specific type of infrastructure; they can simply describe how they want source code or a container image to behave, and IBM Cloud Code Engine automates deployments accordingly.

The serverless computing framework that IBM Cloud Code Engine is built on also makes it possible for IBM to only charge organizations when code is actually running, versus requiring them to commit to a specific amount of infrastructure to run a set of virtual machines, McGee added. Charges are based on the memory and vCPU consumed and incoming HTTP calls. That approach will, over time, substantially reduce the total cost of cloud computing, said McGee.

It should also accelerate the rate at which applications are migrating to the cloud, added McGee. Today roughly 20% of application workloads run in the cloud. Getting the next 40% of workloads shifted into the cloud will require providing a simplified application developer experience, noted McGee.

The challenge organizations are wrestling with today is that they are deploying a mix of monolithic and microservices-based applications in the cloud that, to varying degrees, rely on batch-oriented and real-time platforms. IBM Cloud Code Engine represents an effort to provide a layer of abstraction over a wide range of cloud services that they can flexibly invoke via an event-driven platform, as required.

The DevOps implications of IBM Cloud Code Engine are potentially profound. DevOps teams today spend an inordinate amount of time provisioning cloud infrastructure on behalf of developers. IBM is now making a case for a platform that automates that process in few seconds. In effect, control over cloud infrastructure will shift even further left to application developers. DevOps teams, in theory, will spend more of their time optimizing cloud environments after an application has been deployed.

It’s not clear to what degree platforms such as IBM Cloud Code Engine might force cloud service providers to consolidate distinct cloud services they provide to developers today based on the type of application being built. However, it’s already apparent that the writing on the wall heralding that consolidation have now been indelibly inscribed.

April 28, 2021
Red Hat Extends Reach and Scope of Insights Analytics Service

During its online Red Hat Summit event, Red Hat today announced it has extended the Red Hat Insights predictive analytics cloud platform for managing IT to now include support for editions of Red Hat OpenShift based on Kubernetes and the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform.

In addition, Red Hat has extended Red Hat Insights for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) to include the ability to prioritize security alerts, streamline notifications and track Red Hat subscription consumption.

In total, since launching Red Hat Insights in 2019, Red Hat claims there are now more than 600,000 RHEL hosts analyzed per day.

Joe Fitzgerald, vice president and general manager for the management business unit at Red Hat, said Red Hat Insights provides IT teams with the equivalent of a co-pilot for managing IT environments. In general, advances in automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are making it easier to manage complex IT environments at scale, noted Fitzgerald. However, it’s not likely IT environments will be automated to the point where lights-out management without human intervention is likely to be achieved any time soon, added Fitzgerald.

However, it’s also becoming apparent that it’s not possible for IT teams to manage complex IT environments without help in the form of advanced analytics tools. In fact, while many IT professionals are leery of automation tools because of the perceived threat to their jobs, it’s also becoming apparent that IT teams will not be able to manage modern IT environments without these tools. Organizations can’t afford to hire small armies of IT personnel. In addition, finding and retaining IT professionals that have, for example, Red Hat OpenShift skills remains a significant challenge.

Red Hat Insights provides IT teams with additional levels of context required to manage these environments that goes beyond simple monitoring, noted Fitzgerald. That’s critical, as the IT environment becomes more extended in the age of hybrid cloud and the rate at which platforms are updated steadily increases, added Fitzgerald. Platforms such as Red Hat OpenShift, for example, are now typically updated every three to four months.

DevOps, of course, has always been about ruthlessly applying automation whenever possible. As analytics applications become more robust, IT teams gain the visibility required to automate a wider range of complex tasks, noted Fitzgerald. In fact, in the absence of that visibility, automation can be a dangerous thing when mistakes caused by a lack of visibility and insight are made, added Fitzgerald.

In the longer term, Red Hat expects to see continued convergence of job functions and roles as IT teams become more cross-functional, said Fitzgerald. Platforms such as Red Hat Insights will provide a single console around which these teams can collaborate, added Fitzgerald.

Going forward, there won’t be a handful of administrators with augmented capabilities. Rather, IT specialists that have a particular set of skills will be able to collaborate more easily in a way that both creates a better outcome and ultimately keeps a lid on the total cost of IT.

April 27, 2021
ServiceNow Shifts to Single Unified Agent

ServiceNow today unveiled an Agent Client Collector (ACC) that makes it possible for IT teams to capture data from software, hardware and cloud infrastructure.

Jeff Hausman, vice president and general manager for IT operations management at ServiceNow, said this unified agent will enable IT teams to reduce the number of agents they would otherwise have to deploy to collect the data required to monitor IT environments.

IT teams will also be able to employ incident management tools that can view that data in a way that eliminates the need to install any remote desktop software, Hausman noted. At a time when many employees will be splitting their time between working from home and the office, that approach reduces the level of IT service management (ITSM) friction that many IT teams today regularly encounter, added Hausman.

