Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: New ideas bring low-power ML inference, and more big-tech jobs are going. (more…)
Category: News
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8-Bit Floating Point for AI/ML? | Amazon and Microsoft Shed Tech Jobs
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Top Three DevOps Tools for Cloud Infrastructure
A survey from Canonical of 326 IT executives found the most widely employed DevOps tool for managing cloud infrastructure is the Bash shell and command language (53%), followed by the Ansible automation platform (47%) and Terraform (40%). Another 27% reported they used tools they developed themselves.
The survey also found 58% managed their cloud infrastructure entirely on their own rather than relying in part or entirely on some type of managed service.
Not surprisingly, the survey also found that 83% have seen spending on cloud infrastructure expenses increase over the last two years, but 23% have no visibility into how much they are actually spending. Well over half (57%) do feel they are paying “a lot” for cloud infrastructure.
Tytus Kurek, a product manager at Canonical, said during uncertain economic times, there’s now more focus on the total cost of IT. Cloud costs have become a much larger percentage of the IT budget, so more scrutiny is being brought to bear, he added. As such, there’s more interest in FinOps as a framework for programmatically managing cloud costs more effectively, noted Kurek.
However, only 58% said they believed their public cloud costs were predictable. Well over half (53%), however, noted they qualified for discounts on cloud services offered by providers. In comparison, 73% said their private cloud costs were predictable.
The most widely deployed software on cloud infrastructure are web applications (57%), followed by file storage (52%) and databases (51%). The most widely employed cloud service providers were Amazon Web Services (AWS) at 60%, Microsoft Azure (49%) and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) (33%). In terms of private cloud platforms, the most dominant is VMware (40%), followed by OpenStack (28%) and Azure Stack (15%). Only 25% of respondents managed less than 1TB of data.
In general, cloud computing environments are evolving as more cloud-native applications are built and deployed. The bulk of applications running in the cloud today are monolithic. As such, they typically consume a set of IT infrastructure resources dedicated to running that application. Cloud-native applications take advantage of Kubernetes to scale consumption of IT infrastructure more efficiently; over time, the cost of running a cloud-native application should be less than a monolithic application. It’s still early days as far as deployment of cloud-native applications is concerned, so the bulk of applications running in the cloud will continue to be monolithic for many years to come, noted Kurek.
In the meantime, there is a clear need for more automation. Many cloud infrastructure resources are currently provisioned by developers. There is an opportunity for DevOps teams to automate that process so that it is more efficient and more secure. Developers tend to make mistakes when provisioning cloud resources that, for example, result in data being exfiltrated by cybercriminals via a port inadvertently left open.
One way or another, the management of cloud computing is becoming more structured in an era where IT organizations are rediscovering the importance of capacity planning. The challenge is that many organizations have never known anything other than the cloud, and they may not even know how to achieve that goal. On the plus side, however, it may not be too long before the whole process is automated by an artificial intelligence (AI) model that optimizes the allocation of resources without any human intervention required.
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Okta Makes No-Code Integration Tool for Identity Platform Available
Okta today made generally available an Actions Integration capability that makes it possible to integrate third-party tools without having to write any code.
Shiven Ramji, chief product officer for Okta, said this no-code integration capability for the Okta Customer Identity Cloud extends a simpler approach for managing secrets that is invoked via an application programming interface (API).
At a time when more responsibility for application security is being shifted left toward developers, the Okta Customer Identity Cloud is gaining traction as an alternative for managing secrets more securely, noted Ramji. Rather than developers attempting to manually verify the identity of end users, it becomes easier to manage identity flows within the context of a larger application development workflow using a cloud service, he added.
In addition to giving developers access to Actions Integration, Okta is also making third-party integrations developed by partners available via the Auth0 Marketplace. The goal is to encourage providers of application development tools to build integrations that development teams can simply download when needed, said Ramji.
