devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: acquisition

  • Software AG Acquires Built.io to Advance Integration Strategy

    Software AG Acquires Built.io to Advance Integration Strategy

    Software AG has acquired Built.io as part of an effort to provide a multitier approach to application integration designed for different classes of developers.

    Subhash Ramachadran, senior vice president for product management at Software AG, said Built.io adds a low-code approach to integration in the form of a platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) environment developed using Node.js to a portfolio of technologies that include the webMethods platform.

    Ramachadran said the low-code approach will appeal more to so-called citizen integrators who are trying to integrate business processes with minimal intervention on the part of an IT team. Many of those capabilities are now expected to be delivered in a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model that citizen developers can invoke on demand. Built.io, for example, already provides built-in support for more than 300 applications and services. Those tools, however, don’t replace the need for a set of integration frameworks aimed at more complex tasks that require professional developers, Ramachadran said.

    Increasingly, there are large numbers of use cases for integration that simply don’t require a professional developer to accomplish, he noted. In fact, the number of use cases that can be addressed by tools such as Built.io might be substantially larger than the use cases requiring a platform the size and scale of webMethods.

    Software AG’s goal is to create a single platform to provide organizations with multiple classes of integration frameworks that can be applied to different personas within an organization, Ramachadran said. A common platform eventually would make it possible for integrations of varying skill levels to collaborate more easily.

    Those frameworks could then be plugged into any continuous integration/continuous development (CI/CD) platform to enable various Software AG integration platforms to be natural extensions of a DevOps environment, he added. The webMethods integration platform already supports Kubernetes clusters and Docker containers as a runtime environment.

    As DevOps processes continue to evolve, Ramachadran said Software AG is betting that organizations will want to make it easier for different classes of developers working with multiple types of tools to collaborate.

    To facilitate that transition, Software AG now enables everything from sharing code via GitHub to deploying micro gateways for managing application programming interfaces (APIs) within the context of a set of microservices, he noted, adding those capabilities will only become more important as organizations begin to build highly distributed internet of things (IoT) applications running on a wide variety of platforms.

    Microservices, however, create something of a paradox when it comes to integration. On the one hand, frameworks such as Built.io will make it simpler for more organizations to integrate multiple microservices and legacy monolithic applications. On the other hand, microservices are making integration more challenging for many professional developers as they continue to expand across the enterprise.

    The challenge facing most organizations will be striking the right balance between microservices and existing monolithic applications, many of which don’t naturally lend themselves to being re-engineered into a series of microservices. In fact, in many cases it may be difficult to distinguish from an integration standpoint what constitutes a microservice versus a monolithic application, so long as both can be invoked using a simple API.

    — Mike Vizard

  • DevOps Chat: JFrog Expands Platform with Trainologic Acquisition

    DevOps Chat: JFrog Expands Platform with Trainologic Acquisition

    It’s always great to see companies in the DevOps space grow and expand their breadth of services. JFrog is the latest to fit that description. The company last week announced its acquisition of Trainologic, a Dev and DevOps technology consulting company, to expand its reach by helping new customers start their DevOps journey and supporting existing customers along the way.

    In this DevOps Chat, we speak with JFrog CEO and co-founder Shlomi Ben Haim and Gal Marda, founder and CEO of Trainologic, about the acquisition and how Trainologic fits into the JFrog vision of end-to-end continuous updates.

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

    Alan Shimel: Hey, everyone, it’s Alan Shimel, devopsy.kinsta.cloud. You’re listening to another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat is around some big news coming out of our friends at JFrog, and I’m happy to be joined by my friend, Shlomi Ben Haim, CEO and co-founder of JFrog. Shlomi, welcome.

    Shlomi Ben Haim: Hey, Alan. Thank you for having us.

    Shimel: Thank you. And joining Shlomi is a new member of the JFrog family, Gal Marda, who is the, I guess, founder and CEO of—or was the founder and CEO of Trainologic, correct?

    Gal Marda: Correct. Great to be here. Thanks, Alan.

    Shimel: Welcome, and welcome to the JFrog family.

    Marda: Thanks a lot. It’s very exciting for me.

    Shimel: So, I’m gonna let—Gal, I’m gonna let you tell our audience the big news coming out today. What went down here?

    Marda: So, what went down, as Alan said, it’s very exciting, actually. Shlomi had this great idea of JFrog coming out with this platform, the EPlus platform, which is a complete revolution in the DevOps industry, in my opinion, and he thought that DevOps and the vision of liquid software, to make it successful, it’s both tools and practices. And taking out this platform and making sure it’s successful requires some consulting services as well to make sure that JFrog customers are making the right decision on the way they used the Enterprise platform.