ACC surfaces both configuration and performance data in real-time to provide IT teams with greater visibility. That data can then be used to drive a variety of workflows and playbooks that trigger automated incident responses.

ServiceNow will employ ACC both within its ITSM platforms and IT operations management (ITOM), hardware asset management (HAM), software asset management (SAM), and security operations (SecOps) tools.

Hausman said ServiceNow will employ ACC alongside agentless tools for managing IT environments as part of an effort to strike a balance between the amount of software that needs to be deployed and the capabilities that agent software enables. Ultimately, ServiceNow will also open up ACC to third-party tools that offer complementary capabilities, he added.

More than a few IT organizations are suffering today from a phenomenon known as agent fatigue. Each new tool added to the IT arsenal often requires agent software to be installed within a device, application, server or cloud service. The need to reduce the amount of agent software has given rise to agentless approaches to managing IT resources, but the tradeoff is that, in the absence of an agent, the types of data and capabilities that can be enabled tend to be more limited.

The market research firm International Data Corp. (IDC) is predicting that 75% of Global 2000 IT organizations will adopt automated operations practices by 2023. A major driver of that increased reliance on automation has been, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only are organizations making greater use of cloud infrastructure, but application users are not often conveniently located behind a firewall in a corporate office. For the last year, IT teams have been tasked with supporting a largely remote workforce. As more of those employees are vaccinated in the weeks ahead, a lot more of them will be returning to the office. However, it’s unlikely most employees will be working in an office full-time even after the COVID-19 pandemic subsides.

Regardless of how IT is managed, the overall IT environment will continue to become more complex. As such, it’s now more a question of when rather than if organizations will need to revisit how IT gets managed across what has become a highly distributed environment.

April 22, 2021
Applause Delivers Testing Integration Tool

Applause today made a bi-directional integration capability that simplifies requesting application code tests of, dubbed Applause In-Sprint Testing, generally available.

Kristin Simonini, vice president of product for Applause, said application owners will be able to, for example, use a Jira project management application to create a ticket that requests a specific piece of code be tested either by a member of dedicated testing team or by a developer that has assumed greater responsibility for application testing within the context of a DevOps workflow.
Alternatively, that request could be sent to a tester that is a member of uTest, an online community of professional testers that Applause oversees.

The company also published the results of a global survey of 1,800 quality assurance (QA), product, engineering and DevOps professionals that found 44% of development teams that have shifted application testing left are spending a full workday every week on application testing. More than half the respondents (52%) noted that amount of time spent on testing is impacting developer productivity.

On the plus side, a full 88% of respondents that release code multiple times per month said their organizations now test features as they are developed versus waiting until the end of application development process, the survey also found.

The major benefits of shifting testing left cited by respondents are reducing the number of bugs released into production environments (57%), reducing the cost of late-stage bug fixes (48%), and reducing the need for hot-fixes (39%).

The top two barriers to shifting responsibility for testing left toward developers is they are too busy coding (45%) and that development and quality assurance (QA) efforts remain siloed (37%). Nearly half of developers (44%) said they have issues with context switching as they shift between coding and testing tasks.

Simonini said Applause In-Sprint Testing will make it easier for application owners to decide when they want to make use of a professional tester versus having a developer run a test. The Applause Product Excellence Platform then enables IT organizations to leverage a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform to record a series of test case scenarios that can be automatically converted into an automation script without anyone having to write code.

The overall goal is to simplify testing at a time when the number of applications being built has accelerated in part because of the increased focus on digital business transformation that occurred in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. As organizations realize how dependent they have become on those applications to differentiate themselves, the focus on quality assurance naturally intensifies, noted Simonini.

There’s no doubt more organizations are testing with greater frequency. The efforts of developers that previously tended to address large numbers of bugs as part of a series of application updates after deployment in production are now being frowned upon. Organizations realize their applications only get one chance to make a first impression with end customers. As a result, the level of attention to detail being applied to application testing has, for better or worse, never been greater.

April 21, 2021
How the DevOps Skill Journey Fosters a Learning Culture
Human skills, among others, have always been important; now more than ever. Empathy, diversity, creativity, personal commitment have been put to the test. The increase in remote work tends to challenge individuals in unique ways, and these human skills are becoming critical.

Top 5 Skill Domains for 2021

This year, 69% of respondents to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report told DevOps Institute they consider human skills a “must-have or very important” skill for the DevOps human, among other priorities, around skill domains as seen below:

It is no surprise that challenges around the DevOps journey continue around people, process and technology with all respondents giving them equal weight (33%).

To continue thriving within DevOps or to initiate a DevOps journey, individuals, leaders and organizations should take action in developing skills across these areas. Right?