It’s not clear how much influence developers are exerting over how identity is managed as more organizations embrace DevSecOps best practices for building and deploying applications. Regardless of approach, the overall state of application security should continue to improve as developers embrace new methods of managing identity within their applications. One of the issues that frequently creates a security breach is when developers forget to remove secrets created during the application development process before an application is deployed in a production environment. Cybercriminals today routinely scan for secrets that have been inadvertently stored as text within an application.
Lees clear is the degree to which developers may opt to update existing applications to take advantage of identity management services that can be invoked via an API or whether they will opt to switch to a cloud service for only new applications.
One way or another, organizations of all sizes will need to find a way to make it easier for developers to manage identities across multiple applications. There is often a tendency to ascribe responsibility for managing identities to development teams without always providing access to a set of tools to manage the process. In about half of the instances in which organizations adopt Okta Customer Identity Cloud, the decision is made by developers, said Ramji. Many of those developers discover the Okta service when they are building a proof-of-concept for their application, he added.
The other half of the time the decision is made by more senior leaders on behalf of an entire development team, said Ramji. In some of those cases, organizations are even going to far as to create a team of specialists for managing identities across a portfolio of applications, he noted.
The core issue, as always, is determining how much time and effort developers will want to spend on identity management versus writing business logic code. All things considered, most developers are going to find it a lot more convenient to invoke an API to access a cloud service versus setting up and maintaining a vault full of application secrets on their own.
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FAA Ground Stop due to Technical Debt? | Don’t Do DIY Crypto!
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week: The FAA’s NOTAM database gets corrupted, and Threema shows why DIY cryptography is bad. (more…)
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Meet the DevOps Dozen² 2022 Honorees
We are proud to announce the DevOps Dozen² 2022 honorees. For the past eight years, the DevOps Dozen Awards have celebrated the most outstanding individuals and companies in the DevOps community and their remarkable contributions to the industry. These honorees have demonstrated their leadership and commitment to our community during the past year.
Congratulations to all those nominated and to the honorees. All of your hard work and dedication are greatly appreciated.
Without further ado, here are the DevOps Dozen² 2022 honorees:
DevOps Dozen Community Awards
1. Best DevOps Industry Implementation
OJA DevOps Transformation and Implementation
2. Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research
GitLab 2022 Global DevSecOps Survey
3. Best DevOps-Related Video Series (video)
4. Best DevOps-Related Audio Podcast Series
5. Best DevOps Book/eBook of the Year
6. Top DevOps Evangelist
7. Best DevOps Transformation (non-vendor)
Natura Cloud & DevOps Center of Excellence
8. Best DevOps Event of the Year
9. Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project
10. DevOps Executive of the Year (non-vendor)
11. Best DevOps Presentation of the Year
“Journey from 100’s of Pipelines to a Single Pipeline Ecosystem” by Ali Ravji and Prashant Parekh
12. Best DevOps.com Article of the Year
DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards
1. Best End-to-End DevOps Tool/Service
Harness Software Delivery Platform
2. Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service
3. Best CI/CD Tool
4. Best Value Stream Management Tool
5. Best Observability Solution
6. Best DevSecOps Solution
Veracode Continuous Software Security Platform
7. Best Testing Service/Tool
8. Best Kubernetes Platform/Service
9. Best Cloud-Native Security Solution/Service
10. Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution
11. Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution
12. Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider
BMC Compuware zAdviser DORA Metrics dashboard
The honorees will receive both digital badges and physical trophies celebrating their achievements.
Winners were chosen from among the finalists with general public voting counting for 40% of the final total and our judges’ selections for 60% of the weighted total. The panel of judges went through thousands of votes to choose the winners in each category—it was not an easy task. Many thanks to our judges for making the hard calls and to everyone who has supported the DevOps Dozen² Awards by nominating candidates and voting.
For more information, please visit the DevOps Dozen² Awards website and stay tuned for the DevOps Dozen² 2023 Awards.
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Devs Increasingly Rely on IaC to Manage Multiple Clouds
A survey of more than 300 DevOps professionals conducted by Firefly, a provider of a platform for automating cloud provisioning, found that more than a third of organizations (36%) have allocated the equivalent of two or more full-time engineers per month to writing infrastructure-as-code (IaC) templates.
