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Category: Features

  • Helping Bring Balance, Diversity to the IT Workforce

    Helping Bring Balance, Diversity to the IT Workforce

    It’s a fact: Minorities and women traditionally have been underrepresented in the IT space. According to the Brookings Institute, less than 7% of computing and math-related jobs are held by people who are Black and Latino. And while women are faring better, they still only represent about 30% of the workforce in computer and mathematical occupations, according to the institute. Clearly, there is more work to be done in creating a balanced, diverse IT workforce.

    At MediaOps, one of the traits I believe helps define this company is inclusiveness, recognizing the value each person in our organization brings to the table. Different educations, different backgrounds, different perspectives … they all help us see the world in a different light and make decisions that are rooted less in biases and more with a deeper understanding fomented by the populations each of us represents. This, I believe, is fundamental in achieving balance; by recognizing and celebrating our differences, we create a strong, unified organization.

    Be the Change

    It is with the goals of diversity and inclusiveness that MediaOps is proud to announce “Engineer the Change,” a scholarship program in conjunction with Boca Code, an immersive coding school that provides in-depth technical training. MediaOps will sponsor two scholarships annually to students from disadvantaged communities interested in pursuing a career in the tech industry. The scholarships, each valued at $10,000, will enable students to enroll in the flagship Software Engineering Career Course at Boca Code.

    The “Engineer the Change” scholarships will be awarded to two deserving recipients on an annual basis. To be eligible, applicants must be 18 years or older and be part of an underrepresented community. To be considered, applicants will be required to submit an essay detailing how they can serve as role models to other disadvantaged individuals hoping to acquire the skills to become successful tech workers, and what type of career in the tech industry they are hoping to pursue. While the idea is to help the South Florida tech community, applicants can apply from anywhere, as long as they include in their application essay why they are coming to South Florida to launch their tech career.

    Submissions for the first scholarship for the Software Engineering session, taking place April 5-June 4, are now open. The deadline to apply is March 15. The second scholarship application process will open Aug. 1 for the session taking place Sept. 20-Dec. 3.

    To learn more about how to apply for the scholarship, please visit: https://mediaops.com/engineer-the-change/

    Get Involved

    MediaOps is offering these scholarships because we believe diversity enriches everything. We encourage other companies to do their part to help promote diversity and inclusiveness, both within their organization and through programs targeting underrepresented communities locally or regionally. It is time for the IT sector to do its part in promoting technology to women, minorities and other traditionally underrepresented groups; only by getting involved today will we help shape the next generation of technology workers.

  • Datadog to Meld Observability and DevSecOps

    Datadog to Meld Observability and DevSecOps

    Datadog is planning to expand the scope of the security and observability services it provides following the acquisitions of Sqreen, an application security platform provider, and Timber Technologies, a provider of a tool, called Vector, for collecting and normalizing log data.

    Ilan Rabinovitch, vice president of product and community for Datadog, said Vector makes it possible to collect, enrich and transform logs and other observability data from both on-premises and in-cloud environments in a way that makes it easier to route that data to wherever it is needed via a data pipeline.

    Sqreen is a provider of a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that detects, blocks and responds to application-level attacks using runtime application self-protection (RASP) capabilities enabled by a web application firewall (WAF) embedded within an application.

    Rabinovitch said as IT continues to evolve, it’s clear organizations are looking to embrace DevSecOps best practices in a way that will require security tools that can be embedded within an application, coupled with observability tools that provide more context about the overall IT environment. That context is especially critical, given the amount of data that needs to be analyzed to determine the potential scope of a security threat to an IT environment, Rabinovitch said.

    The Datadog platform is already widely employed to monitor cloud computing environments. There is an industry wide effort to take monitoring to the next level by enabling observability, which applies analytics to provide more context. Surfacing that context, however, requires the ability to normalize data across a pipeline using Vector, Rabinovitch said.

    Of course, the Vector tools are equally applicable to DevOps workflows that have yet to incorporate security technologies. The goal, now, is to make it easier for IT teams, made up of developers, IT operations teams and security specialists, to collaborate by breaking down the various data silos created by IT and security management tools.

