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Category: Features

Digital Anarchist – Watch What’s Next in Tech
Today, we announce the launch of the next version of Digital Anarchist, our next-generation video platform, at digitalanarchist.com. The content is also available on the DevOps.com mobile app and OTT channels on Apple TV, Roku and Amazon Fire TV.

Boasting more than 1,400 videos and featuring 1,000-plus guests, the Digital Anarchist library may be the single largest collection of videos covering topics related to DevOps, cyber, cloud-native and digital transformation. It includes webinars from across the MediaOps properties, virtual event sessions, interviews from conferences around the world, DevOps Chats and more.

The new interface, video recommendations and searchable guest and video index are more closely aligned with the original vision of Digital Anarchist that John Willis and I had when we came up with the concept. Providing a consistent user experience across different platforms and applications has proven to be a challenge. We continue to work at it.

The No. 1 Source for IT News and Entertainment

Digital Anarchist is a hub with thousands of hours of information, serving as a catalyst for digital transformation that disrupts the outdated and inefficient, providing the information organizations need for a faster, higher-quality and more secure future.

Visitors and subscribers will have access to exclusive live and on-demand content from a variety of channels:
- Virtual Events – Catch up on sessions and one-on-one interviews with industry leaders from more than a dozen conferences and virtual events hosted in the last 12 months.
- Analyst Corner – View weekly segments hosted by Accelerated Strategies Group’s analysts and seasoned industry veterans, covering the latest trends and opportunities for businesses during these unprecedented times.
- TechStrong TV – Live-stream TechStrong TV on Digital Anarchist three days a week or access previous episodes to hear honest and open dialogues with tech leaders and executives covering the latest news.
- DevOps Chats – Hear the latest episodes of “fireside” podcasts featuring DevOps.com and Security Boulevard Editor in Chief Alan Shimel and Accelerated Strategies Group CEO Mitch Ashley, as they chat with luminaries and thought leaders in DevOps and security.
- On-Demand Webinars – Replay webinars from DevOps.com, Security Boulevard and Container Journal 30 days after the live event.
- CISO Talks – Join MediaOps CEO Alan Shimel and Unisys CISO Mathew Newfield in a bi-weekly series to explore the latest in cyberspace, featuring other experts and newsmakers in the field.
- DevOps Unbound – This bi-weekly/monthly roundtable, sponsored by Tricentis, provides a deep-dive into DevOps, with an emphasis on continuous testing and automation. Roundtables will be open to audience interaction as well.
State-of-the-Art Studio and Video Production

Digital Anarchist features both original and third-party content. The streaming service also provides video production, distribution and sponsorship, offering opportunities for both branding and lead generation campaigns.

Using state-of-the-art digital HD equipment and dynamic post-production video editing, the Digital Anarchist team is highly qualified to create custom videos to tell your story and reach a global audience. Some of Digital Anarchist’s services include:
- Educational series.
- Case studies.
- Brand marketing videos.
- Storytelling testimonials.
- Sponsored ads.
If you would like to have your video content featured on Digital Anarchist, reach out to us at sales@mediaops.com.

In the meantime, please check out the new site and subscribe if you’d like to be the first to see the 15 to 20 new videos we add on a weekly basis. And, as always, your feedback is welcome.
July 7, 2020
How COVID-19 Has Affected Digital Transformation

The current COVID-19 pandemic may have changed the way many of us work and impacted productivity, but digital transformation marches on. With technology arguably more important than ever, digital transformation needs acceleration, and companies are beginning their journey with the cloud. That’s according to results from a survey by cloud service provider Ancoris and the Cloud Industry Forum (CIF).

The survey, which was conducted in the UK by Vanson Bourne prior to the lockdown, is comprised of responses from IT companies and business decision-makers in digital transformation to understand how they were utilizing next-generation technologies and the cloud. According to the results, 80% said they had their digital transformation strategies at hand, compared to today. With the novel coronavirus putting more pressure and less time on these companies to plan, only 18% of them have a strategy in place. “The very survival of office-based organization has hinged on their ability to adapt and go remote as quickly as possible,” Ancoris CEO David McLeman noted, which is putting pressure on companies to pivot as quickly as possible.

