devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: News

  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted as part of an effort to better serve our audience.

    Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers. Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.

    The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.

    We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

    ZipRecruiter

    CapitalOne
    New York, New York
    Lead Software Engineer
    $190,950 to $225,278

    Monster.com

    UMD Energy Solutions
    Bonita Springs, Florida
    AWS Cloud Engineer
    $140,000 to $150,000

    Dice.com

    Cox Communications
    Atlanta, Georgia
    Lead DevOps Engineer
    $105,700 to $176,100

    Indeed.com

    Northrup Grumman
    Dulles, Virginia
    Senior/Principal DevOps Engineer
    $104,600 to $157,000

    SimplyHired

    Visa
    Miami, Florida
    DevOps Engineer
    $85,000 to $120,000

  • Best of 2022: We Must Kill ‘Dinosaur’ JavaScript | Microsoft Open Sources 3D Emoji

    Best of 2022: We Must Kill ‘Dinosaur’ JavaScript | Microsoft Open Sources 3D Emoji

    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 of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: JavaScript is a bloated barrier to progress, and Microsoft’s emoji are on GitHub. (more…)

  • Best of 2022: Microsoft Adds Raft of Tools and Azure Cloud Extensions

    Best of 2022: Microsoft Adds Raft of Tools and Azure Cloud Extensions

    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.

    At its Build 2022 conference this week, Microsoft added a bevy of tools and platform updates as part of its effort to improve the productivity of developers and the DevOps teams that support them.

    A Microsoft Dev Box offering, for example, provides access to a set of pre-configured environments on the Azure cloud that enables developers to be onboarded in seconds, while a previously announced GitHub Copilot tool that makes use of artificial intelligence to make writing code faster will be made generally available this summer.

    Donovan Brown, a partner program manager in the Azure CTO Incubations team, told conference attendees the overarching goal was to enable developers to stay agile while they continue to work remotely in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

    For DevOps teams, a Smart Maps capability was added to the Application Insights module within Azure Monitor. Smart Maps leverages machine learning algorithms to surface performance bottlenecks or failure hotspots and is also available as a technical preview.

    There is also a tool that discovers and groups dependent Hyper-V virtual machines (VMs) and physical servers to ensure all required components are identified and included during an Azure migration.

    Other updates include an App Service Landing Zone Accelerator that provides a combination of artifacts and documentation to automate application deployment using the Azure App Service 3.0 and preview tools for migrating ASP.NET web applications to the platform. In addition, Microsoft is previewing support for Google Remote Procedure Call (gRPC) on the Microsoft Azure App Service. A .NET Multi-Platform App UI framework allows for building natively compiled applications for iOS, Android, macOS and Windows using C# and XAML in a single codebase.

    Microsoft has also extended the reach of its cloud platform for managing application programming interfaces (APIs). The Azure API Management service now supports the Azure Private Link virtual private network (VPN) along with a capability that automatically renews certificates. In addition, Microsoft is previewing support for the GraphQL query language for APIs.

    In addition, a GitHub OpenID Connect (OIDC) with Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) workload identity federation capability has also been added to eliminate the need to store and access secrets outside of the Azure cloud platform.

    Microsoft, in partnership with VMware, is adding a managed Azure instance of the Spring framework for building Java applications and making previews of the Dynatrace observability platform and NGINX proxy software available as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications on the Azure cloud.

    Finally, Microsoft has added a raft of tools to make it simpler to build cloud-native applications on Kubernetes clusters.

    It’s not clear how quickly developers are adopting these tools, but DevOps teams can expect to see the rate at which applications are developed on the Azure cloud increase in the months ahead. The challenge, of course, will be managing all those applications—both as they are being built and after they are deployed either in Azure or some other compatible IT environment.