    It’s too early to tell what impact the rise of DevSecOps will have on roles within IT organizations. Most organizations will continue to employ a range of specialists that will be able to work more closely with IT generalists, Rabinovitch said. Managing IT is becoming the equivalent of a barn raising, in that it requires members of a community with different skills to come together for a certain amount of time to accomplish a specific task, Rabinovitch added.

    It’s also not clear whether IT organizations view observability as a distinct capability separate from monitoring, or whether they will simply view observability as the next logical extension of existing tools. At the core of that issue is debate over whether observability platforms need to be acquired separately, as part of an effort to replace existing monitoring tools, or whether those tools will evolve over time to provide observability capabilities.

    Regardless of the path forward, it’s apparent the increased complexity of modern IT environments – made up of microservices, containers and serverless computing frameworks – is about to force that issue.

  • Could No-Code Enable Everything Ops?

    Could No-Code Enable Everything Ops?

    It feels like DevOps principles are permeating every discipline, creating new buzzwords by the minute. DevSecOps. DatabaseOps. SalesOps. FinOps. MarketingOps. This “JargonOps” is clearly encouraged by marketing campaigns (and bloggers, wink, wink). Yet, the phrases do depict a real trend: all industries are getting an efficiency overhaul in the wake of increased automation.

    As I’ve covered before, low-code and no-code tools lower the barrier to entry to application development, enabling field experts to construct workflows as they see fit. For tech-savvy non-engineers, this could be a huge boon to transform copy-and-paste stopgaps into efficient workflow automations.

    I recently chatted with self-proclaimed “productivity geek” Sean Chou, CEO of Catalytic, to get his take on where this new era of automation is heading. From healthcare to logistics, advertising to supply chain management, every industry is likely to get an efficiency boost — and a lot of this digitization will be constructed using codeless environments.

    But first, how did we get here?

    From RPA to No-Code

    “The story of B2B software is largely about automation,” said Chou. If we consider classic examples of corporate applications, we see one common thread — B2B software has always sought to automate traditional office work.

    And so, it came to pass that computing and software devoured all these office tasks, from accounting to time-tracking, communications and many other areas. Though computer-based office work delivered huge efficiency boosts, these interfaces often introduced new hurdles; bad UI design, difficult navigation and a hundred open tabs, just to name a few.

    From there, robotic process automation (RPA) aimed to operationalize a growing number of tedious digital workflows across Excel spreadsheets, web apps and desktop apps. In Chou’s words, “RPA took the concepts of test automation software, and then pointed it toward production systems.”

    Though RPA’s process of recording screen interactions gathered much interest and attention (and funding), screen scraping is ultimately too fragile to be effective. It adds technical debt over legacy systems. It can be expensive to implement. Lastly, it’s not processes-centric and doesn’t implement reusable software-defined APIs.

    At that point, though, “Pandora’s box was open,” Chou said. Folks started to consider other ways to optimize, and reimagine how end users could automate workflows and stitch together interactions between disparate apps.

    Out of the ashes of RPA rose a new paradigm — low-code and no-code.

    No-Code Addresses Everything Ops

    With developer resources stretched thin and limited engineering talent available, it can be challenging to loop expert programmers into codifying traditionally non-IT processes.

    There’s not often enough developers to help with SalesOps, FinOps or any other Ops areas, explained Chou. “The only thing that can change the narrative is no-code technology that is effective.”

    Similar to how higher-level programming languages made low-level programming more accessible, Chou sees low-code and no-code unlocking accessibility for automation design by orders of magnitude.

    Four Examples of Everything Ops

    So, what are some examples of no-code use cases for automating operations? Chou outlined four specific categories that he believes will see much more citizen developer attention and action in the years to come:

    Customer Ops: “It’s really important to run customer operations as efficiently as possible,” Chou said. Especially in B2B interactions, people need to adopt various systems dictated by the customer. This can result in many ad-hoc implementations that beg for efficiency improvements.

