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Applitools Advances AI Testing of User Interfaces

Given the number of platforms applications now need to be able to run on, it’s little wonder that mistakes and errors that compromise the graphical experience of the end user appear all too regularly in production. Keeping up with all the various nuances of each platform is just too much to ask of the average developer. To even those odds, Applitools has developed Applitools Eyes, the latest release of which extends the reach and scope of user interface testing in addition to providing expanded third-party tool integrations, enhanced analytics and team collaboration tools.

Version 10 of Applitools Eyes extends the company’s mission to employ artificial intelligence (AI) to enable organizations to consistently deliver a better application experience, said James Lamberti, chief marketing officer for Applitools.

Testing of graphical user interfaces (GUIs) is becoming more complex because the front-end of each application is increasingly made multiple microservices. Any change to the application requires developers to test each individual microservice and associated content that gets rendered on any number of platform. Applitools Eyes automates that testing process in a way that enables organizations to deliver applications faster without compromising the user (UX) experience, said Lamberti.

“AI makes it easier to identify where the UX is broken,” he said.

Much of the AI focus on DevOps these days tends to be on automating back-end testing. But Lamberti said it’s already been proven AI has a significant role to play in automating UI testing as well. To spur awareness of that requirement, Applitools also announced an Application Visual Management initiative, an attempt to create a new category of tools for visually testing graphical user interfaces.

Lamberti noted that functional tests today are automated, and the visual elements of an application are still conducted manually. That invariably leads to errors that conspire to impede application release cycles no matter how much time and effort may have been invested in continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) processes.

Applitools claims to have already executed almost 100 million visual tests using its visual AI engine to analyze billions of individual UX elements. Version 10 of Applitools Eyes adds improvements to the Layout Algorithm for dynamic content use cases as well as dashboards to make it easier to discover the root cause of a UI issue. Development teams, for example, can review visual test execution status and baseline status updates, bugs squashed and coverage levels specific to individual tasks and test assignments.

Bugs discovered by Applitool Eyes can now also be programmed to automatically generate a ticket with a bug tracking tool such as Jira.

In addition, integration with collaboration tools from Micro Focus as well as Slack is planned for March.

Developers are often especially challenged when it comes to application usability. Application Visual Management may provide a much-needed framework for capturing UI best practices that would enable developers to avoid the same issue over and over by, for example, enabling a testing tool to make specific recommendations about where to place specific functions on a screen. There may even come a day when AI builds the application. In the meantime, when it comes to building applications end users will actually embrace regularly, most developers need all the help they can get.

— Mike Vizard

February 15, 2018
Oracle Unveils Autonomous Cloud Service

Oracle today unfurled at an Oracle CloudWorld event what it describes as a completely autonomous cloud service the company will manage primarily on behalf of application developers.

The Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform is a managed service that makes extensive use of machine and deep learning algorithms across instances of Oracle software that can invoked on a public cloud or deployed in an on-premises IT environment, said Amit Zavery, executive vice president of product development for Oracle Cloud Platform.

“We’re taking away all the day-to-day management issues,” Zavery said.

The Oracle Autonomous Cloud Platform builds on the Autonomous Database service launched last year. This latest service essentially puts all the responsibility for managing IT operations on Oracle, which is relying on a major investment in machine learning algorithms to automate DevOps processes.

The implications of that capability are profound for IT organizations, many of which Zavery said now will be able to shift more resources over to developing and maintaining applications. At a time when more organizations are focusing on digital business transformation, those organizations need to be able to free up resources to focus in application development, he said.

Amit Zavery, Oracle

Examples of how Oracle envisions the transformation of both DevOps and DevSecOps include chatbots that can be interacted with using natural language processing to automate repetitive tasks to automatically identifying and remediating security issues in code within the context of a continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) deployment. There are also controls to prevent data leaks across structured and unstructured data repositories, along with built-in security monitoring tools.

Other capabilities include an ability to create data flows with automated data lake and data prep pipeline creation for ingesting both stream and batch-oriented data, as well as automating the integration of various on-premises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications.

Advanced analytics tools span everything from automated data discovery and preparation to visualization tools for displaying trends.

Oracle may have come late to the cloud computing game, but clearly it intends to make up lost ground by infusing higher levels of automation into cloud services that rivals don’t yet provide. Most cloud service providers are headed in the same general direction as Oracle. But the scope of automation being provided by Oracle, spanning both a public cloud and on-premises IT environments, is unprecedented.

In many ways that level of automation may represent an existential threat to a larger number of IT operations professionals. At the same time, it presents an opportunity. IT professionals should be able to spend more time adding true value to the business instead of having all their time and energy consumed by merely keeping the proverbial lights on in the data center.

Of course, it may take a while for most organizations to make a transition to a single stack of integrated hardware and software provided by a single vendor. Most organizations have decades worth of IT infrastructure consisting of databases, middleware, virtual machines, servers and storage systems all from different vendors. Even if organizations decided the time had come to rationalize those investments in favor of a suite of managed cloud services, it would take several years to make that transition.