  • AWS Saves Ukraine’s Data | WPF ‘is not Dead’ (yet) | Devs Quit for Cash

    AWS Saves Ukraine’s Data | WPF ‘is not Dead’ (yet) | Devs Quit for Cash

    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: Amazon S3 is keeping Ukraine’s data safe, we ask if Windows Presentation Foundation is dead, and developers tell us why they switch jobs. (more…)

  • Opvizor Extends Monitoring Reach to the Cloud

    Opvizor Extends Monitoring Reach to the Cloud

    Opvizor, a unit of Codenotary, has extended its monitoring capabilities to cloud computing environments starting with support for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

    Codenotary CTO Dennis Zimmer said Opvizor aggregates data to provide a more efficient approach to applying analytics to surface performance and risk issues.

    Previously, Opvizor was optimized for instances of VMware vSphere running in an on-premises IT environment. Now the unit of Codenotary, a provider of a service for generating software bills of materials (SBOMs), is extending those monitoring capabilities to the cloud.

    That transition comes as many organizations are looking to strike a balance between monitoring pre-defined metrics and observability platforms that make it possible to surface unknown potential issues that could adversely affect IT environments.
    It’s still early days as far as observability is concerned, so Opvizor is focused on meeting most IT teams where they are today as they further embrace cloud computing, said Zimmer.

    Observability, in general, promises to query not just logs and metrics but also distributed traces that are applied to specific processes. In that way, observability allows organizations to detect patterns that have not been predefined. In effect, an observability platform makes it simpler to debug application environments where the number of dependencies that exist between services are becoming too complex to track manually, much less decipher. Without the aid of an observability platform it can take weeks to discover the exact cause of an application’s performance degradation.

    Of course, those applications will need to be instrumented using agent software capable of generating the data observability platforms require. Fortunately, open source projects such as OpenTelemetry are helping to drive down the total cost of instrumentation.

    However, in the absence of observability, most IT teams will rely on existing monitoring tools. Opvizor is making a case for centralizing monitoring across multiple platforms to reduce costs, noted Zimmer.

    Heading into 2023, each IT team will need to decide how and when to rely on traditional monitoring tools versus observability platforms. Many observability platform providers are justifying the acquisition of a new platform based on cost and the ability to eliminate the need for multiple monitoring tools. However, it remains to be seen whether IT organizations will prefer to employ both monitoring tools to track predefined metrics alongside observability platforms.

    Regardless of approach, the reality is that IT environments are becoming more complex to manage. In addition to running workloads in multiple cloud platforms and on-premises IT environments, organizations are deploying emerging cloud-native applications based on containers alongside existing monolithic applications deployed on legacy virtual machines. As workloads are deployed on multiple platforms, the total cost of IT starts to rise. One way to contain those costs is to standardize on a set of tools that can be applied to multiple platforms.

    The pressure to rationalize toolsets only increases during any period of economic uncertainty. The challenge, of course, is convincing one team to give up their preferred tool in favor of another to reduce costs.

  • DevOps 2022: The Year That Was and Wasn’t

    DevOps 2022: The Year That Was and Wasn’t

    We will be wrapping up our DevOps coverage for the year by the end of this week. It’s hard to believe that another year has gone by. The gravitational lensing of COVID-19 makes it hard to see the progression of the last nine years here at DevOps.com. Things seem to get a bit hazy looking back. However, 2022 was certainly one for the record books in ways both good and bad. 2022 saw DevOps, our community our countries and our world pushed and pulled in directions we would not have imagined just a few short years ago. To understand what happened in DevOps in 2022, we need to account for several macro factors that played outsized roles this year. They are:

    1. COVID-19: It’s still here; still killing hundreds of people every day. While some in the U.S. and Western Europe have “moved beyond” it, COVID-19 is still draining our resources, sucking the air out of the room and impacting not just the economy but how we interact with each other individually. In the next few months, I am afraid we will see the 1.4 billion people of China experience a backlash as they move away from zero-COVID policies. Not to mention the other viruses and diseases that are circulating.
    2. War: When I was a young boy, I remember a popular poster/sticker that said something like, “War is not healthy for children and other living things.” That’s still true; it’s not healthy for the economy, either (unless you sell ammunition). The human toll of the war in Ukraine is heartbreaking in the present moment, and the toll that this war will take on the once-healthy tech sectors in Ukraine, Russia and the rest of Eastern Europe also will be felt for a very long time.
    3. Inflation: Again, I am transported back to my youth as inflation rears its ugly head and puts its foot on the throat of our economy. Sometimes I wonder if the Fed and other central banks won’t stop raising interest rates until the economy is good and dead, but their fear of inflation is almost genetic. While recent signs point to a potential peak, we still have a long way to go and the possibility of more interest rate hikes ahead of us. These will continue to make it harder to raise money and put a crimp in companies’ budgets. That means layoffs and budget cuts; projects cut or pushed out. We haven’t seen disruption like this in tech for more than 10 years. But for those of my vintage, we have seen cycles like this before. This too shall pass.
    4. Hate: Is it me or has the whole world gone crazy with tribalism, nationalism, racism, antisemitism and a bunch of other “-isms”? We seem to be ripping ourselves apart from the inside out. I don’t have a clue how to combat this on a macro level, but I pray every day that things get better.

    With these four horsemen of the apocalypse riding among us, you may think that I am not very bullish on DevOps now and in the future. But you’d be wrong. Like the little boy in a room full of horse manure, I remain very excited because I know there must be a pony around here somewhere.

    DevOps has continued to evolve, continued to mature and has become an indispensable part of today’s modern software factories. Like their own version of Marvel’s Avengers or DC’s Justice League, DevOps, along with cloud-native, SRE, Agile, CI/CD, DevSecOps and dare I say it, platform engineering, are wielded by IT teams around the globe to continue to push forward as we digitally transform our businesses and the very fabric of our lives. That is what gets me up and out of bed every day and makes me excited to come to work.

    While some marketers are busy running around printing stickers and shirts proclaiming that DevOps is dead, nothing could be further from the truth. Look around—as far as the eye can see, DevOps is everywhere. As we explored in our DevOps Experience virtual event in October (the sessions are still there for you to watch on demand), DevOps is everywhere. It is at the edge; it is in the “connected things”; it is inherent in technologies like WebAssembly (Wasm) and DevOps is distributed.

    In 2023, I think DevOps at the edge, the DevOps of things and Wasm will be huge areas of growth. I realized that some of these folks claiming that DevOps is dead are trying to say platform engineers will replace DevOps engineers. But like Darth Vader trying to strike down Obi-Wan, all they are doing is making DevOps stronger than ever. You see, DevOps was never about DevOps engineers; it’s not about one role or one individual. In fact, some of my best friends helped kick off the DevOps movement and they’d react quite loudly when they heard the term DevOps engineers. DevOps is about building, maintaining and managing our software and applications. It’s a way of thinking about how we can go faster, be smarter and achieve better quality. It’s not about a particular tool you use or the role you play on the team, it’s about the fact that you have a team.

    So, what does 2023 have in store for DevOps? More of the same, I think. DevOps, along with all of the associated frameworks and technologies, will continue to allow us to do more and do it faster and better. As I think about the coming year, I am very excited about the potential for ML and AI and I think they are going to have an outsized role in allowing us to be more successful. I think the novelty of these technologies has worn off and we will get to the productivity phase. I remember interviewing Luke Kanies years ago; he told me that one day software would write software. I asked him when he thought this might happen, and he said maybe 2035 or so. I think we are on track. Much like ChatGPT and Jasper’s impact on copywriting, AI won’t take the place of developers. But it will free them of some of the mundane, repetitive chores they do now.

    I think we’ll also see an emphasis on feedback loops and iteration. I think automation, ML/AI will contribute to this in a big way. We have put so much of our DevOps emphasis on the development, integration and deployment of software. But observability allows us to see patterns and use cases as never before. We need to incorporate those findings into the next revision of our software. This is going to be a big story in 2023. That old infinity loop model for DevOps will rise to the top once again.

    Thank you for all of the support for DevOps.com this year and over the past few years. I hope this holiday season finds you and yours healthy and happy. Merry, merry. Happy, happy. See you in 2023.