    Financial Ops: Imagine the number of Excel spreadsheets that make up an account’s financial foundation. Consider the tedium of inputting data, generating reports or migrating calculations into other tools. There’s a ton to automate here. Providing no-code platforms to financial minds could have a “really transforming effect,” said Chou.

    People Ops: “The number of mini apps being developed for HR use cases is astounding,” Chou said. Think of all the digital tools HR must use: vacation requests, employee performance reviews, personnel databases – the list goes on. There’s a significant opportunity to clean up legacy applications within many HR departments to build a more coherent platform.

    SupplyChain Ops: Procurement and supply chain operations is another area where no-code could have an impact. Streamlining inter-company communications or engaging with potential customers are areas worthy of automation.

    No-Code? No Problem

    Across all these verticals, Chou notices three common patterns emerging.

    First, groups are using no-code to create standard operating procedures (SOP). SOPs could be used for onboarding or offboarding customers or ensuring compliance with a set of policies.

    Another everyday use is data pipelining — pulling information from many resources for analysis. A common use case is processing financial or customer data to generate a particular output. This is an area where embedded machine learning models could enrich the data.

    Lastly, a third common use case is creating workflow-powered surveys. These online forms could be used to measure employee engagement or to collect customer input. No-code workflows enable not only the collection of that data, but could allow for additional actions to be taken upon input.

    Implications and Governance

    Of course, giving non-developers the keys to the castle could have some downsides. Let’s face it — computer science is, well, a science. There’s a reason engineers are taught strict practices around version control, data governance and peer reviews. All of which must still be upheld when establishing a citizen development culture — especially at scale.

    When it comes to low-code and no-code, “governance is a huge thing,” said Chou. “Any company coming at this with no governance in mind can’t work beyond small teams.” Move beyond 10 or so citizen developers, and you’ll really need to establish some sort of shared framework or center of excellence.

    Making citizen development work in a large company requires IT visibility, data governance and a review process for new workflows, said Chou. IT will likely also want to verify that a new workflow doesn’t make permanent state changes. Otherwise, static apps that don’t touch core systems or affect persistent data stores are probably fine. “Having built-in governance is really key to making this successful,” Chou said.

    A Technology Leap

    No-code is giving more people the ability to produce unique workflows to increase their efficiency and do more with less. But with this movement comes worry. “With every technology leap, there’s always a wave of people concerned,” said Chou. Many naysayers are worried that automation will leave people out of work – “They’re coming for our office jobs!”

    Instead, Chou recommended we curb our expectations. Citizen developers are not going to build sophisticated iPhone apps any time soon. “If you think no-code is a panacea for all software, you’re coming at it all wrong,” he said. Instead, what they can actually can accomplish is far more practical.

    In reality, things are not as dire as some may make it seem. The new age of automation will likely open room for more jobs than it diminishes. “The net is always a plus,” said Chou.

  • Puppet Adds DevOps Consulting Practice

    Puppet Adds DevOps Consulting Practice

    Puppet has launched a DevOps consulting service that promises to help organizations implement best practices that will ultimately make their IT organizations more efficient.

    Nigel Kersten, field CTO, Puppet, said the Scaling DevOps Service is especially focused on improving workflows among organizations that have already started down the DevOps path.

    Most IT organizations that embrace DevOps eventually encounter bottlenecks that conspire to limit the rate at which they can build and deploy applications. Puppet will make available DevOps experts capable of assessing DevOps workflows as part of an effort to reduce operational friction, said Kersten.

    Those consultants can also identify integration opportunities that might further streamline workflows, in addition to providing an overall assessment of an organization’s DevOps maturity based on a model Puppet developed.

    Kersten said in many cases, enterprise IT organizations, especially, are trying to adapt DevOps principles that were originally created for small startup companies, with mixed success. Puppet consultants, using observations gleaned from their own engagements with customers that have embraced its tools for automating the management of IT, are often in a better position to identify ways to optimize DevOps workflows across larger IT organizations, Kersten said.

    It’s also easy for large enterprise IT organizations to misinterpret how one DevOps principle or another should actually be implemented, Kersten said.

