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DevOps Dozen Nominations Are Now Open
[su_heading]The 3rd annual DevOps Dozen awards are now open for nominations. [/su_heading]

The DevOps Dozen honors the best of the best in DevOps. The third annual DevOps Dozen awards opened for nominations today. Finalists will be selected based upon how many people nominated them. The top 4 to 6 nominees in each category will then make it to the finalists. The winners will then be voted on by our panel of judges.

You can nominate up to two entrants in the 12 categories for the DevOps Dozen. It is one nomination per person though. We are also requiring name and email address for all people nominating. While that is not going to thwart ballot stuffing, we hope people take these awards in the spirit they are meant to be.

As stated earlier, we will take the top 4-6 nominees in each category and designate them finalists. Our panel of judges will then pick the winners from that finalists list. Finalists can submit a presentation on why they deserve the award. These can be sent to judges@devops.com. Finalists will be announced 2nd week of November and winners will be announced in December.

Who are the judges? This is tough. We couldn’t have anyone who might be eligible for an award. That disqualifies vendors, practitioners and many others. However, I think we have 4 great judges:
1. Alan Shimel, founder, editor-in-chief, devopsy.kinsta.cloud
2. George Hulme, long time tech journalist and editor at devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Security Boulevard
3. Jayne Groll, CEO and co-founder of the DevOps Institute
4. Ericka Chickowski, an original editor of devopsy.kinsta.cloud and well know tech journalist
So what are the dozen categories for the DevOps Dozen this year? Well you can get the full story at the site itself. Here they are as well:

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If you have questions after visiting the DevOps Dozen website, write us at DD@devops.com.

The DevOps market is so crowded with worthy winners that we know some great companies and people won’t make the cut. However, there can be only one (as they say)

Voting for finalist nominees is open for just 2 weeks, so don’t waste time. Nominate your favorites today. Good luck to everyone vying for the DevOps Dozen.

— Alan Shimel
October 12, 2017
Cloud Foundry Study Confirms Accelerated App Development

When it comes to accelerating the development of applications, having a standard set of runtimes can make all the difference. A new study of 753 IT professionals conducted by ClearPath Strategies on behalf of the Cloud Foundry Foundation (CFF) finds a marked decrease in the time it takes organizations using the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment to develop code—just 18 percent need three months or longer, compared with 51 percent of respondents that don’t use the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime. And, according to the study, the 46 percent of responding companies that use the Cloud Foundry Application Runtime see application development times of less than a week, compared with only 16 percent of non-users.

Abby Kearns, executive director for CFF, says use of Cloud Foundry Application Runtime has expanded considerably in the last year. Nearly half (45 percent) of the respondent have been using the PaaS environment in the last year. The survey also finds that more than half (51 percent) now have more than 10 developers employing Cloud Foundry Application Runtime, while 28 percent now have more than 50 developers.

Kearns says those results are noteworthy because it shows that CF is now being used for a lot more than simple proof-of-concept projects. In fact, Kearns notes use of CF to develop a broader range of cloud-native application is increasing. The study finds half of Cloud Foundry users currently use containers, with another 35 percent evaluating or deploying containers.

Kearns says there’s a high correlation between implementations of CF and adoption of DevOps processes. He notes that often organizations decide to implement CF to force the DevOps issue—a PaaS environment the size and scale of CF requires every process and function within an IT environment to participate in what has become a large-scale continuous application/continuous integration (CI/CD) platform operating at scale. Confronted with that requirement, Kearns says it’s not too long before the IT culture adjusts to that new reality by implementing a new organizational structure.

CF is not the only PaaS game in town. But via CF distributions from Pivotal, IBM, SAP and others, use of CF has steadily grown, especially among larger enterprises that have the skills required to implement CF at scale. The survey finds that enterprise IT organizations with more than $1 billion in revenue account about half (49 percent) of all CF users. As deployments of the various elements of a PaaS environment becomes more automated, adoption of CF in small-to-medium enterprises should increase.

