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  • DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Exadel’s Jonathan Fries

    DevOps Chat: Digital Transformation with Exadel’s Jonathan Fries

    In this DevOps Chat, Jonathan Fries, VP of Engineering and Digital Transformation at Exadel, tells us about the new Innovation Lab by Exadel—a place for organizations to accelerate their transformation. We also talk about the state of IT in general from his perch at Exadel, a company with 20 years of empowering IT.

    You can find out more about the Innovation Lab at exadel.com/innovation-lab/.

    As usual, the streaming audio is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation.

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, DevOps.com, and you’re listening to another DevOps Chat. This episode of DevOps Chat features Jonathan Fries of Exadel. Jonathan, welcome!

    Jonathan Fries: Hi, Alan. It’s great to be here.

    Shimel: Hey, it’s great to have you here, Jonathan, and I wanna thank you. It’s always nice to have a new company coming up on our chats here, so it’s—you know, some fresh blood for the audience. I assume most of our audience is not familiar with Exadel, so why don’t we start with that, Jonathan? Tell us a little bit about Exadel.

    Fries: Sure. So, Exadel is a global software engineering services firm. So, we help our clients write software. We have—we’re a global company, so we have offices in Eastern Europe, Belarus, Lithuania, Poland being kinda the big ones where we have our offices in Europe. And, you know, we help clients in a variety of areas. Probably our big verticals are health care, finance, transportation, media and entertainment, and high tech. And, you know, we have some really good clients in those areas. Health care, McKesson is one that people have heard of. Finance, we work with Deloitte. In the high tech world, we have HP and Google as our clients.

    So, we’re doing offshore development for a lot of it. We have teams that are either all in Europe or usually a hybrid of some people here in the U.S. and some people in Europe. We’ve got about a thousand developers in Europe, so that’s where a lot of our work gets done. We’ve been around for 20 years, and so yeah, that’s a bit about Exadel.

    Shimel: Another overnight sensation, huh?

    Fries: Pardon?

    Shimel: I said another overnight sensation.

    Fries: [Laughter] Yeah, it’s been a gradual sort of buildup of working with clients and, you know, getting to work with a lot of interesting companies and them recommending us to others.

    The name of the company actually comes from a combination of excellent and delivery. I always think that that’s an interesting fact to bring up, and I think it’s an important part about kind of who we are and where we come from and how we got that list of clients. You know, we’re all about building really great products, software products for our customers, and that’s how we’ve grown the business.

    Shimel: Sure. So, and Jonathan, you know, kidding aside about overnight sensation, that’s the right way to build the business, right? You don’t just—I mean, yeah, everybody wants to be a unicorn, but unicorns are mythical, right? [Laughter]

    Fries: [Laughter]

    Shimel: [Cross talk] the world and all of that, so good for you guys. But you know what I didn’t mention is, what exactly—and just sharing with the audience, what’s your position with Exadel?

    Fries: My title is Vice President of Engineering and Digital Transformation. So, my background is in the software development world doing software development, leading teams, eventually sort of managing engagements and things like that, and also today heading up the digital transformation practice inside of Exadel.

    So, my background comes from the technology world and software development, and that’s why I’m proud of—I’m proud of our engineering capabilities and what we’re able to do for customers.

    Shimel: Good for you, good for you. So, Jonathan, you know, digital transformation is such a buzzword today, right?

    Fries: Yep.

    Shimel: We’ve all heard it, you know, and the one thing I’ve learned is that, for many organizations, you know, digital transformation is hard, right? I’ve heard so many people say, “Well, this wasn’t as easy as it was made out to be.” And I think one of the issues is, is that, if you can’t define something, how can you achieve something? Right?

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: And so, it starts with, “Well, what exactly does digital transformation mean?” And so, I’ll throw it back at you—what does digital transformation mean to you?

    Fries: So, digital transformation for us is about helping our clients with the—you know, the doing and the engineering work of doing digital transformation. So, it’s about software development—you know, in particular it’s cloud development today—QA automation, and DevOps. I mean, those are really the big three areas of expertise within the company that we’ve really brought together under the digital transformation sort of heading as well as our agile methodology expertise, and so, bringing kind of those four things together. And they completely make sense together, because, you know, DevOps is really kind of the technology reflection of agile methodology and agile methodology is kind of the methodology reflection of the DevOps technology mindset. And QA automation is so tightly wound into DevOps and really the way that we’re delivering software and the way that our DevOps solutions work are very much married a lot today to cloud development.

    And so, we’re bringing all of those things together, which are all things that Exadel had lots of expertise in, but figuring out how to make sure that we were weaving those strands together, if you will, in a really sort of explicit way and building up some solutions for clients. Not just, “Hey, we’re really good at those things, and we have people who can be really good at those things for you,” but we can bring all of our best practices together and some technology solutions together.

    So, that’s what it is for us. It’s very much, you know, we’re a software development, software engineering firm, so we really—you know, we’re not sort of going after the cultural transformation part of that, or the, you know, the change management. I mean, we certainly have experience with those things, but for us, it’s really about the development side of it and our expertise in helping clients take on hard projects and succeed.

    Shimel: Absolutely, absolutely. Let’s talk a little bit about something new that Exadel recently delivered, and that’s the Innovation Lab. Talk to us—what exactly is the Innovation Lab?

    Fries: Yeah, the Innovation Lab is, it’s a new offering that we’re bringing to the market that combines some things that we already have into one thing. So, you know, we’ve all heard about the importance of innovation and even innovation labs. You know, some companies have them or are creating them. Exadel’s Innovation Lab is sort of more of a virtual innovation lab as opposed to, say, a physical place that we help someone create.

    So, we already have something called Appery, which is a cross-platform, low code development environment for creating cross-platform mobile apps as well as, like, a low code backend that runs behind that. So, that’s a way to build software very quickly to create real, working software.

    We already have a lot of expertise in agile development, as I mentioned before. And so, that’s also part of what we do. We have really great resources, all of those developers that we have, you know, in Europe and some here. And we have some packaged solutions that are a part of those practices.

    So, we’re bringing those all together to help our clients innovate. So, you know, what we wanna do is help our clients who are looking for a way to move faster, experiment, try something, get some features in front of customers or business stakeholders more quickly, and the Innovation Lab is our sort of packaged solution for doing that.

    So we can, we bring all of those things together—low code development, agile, on-demand resources when there might be something. Since a lot of what people what to experiment today are things like artificial intelligence and blockchain and how can we make those things work for us, so that’s—you know, often, we might have to bring in, you know, we might have to bring in an expert to help out with that as well.

    So, it’s really, it’s all of those things to help our customers and new customers innovate more quickly.

    Shimel: Got it. So, you know, and to me, when I look at it, Jonathan, you know, we talk about digital transformation, and what I said before about how, if you can’t define it, how can you be successful, and even once you define it, it’s an experiment in a lot of ways, right? It’s kinda that classic DevOps where you deliver, you learn, you get feedback loops, you iterate, you reiterate, and you keep reiterating.