    DevOps consulting, of course, has become a cottage industry within the IT services sector over the last decade. Now, almost every systems integrator has a DevOps practice. Most of those practices are focused on enabling organizations to embrace DevOps, versus helping organizations optimize workflows after they have already begun the transition, said Kersten.

    It’s not clear to what degree organizations that have not embraced Puppet’s automation framework will embrace consulting services based on a DevOps model created by observing Puppet’s customers. However, it’s apparent many IT organizations have inconsistently implemented DevOps practices across various departments. In many cases, bottlenecks that result in various departments within a larger IT organization are being addressed using a set of manual processes that have been created as a workaround to a specific problem.

    Of course, optimizing DevSecOps best processes is only going to become more challenging as emergent technologies such as containers, Kubernetes clusters and serverless computing frameworks are added to the IT mix. More challenging still, many organizations are now trying to shift responsibility for security further left as part of a DevSecOps workflow.

    Many IT teams are, naturally, resistant to paying for advice, while others routinely hire small armies of consultants in the hope that ideas and concepts that have worked well elsewhere can make their IT teams more efficient. Regardless of the approach pursued, IT leaders need to remember that DevOps is a continuous journey. Every time a new platform is added to an IT environment, a DevOps workflow will need to evolve. The real issue IT leaders need to come to terms with is how long it will take for their internal teams to adapt, whether it’s via the school of hard knocks or relying on external expertise that has handled most of the issues an internal IT team is likely to encounter.

  • Game On: Secure Coding Virtual Summit 2021

    Game On: Secure Coding Virtual Summit 2021

    Agile organizations are looking for ways to win at security without slowing down their release cycles. That’s where DevSecOps comes in. The days of a hands-off security approach for developers are over. Organizations implementing DevSecOps to integrate security into their DevOps framework are able to release secure software faster. Developers test code for potential security vulnerabilities earlier in the pipeline to fix security issues in real time to avoid costly delays.

    At Secure Coding Virtual Summit 2021, industry-leading AppSec and DevSecOps practitioners, analysts and visionaries will come together to share their best pro tips and power ups to level up your code security. The agenda for the virtual event, taking place March 24 from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. ET, features a mix of topics including AppSec, threat modeling, API security, container security, case studies and more.

    The most brilliant security luminaries from OWASP, Okta, Microsoft, Secure Code Warrior, WhiteSource and many other well-known IT companies, will discuss:

    • How to level up your secure coding strategies
    • How to run an AppSec program with open source projects
    • The best practices for securing your APIs, the attack surface of an API and common authorization problems
    • The concept of threat modeling, its objectives and its role in the SDLC
    • How to transform developers into security people
    • How easy (or not) it is to get a container or Kubernetes cluster hacked on purpose
    • How to create an AppSec pipeline with containers in a short period of time (demo)

    This year’s Secure Coding features outstanding industry leaders, such as:

    • Vandana Verma Sehgal, global board of directors at OWASP
    • Simone Curzi, cybersecurity principal consultant at Microsoft
    • Keith Casey, API problem solver at Okta
    • Matias Madou, CTO and co-founder at Secure Code Warrior
    • Matthew Coles, senior principal product security engineer at Dell
    • Sarah Young, security architect at Microsoft
    • Chris Romeo, CEO and co-founder at Security Journey
    • Dr. Phillipe de Ryck, web security expert and founder at Pragmatic Web Security
    • Richard Greenberg, founder and CEO at Security Advisors LLC
    • Izar Tarandach, principal security engineer at Squarespace
    • Jeroen Willemsen, principal security architect at Xebia
    • Shiri Ivtsan, director of product at WhiteSource
    • Justin Hutchings, director of product management at GitHub
    • Matt Tesauro, senior partner at 10 Security
    • Matthew Butler, principle engineer at Laurel Lye

    Attendees will have access to useful resources and will be able to interact with sponsors to power up their secure coding strategies. There will be live Q&A chats with keynote speakers to get your burning questions answered. Attendees will also have the opportunity to hunt for Easter eggs to boost their player score for a chance to win a PlayStation 5.