In the meantime, IT organizations need think through the amount of time and money developers are wasting using alternative approaches. Not every IT organization appreciates the opinionated workflows that are baked into a PaaS environment. But given the length of time it takes to build applications using other platforms—as well the total cost of maintaining those environments—building and deploying applications at a higher level of PaaS abstraction is difficult to ignore. In fact, managing IT at a higher level of abstraction may eventually prove to be the difference between thriving and merely surviving.

— Mike Vizard

October 11, 2017
Platform9 Brings Workflows to Serverless Computing

Serverless computing frameworks are widely regarded as the next big thing in enterprise IT because they are based on an event-driven architecture that makes servers, storage and networking resources dynamically available as needed using a programming construct known as functions. But DevOps teams are challenged in finding a way to orchestrate all those functions in concert with one another.

To enable the orchestration of those functions, Platform9 has added support for Fission Workflows to its instance of a serverless computing framework. Platform9 CEO Sirish Raghuram says Fission Wokflows will make it possible for IT organizations to craft complex applications made up of thousands of functions.

On the one hand, serverless computing frameworks promise to make DevOps easier by eliminating the need to provision infrastructure every time a workload exceeds whatever amount of capacity that has been assigned to it. On the other hand, attempting to manage what could easily become thousands of functions in an IT environment is likely to make DevOps even more challenging than it is today. While not a new concept, Raghuram says Fission Workflows provides IT organizations with a familiar construct for managing functions.

Benefits of Fission Workflows include an ability to reuse functions as well as being able to upgrade entire related sets of functions all at once. There are also fault-tolerant capabilities that make possible to recover and restart a workflow in the event of an infrastructure failure.

Platform9 is specifically making the case for a serverless computing framework based on Kubernetes clusters that can be deployed on-premises or in the cloud. Platform9 also provides support for containers on an instance of Kubernetes, and Raguham says the company expects that IT organizations will mix and match containers and serverless computing frameworks as they see fit. For example, a container might invoke a function via an API call to run a stateless process while Docker containers are employed for all the stateful processes that require access to primary storage, he says.

Raguham notes the trouble with serverless computing frameworks put forward by cloud service providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS) is that they lock an IT organization into a specific platform instead of taking advantage of a portable cluster technology such as Kubernetes, which is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF). Kubernetes also provides the added benefit of a common platform for both containers and serverless computing, he says.

It’s still early days for the use of serverless computing frameworks in the enterprise. Nevertheless, it’s clear they will need to be managed from a DevOps perspective alongside cloud-native applications running on containers and platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environments and legacy applications running on virtual machines and bare-metal servers. Given the fact that none of these architectures is likely to supersede any of the others anytime soon, IT organizations would be well-advised to start crafting a DevOps strategy now on the assumption that the overall IT environment is about to become even more complex.

— Mike Vizard

October 9, 2017
Quest Software Aims to Mend DevOps Fences for DBAs

It’s no secret there’s been a lot of contention between application developers, who are under pressure to build applications faster, and database administrators (DBAs), who are charged with providing those developers with access to data. Historically, developers have been dependent on DBAs to create schemas that would allow them to access data. But it takes time to build schemas, which is why many developers as of late have opted to employ a NoSQL database that don’t require a schema to access data. While that provides developers with some much-needed flexibility, most of the data stored in an enterprise today is still inside a relational database.

To make it possible for DBAs to respond faster to developer demands, Quest Software has unveiled the Toad for DevOps toolkit, which makes it easier to include relational databases such as Oracle within a larger continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) process managed by frameworks such as Jenkins, Bamboo and Maven.