    And an innovation lab is kinda the perfect place to kinda have that sort of learning that propels, that helps you define and then succeed in your digital transformation, right?

    Fries: Yep.

    Shimel: You know, you don’t wanna practice, I guess, on live TV or stuff like that. But you need—you need these labs to push the envelope and find out what works for you and what doesn’t work for you.

    Fries: Yeah. I very much view it, you know, as an extension of the product owner, you know, life cycle from scrum. You know, there’s the regular sort of software development life cycle within scrum where you’re doing your sprints and you’re delivering software.

    Shimel: Mm-hmm.

    Fries: But a big part of what the product owner should be doing is developing the product backlog which includes, you know, testable hypotheses. That’s kinda the way that the scrum community talks about it.

    And so, the Innovation Lab is a way for product owners to test some hypotheses that they might not be able to test, you know, if they already have a product. Like, you may not wanna do all the work to develop it and test the hypotheses over here, or that hypothesis over here. You may wanna use something like the Innovation Lab where we can use some of the tools at our disposal to create something that you can deliver and test out one of those—you know, test a hypothesis kind of on its own, if you will—but with working software. Which, you know, as we know is also a big part of agile and DevOps. You know, wireframes and requirements are great and they have a place, but they’re not the best way to show people what you’re doing or get feedback, and this really allows us to help clients do that and do it more quickly.

    Shimel: Got it. I agree 100 percent. Interesting—great idea. Moving off Innovation Lab, there’s other stuff going on at Exadel. You wanna share with our audience a little bit?

    Fries: Sure, yeah. We just launched the practice areas. As I mentioned, I’m the head of the Digital Transformation practice, and we also have a Digital Marketing Technology practice and a Products and Platforms practice that, much like digital transformation, the other two are also things that, you know, in places where we already have a fair amount of expertise and were kind of collecting all of that together in one place.

    So, for Digital Marketing Technology, we have some pretty significant clients for whom we’ve done work with Adobe Experience Manager to build global, localized, large scale websites. And since we had really done that several times, the Digital Marketing Technology practice is all about packaging that solution and delivering that to other clients for kind of building those large scale worldwide type of websites with Adobe.

    Products and Platforms is—you know, given that we’ve developed Appery, which really is, you know, it’s not just an application, it’s a whole platform for building other applications, and we’ve done that both for ourselves with Appery as well with several of our other clients like GHX where we’re creating a lot more than just an application, it’s this whole ecosystem. And so, that Products and Platforms practice sort of brings together the best of our knowledge base about developing those really sophisticated, large scale platforms.

    And Digital Transformation, of course, which is mine, is all about DevOps, cloud tech, QA automation, and agile. We have a solution that we’re putting together within the Digital Transformation practice that is a cross-cloud Kubernetes implementation that’s all done with Terraform and we’re actually getting ready to use that with the first customer now. We’ve kinda been just doing our internal dev on it, but we’ve shown it to some people and they’re pretty interested in that. The first customer will probably just use it on Azure, but it’s got some really sophisticated—you know, deploying Kubernetes with Terraform, autoscaling, a lot of really cool tech for containerized application development. So, I’m pretty excited about that.

    Shimel: So am I. I mean, it’s an exciting time to be alive in IT. I mean, from a developer point of view, from an ops point of view, there are so many options and so—you know, such power at your fingertips.

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: It really is, you know, it’s a golden age to be into this kinda stuff.

    Fries: Yeah, I agree. I mean, I just—I think it’s an amazing time and, you know, I think there’s so much opportunity. There’s so much opportunity out there in what you can do and so forth and then how easy it is now to, you know, to bring computing solutions online for stuff, you know, and it’s what can be done.

    It’s awesome, and I know that, you know, it’s a lot of change and it can be hard on people sometimes, but I’m definitely an optimist and an “all ships will rise” type of guy, so, you know, I see all those opportunities out there and it’s like—you know, yeah, there’s an awful lot exciting going on.

    Shimel: Well, you know, Jonathan, I think in our business, either we can be optimists, or we can be cynics.

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: I got into it yesterday, some guy, I don’t even remember his name, but he tweeted, “Oh, those DevOps people selling snake oil! There’s no such thing!” I think they reach a certain age where they just feel like there’s nothing new under the sun, and therefore, they’re just gonna bad mouth, right, whatever new comes along, and—hey man, you know, there’s a place for them on Earth, too, I guess.

    Fries: Yeah, and I mean, I think there’s always, I think, a real reason to be concerned about automation and the changes that that brings to not just our industry, but all of society. I mean, you can look around and see how much automation is impacting everything and, you know, as somebody with—you know, I have kids who are grade school aged kids, and it’s like, the world’s gonna look a lot different 20 years from now, so here’s what you need to spend your time thinking about and learning. Because, you know, if you really wanna do this kinda job, it’s not gonna be there 20 years from now.

    Shimel: And I have kids in high school and college and I’m telling them the same thing, man. It’s a crazy world. But you know something? To me, you know, we talk about being optimist, pessimist—Jonathan, the flip side of digital transformation is disruption.

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: Right? And so, you get to the haves and the have nots. You have the empowered people who embrace transformation and are accelerating their business, and you have the laggards who don’t, and they may very well have to die off, right?

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: I think that’s the choice that we—you know, that it’s nice to talk about this golden age, but that’s also the choice out there is, you can get with it or fall by the wayside. It’s compete or die. And, you know, that may be harsh to some, but that, I think, is the way it is.

    Fries: Yeah. It’s kind of been true for, you know, for a while, honestly. Industrialization automated some things, and like I said, I think, at the end of the day, the new businesses that will be created by digital transformation, the businesses that will be completely transformed by digital transformation will create, you know, even more opportunity, and as long as you are looking at it through the lens of those things, even though automation can be—you know, it can be scary.

    I mean, like I said, I came from—I was a developer and worked in IT and things like that, and you know, there was lots of things even 20 years ago, where it’s like, “Oh, these things are gonna change everything and jobs will go away” and it’s like—you know, that’s—

    Shimel: [Cross talk] Doesn’t happen, doesn’t happen. Anyway, Jonathan—

    Fries: No, it happens.

    Shimel: – when we started, I told you, the 15 minutes goes really quick, man. [Laughter]

    Fries: Yeah.

    Shimel: And we’re way over already. I apologize, but I didn’t wanna stop you, you were on a roll, and I thought it was a good conversation. So, but we’re gonna need to pull the plug on this episode of DevOps Chat. Jonathan Fries from Exadel, thanks for being our guest today.

    Fries: Absolutely, Alan. It was great. Thanks for having me.