Before the lockdown, the cloud was considered a vital element of their digital transformation efforts for 25% of respondents in the business and professional services sectors, 23% in the public sector, 22% in retail and surprisingly low 19% of respondents in the financial sector.

Among other key findings: twenty-eight percent of businesses already have their digital transformation strategies fully in place, while 54% have begun their implementation. Businesses are also seeing the importance of the cloud, as 93% of respondents said their companies use it in some sort of way. And 25% of respondents said that they don’t get enough assistance from partners in helping them make strides in digital transformation.

McLeman emphasized the importance of having external partners now and after COVID-19. They play a “leading role” in helping companies digitize, he said, and will be an “increasing integral component on ongoing digital transformation” post-COVID-19.

July 6, 2020
Financial Services: Future Proofing Your Digital Transformation Strategy
The Financial Services: Future Proofing Your Digital Transformation Strategy virtual event will explore the state of development and DevOps in the finance industry, and how organizations can digitally transform their strategy in order to release new, compliant applications and safely adapt to change at any speed demanded by the business. The virtual event will take place on July 9 at 2:30 p.m. CEST (8:30 a.m. ET).

CloudBees is bringing together a stellar line-up of thought leaders to discuss the impact of digital transformation in financial services, including:
- Sacha Labourey, CEO of CloudBees
- Jost Hoppermann, VP and principal analyst at Forrester
- Chafin Bryant, software engineering manager at Capital One
- Keith Blizard, SVP of public cloud services at Fidelity Investments
The experts will discuss the challenges the financial services industry faces in adopting DevOps.

At the Financial Services: Future Proofing Your Digital Transformation Strategy virtual event you will learn:
- How to assure separation of duties and access controls without stifling innovation.
- About Capital One’s DevOps success story and how they’ve tackled some of the unique challenges of CI/CD in the finance industry.
- How to incorporate legacy and hybrid technology into your release trains and processes.
- How to scale across geographies, teams, applications, regulations and environments – and still get the velocity and reliability expected by the business.
- About Fidelity’s cloud transformation journey and CI/CD best practices.
- How to build bridges across devs and ops; employees and contractors.
Join the CloudBees community and learn how to future-proof your digital transformation strategy. To check out the agenda and to register, visit the Financial Services: Future Proofing Your Digital Transformation Strategy website.
July 3, 2020
SREs Tasked With More To Improve Digital Experiences
The digitization of the enterprise has never moved so swiftly, and never have enterprise environments been as complex to manage. And, never have more businesses been as dependent on their infrastructure and operations being unfaltering.

According to a new survey and accompanying report from Catchpoint and the DevOps Institute, site reliability engineers (SREs) and teams still struggle with effective SRE processes that would help these teams improve their system reliability, incident management and end user/customer satisfaction.

For instance, the survey found that 53% of respondents reported being brought in too late into the application life cycle. Most respondents said that they are currently spending 75% of their time focused on operations and very little of their time on development objectives.

That heavy focus on ops comes at a cost by increasing the ongoing costs associated with owning and operating their systems and infrastructure. Moreover, in recent months, perhaps because of increased remote work, Ops-related activities have increased by 10% overall among those surveyed.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, the number of SREs who believe they will be working remotely in the next year jumped to 50% from only 19% who thought so before the outbreak of the novel coronavirus.

When it comes to performing their duties, more than half of the respondents cited the change to remote working causing challenges when it comes to attaining a balance between their work and their life.

Additionally, while 9% of respondents felt incident management has improved, 41% said that half or more of their work is focused on managing mostly manual, repetitive and tactical tasks that could likely be automated. Another 52% said they spend too much time debugging.

The report provided a few suggestions for teams:
- Be sure to include consideration for not only your code but also the networks, third-party services and delivery chain components to evaluate how well the three observability pillars are applied through this new digital experience observability lens.
- Work to be included earlier in the development process should shift reliability further left to reduce cost, increase team alignment and identify constraints that can be removed.
- Turn newly surfaced or previously ignored challenges into strategic differentiators. Focusing on challenges such as morale, employee experience, work/life balance and employee engagement and sentiment may showcase a company’s employee-first mentality to attract or retain top talent.
As we covered in “Digital Transformation Efforts Hindered by Lack of Upskilling,” there are no digital transformations without staff transformations and the same is true for practices such as DevOps and SRE. And it’s that last point that may be one of the biggest inhibitors to SRE teams getting from where they are today in maturity to where they want or need to be. An earlier survey from the DevOps Institute, the “2020 Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report” found that 58% of enterprises have a tough time actually finding those with the right DevOps skills, and 48% said it’s difficult to retain skilled DevOps professionals.
July 3, 2020
But Wait, There’s More! The Trouble With DevOps Tools

DevOps tools today increasingly are no longer out-of-the-box ready for use. And that’s an aggravating issue

Imagine you bought a new power tool—a sweet battery-powered drill/screwdriver that did everything you needed.