    To see the full agenda and to register, please visit the Secure Coding website.

  • How to Respond to Rising Cloud Costs

    How to Respond to Rising Cloud Costs

    As organizations ascend to the cloud, their cloud expenses are floating to the same lofty heights. But are all cloud costs necessary? The answer is a resounding no — there’s a lot of waste.

    In 2020, organizations wasted $17.6 billion on idle cloud resources and cloud overspending, according to ParkMyCloud. Data egress, upgrades and subscriptions to SaaS tools also crowded the cloud invoice inbox. With digital innovation a pressing concern, cloud spend is forecasted to rise significantly in the coming years. Without the right fiscal discipline in place, companies face escalating fees.

    I recently met with Eugene Khvostov, VP of product management at Apptio, to discover how organizations can rein in cloud and SaaS spending. According to Khvostov, IT departments require increased visibility, optimization and responsibility if they are to curb the cloud checkbook. Below, we’ll see what he means and discover useful tips for reducing unnecessary expenditures. Following these general guidelines could help right-size your cloud offerings across AWS, GCP, Azure and other cloud-based tools.

    Where We Are With Cloud Costs

    The pandemic has ushered in significant growth in the cloud computing and SaaS space. We’re also seeing a multi-cloud fracturing effect, as cloud service providers like GCP and Azure reach parity with AWS offerings.

    Cloud tooling grants extraordinary flexibility, elasticity and scalability. Being able to spin up or wind down an instance on a whim has permanently altered how software architecture is built. Yet, with great cloud power, comes great responsibility. “How do I make sure I’m not wasting money in the cloud?” Khvostov asked.

    According to Khvostov, as more organizations move to hybrid and decentralized multi-cloud models, more and more questions arise: What is the total cost per service? Who is spending what? Is cloud spend actually driving growth, and, if so, how much? How are new tools being procured?

    Three Cloud Financial Management Strategies

    To address these concerns and plan for cloud spending increases, Khvostov recommended three general strategies. These three phases can be thought of as research, remediation and prevention.

    1. Access and Visibility

    “You’ve got to have access and visibility,” said Khvostov.

    First, companies require access to their spending data. In this case, large, general invoices are not granular enough. You need breakdowns by service, said Khvostov, to access more fine-grained spending habits.

    Second, you need to equate those spending habits to team usage. This requires improved visibility into your organizational structure and service usage tracking at a team-by-team level.

    2. Optimize

    Next comes optimization. Ensure cloud footprints are appropriately sized for each application, and ensure you don’t have any idle resources, Khvostov said.

    Where do you have the opportunity to optimize? Well, it could be as simple as shuttering an orphaned volume, such as an Amazon Elastic Block Store (EBS), which could persist even after an EC2 instance is terminated.

    “BS volumes tend to persist unless you select the Delete on Termination,” AWS explained. So, check your configurations. Amazon provides a way to detect this using OpsCenter.

    3. Responsibility

    Once things are optimized, you need to maintain standards. “You must ensure teams drive responsibility for spend management and optimization,” said Khvostov.

    But how do you instill an optimization mindset and empower engineers to take action? Khvostov said it’s all about demonstrating a measurable return on investment (ROI) and continuing discussions between stakeholders.

    A recent report from A Cloud Guru found that 90% of organizations plan to expand their cloud services over the next one to three years, but 44% lack a plan to upskill their workforce. Most groups have their work cut out for them if they are to assign accountability for cloud costs ownership.

    Specific Cloud Costs That Bite

    So, what are some other particular areas we should be watching? Well, arguably, the most common cost is hidden data transfer fees. Surprise ingress and egress fees can be costly — take the story of Chris Short, whose personal site was charged $2700 for an unexpected 30.6 TB data transfer.

    Watch out for other cloud costs around:

    • Services automatically launching or autoscaling.
    • Idle resources due to “orphan” instances or overprovisioning.
    • Price lock on granular commitments. You could be stuck in a savings plan on an Amazon EC2 R5 instance, which would be lost upon upgrade to R6. (Khvostov acknowledged that AWS has remedied this situation, to an extent).
    • Legacy, less-efficient code can rack up cloud costs, The Information reports.