  • Rezilion Updates Open Source MI-X Tool to Better Secure App Development

    Rezilion Updates Open Source MI-X Tool to Better Secure App Development

    Rezilion has updated its open source MI-X vulnerability discovery tool to include mitigation and remediation recommendations.

    In addition, the tool can now produce machine-readable output in either a JSON or CSV format.

    Finally, the company added Windows support for Heartbleed and SpookySSL vulnerabilities in Windows environments.

    MI-X makes it possible to use a command line interface (CLI) tool to identify and establish the exploitability of more than 20 well-known common vulnerabilities and exposures (CVEs).

    Yotam Perkal, director of vulnerability research for Rezilion, said Rezilion created the tool as part of its efforts to create a platform that enables organizations to better secure their software supply chains. The primary purpose of the platform is to prevent vulnerabilities from being introduced into applications in the first place by providing developers with the context required to understand the potential severity of a vulnerability, he added.

    There’s no doubt that developers need tools that enable them to easily identify vulnerabilities while writing code. However, shifting responsibility for vulnerabilities entirely left toward developers is not a panacea for application security. DevOps teams need to embrace DevSecOps best practices to ensure that the build created by multiple developers is secure and that the runtime environment where applications run is also free of malware.

    The challenge is that achieving that goal needs to go beyond adding additional tools to a DevOps workflow. The biggest challenge is narrowing the historic cultural divide between developers and cybersecurity teams tasked with discovering vulnerabilities. Most cybersecurity professionals don’t understand how applications are developed, so every instance of vulnerability found in an application looks the same to them—regardless of whether the actual code is externally accessible.

    DevOps teams, meanwhile, are trying to strike a delicate balance between patching innumerable vulnerabilities and building and deploying additional applications. More than anything, those teams need to be able to prioritize their patching efforts based on the actual versus theoretical severity of a vulnerability, noted Perkal.

    It may never be possible to address all the application security debt application environments have accrued over the years. However, as apps are built and application security issues are addressed more proactively, the state of cybersecurity should improve. The issue, of course, is that cybercriminals are now targeting software supply chains; inserting malware into a DevOps workflow creates a potential opportunity to compromise any number of downstream applications. Organizations are now racing against time to secure their software supply chains.

    The good news is that no developer intentionally sets out to build an insecure application. It’s just that far too many of them have been conditioned to think of security as an obstacle they need to overcome rather than address. However, the more tools they are provided to remediate as many vulnerabilities as possible, the better off everyone concerned will be.

  • Salesforce Launches Low-Code DevOps Platform

    Salesforce Launches Low-Code DevOps Platform

    Salesforce made generally available today a low-code DevOps Center service on its infrastructure through which developers are provided an opinionated platform for building custom applications. The Salesforce DevOps Center service is based on the same object model Salesforce uses to construct its own applications.

    Karen Fidelak, senior director of product management at Salesforce, said after nearly two years of development effort, this platform will make it simpler for both professional and citizen developers to build applications consistently using a common Source Control repository. That’s especially critical for professional developers that may need to access source code previously created by a citizen developer, Fidelak noted.

    In 2023, Salesforce will embed more robust continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) capabilities within the platform to make it simpler to deploy custom applications on the Salesforce platform, Fidelak added.

    In general, the number of developers willing to embrace DevOps best practices to build Salesforce applications has been surprising, since the platform was initially launched in 2020, noted Fidelak. She noted that both citizen and professional developers are looking to adopt best practices that provide a set of guardrails that ensure high-quality applications are secure. Salesforce anticipated a much higher level of DevOps resistance, added Fidelak.

    The DevOps Center platform enables development teams to track and deploy changes to custom objects on the Salesforce platform as Work Items that can be integrated with other Salesforce Flows, a set of process management tools the company provides. As development teams make changes in their sandboxes, DevOps Center automatically tracks them. Developers can then point and click to promote their desired metadata components via custom pipelines they define.

    In addition, Salesforce also provides optional integrations with version control systems such as GitHub to centralize the management and governance of artifacts.