Imagine it looked as though it ran on its own, but when you got it out of the box, you discovered that it didn’t come with a battery.

Imagine you got the battery, and only after the battery was installed you discovered that it needed a specialized wrench/chuck to install and remove bits. And you had to go buy that.

Imagine you got the chuck and were all set to go, only to discover that it would slip and normal drill bits wouldn’t turn unless you had a specialized adapter.

That’s what our tools environment in DevOps has become. And we need to demand better.

If your software requires X and Y and Z to be useful—whether you are commercial or open source, whether X and Y and Z are a million bucks or zero—state it before install.

We’re setting up an entirely new environment, stretching things a bit for an internal project, and honestly, the amount of “Oh yeah, this is required, too” that we’re finding out after install is insane. We have done our research; we should not be getting surprised by “But wait! There’s more!” type installs.

For an industry that insists on plug-and-play for all OSes and every odd bit of hardware ever dreamed up, we sure let software steamroll us. Vendors need to be clear about what will be required to run the tool and what will be required to run it effectively before we waste our time. Because there are some dependencies we’re not willing to accept, for usability reasons and/or security reasons. And if, under the covers, the tool does exactly the same thing as another tool … then what, exactly, is the value-add? It better be good.

We’re just one DevOps group—and a small one at that—but we have decided for this project not to use tools that dupe us into thinking they’re usable out of the box, then immediately require us to install something else. Or at least we’re trying. This has gotten so prevalent that in a couple of areas, we’re struggling. After all, the software still has to be built.

It’s a good thing drill manufacturers don’t think that way. Maybe there is hope.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep trying to do what you all are doing: kicking rear and keeping systems running.

June 29, 2020
DevOps Deeper Dive: Apple Adds Fuel to ITSM Fire

Apple’s acquisition this week of Fleetsmith, a provider of IT service management (ITSM) tools for Apple devices, is reigniting a fierce debate over how best to manage endpoints in heterogeneous IT environments.

Fleetsmith, along with rivals including Jamf Software and IBM, provides ITSM tools that only manage Apple devices. The company argues that the IT teams managing Apple devices prefer to use tools that feel like MacOs or iOS applications. However, both enterprise environments typically have both Apple and Windows devices. As such, many IT teams have adopted ITSM tools that allow them to centrally manage both platforms.

Until now, Apple has been relatively neutral in terms of how best to manage its devices. The acquisition of Fleetsmith signals the company is about to focus more on ITSM at a time when many organizations need to revamp their approach to managing endpoints in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

With more individuals likely to be spending more time working from home, the management of highly distributed endpoints becomes even more challenging. Apple has yet to outline its plans for Fleetsmith or say whether it will continue to support Fleetsmith customers. The assumption is the company will incorporate the Fleetsmith ITSM tools into its portfolio.

Mac and Windows: Can’t We All Get Along?

In the meantime, providers of platforms capable of managing heterogeneous endpoints are pressing their cases for increased centralization. Many IT organizations have adopted separate tools for managing Windows and Apple devices; centralizing the management of endpoints presents those organizations with an opportunity to reduce costs.

“IT teams don’t want to hop around infrastructure, said Greg Keller, CTO for JumpCloud, a provider of ITSM tools. “Centralization creates this single-pane-of-glass efficiency.”

The need to centralize endpoint management will become even more pronounced as desktop computing moves into the cloud, added Pradyut Roy, a product manager for ManageEngine, a provider of ITSM tools that also span multiple types of endpoints.

“There is going to be a huge drive to centralize the control plane,” said Roy.

A survey of 519 IT professionals published this week by ManageEngine finds 47% of organizations are planning to provide more mobile-capable assets to employees. As those endpoints are rolled out, IT teams will need ITSM platforms accessible from anywhere that enable them to manage devices regardless of what network they are connected to at any given time.