A full 82% are also deploying the templates within the context of a DevOps pipeline, with 68% reporting more than half of their cloud instances are now managed using IaC tools, according to the survey. A total of 27% reported they are now managing every aspect of IT as code.
The challenge is that 61% of respondents also admitted they can’t automatically detect configuration drift over time, with more than a third (35%) spending days or weeks remediating IaC templates. Well over half of respondents (56%) said they are also retrofitting existing cloud instances using IaC tools.
Cindy Blake, vice president of marketing for Firefly, said this issue is likely to become more challenging to address as the number of clouds in use continues to increase. The survey found 44% of respondents already use multiple cloud providers. Overall, 42% reported having more than 10 cloud accounts.
The top IaC benefits identified by survey respondents are improved efficiency (75%), increased reliability (55%) and easier compliance (52%) and simpler troubleshooting (49%).
Not surprisingly, the survey identified knowledge (46%) followed closely by complexity (43%) as the top challenges organizations face when using code to manage cloud infrastructure. Factors increasing complexity included cost and complexity (70%), followed by security (61%).
In addition, only 14% of respondents reported that all their engineers are IaC literate. More than a third (36%) said they only have one IaC-literate engineer. As a result, many organizations are now attempting to navigate IaC bottleneck issues that could be alleviated if they relied more on automation that can be integrated within a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, noted Blake. She added that many organizations are already allocating too much engineering time to manually writing IaC templates.
Those manual efforts often result in misconfigurations that are easily exploited by cybercriminals, added Blake. Many developers using IaC tools such as Terraform have had little to no cybersecurity training, so the odds they will make a mistake are high.
At a time when more organizations are focused on the productivity of DevOps teams and ensuring the integrity of software supply chains, there is a clear need to automate processes that increasingly span multiple clouds. More organizations than ever are employing multiple clouds to ensure application availability in the wake of a series of outages over the past few years, Blake said.
Regardless of the motivation, multi-cloud computing is here to stay. Developers opt for different clouds based on the performance capabilities they can provide for various classes of workloads. There may be one cloud platform that runs the bulk of the workloads, but the number of organizations that have standardized on a single cloud are comparatively few. The issue is finding the best way to manage multiple clouds that doesn’t require as much manual effort so organizations can reduce the total cost of managing IT environments.
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Broadcom Survey Reveals Spike in VSM Adoption
Value stream management (VSM) is gaining traction as organizations look to find ways to engage customers more efficiently via digital business transformation initiatives.
A survey of 500 executives, IT and business leaders conducted by Dimensional Research on behalf of Broadcom published this week found 39% of respondents implemented a VSM platform with another 16% having some equivalent capability. Another 31% said their organizations is moving in the direction of adopting a VSM platform. A total of 60% of respondents indicated that they will be using VSM to deliver products in 2023, with 95% of organizations that have adopted VSM also engaged in digital transformation.
Laureen Knudsen, chief transformation officer for Broadcom, said the primary goal is to close the divide that has emerged over the years between software development teams and the rest of the business. More than two-thirds of respondents (68%) reported there are disconnects between the business and software development.
Overall, the Broadcom survey identified increasing customer value (58%), improving product quality (55%), reducing costs (51%), adding more customers (50%, increasing profits (49%) and increasing speed to market (45%) as the top strategic issues organizations face in 2023.
The top benefits derived from investing in VSM were increased transparency (42%), improved organizational alignment (39%), faster solutions to customers (38%), data-driven decision-making (37%) and improved access to data (36%).
VSM traces its lineage back to lean manufacturing methods, which called for each step of a manufacturing process to be continuously measured. As software development has evolved and organizations realize how dependent they are on software, there is a growing appreciation for the value of monitoring things such as the impact of missed software development deadlines on the business. At their core, VSM platforms aggregate DevOps metrics and then match them to a set of key performance indicators (KPIs) defined by business leaders. Once those metrics are gathered and correlated, organizations can apply advanced analytics. The goal is to apply algorithms and other forms of predictive analytics that will enable organizations to more easily identify the precise impact software development processes have on the business.