    The Cloud Economist Role Is Trending

    To unearth these costs, some believe a brand new role is required. A cloud economist is a cloud financial manager that helps spot fees, directs further cloud optimizations and calculates overall ROI from cloud investments.

    The rise of cloud financial offers is an accelerating trend, Khvostov said, one that requires the right tools and practices within an organization to become a trusted ally. “It’s definitely a legitimate role in the sense that it’s critical to organizations,” said Khvostov. “It’s specialized enough that it requires technical and financial skills.”

    Hiring a cloud economist, or building a cloud financial center of excellence, could provide a lot of value. Yet, gauging the ROI of this role isn’t immediately obvious. Some optimizations could take time to visualize, Khvostov said. A certain change could instantly invoke 20% cost savings, but you may not register that impact for 30 days or more.

    “It’s not just about cloud infrastructure — it’s about your SaaS spend, as well,” Khvostov added. He believes companies desperately need a window into what infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and automation, like Chef or Jenkins, cost, along with the time savings and dollar ROI their usage equates to — because, he said, “You can only right-size what you know.”

    Trimming Cloud Spend and Cloud Costs

    Some IT folks simply fail to understand the implications of their cloud resources. Surprisingly, a recent survey by SoftwareONE revealed that 30% don’t realize that everything in the cloud is metered. To rectify this knowledge gap, organizations could use better awareness into their cloud holdings.

    The cloud is the future, and we must prepare responsibly. Yet, having fiscal discipline in a world where every software function is commodified “as-a-service” is tricky — teams require financial visibility into their cloud holdings. To rein in costs, Khvostov recommended treating it as a continuous process: access and visualize spending data, optimize your existing cloud footprint and disseminate responsibility among teams.

    Once you have a better frame of reference, you can begin to right-size cloud, right-size SaaS and appropriately right-size the team. Eventually, with the right multi-cloud and SaaS financial management strategies, perhaps that cloud bill will start to feel a little lighter.

  • GitLab Releases Updates to CI/CD Platform

    GitLab Releases Updates to CI/CD Platform

    GitLab this week made available a 13.9 update that adds more than 60 new features and updated capabilities to its namesake open source continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

    Brian Glanz, a product marketing manager for GitLab, said chief among those capabilities is a Security Alert Dashboard that enables DevOps teams to triage high-priority alerts more easily. As more organizations embrace DevSecOps best processes, application development teams need to be able to prioritize which security issues are more pressing than others, Glanz said.

    Other new capabilities include the ability to reuse a pipeline of a CI/CD configuration, and a maintenance mode option that keeps instance available while administrative tasks are being performed.

    Additionally, it’s now possible to view group-level analysis of release metrics, in addition to the ability to view a version of a pipeline configuration with all of the include and extends configurations merged together.

    Glanz said GitLab continues to gain traction, because all the capabilities it provides are based on the same integrated code base. The effort a DevOps team needs to exert to take advantage of new capabilities is substantially less than rival platforms, Glanz said.

    At the same time, Glanz noted that the number of contributors to GitLab coming from outside the company also continues to increase. The latest version has 299 merged contributions from the wider GitLab community.

    It’s not clear how much of an appetite organizations have, these days, to replace an existing CI/CD platform. However, it’s not uncommon for organizations to have multiple CI/CD platforms employed by different DevOps teams. In the meantime, the number of teams within enterprise IT organizations that are embracing DevSecOps processes to advance digital business transformation initiatives continues to rise. As more organizations realize how dependent they are on custom software to differentiate themselves from rivals, more enterprise IT organizations will opt to standardize on a single CI/CD platform to both reduce costs and increase overall efficiency.

    A report published last year by GitLab noted organizations can improve application development and delivery by 87%, resulting in a savings of more than $23 million. Overall, the report claims organizations can see a 407% return on investment (ROI) on the GitLab platform.