In addition, many organizations would also still need to evaluate the total cost of acquiring and managing IT infrastructure over several years versus contracting for services over the same period of time.

Regardless of the path a company chooses, IT operations is about to be transformer utterly by artificial intelligence (AI)-infused automaton.

— Mike Vizard

February 12, 2018
HashiCorp Adds Terraform Workflow Tools for IT Ops

HashiCorp this week moved to templatize automating IT operations by making it easier to share Terraform configuration files which make it simpler to programmatically invoke infrastructure that exposes application programming interfaces (APIs) without knowing how to code.

Available in an on-premises edition or as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application, HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise is intended for use by IT operations teams. A HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Module Registry function has been added to enable IT operations teams to implement a publish-and-subscribe mechanism for Terraform configuration files.

Company CTO Armon Dadgar said HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise is designed to enable IT operations teams to respond faster to requests from developers for infrastructure resources without requiring them to develop programming skills. It’s unlikely developers working for traditional enterprise IT organizations will be taking over control of IT infrastructure anytime soon, he said, and Hashicorp Terraform Enterprise allows IT organizations to inject a level of agility into their workflow processes without requiring IT operations teams to completely re-engineer existing processes.

The HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Module Registry extends that capability further by making it easier for IT operations professionals who have developed expertise employing declarative Terraform configuration files to share those files with other members of the team, Dadgar said.

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Operations Management Puts the ‘Ops’ in DevOps

At the same time, IT operations teams that want to build workflow applications on HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise can use a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) that HashiCorp has exposed. In addition, the company has revamped the user interface for Terraform—workspaces now can be created by combining Terraform files into modular components that can be assigned to specific IT teams. Permissions to access are provided via support for the secure access markup language (SAML) as well as the Sentinel policy management software developed by HashiCorp.

The HashiCorp approach to automating IT operations strikes at the core of the DevOps debate in the enterprise. While web-scale companies typically can afford to hire IT professionals with programming skills to manage IT infrastructure, the average enterprise IT organization still relies on administrators to manage servers, storage and networking. Not only are IT administrators in short supply, most of them would not be in IT operations if they knew how to program—they’d be writing and testing applications instead.

Rival approaches to automating the management of IT infrastructure, despite being around for years, have yet to gain mainstream acceptance, mainly because they require programming skills. Declarative approaches allow IT infrastructure to be managed as code still, with less resistance from IT operations teams that tend to be more comfortable employing declarative tools. In fact, there’s long been a chicken-and-egg debate over the degree to which the transition to modern DevOps practices requires organizations to acquire new tools first or vice versa. The HashiCorp approach strikes a middle ground by providing tools that enable IT operations teams to first become more efficient, which ultimately should enable them to implement new processes that often is much less disruptive to the existing IT culture.

— Mike Vizard

February 9, 2018
Subtree Rises to Microservices Data Management Challenge

Fresh off raising $10 million in funding, Subtree has emerged from stealth to launch a service based on the dotmesh open source utility for microservices to enable DevOps teams to capture the entire state of applications.

Dotmesh captures application state as a series of units known as datadots, and captures and tracks all versions of all the databases, files and other data in any application based on a microservices architecture, said Subtree CEO Luke Marsden. That utility exposes a command line interface (CLI) through which data about the application captured by dotmesh can be collected, and a dotmesh server component stores all the datadots.

Marsden said the dotmesh utility can be applied to any microservice regardless of what runtime or class of containers is being employed.

Once captured, that information can be shared via a dothub repository managed as a service by Subtree. Marsden said there’s no requirement to use dothub as the repository because the dotmesh utility is available as open source code. But dothub is designed to be the most efficient way to share data about the state of microservices applications distributed across the enterprise, said Marsden.

The goal, he said, is to provide the equivalent of the service for source code that Github makes available and designed specifically for sharing information about the state of microservices applications deployed in production environments.

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In effect, the combination of dotmesh and dothub creates a new type of service mesh for tracking and managing data, Marsden said.

He noted that microservices create a significant data management challenge because best practices call for each one to have access to its own database. Managing applications made up of microservices that are tethered to larger numbers of databases makes it difficult to ascertain the state of an application built on top of multiple microservices, Marsden said. If one microservice should fail, for example, the DevOps team often has to stop the application because of all the dependencies between them. However, dotmesh utilities tethered to the dothub service via application programming interfaces (APIs) make it easier to determine the relationship between all those microservices and their data sources, he said.

Subtree envisions DevOps teams employing both dotmesh and dothub together to create workflows that specifically address data management in a microservice environment. The degree to which IT organizations are currently challenged by data management varies according to the number of microservices they are attempting to manage. At some point, however, just about every IT organization that embraces microservices will need to address how the data attached to each microservice gets managed, especially within the context of a larger stateful application.

The impact of a lack of data management that is designed for microservices is already being felt. Many organizations are unable to effectively test a microservices-based application because the tests don’t accurately reflect the true size and scope of the application.

Pricing for the dothub service is $10 per month for 5GB of storage. There’s also a free tier of storage provided for up to 1GB of storage.