Why, then, are only 39% of respondents reporting they have a formal upskilling program? What is the challenge for the other 61%? Recognizing the importance of these skill domains is one thing – doing something about it seems quite another. Why is so little done about upskilling?

Can these skills be taught? Well, maybe, or maybe not.

Research has shown that knowledge and skills can be developed by most people, while abilities, personal capabilities and characteristics are rather innate. Furthermore, existing human capabilities are constructs that facilitate individual learning, adaptability and development and maintain their value even when drastic environmental changes occur.

When we asked how organizations are prioritizing human skills during our research, we found that the human capability or domain is among the top five must-have skill domains. We also found that organizations have adopted both the concept of the learning organization and safety culture as two important constructs for DevOps.

3 Things to Understand about Human or “Soft” Skills
1. The human skill or domain is fundamentally different. While technical skills – such as container orchestration, CI/CD automation technologies and cloud infrastructures – can be developed through training (and these skills can be certified), the human skill domain is somewhat different. First, some human skills are shaped through experience and practice in both our personal and work life. For example, collaboration and communication skills are shaped during projects and can be adjusted according to the culture of the organization. Other skills, such as curiosity, might have been developed during early life stages or are somewhat innate.
2. Take inventory of your top human skills. Our survey respondents offered great insight on the top must-have human skills within DevOps. Every situation, however, is different, but take a look at these and do a self-check on your human skills.
3. Human skill development requires coaching and continuous feedback. No matter what methodologies organizations leverage, one key aspect is that individuals and leaders alike should have a coach or mentor who provides guidance and support. And, just as important is continuous feedback around an individual’s personal development. Today’s human resources teams might be able to assist. If not, network with others which might already model the skills needed and that can provide support and guidance.
Must-Have Human Skills According to the C-Suite

The graph below shows executives, management and individual contributors all have similar priorities when it comes to human skills. (Blue is executives and management, and orange are individual contributors)

There are some differences in opinion when it comes to multitasking, customer skills, thought leadership, business understanding, creativity, diversity and inclusion, empathy, personal value, communication, interpersonal skills, sharing and knowledge transfer.

How does one identify an individual’s potential for soft skills and other skill development? Unfortunately, this is not an exact science. One possibility is to understand what DevOps capabilities are needed, first, and then perform a skills inventory check. Then, the question becomes, how can you encourage individuals to develop their skills?

The Skill Journey Toward a Learning Organization

A learning organization is composed of individuals and leaders all interested in increasing their capabilities and improving their skills to achieve results they care about. Learning how to do something is extremely rewarding, and, at the same time, achieves specific organizational goals if the learning is aligned to the needed capabilities.

First, assessing what DevOps capabilities are missing, paired with a skill path for the DevOps team members, is a win-win.

5 Tips for Your DevOps Journey
1. Make continuous learning part of the DevOps journey. Continuous learning and education must be a fundamental best practice within your DevOps journey. A first step is always education, providing learning resources and allowing engineers and individuals to participate with and learn from others in the community.
2. Don’t hide the experts. Another critical step is determining if subject matter experts are being sheltered or siloed away. Instead, learn how to embed those people within teams, so they can spread their subject matter expertise by osmosis to others on the team.
3. Growth of skills requires time and budget. According to Jayne Groll, “Enterprises should take intentional steps to support the growth of their DevOps humans.” Some may assume that engineers learn organically, but in truth, engineers need time and budgeted resources to develop new skills, hone existing skills, experiment and improve their capabilities. This could be in the form of time to attend a virtual conference, go to a training class, practice in a sandbox and/or doing peer-to-peer mentoring. Just take a look at site reliability engineers, for example, which are tasked with spending half of their time “making tomorrow better than today” by reducing toil through automation. DevOps engineers should be allotted a similar amount of time to do the same.
4. Adopt a buddy system. The adoption of a coach or buddy system to further aid individual learning and growth is an excellent idea; pair less-skilled DevOps humans and engineers with highly skilled and experienced ones, and watch growth happen. This helps growth on both sides – both for the experienced buddy and the less-experienced person, in learning and teaching.
5. Equip your leaders. Leaders are expected to know how to do things, right? To have all the answers? Well, not really. Some research has shown that the largest group of leaders today are “accidental leaders,” and 60% of frontline leaders say they have never received any training for their new role. Leaders need to learn and upskill, as well.
The challenges of the past year showcased the importance of human skills in transformational efforts. Without the spirit, willingness, collaboration, cooperation and competencies of IT professionals around the world, many enterprises would not have been able to adapt to rapidly changing business models in a pandemic-fueled economy. As we continue into this next decade, organizations should plan to invest in upskilling their humans as much (or even more) than their technology.
April 21, 2021
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.

April 20, 2021
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.

April 19, 2021