    Naturally, competition among CI/CD platform providers remains fierce. With most developers working from home to help combat the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, these platform providers have been touting their ability to support remote work. It’s not clear if developers will be returning to the office en masse now that COVID-19 vaccines are being distributed. However, it’s clear that even once the pandemic subsides, the way application code is created and maintained will be a lot more fluid. Many organizations are now more comfortable hiring developers wherever they can find them.

    Of course, many of those developers are going to be wary of joining organizations that have disjointed workflows, especially when it comes to shifting responsibility for application security further left toward developers. In fact, the ability of any organization to effectively recruit developers is now directly tied to the overall sophistication of their DevOps workflows.

  • SolarWinds Unveils Revamped APM Platform

    SolarWinds Unveils Revamped APM Platform

    SolarWinds is unifying its various application performance management (APM) tools within a single suite accessed via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform.

    Denny LeCompte, senior vice president for products at SolarWinds, said the APM Integrated Experience offering combines the company’s AppOptics, Loggly and Pingdom tools to collect metrics, traces and logs along with real user monitoring capabilities and tools to simulate application traffic.

    APM Integrated Experience also provides access to a landing page that identifies what has changed in an IT environment over the previous week and highlights which of those changes might become an issue. As most IT professionals well understand, most IT issues can be traced directly back to a recent change made to an IT environment that was previously running as intended.

    Other capabilities include advanced search tools and the ability to inspect lists and maps for hosts, containers and plugins for web servers and databases. In addition, APM Integrated Experience is integrated with both Amazon Web Services (AWS) and the Microsoft Azure cloud.

    LeCompte said the goal is to make it less expensive for the average IT organization to broadly instrument applications using an agent developed by SolarWinds that can automatically be installed.

    Ultimately, the goal is to enable organizations to better manage their software supply chains, LeCompte added. Of course, SolarWinds is at the heart of the software supply chain breach that involved its Orion network management software. That software runs on-premises. In comparison, APM Integrated Experience is a SaaS platform that is more secure. In fact, LeCompte said, IT professionals that manage software supply chains are generally sympathetic to the challenge the company currently faces. Most of those organizations have dealt with similar software supply chain issues, albeit on a smaller scale, LeCompte added.

    In general, LeCompte said it’s apparent most organizations need access to an APM platform that costs substantially less than rival platforms and still delivers 90% of the capabilities they require. In many cases, IT organizations are paying for extra capabilities that only very high-end enterprises require, LeCompte noted. In fact, one of the primary reasons APM platforms are not as widely employed is most organizations have found rival APM platforms simply too expensive to deploy, said LeCompte.

    LeCompte declined to speculate whether there is a meaningful difference between what has been historically known as monitoring and so-called observability platforms that have emerged in recent months. Regardless of approach, however, it’s clear as distributed IT environments become more diverse and complex, the number of organizations that need more visibility into their application environment is steadily increasing, said LeCompte.

    Of course, with the rise of microservices-based applications, that level of IT complexity is only going to increase. As applications grow and expand, the number of dependencies between microservices starts to increase. Understanding how an issue with one microservice is impacting a distributed computing environment will undoubtedly require more instrumentation. The challenge, going forward, will be determining how best to achieve that goal at a reasonable cost.

  • Applause Automates App Testing via SaaS Platform

    Applause Automates App Testing via SaaS Platform

    Applause today unfurled a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that makes it easier to automatically create test automation scripts without having to write code.

    At the same time, the company is adding support for an application programming interface (API) through which DevOps teams can send new features to be tested by the Applause platform.

    Both offerings are now being included with a rebranded Product Excellence Platform (PEP) offering, a suite of tools and platform through which Applause is making its portfolio of offerings more accessible.

    Rob Mason, Applause CTO, said the Applause Codeless Automation (ACA) platform makes it possible for testers to record a series of test case scenarios using a SaaS platform that translates those sessions into an automation script without anyone having to write any code. The current offering supports Android and Apple iOS applications with support for web applications planned, Mason said.

    An Applause In-Sprint Testing capability, meanwhile, makes the testing process more iterative using a bi-directional API that can be plugged into any software development life cycle (SDLC) process, Mason said. That bi-directional capability makes it possible to embed the feedback from the testing process into any bug tracking system implemented by an application development team, said Mason.