It’s still not quite clear who inside IT organizations will manage the data being accessed by what inevitably will become thousands of microservices. But it is clear that currently, the tools for managing all that data are, for the most part, nonexistent.

— Mike Vizard

February 7, 2018
GitLab Acquires Gemnasium to Advance DevSecOps

GitlLab, as part of its effort to extend the reach of its DevOps platform into the realm of security, has acquired Gemnasium, a provider of tools to mitigate vulnerabilities in open source code.

The goal is to incorporate the IT security tools Gemnasium has developed within a single software development lifecycle (SDLC) platform, said GitLab CEO Sid Sijbrandij.

Because both companies relied on the Ruby on Rails programming language to write their respective applications, integration of the Gemnasium software into the core GitLab platform will be easier, he said.

Sijbrandij noted a growing number of organizations are looking to extend the reach and scope of their DevOps processes to include security, also known as DevSecOps. The pitfall they face will be trying to integrate disparate DevOps and security management tools. GitLab is moving to integrate both classes of tools within a single SDLC environment that will make it easier for organizations to make the transition to DevSecOps.

GitLab, Sijbrandij said, already had been moving down that path prior to the acquisition of Gemnasium. Previous releases of the company’s platform have included support for static application security testing (SAST), dynamic application security yesting (DAST) and container scanning. The separate software that Gemnasium developed will no longer be supported after May 15.

Related Content:

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Longer term, Sijbrandij said GitLab is moving toward being able to host its software on top of the open source Kubernetes container orchestration platform. That approach will make it easier to automate deployment of its software on multiple public clouds and on-premises IT environments using a zero-touch provisioning framework.

Ultimately, embracing DevSecOps should result in more secure applications. But just as importantly, IT organizations need to be able to adroitly remediate software vulnerabilities whenever required. There’s a direct correlation between how long malware goes undiscovered and the amount of potential damage caused. It’s not uncommon these days for malware to go undetected for months; as such, eliminating as many of the vulnerabilities that cybercriminals routinely exploit must be a much higher priority for developers.

Achieving that goal, however, is as much about process as it is tooling. Most developers are not security experts. Conversely, IT security experts typically know little about building applications. Developers are under more pressure than ever to roll out applications faster. But that pressure also often leads to them to short-shrift testing processes that otherwise would have uncovered a vulnerability. Organizations that embrace DevSecOps are trying to address security issues earlier in the process because fixing them once an application is in production is expensive. At the same time, however, no one wants to slow down the speed at which applications are being developed. That creates something of a chicken-and-egg dilemma for IT leaders trying to determine degree to which new tooling will foster changes to processes and culture, or whether they need to accomplish the latter before investing in new tooling.

There’s always been a natural tension between developers and IT security teams. The hope is that by making them all part of the same DevSecOps team, that tension is either eliminated or sharply reduced. That outcome stands a better chance of being achieved when everyone involved is employing a common framework.

— Mike Vizard

February 7, 2018
CloudBees Acquires Codeship to Extend CI/CD Reach

CloudBees today signaled its DevOps ambitions to extend well beyond the Jenkins continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform by acquiring Codeship, a provider of a CI/CD platform that is delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

The decision to acquire Codeship is being driven by the need to engage smaller DevOps teams that don’t have the time or expertise required to set up on-premises instances of Jenkins, said CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey.

Codeship today is being used by more than 100,000 developers spanning 2,400 customers. Many of those developers are working at smaller companies. But Labourey noted that small teams of developers inside larger companies also prefer to invoke a CI/CD platform as a service.

“Different teams will decide to do different things in the same organization,” said Labourey.

The Codeship platform is not based on Jenkins and there is no plan to rehost the Codeship service on Jenkins, says Laborey. Jenkins is designed to be highly customizable by the organization that employs it. The Codeship service is a highly opinionated instance of multitenant CI/CD platform that is designed to provide a turnkey experience capable of support lots of developers at once, explained Labourey.

CloudBees will explore ways to bundle its core platform with the Codeship service for organizations that find themselves needing to deploy both a CI/CD platform on-premises in addition to a cloud service, he added.

The acquisition of Codeship signals a wave of coming consolidation across the DevOps sector, Labourey said, predicting that over time, a much smaller number of companies will account for most of the DevOps software and services sold. Some will rise from the ranks of the pioneers of DevOps. Others will be the same companies that today dominate application lifecycle management (ALM) and software development lifecycle (SDLC) software in the enterprise. As DevOps continues to gain momentum in the enterprise, it’s now only a matter of time before legacy ALM and SDLC vendors are forced to modernize their portfolios by making acquisitions or partnering with companies such as CloudBees, he said.

It’s too early to speculate how that consolidation might play out. But it’s clear the rise of microservices is about to force the DevOps issue in many enterprises. The rate at which DevOps processes have been adopted across enterprise has been uneven, but as organizations embrace microservices to build better applications faster, many will need to re-engineer their application development processes. There always will be monolithic enterprise applications that may be better-served by waterfall approaches to application development, but in time, the bulk of applications will be built employing microservices architectures that make it easier to update and manage applications employing modern DevOps best practices.