    Shimel: Alright! This is Alan Shimel, DevOps.com, and you just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • DevOps Institute Brandjacking: When Imitation is Not the Sincerest Form of Flattery

    DevOps Institute Brandjacking: When Imitation is Not the Sincerest Form of Flattery

    “There can be only one”    ~ Duncan McCloud, Highlander

    They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. Often it is absolutely true. But stealing, ripping off and/or trying to trade on the name of others crosses the line between right and wrong, legal and illegal. As a co-founder of the true, one and only DevOps Institute, I was appalled to see the efforts of another company, whose name I won’t even dignify in this article, trying to launch “the DevOps Institute.”

    If you told me that this company perhaps did not know that there was already a DevOps Institute (it’s not like we hide it), I would say OK, maybe it was an honest mistake. But no. In this case, the company in question actually reached out to DevOps Institute—us—and had several conversations/interactions regarding becoming a registered education partner of the DOI. What the company reps were actually doing was fishing for information as they sought to launch their own version of DevOps Institute. So this is certainly not a case of an innocent mistake; rather, it’s a deliberate attempt to misappropriate the name, assets and hard work of another. Where I come from, the streets of NYC, we call it stealing.

    You have to ask yourself: Knowing what we know of the situation, why would these people commit such an unethical, illegal act? I can only come up with a few reasons:

    1. They are seeking to deceive and confuse the public by literally trading on DevOps Institute’s—our—good name to make a quick buck.
    2. They are part of those in the world who do not respect intellectual property, seeking to sell out the back door anything they get their hands on from the front door.
    3. They are unscrupulous thieves who are incapable of building a business by themselves.

    No matter whether one or all of the above, none of the reasons are very good.

    In generally acceptable business practices worldwide, there are more than several acceptable ways for companies to imitate the business strategy and models of others. More power to them—after all, competition makes us all up our game.

    In the DevOps education training and education space, there is certainly no shortage of competitors. Just do a Google search of DevOps Institute and look at the companies buying that ad word or otherwise using SEO to get listed. Lots of competitors, for sure. Remember, this isn’t even a generic “DevOps training” search, but actually searching for DevOps Institute.

    Taking another’s name crosses the acceptable boundary. So now we have to lawyer up to protect our rights and property. No one likes to throw good money at lawyers to go after bad actors. But protecting one’s brand, reputation and IP is that important.

    For those of you familiar with the DevOps Institute, you know that the team has worked hard for more than four years now to lead the way in curating content for bringing DevOps training, education and certification to the market. It hasn’t always been smooth sailing. When DevOps Institute launched, we faced strong headwinds from those who thought a training/certification program around DevOps was wrong. We listened, we learned, we set up the feedback loops and we iterated (like good DevOps should). We have won over many of our critics; they saw the good work we were doing.

    More than that, they saw DevOps Institute try to be stewards of and active participants in the DevOps community. We are not in this for the fast buck or the quick hustle. The executive team has plowed our revenue back into the company and community, expanding the association’s offerings and reaching out to DevOps communities throughout the world. Today, DevOps Institute has ambassadors in Europe, South America, AsiaPac and of course here in North America. We go wherever DevOps goes.

    Recently DevOps Institute has tried to build a greater DevOps community based on the Humans of DevOps and our SKILS framework (Skills, Knowledge Ideas and Learning). We have worked with the leading names in the DevOps industry to do research and help bring greater understanding of DevOps. We have sponsored and spoken at many of the DevOps events you have attended. In fact, I am satisfied to rest on our laurels.

    If you are not familiar with the real DevOps Institute (and that is at https://devopsinstitute.com, btw) check it out for yourself. We have nearly 200 partners around the world who deliver training for our certifications. We have a healthy global community and active engagement with industry thought leaders. We obviously are doing something right.

    Finally, I wanted to speak to my entrepreneur friends in the audience: Those of you know who know me, know that this isn’t my first rodeo. I have founded and helped several venture-backed startups through IPO and exit. I have had my share of wins and my share of losses. I am not one to whine or back down from some good competition, but this kind of shadiness has no place in the business world.

    We put a good chunk of our own blood, sweat and tears into our businesses, and for someone to swoop in and steal the fruits of our labor is just plain wrong. Brandjacking is stealing. I started this article off with the quote from “Highlander.” So if you see me walking around with a severed head or sword in my hand, remember: There can be only one.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

    Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

    I had the pleasure recently of attending my first Insight IGNITE event, which was held at the ION Adventure Hotel in enchanting Iceland. It was also my first trip to Iceland. These two new experiences combined to deliver an excellent learning and networking experience, resulting in me realizing more than several new insights (pun intended) around DevOps, cloud and cybersecurity, as well as mindfulness and contentment.

    The agenda for this particular IGNITE event featured some great examples and discussion around DevOps, cloud migration and infrastructure and cybersecurity, among several others. All three of these were right in my wheelhouse, so I really enjoyed the presentations and discussions. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with all of the insights I was soaking in. Of course, I was also trying to contribute to the conversations, which are held in a very open, communal manner under Chatham House Rules.

    You may not be familiar with the Insight IGNITE Innovation Roundtable Series. They are the brainchild of Insight Partners’ Emmet B. Keeffe III. Emmet is beyond passionate about digital transformation (among several other passions including Formula One racing, world peace and now mindfulness/contentment). Utilizing his vast network (and it is vast), Emmet founded Insight IGNITE, an innovation program that delivers Innovation Briefings, the Innovation Roundtable Series and Growth Advisory Board opportunities to global IT leaders. I know that sounds like marketing speak, but let me explain.

    Basically, Emmet holds about one of these events a month at some of the most fascinating venues on earth. Each one has ~50 people. There is a mix of C-level executives from some of the 200+ Insight Partners portfolio companies, along with executives past and present from large global enterprises, sprinkled in with a mixture of technology experts and subject matter experts (I guess that is what got my ticket punched). The agenda is an exhilarating mixture of roundtable discussions and presentations on subjects touching on Digital Transformation, along with exciting activities that allow attendees to experience the local venue.

    The events are open to Global 2000 executives and other business and technology experts who think they could both benefit from this type of experience as well as have something to offer.  You can reach out to Emmet’s team if you are interested in attending one of these events.  Most attendees have to cover their own airfare/hotel. While not cheap, it is well worth the money, and the IGNITE team, who are extraordinary, do an amazing job of keeping it fresh, fun and challenging.

    The real special sauce of the IGNITE Roundtable Series, though, is the passion, caring and love that they receive from Emmet’s team. It is infectious and spreads to the attendees as well. I have attended hundreds of conferences over the years and don’t remember one where I made as many connections, had as many great side conversations and really felt part of a group. I am sure many of the people I met at this event I will be in touch with and doing business with in the months and years ahead.

    I met Emmet about three or four years ago in London (where he lives with his family now) and was invited to a previous event or two but was unable to make it. Since then, it seems Insight Partners is investing in so many of the companies that we work with here at MediaOps in DevOps, containers and cybersecurity—including Tricentis, JFrog, Aqua Security, Firemon and others. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em, as they say, so I decided to take Emmet up on his kind invite and check it out.