    Mason said that capability is critical, because it enables DevOps teams to identify issues earlier, thereby avoiding late-stage bug fixes that are more costly to fix. It also provides the added benefit of making it easier for developers to address issues in the moment applications are being written, versus days or weeks later when the context around that issue has long since been lost, Mason added. The SaaS platform provide developers with a just-in-time testing capability, Mason said.

    Ultimately, Mason said the goal is to make it simpler for a wider range of individuals to participate in application testing by making it easier to reuse tests. In addition, he said, it will allow subject matter experts to record tests that can be turned into test scripts on their behalf. That approach will enable organizations to push testing further left, beyond the developers that originally created an application, to include the owners of that application, Mason added.

    The rate at which applications are being built to drive digital business transformation initiatives is increasing, and makes testing more problematic. Automation is the only way to close the gap between the number of application testers an organization can dedicate and all the applications being developed. The automated approach not only reduces the time and effort required to create a test, it also makes it easier to reuse tests across different application use cases.

    Ultimately, it’s only a matter of time before machine learning (ML) algorithms and other AI capabilities play a larger role in application testing. The challenge will be finding exactly where the interface between humans and machines should lie in the context of application testing.

    In the meantime, the more automated testing becomes, the more widely it will be conducted. The results of those tests may not always be welcome news, but the issues they raise are always better addressed sooner than later.

  • Mabl Adds Beta of Desktop Continuous Testing Tool

    Mabl Adds Beta of Desktop Continuous Testing Tool

    Mabl today announced availability of a beta version of a desktop tool for creating tests that can be applied to browsers and application programming interfaces (APIs) using a low-code tool.

    Dan Belcher, co-founder of Mabl, said the goal is to make it simpler to streamline testing processes as responsibility for application quality assurance (QA) continues to shift left within the context of a DevOps workflow.

    Mabl provides a low-code tool for testing desktop and mobile browser applications, alongside the APIs they invoke, using an Electron tool that generates tests in a way that eliminates the need to write scripts. Previously available only via a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform, Belcher said the desktop platform will make it simpler for developers to test code as they develop it on a local machine.

    Developers using the desktop tool can now also manage and run tests instantly via command line interface, versus having to completely exit from a project to invoke a separate testing tool, Belcher said.

    The Mabl testing tools are already integrated with multiple continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platforms, such as Bitbucket and Bamboo, as well as the GitHub repository.

    In the longer term, Belcher said it is clear organizations will need to involve more developers in QA testing, as the rate at which applications are being built and deployed continues to increase. Testing teams, on their own, can no longer keep pace with the rate of change, Belcher noted.

    The challenge is achieving that goal in a way that creates the least amount of friction possible, Belcher added. The Mabl platform and desktop application make it feasible for developers to test both web and mobile applications without taking too much time away from developing application code, said Belcher.

    Testing has become a major DevOps issue because, as developers assume more responsibility for applications after they have been deployed in a production environment, they naturally want to vet applications more thoroughly. Issues that arise after an application is deployed simply result in less time available to write new code. There will always be issues that need to be addressed, but the more of them that are resolved as part of a QA process integrated within a DevOps workflow, the more productive an application development team will be.

    Unfortunately, testing is often given short shrift; it primarily occurs at the back end of the application development life cycle. Developers are typically behind schedule, so there is a natural tendency to reduce the amount of time allocated to testing in the hope of making an application delivery deadline. The vicious cycle that ensues is that, inevitably, there are more bugs to fix after an application has been deployed, simply because not enough testing was done during the original development cycle.

    Of course, some development teams have become conditioned to fixing bugs as part of an agile development process that, too often, encourages them to push known issues off to the next sprint. The trouble is, in the absence of continuous testing, it’s not long before all those known bugs start to pile up. It’s not uncommon for applications to be riddled with bugs that development teams – with mixed success – attempt to address all at once. The earlier those issues are addressed, the less stress there will be later for all concerned.