How much those DevOps processes will be based on CI/CD platforms running in the cloud or on-premises is anybody’s guess. More than likely, most organizations will rely on a combination of both, depending on the size and scope of their efforts. Regardless of the approach, however, at a time when every company is becoming more aware of their dependency on software to compete, it will be those organizations that embrace DevOps processes best that will prosper at the expense of rivals.

— Mike Vizard

February 6, 2018
Mirantis CEO Charts Hybrid Cloud Path Forward

Adrian Ionel is back at the helm of Mirantis as CEO at a time when the shift to hybrid cloud computing is tantalizingly close to being an everyday IT reality.

Adrian Ionel, Mirantis CEO

Ionel is one of the original co-founders of Mirantis, which provides a curated instance of OpenStack and Kubernetes cluster software alongside a suite of services to manage them on behalf of a customer. Ionel replaces Alex Freeland, who will remain on the board of directors of Mirantis.

The decision to shift leaders is being driven by the need for Mirantis to grow more rapidly at a time when IT organizations soon will be moving toward unifying the management of multiple clouds, said Ionel.

While Mirantis owes its existence to OpenStack, the company has been rapidly developing Kubernetes expertise that is at the heart of a recently unfurled managed hybrid cloud computing service. Ionel said the rise of Kubernetes provides a unique opportunity to manage private and public cloud services based on Kubernetes via a central control plane.

The challenge Mirantis will face in achieving that goal is the reluctance IT organizations historically have shown when it comes relinquishing control over their IT environments to a third party. In addition, an already fierce number of rival managed service providers (MSPs) also are moving to embrace Kubernetes.

Ionel said most IT organizations underestimate the complexity of managing multiple clouds. As more of them come to that realization, the number of organizations looking to rely more on external expertise to deploy modern microservices-based applications on Kubernetes should increase substantially. To facilitate that transition, Mirantis has crafted a hybrid Kubernetes service that can be invoked programmatically by developers. A crucial factor driving that decision will be increased awareness of the perils of being locked into a specific public cloud service provider. In fact, Ionel noted that many IT organizations today underestimate how easy it is to become entangled by proprietary application programming interfaces (APIs) on a public cloud service such as Amazon Web Services (AWS).

For the immediate future Ionel said Mirantis expects to see most instances of Kubernetes to be deployed on top of virtual infrastructure. Use of Kubernetes on bare-metal systems is confined largely to application development, he said. But as Kubernetes continues to mature, Ionel noted it’s only a matter of time before IT organizations will be deploying more instances of Kubernetes running on both virtual machines and bare-metal servers. That, of course, will further add to the complexity that needs to be navigated.

Ionel said rivals underestimate just how healthy the current Mirantis business is as use of OpenStack continues to increase. AT&T, for example, has now deployed more than 10,000 nodes employing instances of OpenStack provided by Mirantis, he said.

New CEOs don’t usually magically transform a company by their mere presence. But in the case of Mirantis, the opportunity for Ionel to turn potential in real growth is higher, for no other reason than he doesn’t have to first learn how the company operates.

— Mike Vizard

February 5, 2018
Third Annual DevOps Dozen Winners Announced
We are very pleased to announce the winners of the third annual DevOps Dozen Awards. In many ways this year was a watershed year for the DevOps Dozen, as the process of selecting, voting and choosing the winners was much more refined and mature. In each of the 12 (it is a dozen, after all) categories the winners were absolutely deserving of the award and recognition.

Many thanks to our all-star panel of judges: Jayne Groll, Robert Stroud, Helen Beal, George Hulme and Ericka Chickowski. I was the tie-breaker judge and had to cast a vote in just one category. I should also say that almost all of the categories were very tight. Every one of the finalists was deserving of the recognition!

These awards are a reflection of some of the great work being done in the DevOps community. They are not exhaustive; there are many, many worthy companies, people, projects and products out there. But here is our take on the best of the best in DevOps.

So, without further ado, here are the 2017 DevOps Dozen winners:

Best DevOps Open Source Project

Jenkins is the winner of the Best DevOps Open Source Project for 2017. Originally created in 2004 as a fork of “Hudson,” Jenkins is one of the leading open source automation servers available. Jenkins has an extensible, plugin-based architecture, enabling developers to create 1,400+ plugins to adapt it to a multitude of build, test and deployment technology integrations. In 2017, Jenkins surpassed 155,000 active installations (these are active installations that report usage back to the Jenkins project—only a fraction of total installations), and approximately 1.5 million users, making it the most widely deployed continuous delivery automation server in the world. Learn more: https://jenkins.io/

Best DevOps Commercial Solution

ElectricFlow from ElectricCloud is the winner of the Best DevOps Commercial Solution for 2017. ElectricFlow is an enterprise-grade DevOps release automation platform that simplifies provisioning, build and release of multi-tiered applications. A shared, model-driven approach to managing environments and applications allows teams to coordinate multiple pipelines and releases across hybrid infrastructure in an efficient, predictable and auditable way using the tools and stacks teams already know and love. Learn more: http://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow/

Best DevOps Solution Provider Executive

The winner in this category was actually a 1/1a entry of the CloudBees team of CEO Sacha Labourey and CTO Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Sacha’s background prior to CloudBees was as CTO and key person at JBoss. KK was a Sun engineer when he first became involved with Hudson and later founded Jenkins. Together, they have built CloudBees into a powerhouse in the DevOps and CI/CD space. While working closely with the Jenkins community, they also have been instrumental in the continued growth and popularity of the Jenkins project. Together, they are a formidable team worthy of this award!