    The IGNITE event in Iceland had several great presentations about disrupting your own company product by spinning up the disruptor internally. We heard from “a queen of transformation” who has led transformations at several large multinational and government agencies. Another presentation focused on how an energy company keeps transforming as it stays ahead in today’s ever-shifting market and sets the bar for what the energy company of tomorrow looks like. In addition, there were some great panel discussions on the current state of DevOps and Agile, another on the state of cloud migrations, hybrid cloud and next-generation infrastructure. Also on the agenda was a great discussion regarding what is happening in cybersecurity and how critical it has become as part of any transformation. All of these were great, but what made them better was the great discussions they sparked among the attendees.

    That was not the full roundtable agenda, though. We also had a private briefing with the first lady of Iceland, discussions on some new fintech companies and technologies, AI/ML and more.

    But perhaps some of my favorite presentation and discussions were on a new passion of Emmet’s called the Contentment Foundation. This is a breakthrough effort to bring a new take on making education better for the world of today and tomorrow. Led by Dr. Daniel Cordaro, it recognizes that children are truly our future. How can we make them more content and mindful, better equipped to handle the world of tomorrow and the challenges they will face? The Contentment Foundation has developed a curriculum that is available to just about any school in the world. If you know a school that you think could benefit from this, I encourage you to reach out to them.

    All work and no play would make for a boring event, though. My trip to Iceland at the Insight IGNITE Roundtable was far from boring. We visited the famous Perlan Planetarium (which, unfortunately, was as close as I got to seeing the Northern Lights on this trip); ate in a Viking-themed restaurant; and rode ATF vehicles through the rugged, lava rock-strewn, stream-filled Icelandic countryside. We explored a lava tube cave and more. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, so we had to cancel snowmobiling, whale watching and dinner on an island off the Iceland coast. I stopped off before heading to the airport to explore a bit in the capital of Reykjavík, which is a great little city with great cafés, shopping and sights.

    Even the social activities provided some great bonding and networking opportunities. It is rare for me that I not only make business acquaintances, but also form friendships at events like this. To me, this was yet another unique feature of the IGNITE Roundtable: People were there genuinely to share their experiences and discuss the burning topics at hand.

    All in all, one of the best events I have attended in a long time. I highly recommend attending at least one of these IGNITE Roundtables, if this sounds like something you may be interested in. As for me, I am already looking at what is the next one I will be able to attend. Once I have had a chance to digest and percolate on some of the insights I experienced, I will share a follow-up article to share them with you.

    Thanks, Emmet and IGNITE team, for a great experience.

    — Alan Shimel

  • The DevOps Institute Has Been Brandjacked

    The DevOps Institute Has Been Brandjacked

    Sadly, another organization has decided to brandjack the DevOps Institute name. Quickstart, an e-learning organization based in Austin, Texas, recently approached DevOps Institute about becoming a channel e-learning partner. Instead of joining our partner community, Quickstart chose to stand up another “DevOps Institute.” Since they were in communication with the actual DevOps Institute as late as March 9, I can only assume that this was an intentional act to confuse the market into believing that they are somehow associated with (or are) the actual DevOps Institute.

    They are not.

    Since 2015, the DevOps Institute has spent countless hours, attended numerous conferences and invested significant resources in advancing the human elements of DevOps. We were the first stand up formal association to focus on DevOps learning and certification as DevOps was emerging in the enterprise space. We are known and respected by many of the key DevOps thought leaders and vendors. We recently fielded the “Upskilling: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report” with the support of Electric Cloud, CloudBees and Lenovo. We not only talk the talk, but we also have demonstrated time and again that we are committed to walking the walk and are heavily invested in the goals of the DevOps community.

    To be clear, we have no issue with fair competition, particularly in a space that is growing as quickly as DevOps. That’s the nature and risk of running a business. Competing on products or offerings—that’s expected, and it ultimately helps the people within the industry succeed. Hiding behind another organization’s brand, though? That’s not only unethical, it defies every value that is at the heart of DevOps and established business practices.

    I thought long and hard about whether to give Quickstart and www.devopsinstitute.io visibility by exposing their actions. The easy way would be to stay quiet and let the lawyers sort this out (which they certainly will). However,  the real DevOps Institute stands by our moral obligation to the DevOps community and we, therefore, cannot let an imposter bully us into silence. The dictionary definition of an imposter is “someone who pretends to be someone else in order to deceive others.” Quickstart is an e-learning company masquerading as a well-respected DevOps association, presumably for commercial gain. What do you think?

    Please do not be deceived by imposters that falsely attach their services to DevOps Institute in the hope of benefiting from the goodwill we have established with our brand in the DevOps community.  There is only one DEVOPS INSTITUTE (www.devopsinstitute.com) and we are wholly committed to advancing the human elements of DevOps through our SKIL (Skills, Knowledge, Ideas and Learning) framework.

    Buyer Beware!

    — Jayne Groll

  • The Right DevOps Tool for the Job

    The Right DevOps Tool for the Job

    Innovation and environment are only two factors in determining which DevOps tools are best for your organization

    Any time there is a movement in IT that involves a new space and new toolsets, there is sudden growth, then inevitably consolidation and, finally, a selection of tools that suit the needs of most customers. Then the cycle starts over. Usually by this point, users have developed a defense mechanism about their choices regarding which solutions to implement and discussions can get heated.

    I’m happy to say that the last bit—heated discussions—has not occurred with DevOps the way it has with other technologies (think the browser wars, OS dominance or even cloud service provider preferences). There is the occasional “You’re doing it wrong,” but not the wild-eyed flame-wars so far.

    But the other two? Yes, yes indeed. DevOps has been through a couple of cycles, and the end is nowhere in sight. I don’t necessarily see that as a bad thing; in fact, as long as innovation is occurring, you have the opportunity to look at changes and decide what can best help your DevOps efforts.

    My mantra since the language wars was that C, C++, VB, etc., were the “right tools for the job.” I have kept that mantra for all of IT. It is easy to adapt the tools you are familiar with—to do more than they were designed to—and most shops have fallen into this trap at some point. But a serious look at what is available and where the market seems to be evolving usually stops this kind of adaptation.

    Some shops use Jenkins for far more than it was designed for. It’s a great tool, but at some point, the benefits of using tools aimed at a given piece of the DevOps toolchain outweighs the fact that Jenkins could handle that bit.

    The popularity of Puppet is starting to cause the same issues, if anecdotal evidence is to be believed. In words I use to my children, “Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.”

    The environment always plays a role in the “right tool for the job,” but it should not be the major factor. Having a DevOps tool that you already know that could do the job is one answer—but quite often not the best answer.

    So, use resources like us here at DevOps.com, and your favorite site for IT ratings and reviews. Do some feature research, think about what it would take to make your existing tools do the same job, and consider bringing in new tools to achieve a given goal. We see so much change these days that sticking with what you know on this one tiny bit of the toolchain, may seem reasonable, but make sure you are not missing out on additional functionality or suitability to task over the long term.