Greg Davoll, executive director for product management and marketing for Quest database management solutions, notes the DBA traditionally has been the last holdout in embracing DevOps—DBAs didn’t really have access to tools that would enable them to participate in an agile development environment. The Toad for DevOps Toolkit address that issue by enabling them to test PL and SQL code during the application build process and ensure schema, data and database integrity with the context of a DevOps pipeline process, Davoll says, adding DBAs participating in a DevOps process can now also perform static code reviews and promote artifacts into a target environment to see how they perform in a production environment.

The arrival of Toad for DevOps Toolkit is scheduled to coincide with the release of Toad for Oracle 2017 R2, which will add pass/fail status notifications within the Code Analysis code review process, a redesigned multi-schema compare and sync function, and an enhanced REST API as part of the Benchmark Factory testing tool to help automate performance testing within a CI/CD workflow. Over time, Quest Software will add similar capabilities across the full range of databases it supports, Davoll says. Quest Software just announced a Toad for MySQL offering to complement its existing support for Oracle and Postgres databases.

Many of the decisions over the years concerning what database to employ have come down to which platform incurs the least amount of friction for developers to deploy. That hasn’t always resulted in the right database decision being made. In fact, it’s usually not too long before a developer wants to offload the management of the database back to the IT organization. Invariably, that results in DBAs having to manage multiple database platforms. While there may be a perfectly rational reason to employ something other than a relational database, that decision should be based on the attributes of the database rather than internal IT politics and purchasing processes. The challenge facing DBAs now is how to re-engage developers who have developed a bias against specific classes of databases, no matter how much critical data they may hold.

— Mike Vizard

October 5, 2017
CA Technologies Acquires Runscope for API Monitoring

There’s a pressing need for a variety of monitoring tools more than ever. But given the proliferation of application programming interfaces (APIs) inside the enterprise, demand for API monitoring tools in particular is rapidly expanding. To address that requirement, CA Technologies has acquired Runscope, a provider of an API monitoring service delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application.

Ali Siddiqui, general manager for agile operations at CA Technologies, says Runscope will complement CA Blazemeter continuous testing tools the company acquired last year and the CA API Management platform based on the technology CA Technologies gained when it acquired Layer 7 Technologies in 2013.

While the API Economy has been a phenomenon for external-facing web and mobile applications for years now, Siddiqui notes that IT organizations have only begun to rely on APIs to ingrate internal applications in recent years. The number of private internal APIs that have been published already dwarf the number of external public APIs. Because those internal APIs have now reached a critical mass, Siddiqui says the time is now right for CA Technologies to add an API monitoring service to portfolio of DevOps tools.

He notes that the rise of microservices inside enterprise IT organizations also will exacerbate existing API monitoring and management challenges. Each microservice generates its own API, which needs to be maintained and monitored. Before too long IT organizations will find themselves trying to unravel the interdependencies of thousands of microservices that all expose an API that can be developed in any number of programming languages.

These days it’s not uncommon to see dedicated management teams focusing on specific APIs. Rather than treating the API as an afterthought, many IT organizations have come to realize it’s the quality and robustness of the API that ultimately determines the quality of the application experience. In fact, most service level agreements (SLAs) going forward will require access to data being generated by APIs to make sure the terms of any agreement are being met. As such, it’s starting to make sense in some organizations to organize DevOps teams around critical APIs, rather than specific elements of application logic that, in the age of the containers, will soon be more frequently updated.

There’s no shortage of API monitoring tools these days, and Siggiqui says CA Technologies is committed to making sure the Runscope service remains open in terms of integration with other API management and testing tools. However, eventually there will be incentives provided to organizations that choose to standardize on multiple DevOps tools from CA Technologies.

Despite the proliferation of monitoring tools, the percentage of application workloads that are instrumented remains relatively small. The reason for this is that the cost of monitoring every enterprise application has often proven prohibitive. The issue that enterprise IT organizations will have to confront as dependencies between microservices increase will be figuring out how to implement instrumentation across all those services in a way that doesn’t wind up breaking the budget.