Best DevOps Solution Provider

CA Technologies, which now includes Automic, BlazeMeter, Runscope and Veracode, is the winner of the Best DevOps Solution Provider for 2017. From a toolchain perspective, CA Technologies provides the widest array of highly automated solutions necessary to build and optimize integrated workflows across application development, delivery and operations. Spanning the entire application life cycle—including planning, development, testing, release and operations—only CA Technologies offers the full range of capabilities needed to deliver secure, quality applications quickly with an unparalleled customer experience.

Most Innovative DevOps Solution of the Year

The Most Innovative DevOps Solution of the Year 2017 goes to Habitat from Chef, the leader in Continuous Automation. Habitat is a SaaS-based service that provides the fastest way to package apps simply and consistently for deployment and management across flexible cloud-native architectures such as those comprising Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, both on-premises and in-cloud. Habitat gives developers and operations teams complete control over the containerized application life cycle. Learn more: https://www.habitat.sh/

Best DevOps Evangelist

Derek Weeks VP and DevOps Advocate at Sonatype (co-founder of All Day DevOps) is the Top DevOps Evangelist for 2017. This year All Day DevOps offered 100 free online sessions led by DevOps practitioners to 33,000 professionals around the world. Since its founding, the community has attracted, educated and supported more than 40,000 DevOps professionals. The conference also brought attention to more than 250 DevOps-related communities, meetup groups and organizations that are helping to educate practitioners around the world. In 2017, Derek delivered 18 DevSecOps-related keynote addresses, conference speeches and meetup presentations in the United States and Europe. He also produced more than 75 DevOps-related blogs over the year, covering topics from continuous delivery to DevSecOps, modern infrastructure and cultural transformations. The blogs not only delivered first-hand experiences, but also highlighted the work of more than 40 DevOps practitioners from different companies around the world. The blogs can be seen at Sonatype, All Day DevOps, devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Dzone. In addition, Derek championed a number of DevOps reports and surveys in 2017, including the “State of the Software Supply Chain Report” and “2017 DevSecOps Community Survey,” to shed light on industry best practices and areas in need of attention or evolution.

Best DevOps Transformation

CapitalOne was the judges choice for Best DevOps Transformation for 2017. Over the past few years, the 20-year-old financial services giant has been transforming itself, tapping DevOps to establish a continuous software delivery cycle. Topo Pal, a senior director and senior engineering fellow, told a packed room at the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco the company’s journey suits its entrepreneurial spirit. “We consider ourselves a startup, and like any startup, we have different DNA,” said Pal. “For instance, we build our own software.” All the better for adopting DevOps. The company does just about everything (including back-end processing) in the public cloud now, with a focus on building microservices using open source technologies. Having spent the previous three years building out automation steps, scaling DevOps, adopting open source and cloud and starting to measure its success, Capital One is now turning its attention to continuous delivery. Learn more:
- DevOps at Its Core
- This is Why We Push for DevOps
- The Four Stages of DevOps Maturity
- How Capital One Became a Leading Digital Bank
- Case Study: Capital One Invests in Continuous Delivery to Automate Software Development Pipelines
Best DevOps Transformation Leader

Paula Thrasher is the winner of the Best DevOps Transformation Leader for 2017. Paula is Director of Digital Services at CSRA Inc. Paula Thrasher has 20+ years experience in IT and has spent the last 15 years trying to implement Agile culture in the federal government. Her first Agile project was in 2001; since then, she has led more than 15 programs and projects as an Agile developer, technical lead, Scrum master or Agile coach. Her teams have helped two federal agencies migrate applications to Amazon AWS GovCloud and done some other amazing DevOps ninja work along the way. Paula is also the executive lead for CSRA’s corporate giving group’s search for a STEM charity and joined forces with Girls Who Code to bring summer programs and after-school clubs focused on closing the gender gap in IT. She also participated in the DevOps Forum 2017, co-authored a paper on DevOps learning in organizations,”Continual Learning: Building a DevOps inspired Career Track,” and peer reviewed other paper topics produced by the forum this year. Paula has spoken publicly at multiple industry conferences including AllDayDevOps 2017, Red Hat Government Symposium and DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017.

Best New DevOps Solution Company

nClouds is a provider of DevOps and cloud services, products, and solutions, specializing in modern infrastructures on AWS — and winner of Best New DevOps Solutions Company for 2017. They work as an extension of their customers’ teams to build and manage modern infrastructure solutions that deliver innovation faster. nClouds is a certified AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with 250+ DevOps AWS implementations, 500+ deployed pipelines, and 10,000+ managed servers. They call their new SaaS offering, nOps, modern change management at the speed of DevOps. nClouds was named to CIOReview “20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers – 2017” and “20 Most Promising IT Service Management Providers – 2017”.