Apple doesn’t have the greatest reputation when it comes to appreciating ITSM requirements in the enterprise. For example, it often changes application programming interfaces (APIs) in ways that are not backward-compatible, so providers of ITSM tools often must make significant updates to their tools. That API issue is likely to become even more significant as organizations that have adopted best DevOps practices look to extend them to applications running on Apple devices.

ITSM is clearly in a state of flux. Most IT organizations rely on legacy ITIL-based processes to manage IT infrastructure consistently. As businesses begin to require more flexibility, many of those ITIL-based processes will need to be revisited. The opportunity—and the challenge—now is finding a way to converge ITIL and DevOps practices across as many different types of endpoints as possible.

June 26, 2020
COVID-19 Long Tail Budget Impact

Technology budgets have shifted dramatically since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a recent study from online CIO networking and information hub, Pulse. The pandemic, and its resulting shutdown, will likely continue to have a substantial impact on technology budgets for some time.

The initial budgetary impact was substantial. When COVID-19 first arrived, many technology budgets were frozen in place. Today, 23% of CIOs report that their budgets are still frozen with 49% reporting a decline in their technology budgets. Seventeen percent said that they expect to decrease their budgets by more than 10% in the next two months.

Fortunately, it’s not all bad news. Many respondents, 24% of them, predict that within the next two months their budgets will rise, including 9% of respondents who believe their budgets will increase more than 10%. However, most CIOs (27%) say that their IT budget won’t change in the near future.

“And an additional 6% anticipate their budget will become frozen in the next two months — though, on a positive note, this figure is down from 23% two months ago,” stated the report.

Surprisingly, there hasn’t been a change in business-technology priorities over the past two months for 79% of respondents, while 21% said that they now have different priorities than from the beginning of the pandemic.

The priorities of those surveyed include focusing on internal communication and collaboration tools (45%), mobile security (39%), customer communication and collaboration tools (37%), password management tools (28%), virtual private networks (28%), security awareness training (24%), remote desktop tools (23%), encrypted communication tools (23%), and data security tools (15%).

“Many companies are going to allow (or require) employees to work from home after the pandemic, due to health concerns and reduced overhead. The fact that CIOs are investing in security and end-user technology — even though budgets are decreasing — indicates this,” said Brian Sampietro, CIO at TGI Office Automation, in the report.

For those organizations who changed their priorities, the new budget items include virtual private networks (36%), password management (32%), remote desktop tools (30%), data security tools (27%), encrypted communication tools (26%) and mobile security (21%).

How are CIOs making decisions when it comes to technology purchases? The majority said peer recommendations (69%) and industry analysts (52%). However, social media and email fared poorly as influencers, at 23% and 20% respectively. CIOs are determining needs, according to the survey, based on both executive and end-user requests. Only 10% said they depend upon user requests alone, and only 21% said executives solely drive decisions. Interestingly, 35% of CIOs make decisions quickly: Within one week they said they will decide on the right tool to acquire. The rest said they take more than a month (26%) or within four weeks (39%).

When it comes to layoffs, there are still rough patches ahead, as a sizable number of organizations still have layoffs on the planning table. While 48% of organizations have maintained their headcount through the COVID-19 crises, 40% do plan to cut staff sizes in the next six months, with 25% not sure if they will cut staffs.

June 23, 2020
Upcoming Event: Time Series Virtual Summit
The Time Series Virtual Summit will bring together InfluxData community members for a unique learning experience focused on the impact of time series data. Presented in a virtual reality environment, the event will take place on July 16, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. EDT.

This virtual event will focus on the impact of time series data and how it can be used to help build and optimize solutions for real-time visibility into stacks, sensors and systems.

Here’s a preview of some of the speakers:
- James Governor, analyst and co-founder at RedMonk
- Al Sargent, senior director of product marketing at InfluxData
- John Gleeson, VP of operations at Tardigrade.io
- Jon Herlocker, president and CEO at Tignis
- Michael Ellis, community manager at InfluxData
Plus, speakers from companies such as AWS, Google, Microsoft and more.

The industry leaders will share their thoughts on time series data, discuss the benefits of a time series database and the challenges of data management.