— Mike Vizard

October 4, 2017
Oracle on the March Toward Automated CI/CD Services

At its OpenWorld 2017 conference today, Oracle charted a course forward that essentially creates a managed DevOps platform spanning a broad number of application types and styles.

The Oracle Application Development Platform is a subset of the Oracle Cloud Platform optimized for application development. Siddhartha Agarwal, vice president of product management and strategy, says the company is working to automate every aspect of DevOps with an eye toward making it possible for organizations to concentrate all their efforts on developing applications versus managing them.

The latest step in achieving that goal are updates to the Oracle Application Development Platform, which now incorporates the Oracle Container Native Application Development Platform based on the open-source Kubernetes container orchestration engine, and Oracle Container Engines, a container pipeline management service based on the Wercker software the company acquired earlier this year. The company also announced it is adding support for the Go and Java Enterprise Edition programming languages to existing support for Java Standard Edition, Node.js, PHP Ruby and Python runtimes.

Other options being added to the Oracle Application Development Platform include Fn.a, an open source serverless computing project based on software the company gained when it acquired Iron.io, as well as an implementation of the Open Service Broker that enables applications developed for the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment to be deployed on Oracle Cloud. The company is also making available an instance of a BOSH Cloud Provider Interface to automate the deployment of those Cloud Foundry workloads.

Meanwhile, the Oracle Data Hub Cloud Service now also supports the open-source Cassandra database alongside existing support for MongoDB, Postgres and other databases to be added in the future. However, the core Oracle database remains the primary data engine service. In fact, Oracle Database 18c, announced earlier in the week, employs machine learning algorithms to manage instances of the company’s relational database autonomously with no human intervention required.

Finally, the company is adding a Blockchain Cloud Service that allows developers to access an implementation of open-source Hyperledger blockchain software, as well as an intelligent chatbot platform that can incorporate in mobile computing applications.

Agarwal says his company is committed to making available both commercial and open-source platforms available via an Oracle Cloud Platform that provides access to x86, Sparc and graphical processing units (GPUs). Agarwal says the company expects IT organizations to mix and match back-end services as they see fit. But increasingly all those back-end services will be managed under the auspices of a fully managed continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform.
Long-term, Agarwal says there may even come a day when application workloads are able to self-describe themselves, which would then enable the company to deploy them automatically on the best-suited back end.

Naturally, it may be a while before the level of DevOps nirvana gets achieved. But as machine learning algorithms and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) advance, it’s clear that the weight IT organizations are expected to carry is increasingly shifting more toward building applications than managing the underlying infrastructure on which they run.

— Mike Vizard

October 2, 2017
Using AI to Automate Incident Management Sparks Debate

When it comes to incident response with an integrated DevOps environment so much depends on the ability of an IT team to respond quickly and consistently to a specific set of events. Because of that requirement, many IT organizations have invested in incident management systems that everyone in IT can consult whenever an issue arises. Now PagerDuty, a provider of incident management software, is taking that concept a step further by applying artificial intelligence (AI) to automate as many incident response tasks as an organization deems appropriate.

As promising as that may sound, however, Resilient Systems, a unit of IBM that is an arch-rival to PagerDuty, contends most organizations today do not have anywhere near the level of incident management maturity to make investing in AI worth their time and effort yet.

Eric Sigler, head of DevOps for PagerDuty, says the the latest edition of the company’s namesake incident management platform is designed to augment the capabilities of the local IT administrator by providing:

Alert Grouping: Rules-based automation and machine learning algorithms automatically group related issues together to make it simpler to identify related issues.

Similar Incidents: IT administrators and support specialist can see previous related issues and surface information around incident severity, impact and remediation steps.

Response Automation: A Response Plays capability allows teams to design and execute an automated response pattern to recruiting responders and stakeholders by a single click.

Dynamic Notifications and Event Routing: IT teams can select notification and assignment behavior and automatically route events to different teams based on event payloads.