Best DevOps Book/eBook

“The DevOps Adoption Playbook” by Sanjeev Sharma of IBM won the Best DevOps Book Award for 2017. The book lays out a clear “how-to” for DevOps, including topics such as value stream mapping, how to lead the transformation of culture and scaling DevOps to the enterprise. As Sanjeev himself says, the book started from a Powerpoint deck of best practices he created to take in everything he had learned.

This book represents the culmination of years of learning by not only Sanjeev, but by IBM in general, and includes some of the leading names in DevOps that he learned from during this time. Sanjeev also stays true to the “playbook” paradigm, making references to cricket, soccer and other sports throughout. It is a good read and well-organized. To learn more, listen to this DevOps Chat: ‘The DevOps Adoption Playbook’ by Sanjeev Sharma.

Best DevOps Presentation of the Year

“DevOps: The New Reality for Enterprise Transformation,” a 45-minute keynote presentation at IBM InterConnect 2017, is the winner of the Best DevOps Presentation for 2017. It features Gene Kim, John Comas, NBCUniversal and IBM execs and distinguished engineers including David Lindquist, Angel Diaz, CJ Paul and Michael Elder. Are you dabbling in DevOps? Maybe you’ve run a great pilot project or have a terrific two-pizza team that’s innovating new apps. How do you scale their success to your whole organization? The answer lies with a combination of cultural, personal and technical transformations that blend methodologies and cloud-native approaches with proven automation patterns and existing on-prem development. The presentation includes client stories and demonstrations of the latest IBM solutions to help companies transform their teams and build, deploy and manage their apps for large-scale enterprise IT environments.

Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

“Continuous Integration vs. Delivery vs. Deployment: What’s the Difference?” by Chris Tozzi won the Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year Award for 2017. Christopher Tozzi has covered technology and business news for nearly a decade, specializing in open source, containers, big data, networking and security. He is currently Senior Editor and DevOps Analyst with Fixate.io and Sweetcode.io.

Again congratulations to the winners—well-deserved recognition for all of your efforts.

For those interested in next year’s DevOps Dozen, information will be out in July or August of this year.

— Alan Shimel
January 23, 2018
5 Key 2018 Tech Predictions for the C-Suite

The most important digital trends for C-level business leaders to consider in 2018 relate to digital transformation, artificial intelligence (AI), internet of things (IoT), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliance and cybersecurity. Read on for insights and predictions about why these topics will matter so much to C-suites in 2018.

Prediction 1: Digital Transformation—All Aboard!

As one of the armaments of business innovation and disruption, digital transformation has become such a buzzword that it turns people off. But in 2018, fates likely will be sealed. A company has either transformed, is on its way to doing so, is actively planning its transformation or has decided not to get on that train. That last group won’t be invited to the AI party and are making themselves targets for disruption. According to Forrester, more than 60 percent of executives believe they are behind in their digital transformation. That’s OK, as long as they keep moving. CEOs need to fund this expensive endeavor from the outset and not try to make it pay for itself. Nickel-and-diming digital transformation could be the last mistake a CEO makes.

Prediction 2: By 2020, AI Will Be a Game-Changer

Every so often a technology comes along that has the potential to completely change everything around it. The last such technology was cloud computing. And like cloud, which had several precursors, AI has been around for a long time. AI and machine learning/deep learning are catching up to the initial promise, and that will become more evident as the next few years unfold.

The best options for near-term success with AI are business intelligence and decision support. Some enterprises are using machine learning/deep learning to plumb big data—especially unstructured data such as text and video—to drive new forms of data analytics.

Even so, many companies will strike out with AI/machine learning largely because it’s no paint-by-numbers endeavor. Companies need talented people who know how to harness this technology, but those people are scarce and don’t come cheap. Companies need businesspeople actively making sure that the technology serves the business need, potentially in charge of the project. And companies need the right data. An AI-based decision-support system, a common application of the technology, is fueled by quality data. Do you have it? This HBR.org article, “A Survey of 3,000 Executives Reveals How Businesses Succeed with AI,” will help get your organization oriented toward AI success.

AI is likely to be a largely experimental for the next year to two years as organizations give it a shakedown cruise. But early adopters have had some success, and many see potential for AI to deliver revenue growth.

Ultimately, AI and machine learning/deep learning will be looked upon as major advances with far-reaching effects, much like cloud computing and the internet. In 2018, it may not seem that way as enterprises experimenting with it feel the pain of separating the hype from the reality, adjusting business processes to make it work, cultural resistance from tech teams and a lack of available talent. Stick with it to reap eventual rewards.

Prediction 3: IoT—A Thousand Points of Entry?

Enterprise implementations of IoT functionality are very popular these days. But security vulnerabilities and issues are both inherent and legion with this technology. It simply hasn’t been thought through. In 2018, the disregard for IoT security solutions will come home to roost for several major corporations. Until the security issues are resolved, IoT will begin to be seen by some, at least, as a promising technology that’s not ready for prime time.