    — Don Macvittie

  • DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    DevOps Market Consolidation Gets Real: CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud

    You may have already seen the news today: CloudBees has acquired Electric Cloud in a move that marks a true market consolidation in the DevOps space. I had a chance to speak with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey to discuss the acquisition. We discuss the motivation for the deal, what the combined entity may look like going forward and more. The video of our conversation is at the bottom of this article.

    In my mind, this acquisition represents true consolidation of the DevOps tool vendors market. My reasons for this are as follows:

    1. Until now, many of the acquisitions in the DevOps space have been by large, established public companies such as CA, HP or IBM. Typically, these kinds of deals are not as much consolidation as they are large companies using M&A activity in place of R&D. CloudBees is not a large vendor—this isn’t R&D dressed in an acquisition.
    2. Electric Cloud is not your typical venture-backed startup that is looking for exit opportunities. The company has been around for many years. It has a large base of enterprise customers and an enterprise-tested product.
    3. With the recent changes in the DevOps vendor market involving CA (now Broadcom), HP(E) now Micro Focus and IBM preoccupied with Red Hat, there is a vacuum for enterprise leadership. The combination of these two vendors of scale is really a consolidation move.

    Best of luck going forward and congratulations to our friends at CloudBees and Electric Cloud. It will be interesting to see what repercussions this deal brings to the rest of the DevOps market.

    For more details on the acquisition, check out Mike Vizard’s article in DevOps.com today. In the meantime, enjoy the video and conversation with Sacha. Also, let us know what you think about the acquisition—and other M&A activity in the DevOps space—in the comments section below.

    — Alan Shimel

  • CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud to Advance Continuous Delivery

    CloudBees Acquires Electric Cloud to Advance Continuous Delivery

    CloudBees announced it has acquired Electric Cloud as part of an effort to extend the reach of its DevOps portfolio further into the realm of continuous delivery and application release automation (ARA).

    Announced at the CloudBees Days event in San Francisco, the deal follows CloudBees’ acquisition of Codeship, a provider of a cloud-based continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform, last year.

    CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey said both deals are part of an effort to start rolling up many of the smaller companies providing DevOps tools that have not been able to achieve the critical mass required to operate at scale. As organizations of all sizes realize how much they depend on software to differentiate their company from competitors, he said, they are looking for a single vendor that can address all their requirements end to end. At the time of the acquisition, which closed earlier this month, Electric Cloud had 110 employees.

    Labourey added the acquisition of Electric Cloud is also notable because it extends the reach of the CloudBees Jenkins and Jenkins X CI/CD platforms to the realm of application delivery for both legacy applications and emerging modern applications based on cloud-native microservices architectures.

    While application development teams have largely embraced continuous integration, getting IT organizations to successfully implement continuous delivery has proven more challenging. The next phase of DevOps, Labourey said, will need to focus on applying machine learning algorithms to automatically discover the environment in which an application is to be deployed. Armed with those insights, it should be much easier for organizations to continuously deploy and update applications across diverse IT environments, he noted.

    As DevOps continues to evolve, it’s apparent that legacy categories such as application release management are going to be subsumed into larger software development lifecycle frameworks based on best DevOps practices. The debate many organizations are currently engaged in is determining how much they need to change their IT culture before acquiring the tools and platforms required to successfully adopt DevOps. However, Labourery said this “chicken and egg” debate overlooks the importance of getting the tools to the teams that need to make the transition to DevOps occur. Otherwise, IT leaders will find themselves advocating for a theoretical cultural change without creating the opportunity for anyone to gain hands-on DevOps experience, he noted. In short, there’s no substitute for on-the-job DevOps training.

    A consolidation of DevOps vendors is underway. In some cases, those acquisitions will be driven by leaders in a category, such as CloudBees. In other cases, providers of software development tools commonly used in legacy application environments will need to extend their reach further into the realm of DevOps. IT leaders, going forward, will need to consider carefully just how and where they want to place their bets, at a time when DevOps teams tend to add and discard DevOps tools, often with little to no regard for any larger IT strategy.

    For more insight on the CloudBees/Electric Cloud acquisition, check out Alan Shimel’s video conversation with Sacha Labourey.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Alerting Consolidation: What’s the DevOps Impact?

    Alerting Consolidation: What’s the DevOps Impact?

    Over the last 12 to 18 months, the monitoring and alerting piece of the DevOps toolchain has been going through some serious consolidation. Companies are bracing to compete with the world or getting picked up by larger DevOps players, making their product more appealing through integrations.

    In general, if such changes don’t impact your toolchain, I say ignore them. The exception is when it appears the entire submarket might need to get aligned to survive, because that means at some point your toolchain likely will be affected.

    So, to recap the source of this blog, in the last short while OpsGenie has become a part of Atlassian, VictorOps has become a part of Splunk and PagerDuty has filed for an IPO. It is likely the rest of the market will have to match these three or admit to eroding market shares. In a competitive market where customers are using a fraction of the available functionality of a given product, deeper integrations (like come from ownership) or bold road maps (like come from IPOs) can have an impact on what customers choose to use.

    Alerting—and monitoring in general—is still relatively new to its current incarnation, and unlike some markets there are still very real differentiators in it. Most alerting engines have a core of functionality built in, while a lot more functionality can be had through integrations with other products. Some focus on the network to garner the bulk of their alert conditions, while others focus on application performance and still more watch the infrastructure closely. While all do a bit of each of these things, they still definitely have a focus. That will change over time as the market either settles down or fragments. I’m hoping it will settle down; we have enough sub-markets in DevOps already.

    All I’m suggesting is that you stay in contact with your vendor of choice and watch the overall market. Some of the changes might create a situation in which an alternative is appealing, and that is worth looking into, but other changes might negatively impact your chosen solution, which is absolutely worth noting.

    If your product of choice is clipping along in a way that is acceptable/useful to you, by all means stay with it. There’s no sense changing a product simply because of possibilities. But being aware can help you navigate the market changes that are well underway and very well might hit you right in the stack.

    — Don Macvittie

  • DevOps Chat: Aqua Security Talks Funding, Security in a Cloud-Native World

    DevOps Chat: Aqua Security Talks Funding, Security in a Cloud-Native World

    Aqua Security, one of the leaders in container and cloud-native security, recently announced it has raised $62 million in a “C” round of investment, led by Insight Partners.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with Rani Osnat and Andy Feit of Aqua Security about how this validates the cloud-native security field that Aqua has helped develop.

    The video of our conversation is immediately below, followed by the transcript of our conversation. An audio version is also available on Soundcloud.

    [videopress 1pfe0tRG]

    Transcript

    Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone. It’s Alan Shimel, DevOps.com, Container Journal, Security Boulevard for MediaOps and I’m really happy to be joined by my friends from Aqua Security. Charge of product marketing, we’ve got Rani Osnat, and, in charge of go-to-market, Andy –

    Andy Feit: Go-to-market, that’s right, Alan.