At the Time Series Virtual Summit you will learn:
- How to use a time series database to improve their competitive advantage and accelerate their go-to-market strategy.
- How to manage risk in decentralized networks with time series.
- How IoT can help manufacturers reduce downtime.
- How to use observability to derive deep insights into system performance and user experience.
The online environment features a lobby, an expo hall lined with booths full of downloadable resources, and an auditorium where attendees can watch the sessions. You can interact directly with time series experts and network with other attendees by joining the chat rooms.

Discover what’s next from the InfluxData community and learn how you can get involved. To check out the agenda, the full lineup of speakers and to register (for free), visit the Time Series Virtual Summit website.
June 19, 2020
DevOps Deeper Dive: IT Terminology Matters

Much like any other profession, the IT industry does not exist in a vacuum. Social upheaval will have as much impact on IT professionals as it does on any other. As conversations concerning race relations become more heated and, hopefully, elevated, many in the IT industry are reconsidering the use of terminology such as master/slave to describe the relationship between applications and devices.

GitHub this week announced this week it will be changing the term “master” as it is applied to its repository to a neutral term. Use of the phrase master/slave as a means to describe relationships between software and hardware has been employed since the very early days of IT. In fact, some would note the concept of slavery stretches back to the dawn of time.

Nevertheless, too many of the terms used in IT evoke a sense of domination that reflects a white, male view of the world, said Dr. Shuli Goodman, executive director of LF Energy, an arm of the Linux Foundation committed to combating climate change by modernizing the power grid using open source software.

“Language reflects our mental models,” she said.

The IT industry in general would be better off embracing, for example, biological models rather than terminology that suggests domination and submissiveness, noted Goodman.

Even IBM, which provides some of the oldest and most venerable platforms in the industry, is open to having this conversation.

The company is committed to recognizing the experiences of everyone in the IT community, said Sanjay Chandru, director of IBM Z DevOps.

“If that means we need to have a conversation about terminology, we’re open to that,” he said. “Personally, I think GitHub did the right thing.”

The time to make a mental shift might never be better, said JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim. The IT industry is transitioning toward a more distributed approach to computing that relies less on centralization. As more workloads shift to the edge, IT environments will need frameworks that span everything from the edge to the cloud, he said.

As a result, the IT industry as a whole is shifting more toward a peer-to-peer relationship between software and hardware, he added. “We need IT to be more flexible.”

The history of IT is marked by pendulum swings between centralized and distributed computing. Arguably, the rise of cloud computing represented a shift back toward a more centralized approach to computing that has a lot in common with the way mainframes were deployed and managed more than 50 years ago.

PCs, on the other hand, were at the forefront of a wave of distributed computing that in many cases simply became too unwieldy to manage. Cloud computing afforded IT organizations an opportunity to centralize the management of workloads. However, with the rise of edge computing, workloads might soon be more distributed than ever.

As is often the case when it comes to IT trends, it’s likely new terminology will soon emerge to describe the relationship between highly distributed instances of software and hardware. Hopefully, more perspective will be brought to bear not only on what those terms mean from a technical perspective but also how they might be perceived both inside IT and socially.

June 19, 2020
Participate in the Checkmarx 2020 Survey
Checkmarx, the global leader in software security solutions for modern enterprise software development, and DevOps.com are conducting a survey about the implementation of DevOps and related automation and security tools.

The purpose of the survey is to help organizations evaluate their DevOps maturity, find out what are the most used DevOps tools and the most common challenges organizations are facing with their current DevSecOps model.

The survey consists of 16 short multiple-choice questions. The results will depend on several factors including:
- The organization’s progress on their DevOps adoption journey.
- The role of the respondents in their organization and their responsibilities for DevOps transformation.
- Automation and security tooling capabilities respondents are using for DevOps and cloud-native applications.
- The respondents’ ability to overcome challenges and obstacles standing in the way to successfully implementing DevOps.
We urge everyone in the DevOps space to participate in this survey. The more data we can gather, the more we’ll find out about the adoption of DevOps and AppSec tools. We’re counting on you to make this report even more valuable. Invite your friends and colleagues to contribute to the survey, too — the more the merrier.

Click on this link to complete the survey.

We will make an announcement when the report is ready. Stay tuned!
June 19, 2020