Prediction 4: The GDPR Powder Keg

By the end of 2018, some companies will be getting out of European markets, while others will look for a means of circumventing the EU’s GDPR. Still others will be scrambling to comply. And a last group will be doing what they’re doing now: taking the risk that the cost of the penalty is less than the cost of compliance. Forrester predicts that 80 percent of firms will not fully comply with GDPR. The unfortunate part is that, while a company may be able to ride out a steep fine on non-compliance, damage to its brand may be irreparable or very slow to heal.

Companies also can’t just throw money at GDPR—it probably will require new companywide policies and a shift in cultural thinking about personally identifiable data and the individuals behind them. Some companies are going to find it very difficult to make that cultural change.

Prediction 5: Cybersecurity Needs New Thinking

Customer experience and security are at odds with each other. Passwords don’t work. Biometrics aren’t completely safe. Security awareness is treated as an afterthought. Security breaches are an everyday headline. What’s it going to take to make society wake up? There is a huge need for a new type of user authentication system, as just one example. There are significant opportunities for those that can deliver new technologies, new products and new solutions. We need to think differently about cybersecurity. We need to teach it in schools. In 2018, we will hit bottom. It will become apparent to all of society that our security measures are antiquated and have no hope of meeting the rising threat from many quarters. As the digital world continues to assimilate more and more of our previous analog way of life at a rapid clip, security has trailed far behind. Cybersecurity desperately needs innovation.

— Scot Finnie

January 5, 2018
Strap in, CIOs: Analysts Predict Wild Ride for 2018-2020
Digital transformation is the underlying theme of many of the 2018 and beyond IT predictions made recently by analyst firms Forrester, Gartner and IDC. Technologies such as cloud, AI, data analytics, big data, blockchain, IoT, conversational interfaces, DevOps and cybersecurity will also force CIOs to perform a juggling act. The rapid evolution of these technologies combined with the business opportunities they unlock will create a pressure cooker for CIOs, become an everyday topic of discussion for C-suites and possibly even a preoccupation of boards of directors.

We’ve analyzed the predictions by the three research firms and have gathered the key themes as the seven most pressing issues for the C-suite next year and beyond:

1. CIOs are at a Crossroads, Representing Both Challenge and Opportunity

Forrester believes that CEOs will make digital business a top priority in 2018 and CIOs will lead the digital transformation at most companies. In a November report, “CIOs Make the Chief Digital Officer Obsolete,” Forrester summed up: “In 2018, boardroom discussions will focus on digital. Key questions will revolve around platform-based business models, new partnership ecosystems, and new ways to organize for success. CIOs will build new skills and competencies to help drive this change.”

The challenges for CIOs during this period will demand that they step up, expanding their digital skill sets and employing technologies with both eyes focused on business value. Forrester predicts that CIOs will need to orchestrate the underlying technologies and supplier relationships for companies to manage their platform-based business approach. CIOs would also be smart to leverage cloud computing and open source software, and build on containers, APIs and microservices.

CIOs also may need to develop new leadership skills to direct their company’s digital transformation. That includes displaying a laser-like customer focus, attracting the necessary talent, restructuring their organizations and developing the culture required to deliver tangible business results. Doing so, Forrester said, “will present CIOs with the opportunity of a lifetime, allowing them to demonstrate the level of trust and performance that their senior peers and boards require, and positioning them as leaders of the digital transformation — even the enterprise.”

IDC’s November “Worldwide CIO Agenda 2018 Predictions” offers predictions that dovetail with Forrester’s view:
- By 2020, 60 percent of CIOs will implement an IT business model and culture that shifts focus from IT projects to digitally oriented products.
- By 2020, 60 percent of the CIOs who have crossed the digital divide will prevail in C-suite turmoil in competition to become digital business leaders for their enterprises.
Advice to CIOs: Find a leadership coach. Choose one or two lieutenants you trust to delegate important roles to. Find a senior product manager-type person in your company to help you become more knowledgeable about generating business value. Make a point to talk to your CEO about the advantages of digital transformation. Develop a plan for adopting a new digital governance model. What should your digital platform look like?

2. Digital Transformation Becomes Real for Most Companies in 2019-2020

We’ve been hearing for a couple of years that companies are digitally transforming their businesses. The truth is that those companies represent the leading edge and they are a small minority. Most CIOs are still stuck doing more with less, the hangover from the last recession. CEOs: Your CIO needs more budget to position your company for digital success over the next few years. IDC predicted that “through 2019, 75 percent of CEOs and their enterprises will fail to meet all their digital objectives, dragged down by conflicting digital transformation imperatives, ineffective technology innovation, cloud infrastructure transition and underfunded end-of-life core systems.”

That’s a lot of failure. CEOs and CIOs are going to need to work together to make digital transformation a reality. It’s not just about updating your technology, it’s about business innovation.