    Shimel: – none other than Andy Feit. Both of these guys are familiar to our audience or you’re both familiar to the audience – you’ve been on – but, guys, first of all, congratulations, mazel tov, whatever you wanna say. Big news today with Aqua. You guys raised a Series C, I believe it is, for $62 million.

    Feit: Yeah, thank you, Alan.

    Rani Osnat: Thank you, Alan.

    Shimel: Congratulations. So let’s talk about what this means, guys. So, first of all, it looks like this round was led by Insight Ventures, correct?

    Feit: Yep.

    Shimel: And I don’t know if we know; who is the Insight partner kinda leading the charge on this?

    Osnat: It’s Jeff Horing, was the _____ –

    Shimel: So I know Jeff and he’s one of the senior people there. Will Jeff be joining the board of directors?

    Feit: Yeah, so Insight will have a board seat.

    Shimel: Okay. Will it be Jeff, though, or you don’t know at this point?

    [Crosstalk]

    Osnat: Yeah, we’re not sure that it’s gonna be Jeff.

    Feit: We’re not positive, yeah.

    Shimel: Okay. I don’t mean to ask any trick questions, so don’t worry. So, Andy and Rani, you know, what I thought was interesting in reading the release was, yes, Insight did lead this round for $62 million, but a couple of things to note. Number one, your existing ventures, Lightspeed, Microsoft or M12, M7, whatever they call it –

    Osnat: M12, _____.

    Shimel: – Shlomo Kramer. You know, your existing venture investors all participated in this, correct?

    Osnat: Correct. Yeah.

    Shimel: And that says something, right? People believe in it enough to keep writing more dollars into it. Kudos to the Aqua team ’cause that does mean something.

    Osnat: Yeah, and it has been like that in all previous rounds as well, so we’ve always had the existing investors continue to participate. And I think, from their perspective, obviously, this is – they’ve taken – especially the early investors, like Shlomo Kramer and then TLV Partners, have taken a risk, investing in a very early-stage startup with an uncertain market. And now a lot of that risk is gone – you know, you can never know, but it’s a much more solid proposition than we had _____ _____ ago –

    Shimel: Well, it certainly less risky than a raw startup, but, you know –

    Osnat: It’s less risky, and so they deserve it.

    Shimel: – from an investment point of view, when they – it’s almost doubling down, when they continue to participate. Right? That’s saying, “I believe in this enough that I don’t wanna be watered down in my stake in the company, and so I’m gonna invest my pro rata or per-capita share so that my stake in the company remains constant, not decreased or watered down as they raise more money.” So it is very significant.

    The other thing I just wanted to mention is, hey, this brings the total raised, I think, to $100 million, maybe a little over $100 million.

    Feit: Just don’t round down, yeah.

    Shimel: I was doing the math on my fingers; I ran out of the toes, but I knew it was close. But the obvious question then becomes “So does this move Aqua into a unicorn, where you have a valuation of a million-plus?”

    Feit: Yeah, we’re not really sharing the details on the post-money valuation here. One of the nice things about being a privately-held company: you don’t have to share all those details. But, obviously, the number’s more than $100 million and we’re excited about bringing in a new investor that’s actually more than just bringing money to us. And I think what’s great about Insight is how involved they are, how well they know the space, the introductions they can make to partners as well as end-user customers. And this is really – they are a late-stage investor that knows what it takes to make a company successful.

    Shimel: No doubt about it. As we were talking off camera before, I have a relationship with Insight for a number of years now and, look, I’ve seen them invest in many companies that I’m very familiar with – some of them, I’ve worked with. Companies like FireMon and JFrog and Tricentis, Aquanow, and others. So, I mean, their record kinda speaks for itself. And I will tell you, more than just writing a check, I’ve seen firsthand, right, what they’ve done. I mean, frankly, we’ve talked about working with them here at MediaOps, in doing something for their whole portfolio, right? And great company. You couldn’t pick a better partner, in my opinion.

    Feit: We definitely feel that way and it’s impressive how well they know the space. Through the due diligence process and even –

    Shimel: No doubt about it.

    Feit: – here at the meeting, they’re digging in. And the fact that they spoke with our customers, they met with our team, they looked at our product, they went through it – it’s a testament to how far we’ve come and we’re excited about that.

    Shimel: Great. So let me pivot now. So, again, congratulations on the raise. That’s a significant amount of money. It means you guys can do some great things. In reading over or perusing the release, though, I saw some other kinda subtle changes in messaging, and that is I knew Aqua or many of us may know Aqua as a container security company. And now I see the messaging changing to more a cloud-native security company. Let’s talk about that. What does that mean, Rani?

    Osnat: Yeah, I think, when we started out, the market was different, in terms of adoption and also in terms of the technology landscape. A lot of the technologies that are now maturing were really experimental at the time – and we’re not talking about a long time ago; it’s three and a half years ago – but things like serverless, for example, that are catching on. They’re not as big as containers yet, but, if you believe some of what the proponents say, they will be bigger.

    And, in general, I think there’s a trend to look at this cloud-native space, for lack of a better term, as something that is supporting the next generation of application development, application deployment, and runtime environments, where cloud-native doesn’t – it’s not equivalent to cloud, right? I mean, you could run things in the cloud that are not cloud-native and you could run cloud-native applications on-prem as well. But the whole notion is that you support this very Agile, microservices environment that is portable, interoperable, and you can update it very frequently. It’s very resilient – you can update different pieces without impacting other pieces.

    And the benefits to enterprises that adopt these technologies are huge, and so that’s why it’s catching on. And we’re at that stage where we see not just the breadth of adoption across the industry, in terms of the number of companies that are actually using it, but also how deep it goes and how wide the adoption is within a given company. So we’re still at an early stage, but we see how a lot of enterprises like banks and insurance companies, not the tech industry itself, are looking at these technologies as strategic to their objectives – digital transformation, customer centricity, all those things.

    Shimel: You know, I was telling someone in the office here this morning, “We live in such interesting times if you’re a tech person.” Right? I think bank to my first Web hosting company in 1995 and what it meant to rack up a server.

    Osnat: Right.

    Shimel: Right? Set up a server for someone. My ops people walked around with tool belts, with pliers and screwdrivers, right, ’cause you had to literally screw in the server into the rack. It’s a different world; it’s an amazing world. Here’s another just something I wanna throw out at you: when we talk about things like serverless and we talk about what Kubernetes brings to the picture, it almost – there’s a place for everyone here. It’s not just the cloud, like we’ve seen with AWS or Azure or Google or Alibaba or – you know, the data center is back.

    Osnat: Right. Yeah, I –

    Shimel: Right? And there’s now _____ serverless stuff, right?

    Osnat: Yeah.

    Shimel: And it’s still native.

    Osnat: Yeah, absolutely, and we think if you really kinda distill it, from a technology standpoint, to one thing, we’re talking about a complete abstraction of the application layer from the underlying infrastructure. Right? So that’s –

    Shimel: That’s it right there. Mm-hmm.