Sigler says PagerDuty has also redesigned the company’s user interface, creating an enhanced live incident details page that makes discovering events simpler.

Those capabilities, says Sigler, will collectively prove to be critical in an emergency because most of the time the specialist associated with a specific IT discipline is usually not immediately available when needed. First responders to any given event need as much information as possible as their fingertips to resolve issues as quickly as possible.

But Ted Julien, vice president of product management for Resilient Systems, says most organizations simply don’t have incident response processes in place that would benefit from that level of AI. Machine learning algorithms require access to massive amounts of incident response data to learn what to do, but most organizations don’t collect that data, much less learn from it, he says. That doesn’t mean AI doesn’t have potential. But he believes AI is not nearly as far along when it comes to incident response as anyone would like. In fact, he notes, machine learning algorithms and other forms of IT automation could just as easily wind up doing more harm than good.

There may come a day when incident response in an IT environment is fully automated. But the distance between where most IT organizations are today and the achievement of that goal is still nothing less than considerable.

— Mike Vizard

October 2, 2017
LogicMonitor Extends Reach to the Cloud

LogicMonitor has been making available performance monitoring tools as software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for several years now. At the Microsoft Ignite conference this week, the company announced it is adding a module through which IT organizations can gain similar insights into public cloud computing services.

Steve Francis, founder and chief evangelist for LogicMonitor, says LM Cloud is designed to provide real-time visibility into the performance of Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure clouds, including resource performance monitoring, detailed billing analysis and cloud provider availability.

Many IT organizations don’t realize just how different managing a public cloud is compared to an on-premises IT infrastructure environment, he says. Not only is too easy to let a workload waste resources, spiraling cloud service costs out of control, but also cloud service providers have policies that limit consumption of resources in a specific region.

Capabilities provided by LM Cloud include automated discovery of an organization’s entire cloud environment and dashboards that can be employed to troubleshoot issues.

Francis says that as an extension of the core LogicMonitor service, LM Cloud provides a means for IT organizations to employ one monitoring tool across what have become de facto hybrid cloud computing environments. In fact, using multiple clouds will require IT organizations to rely more on monitoring tools based in the cloud. Otherwise, Francis notes, IT organization would have to correlate data across multiple incompatible tools.

One of the things that holds IT organizations back from using public clouds is simply that they are more familiar with their on-premises environments. Francis says tools such as LM Cloud will make it much simpler for IT administrators to explore a public cloud environment using a set of capabilities that cloud service providers are not inclined to provide.

Thanks to the rise of public clouds, DevOps arguably has never been more complicated, with applications distributed across multiple public clouds. But it’s very difficult to manage what can’t be seen, and it’s nearly impossible to compare one public cloud with another—much less an on-premises IT environment—without access to a common baseline of metrics. All too often deciding where to deploy a workload is based on either instinct or corporate fiat rather than detailed analysis.

While many IT organizations expect to reduce costs by moving workloads to the public cloud, the truth is more nuanced. Long-running applications tend to be less expensive to deploy on-premises. Shorter-run applications lend themselves well to public clouds. Yet, many IT organizations are simply not fast enough when it comes to deploying applications on-premises. Internal IT organizations that have embraced DevOps processes, however, are now more agile. That, coupled with software-defined infrastructure, is narrowing the dexterity gulf that exists between on-premises and cloud computing environments.

All things may not be equal just yet. But the day when an on-premises IT environment is just another cloud that needs to be managed is that not that far off.

— Mike Vizard

September 29, 2017
OutSystems: Low-Code Apps Require Sound DevOps Processes

As more IT organizations embrace low-code application development platforms, many of them are discovering that accelerating the rate at which they develop applications can be too much of a good thing.