Key points on digital transformation from IDC’s CIO 2018 predictions:
- By 2019, 60 percent of CIOs will complete infrastructure and application replatforming using cloud, mobile and DevOps, clearing the deck for accelerated enterprise digital transformation.
- By 2019, 60 percent of IT organizations will have deployed digital transformation platforms supporting new customer- and ecosystem-facing business models.
- By the end of 2019, digital transformation spending is expected to reach $1.7 trillion worldwide.
3. AI is No Panacea

Forrester named one of its 2018 prediction reports “The Honeymoon for AI Is Over.” Conventional analytics are undergoing full disruption, largely because AI is perceived to be the solution to both programming analytics and solving the big data riddle. And while it’s likely that AI/machine learning will be able to help with both problems, you can’t just snap your fingers and make it so. Harnessing AI successfully requires specialized engineering talent, quality data, objective planning and some trial and error. According to a Forrester survey, 70 percent of respondents say their firms will have implemented AI in the next 12 months. They chose decision management as their most important use. One of the key points to remember is that the decision-making abilities of it machine learning tool can’t over calm a lack of quality data. Forrester warns: “Don’t be fooled by vendor claims that more intuitive human-to-machine interfaces are [a magic potion] that reduces the need for data and metadata management and curation.”

Quick AI predictions from IDC:
- By 2019, 40 percent of digital transformation initiatives will be supported by cognitive/AI capabilities, providing timely critical insights for new operating and monetization models.
- By 2020, 85 percent of new operation-based technical hires will be screened for analytical and artificial intelligence skills, enabling the development of data-centric digital transformation projects without hiring new data-centric talent.
4. One-Third of Enterprises will Abandon Big Data Repositories in 2018

Has your company built a large data lake that hasn’t delivered any significant business value? Well, 2018 may be the year when you rethink that decision, according to Forrester.

On the other hand, Forrester believes that AI will be able to resolve the longstanding issue of the boundary between structured and unstructured data because of vendors including Digital Reasoning, Expert Systems and Stratifyd.

As you make your move to digital transformation, having more actionable data based on your pool of big data, especially unstructured text data, could deliver book valuable business insights. This might not be the best time to give up on big data. Especially if you’re actively engaged with AI.

5. Blockchain: Confusing, Skills Gap, Steeped in Hype—but Full of Potential

Blockchain will begin to show next year just how difficult it will be to employ but, at the same time, that it’s worth exploring.

“By the year 2020, the banking industry will derive $1 billion of business value from the use of blockchain-based crypto-currencies,” states Gartner’s October “Top Strategic Predictions for 2018 and Beyond.” “When compared to the estimated $7.6 trillion that is the industry gross output of the world’s banking industry, $1 billion may not seem like much. However, the value is more about the tacit endorsement of crypto-currency as a legitimate option by the banking industry.” Cryptocurrency is just one application of blockchain.

Advice: Build your blockchain ecosystem early, Forrester recommends in its 2018 prediction report, “Be Ready to Face the Realities Behind the Blockchain Hype.” “The blockchain terminology will remain confusing,” Forrester noted. “The term ‘blockchain-inspired’ is already a common descriptor for software that has some of the characteristics of blockchain or reflects some of the principles of the blockchain network, but isn’t a blockchain in the true sense.” There is a growing skills gap pertaining to software engineers and security professionals who have experience with blockchain. It’s a nascent technology; make sure your team sets realistic goals.

6. IoT Hits Prime Time, but it Might Not Be Ready

By 2020, IoT technology will be in 95 percent of new product electronics designs, Gartner said. IoT’s growth is very rapid, even for the computer industry. But that growth comes at a cost. The technology has not overcome what many believe to be rampant security vulnerabilities. “Through 2022, half of all IoT security budgets will be spent on fault remediation, recalls and safety failures rather than protection,” Gartner predicted.

Forrester is far more positive about the business advantages of IoT in its report, “IoT Moves from Experimentation to Business Scale.” Its predictions are also more detailed in the several areas where IoT might gain traction in 2018. But the security issues are not lost on Forrester, either. The research firm predicted: “IoT will be at the center of broader and more damaging cyberattacks. The Mirai botnet was a harbinger of future IoT security-related attacks and breaches. … Most firms still haven’t shown a consistent commitment to mitigating IoT-specific threat vectors.”

Advice: IoT is an accident waiting to happen. For B2C companies, the consumer backlash could be fierce if there is a major incident. Make 2018 be the year that you start plugging up those IoT security vulnerabilities and protection gaps.

7. Most Companies Won’t Comply with GDPR in 2018

The European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) takes effect May 25, 2018. Forrester predicted in its November report, “A Year of Reckoning,” that 80 percent of companies will fail to comply with the GDPR. Perhaps more to the point, Forrester additionally predicts that 50 percent of those non-compliant firms will do so intentionally, “meaning they have weighed the cost and risk, and are taking the path that presents the best position for their companies.” The other half of the 80 percent will try to comply but will fail.

Advice: It seems likely that some large company will be made an example of. You don’t want that to be your company.

Takeaways

Those are the standout IT-related issues for the C-suite in 2018 and beyond. If you weren’t tuned in to some of them, knowing is half the battle right? Well, probably not. These are tough challenges. Each organization has its own strengths and weaknesses. But generally speaking, if you parse this list by investing time and budget on the first four while minimizing the potential downsides of last three, you’ll be doing very well.

— Scot Finnie
December 7, 2017