    Osnat: – moving into a serverless world, but “serverless” not in a narrow sense of serverless functions that we have today but “serverless” in the wider meaning of the word, where you really don’t have to manage any servers. And any technology that aligns with that concept is legitimately cloud-native and we need to support those technologies.

    And, even today, there are many choices, right? You can do everything from running containers on VMs to running containers on bare metal to using container-as-a-service type solutions or serverless containers, like Fargate and ACI, and, of course, serverless functions. And there will be a lot of things in between that. We’re already seeing some technologies that are still very early-stage, like micro-VMs or hybrid container VMs, and this will all have a place because, ultimately, organizations will choose the technology that serves them in the most optimal way, without necessarily being married to one particular technology.

    Feit: And I would just add, Alan, I think the common theme between these technologies is the dynamic nature of the infrastructure and the ability to spin up, whether you’re spinning up a VM or requesting a microservice run for 70 milliseconds on a function. It’s happening over the course of the day, over the course of an hour, over the course of minutes. That network is changing and your security infrastructure needs to understand that. And the old-school models of securing these platforms didn’t work before and it’s only getting harder with things like microservices and moving to serverless architectures.

    Shimel: No, I agree. I think Rani hit it, actually, right on the head. We’re just seeing this abstraction where that whole infrastructure is so liquid, right, and so dynamic that you almost – you need to secure it, obviously, but the mission of securing the application, irregardless, wherever it’s _____, of the infrastructure, is a mission in and of itself as well.

    Feit: Which means you need to understand how _____ _____ _____.

    Shimel: And you still have to play nice.

    Feit: Yep. Yeah, you need to understand the application part of it, go with it wherever it’s running, and that’s really the magic of what Aqua does.

    Osnat: Right.

    Shimel: Yeah. Well, and I think that that is the magic, right, and that is the mission. Go with it wherever it’s running. Let me turn back. So, you know, some fresh fuel in the tank. What does the $62 million mean? Let’s talk about it just in terms of go-to-market with you, Andy, but, Rani, let’s talk what does it also mean in terms of product? In this new – I mean, one could say that – saying, “Hey, we’re gonna secure cloud-native. Gives us a bigger surface to play on, a bigger playground to play in.” Go-to-market’s a challenge, right? Both? Let’s hear.

    Osnat: Right. Yeah, I mean, so we’ve been – one of our key advantages in this market has been platform support and being able to support different clouds, orchestrators, operating systems, and modalities of cloud-native, right? And, as we see things right now, the market is not – it’s been consolidating around Kubernetes as the orchestration platform, but, at the same time, there are many different flavors and there are different dependencies, on where you’re running, et cetera, that have to be addressed.

    So we already are supporting a very large matrix of different technologies and combinations of those technologies. And, as the market continues to hold, we’ll need to continue to track that, so not just support them but actually provide deeper security controls at each level and at each step of the way because we’re not only a container security solution, as you pointed out earlier, but we actually provide this support for various types of cloud-native technologies, various pieces of the stack, and also the full life cycle. So, starting from their early stages of development and CI/CD, going all the way to production environments. And this requires investments in R&D.

    Additionally, we also have been investing in open-source tools, specifically around Kubernetes, and we will continue to do that and not only expand the capabilities of those tools that we’ve already put out there in the market but also add new tools. And we do that as part of our philosophy of educating the market, getting out tools that anyone can use, and then, when they get to large production environments, they’ll probably come to us for a commercial solution, with all the benefits of commercial interoperability and support and all that. So that’s – part of the money goes there, obviously.

    Feit: And part of the money definitely goes out to build the infrastructure, whether we’re talking sales globally. We’re working with some of the largest customers – companies in the world today and they have a global presence, but, as we go to market and look at growing the business, we have a proven model at this point. I mean, that’s what happens when you get to this late-stage investment. They’re looking for “Do you have customers? Could you do more of them if you had resources in various countries? Could you scale out more by solving more of their problems across divisions and departments in those enterprises and up-sell and cross-sell?”

    And then the support infrastructure. One of the things that has really differentiated Aqua, when we win our business – and we’re in a competitive marketplace, but one of the things that really drives us is our ability to be on site with a customer, to support them through their deployment, to be truly invested in their success and integrating with their CI/CD pipelines, integrating with their secrets management, integrating with their SIEM tools. Our solution is not standalone; it’s not a double-click install of a SAS solution. This is part of your entire application development life cycle and it requires resources, so we’ll be – there’ll be people, as part of those organizations, that help ensure the customer deployment is successful.

    Shimel: You know, I think Aqua is kinda taking the lead on this cloud-native security. Of course, we all at KubeCon in Seattle a few months ago. There’s another one coming up in Barcelona in – was it May? The end of May, I think.

    Feit: May 20th. Believe it, it’s on our schedule.

    Shimel: Yeah, no, us too. I think I fly out the 18th. We’ll talk about it. But, you know, I mean, we saw at KubeCon in Seattle this buzz, this palpable excitement – it reminded me of AWS Reinvent five years ago, right? Before the – when the cool kids still there. Where do you think we go? Are we at – I guess, are we at the top of the hype cycle here? Do you think it’s just starting? Where’re we going here?

    Feit: It’s still early, I think. [Laughs]

    Osnat: It’s not even close to the top. I mean, so KubeCon in Barcelona is gonna be – they’re expecting 10,000 attendees.

    Shimel: Wow.

    Osnat: Yes.

    Shimel: I didn’t realize it’s that big.

    Osnat: In Europe, _____ _____ _____ –

    Shimel: Yeah, that’s great to hear.

    Osnat: – _____ people coming from all over, et cetera. These European events are typically less well-attended than the US equivalents, so the last KubeCon in Seattle, I think, was 8,500, which was about double what Austin was the year before, and now they’re doubling Europe. So that’s, obviously, a very promising sign. But not only that, we see a lot of companies that are new to this space, new to Kubernetes, new to containers, new to serverless. And, sometimes, we get leads on our website – people who’ll purchase – and you can tell they’ve already done their homework, so these are not clueless people who are just kicking the tires, that are trying to learn the basics. They’ve already done that and now they’re actually looking for a solution because they know that they’re going to production, with their environment, in – whatever – six months, three months, nine months.

    And so that’s a level of maturity in the market that we didn’t see until recently. And also just the number – I mean, the sheer number of companies that are getting involved is huge and CNCF membership, including end-user organizations, is growing. So all of these are indicators to where it’s going. And I think Andy also wants to say something about our presence at KubeCon.

    Feit: Yeah, two things. I would also – before we talk about KubeCon, I think the other indicator is that most of the application workloads that are out there today are still very much in the data center. A lot of them are still monolithic applications; they haven’t all migrated to the cloud or, if they have, maybe they were done with a lift-and-shift. So I think we’re talking about a market that is poised for significantly more growth and we see a lot of different indicators of that. One example is our customers who deployed, say, a pilot project or a handful of applications one or two years ago are now asking us for enterprise-wide licenses and scaling this out to be “This is our cloud-native platform. We’re gonna do everything on this.”