António Barros, product manager for OutSystems, says most of the organizations that have adopted the company’s namesake low-code platform are just now coming up to speed on automated testing. Barros estimates that only 20 percent of the organizations using the OutSystems platform are also employing automated testing tools. The majority of OutSystems customers continue to rely on manual testing even though it’s apparent low-code platforms will produce applications much faster than manual testing can keep pace with. OutSystems has identified five stage of DevOps maturity, he notes, but none of its customers has achieved that level of DevOps maturity.

To help them get a little further down the DevOps path, OutSystems, at its recent NextStep 2017 conference, announced an extension of its partnership with Indigo to provide tighter integration with the OutSystems platform. In addition, OutSystems plans to make available digital transformation playbooks, including one for DevOps, beginning in 2018. Outsystems has already integrated its platform with the Jenkins automated server to provide continuous integration and continuous development (CI/CD) capabilities.

Barros says it’s not only critical to engage in continuous testing, but the application needs to be designed to make it easier to isolate user interface, application programming interface (API) and unit testing. Otherwise, automating the testing process becomes more difficult than it should be, says Barros.

Developers for years have resisted low-code platforms, which automatically generate much of the code that needs to be written for an application. Some fear the platforms can’t build applications that scale. Others have simply decided they prefer to write code themselves. But these days, organizations are under more pressure than ever to deliver applications faster, which has led many organizations to rely more on low-code platforms such as OutSystems.

It’s not clear just how popular low-code platforms will become. OutSystems revealed at its conference it has signed up 122 new customers in the last quarter alone. On average, it now takes organizations eight weeks to build and deploy an application on the OutSystems platform, with new release cycle updates occurring every 48 hours, says OutSystems CEO Paulo Rosado.

Michael Facemire, an industry analyst with Forrester Research, told conference attendees that adoption of low-code platforms is now a matter of economics. The starting salary for a developer in the San Francisco Bay area is $145,000, says Facemire. As the salary of a developer with a few years of experience now reaches more than $200,000 in the Bay area, companies in that geography will have no other option but to employ low-code platforms, he says.

Obviously, developers might be less expensive in other regions. But Facemire notes that no matter what the region, developers are in short supply. That need for speed, he adds, is also why organizations are rapidly adopting containers and serverless computing framework. The challenge IT organizations will face is finding a way to put quality control processes in place to don’t compromise either the speed of the development process or the quality of the end user experience, he says.

By the same token, however, no one really appreciates code that arrives late, no matter how great it might be.

— Mike Vizard

September 26, 2017
5 C’s That Changed the Future – Webinar Series
CI, CD, Containers, Cloud & Culture

Join us for case studies of innovation and success with continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), containers, cloud (infrastructure & migration), and culture (the DevOps kind).

If you’re on the same mission – to create sustainable systems that empower your business to deliver innovation faster and predictably – then you’ll gain incredible insights from this series. We’ll share the journeys of some very cool companies, joined by a few of the experts who are making it happen.

Why 5 C’s?

The consistent theme in these successes is DevOps – culture, process and technology. And when we looked at the results that had the most notable impact on the business, they related to implementations of some or all of the 5 C’s. Results such as:

• 10x faster new product delivery.
• Internal & client confidence in iterative development, driven by innovation in quality & feedback.
• Modernized traditional apps by adding self-healing, auto-scaling, and rolling deployment capabilities.
• Blameless culture, enabled by feedback and consistency across dev, test & prod environments.
• Security integrated across the stack and not simply a checkbox.

The series:

• Tuesday, Oct. 3 – CI/CD, Containers & Culture
• Tuesday, Dec. 5 – Cloud Infrastructure & Culture
• Tuesday, May. 15 – Cloud Migration & Containers

View On-Demand Webinar (Oct. 3):
Faster Innovation with Confidence – How CI/CD & Containers Help Arrayent Go Faster

View On-Demand Webinar (Dec. 5):
Scaling Cloud Infrastructure for Millions of Devices

View On-Demand Webinar (May 15)
Cloud Migration: Solving for Growth with Containers & DevOps on AWS

September 20, 2017