    Finally, Salesforce is committing to tightening integration between DevOps Center and multiple software-as-as-service applications such as Tableau and middleware platforms such as Mulesoft, said Fidelak.

    It’s not clear how much low-code is moving through DevOps pipelines these days, but the volume is increasing as more developers rely on these tools to accelerate application development. The issue that creates is citizen developers typically don’t have the expertise required to build and deploy secure applications at scale—at least not applications that anybody other than themselves really wants to use. Ideally, citizen developers should be supported by application development platforms and DevOps teams that ensure security guardrails are in place for building applications at scale. DevOps teams should also reduce the friction that a citizen developer will most certainly encounter when building any application.

    The fact is, in the absence of that support, most citizen developers—who typically have other tasks that require their attention—will simply abandon an application development project should projects become overly complicated. None of this means organizations shouldn’t be working toward building their own army of citizen developers. The increased reliance on citizen developers is part of an inexorable wave of the democratization of IT. The challenge is making sure those applications are of the highest quality possible regardless of who actually developed them.

  • EU Data Privacy: Try Again | SkyPilot: Choose Cheapest Cloud | WFH: Better Meetings

    EU Data Privacy: Try Again | SkyPilot: Choose Cheapest Cloud | WFH: Better Meetings

    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: EU-U.S. Data Privacy Framework reemerges, Berkeley brings cloud selection box, and proof that remote work is good work. (more…)

  • New Relic Extends Observability Reach to More DevOps Platforms

    New Relic Extends Observability Reach to More DevOps Platforms

    New Relic today expanded its ecosystem by adding integrations between its observability platform and a wide variety of DevOps and cybersecurity tools. The New Relic observability platform now integrates with offerings from Atlassian, Amazon Web Services (AWS), CircleCI, Confluent, GitHub, JFrog, Lacework and Snyk and the open source Jenkins continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform.

    Peter Pezaris, senior vice president for strategy and experience at New Relic, said the goal is to make it simple to share analytics based on telemetry data collected from IT operations environments with the tools organizations rely on to build and deploy applications.

    In total, there are now more than 500 integrations with the New Relic observability platform, he noted.

    Only 27% of respondents to a recent New Relic survey reported that they have achieved full-stack observability and only 5% claimed they have a mature observability practice in place. A third (33%) of respondents also said they still primarily detect outages manually or based on complaints from end users. More than half (52%) of respondents said they experienced high-business-impact outages once per week or more and 29% said they take more than an hour to resolve those outages.

    On the plus side, nearly three-quarters (72%) of respondents expected to maintain or increase their observability budgets next year, with more than half (52%) expecting observability budgets to increase over the next year.

    Observability, in one form or another, has always been a tenet of any DevOps practice. For the most part, the best that could be achieved until recently was continuous monitoring of a set of pre-defined metrics. With the arrival of observability platforms, it’s becoming much simpler to not only monitor metrics but also launch queries that surface issues long before an IT service can be disrupted.

    An observability platform achieves that goal by making it possible to query logs, metrics and distributed traces in a way that surfaces patterns that have not been pre-defined. In effect, an observability platform makes it simpler to debug application environments where the number of dependencies that exist between services are becoming too complex to track or decipher manually.

    Of course, those applications will need to be instrumented using agent software capable of generating the data observability platforms require. Fortunately, open source projects such as OpenTelemetry are helping to drive down the total cost of instrumentation by making agent software more accessible to a wider range of application developers.

    It’s not clear how quickly IT teams will be embracing observability platforms, but there is now a clear opportunity to narrow the divide between IT operations teams and application developers, noted Pezaris. As each DevOps platform makes it easier to collect data via application programming interfaces (APIs), richer telemetry data can be collected, he added.

    In the meantime, as application environments continue to become more complex in the cloud-native era, most DevOps teams will need additional tools. Existing legacy monitoring tools don’t make it easy to discover, for example, which microservice might be adversely impacting the overall performance of an application because calls are being rerouted. The frustrating thing, as always, is that it can take days or weeks to pinpoint an issue that might take only a few minutes to fix.