    But, at KubeCon this year, in Barcelona, as we did in Seattle, where we did a pre-day event called “KubeSec Enterprise Summit,” we will be doing the same thing in Barcelona. You can register on the CNCF site. When you register for KubeCon, you can sign up for KubeSec Enterprise Summit, which is really an event built just for large-scale enterprise customers rolling out into Kubernetes in production. We’ll have customer speakers; we’ll have an analyst speaker; we’ll have panels. It was a terrific event, very positively reviewed in Seattle, and we’re repeating that now in Barcelona on the 20th of May.

    Shimel: That’s great news. You know, and one thing – look, I’m guilty of it; I think you guys are guilty of it too – we call it “KubeCon.” It’s “cloud-native con” too. Right?

    Feit: Absolutely. We do tend to – for those of us who’ve been in the market –

    Osnat: It’s like for a while.

    Feit: Yeah.

    Shimel: No, no, I do it. I’m guilty as charged, but I think there’s gonna come a day where cloud-native maybe is bigger than Kube itself, right?

    Osnat: Yeah. Well, I think it already is, in a sense, right? I mean, Kubernetes is just – it’s a bit like a fleet. You have a – Kubernetes is the aircraft carrier and then you have everything that surrounds it, the frigates and the destroyers and the minesweepers and all of that.

    Shimel: _____ and the battleships. Absolutely.

    Osnat: I think that you can tell I play – I used to play _____ –

    Shimel: I can tell that. Right.

    Feit: And the other thing that I think it comes down to, it’s just harder to say “cloud-native con.”

    Osnat: That’s true.

    Feit: It’s got too many Cs and Ns and _____ –

    Shimel: “KubeCon” does roll. You’re right.

    Osnat: Why don’t we call it “KubeCon cloud-native con”? Not “cloud-native con” or “KubeCon.”

    Shimel: Absolutely. Hey, guys, I know you’re coming to us from Madrid today. You’re at an Aqua team meeting, and so I appreciate you carving out some time, but I wanna be respectful as well. I know you only had 25, 30 minutes, so. First of all – or last of all, congratulations.

    Osnat: Thank you.

    Shimel: You and the whole Aqua team. I tend to think of you two as Aqua, but I know there’s more people behind it.

    Osnat: I mean, _____ _____ people behind this wall. I don’t _____.

    [Laughter]

    Shimel: Yeah. But congratulations to both of you. Congratulations to the whole Aqua team. It’s gonna be interesting to see how it plays out. As I said earlier, we live in interesting times in tech, so I will see you both in KubeCon in Madrid? I mean, in Barcelona.

    Feit: In Barcelona. And if –

    Shimel: In Barcelona. We’re doing videos there for Digital Anarchist, so we’ll have you in and we’ll talk some more.

    Feit: I will be at DockerCon before that if you’re going to San Francisco, so _____ –

    Shimel: I’m not at DockerCon. I have to go to Iceland. But –

    [Crosstalk]

    Feit: All right. Great talking to you again, Alan.

    Shimel: There’s only so many conferences that I can do, but we try. But we’ll talk more. But, for now, Rani and Andy, congratulations. Continued success with Aqua and we’ll talk to you later.

    Feit: Thanks, Alan. Buh-bye, Alan.

    Shimel: All right, guys. This is Alan Shimel for DevOps.com, Container Journal, and Security Boulevard, with our friends from Aqua Security on their recently-announced $62 million raise of round C. Till next time, bye bye.

    Osnat: Bye.

    Feit: Bye.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Effective Cloud Security Requires a Cloud-Native Mindset

    Effective Cloud Security Requires a Cloud-Native Mindset

    Thousands of developers and cloud security professionals will fill the Moscone Center in San Francisco next week for the sold-out Google Cloud Next ’19 conference. Three days of breakout sessions and keynotes will immerse attendees in deep technical content and opportunities for hands-on learning. It’s all designed to help organizations embrace the cloud. A key element of succeeding in the cloud is cybersecurity. More critically, the cloud demands embracing a cloud-native approach to security challenges.

    Leading the Way

    Since its inception, Google has been pushing the envelope and blazing trails in the cloud. Like Netflix, Google found itself—and often continues to find itself—in uncharted territory, where it was forced to innovate original solutions to address unique challenges.

    To help create standards and tool sets for managing container environments, Google joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)—a melding of minds between developer communities and platform vendors—as one of the founding members along with CoreOS, Docker, Cisco, IBM and others. Famously, Google also originally developed Kubernetes—an open source container orchestration system for automating application deployment, scaling, and management.

    Google eventually donated Kubernetes to the CNCF. Transitioning it from a Google project to a CNCF project helped it gain broader traction and momentum and emerge as the de facto standard for container orchestration. Kubernetes became the first CNCF project to graduate out of incubation.

    Cloud-Native Mindset

    Kubernetes is a powerful, scalable platform for deploying and managing container environments of all sizes. Still, security needs to be a core focus for organizations, even in a Kubernetes ecosystem. The nature and volatility of container-based applications and cloud environments requires security to be cloud-native as well. Deploying containerized solutions on Kubernetes requires security that is built in to the distributed infrastructure and puts the focus on API security.

    Automation is Key

    The word “dynamic” is a very polite way to describe most cloud environments; volatile or chaotic might be more accurate, in many cases. Cloud infrastructures typically leverage DevOps tools and principles to compress development and deployment time frames and expedite the process of iterating new versions with continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD).

    The thing is, when development is driven by a CI/CD pipeline, security has to be as well. Manual processes can’t possibly keep up with the volume of assets that need to be monitored and protected, and traditional cybersecurity tools are not equipped for hybrid or multi-cloud environments. What’s more, they lack the scalability necessary for effective cloud security. Implementing and managing security in an environment that is constantly shifting and evolving requires an automated, cloud-native approach.

    Security in this context should be managed via API and also optimized to test API-based applications. Speed is crucial as well, though. Security should not break or impede the CI/CD pipeline due to timeouts or delays.

    Kubernetes clusters need cloud-native security tools to automate application protection. Tools capable of protecting containerized applications, microservices and APIs across public and private cloud environments while minimizing false positives at the same time.

    Conclusion

    There will be a ton of great information shared at Google Cloud Next ’19. While you’re networking, gathering insights on cloud strategies and learning how to solve problems in the cloud, don’t forget the crucial role of security. There are a variety of sessions offered that focus on security—how to manage, deploy, and develop security models for the cloud. Or, take a walk through Google’s dedicated Security Area in Moscone Center’s South Exhibition Hall. It’s a great place to connect with experts and educate yourself on why cloud-native solutions are essential for effective cybersecurity in a cloud ecosystem.

    — Tony Bradley