Knudsen said the survey makes it clear a lack of discipline when it comes to software engineering now needs to be addressed as organizations realize how dependent they are on applications to engage customers. Many organizations have, for example, adopted flawed approaches to agile development that wind up creating chaos across the software development life cycle, she noted.
Many organizations, for example, are unsure how much time development teams are spending on retiring the technical debt accrued within legacy applications versus actually working on developing new applications, Knudsen added.
Business conditions tend to change rapidly, so aligning software development with corporate goals is difficult. Nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents said they are frustrated by the state of the business and constant changes to strategy. Digital business transformation initiatives, however, will require organizations to adopt a more structured approach to software engineering, said Knudsen.
The issue, of course, is the pace at which businesses are already being digitally transformed. The accelerated pace requires almost immediately re-engineering software development processes for them to succeed.
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Cloudflare Adds Digital Experience Monitoring to CDN Portfolio
At an online CIO Week event, Cloudflare today added a digital experience monitoring capability to a portfolio of services layered on top of its core content delivery network (CDN).
Corey Mahan, director of product management for Cloudflare, said the Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring service extends a Cloudflare Zero Trust platform based on agent software dubbed Cloudflare WARP. The solutions delivers a wide range of software-as-a-service (SaaS) offerings spanning everything from data loss prevention (DLP) to email security.
He added that the overall goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by delivering SaaS application services more efficiently using a single agent rather than having to deploy multiple agents for each service.
The Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring service, available as a private beta, will enable IT teams to leverage the Cloudflare CDN to measure and analyze controlled data flows to public or private resources by emulating traffic flows using synthetic data. Via integration with the Cloudflare Zero Trust platform, IT teams can also access real-time data visualizations highlighting anomalies in connectivity or performance that might, for example, be indicative of a security breach, noted Mahan.
While there’s no doubt IT organizations are looking to streamline the number of IT vendors they need to manage, it’s not clear what the center of gravity will be for achieving that goal. Cloudflare is making a case for using the same global CDN that many organizations already rely on for networking services.
The Cloudflare Digital Experience Monitoring service leverages the company’s CDN to make it simpler to understand, for example, why users in one geography experience sub-optimal application experiences compared to another, said Mahan. That’s especially critical when more organizations than ever have employees working from home across multiple geographies, he added.
In the longer term, more networking and security functions will be consumed as a service. The challenge then becomes integrating those services into the DevOps workflows that are employed to deploy applications across a highly distributed computing environment. In many cases, what might initially appear to be an application performance issue winds up being a network connectivity problem that is more easily solved.
One way or another, the management of IT services in the months and years ahead will continue to converge. Organizations of all sizes will need to determine whether it makes economic sense to acquire platforms they need to manage versus consuming a service that is managed on their behalf. Most of the time, a service will be easier to consume and free up resources that can be applied to other IT functions, such as application development.
Of course, organizations will also need to take care to avoid locking themselves into a specific services provider. Ultimately, however, the question is whether managing a specific IT function provides enough differentiated value to be worth the time and effort when there is so much more to do.
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Southwest Airlines: ‘Shameful’ Technical Debt Bites Back
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
20 Years of Neglect Led to ‘Meltdown’
Last month’s débâcle of canceled flights was caused by decades of technical debt. That’s the analysis of Columbia University professor Zeynep Tufekci. (more…)
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Best of 2022: Agile/Scrum is a Failure – Here’s Why
As we close out 2022, we at DevOps.com wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.
Welcome to
The Long View—where we peruse the news and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.
This week, something a bit different: I’m devoting my entire column to Agile and Scrum. They’re increasingly getting a bad reputation, being associated with the worst aspects of toxic workplace culture: Sexism, racism, burnout, micromanagement. (more…)