    So, the idea was to join forces together and bring us on to make sure the customers are being successful with the use of the Enterprise Plus platform.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Shlomi, let me ask you—JFrog as a company has had tremendous success, tremendous growth. Last year, you moved, really, to a platform type of solution in the marketplace, right, offering the platform. Why Trainologic, why now?

    Ben Haim: That’s a great question, Alan. So, as you know, and we spoke about it in the past, the real pain that DevOps is here to solve is not about the milestones of continuous integration and continuous deployment and continuous delivery and continuous testing. These are all very important milestones that created and ________ revolution.

    But, basically, if we will all have a solution that helps us to get to a place that we have continuous updates, that software is being released fast and secure, then the DevOps evolution would be at the procurement level. What we released this year, the Enterprise Plus, is a bundle of seven different products, and it’s not any more one product that you install and run at the server side, then serve your developers. It’s more than that. It’s an end to end binary solution.

    And what we figured out is that we need some experts to help us with the adoption and the know-how and the knowledge transfer among our users. So, we have 4,500 Enterprise customers today. We need Gal’s team to work with us in the field, on customer sites to support that goal.

    Shimel: I wholeheartedly agree, Shlomi. You know, I’m reminded of, back in my days at Interliant, where we did early cloud hosting—things like Lotus Notes and PeopleSoft and Oracle applications. And what we discovered then was, you can never take a sophisticated application like that out of a box, plug it in, and say it’s gonna work, right? There was always, at best, 75 percent, it worked. You always needed professional services, 25 percent, to come in, customize it, fine-tune it, make it work.

    And, really, that—you know, even in the security space, so many of the most successful security companies, when you look at their revenue breakdown, it was the professional services, because security is hard. And people just can’t do it, and so, to me, anyway, there’s no surprise that this is a DevOps problem as well is that you still need those experts to come in and do it.

    My question to you is, though, is that, as a CEO in your position, you’re always—you’re gonna need to balance how many bodies do I want, right? How do we scale this? Because it’s a body intensive, it’s a people intensive business model.

    And so, you know, what—and Gal, you may have experience, having led the charge at Trainologic. What do you do there? How do you keep it in check?

    Marda: So, I—Shlomi, are you taking this, or me?

    Shimel: Either of you.

    Ben Haim: Yeah, I’ll speak about the ratio, and Gal, you will speak about the best practices coming from your experience. I think, Alan, you are right. When you come with—it’s not just the technology, it’s not just the new things that are happening in the market. And the DevOps market is booming. You see it from everywhere, from fundraising to technology adoption, new things, innovation, every morning we are waking up to some DevOps news. So, this is a very exciting day for companies like JFrog.

    But what you also see is that a lot of companies are starting to onboard giant organizations, thousands of developers to a new methodology and new tools. Therefore, we have to keep the balance between what we release to the market and how it’s being adopted. Because otherwise, we will overwhelm our users with technology that nobody understands how to use, and they will—you know, the first reaction will be a reflex reaction of just dropping it and have this mantra of what works should be, stay as it is. If we want to keep innovation, if we—sorry, to push innovation—if we want to keep the market momentum, then we also have to support the market with the onboarding. This is one thing.

    The second thing—JFrog is a product company. JFrog is not a service company. But building the product without helping our customers to better use them is meaningless. It’s just like having a great technology with the wrong execution. So, we are looking up to companies in our field that did this stuff two years ago, three years ago, and how the market adopted their platform. And we learned a lot from it, we did the analysis. So, when we reached out to Trainer Logic and asked Gal to join the team to the swamp, basically, the first thing that we looked at is, is this company already installing ________ Factory and Xray and Bitray and the JFrog pool? Second, is it a big enough team? It’s a TS Super Command Unit, so not too big, and if Gal and the team will be able to build a community, not just with the JFrog professional services, but also with the community of professional service companies around us, and to be some kind of a business development within these units around the world to help us spread the JFrog technology.

    Shimel: Excellent. Gal, do you want to add to that?

    Marda: Yeah, sure. So, you asked about scaling, so I think Shlomi has it correctly. We are going to be a relatively lean and mean command force. We’re not gonna be like thousands of people, but we’re, we can scale in several ways. One of them is, as Shlomi mentioned, by partnerships, okay? We tend to create a network of partners and a community that will help us work together. We’re not going to deal with it all by ourselves.

    And, in terms of scaling inside and taking people and training them, that’s something that we’re very used to doing. We are making sure that young people are shadowing, and we’re grooming them, and we’re teaching them a lot more of our practices, and we’re making sure that they see a lot of different architecture and a lot of different customers with different ways of thinking. And with this kind of activity, they become very experienced in a relatively short time because they see a lot of stuff, and if you take talented people, you give them the right mentoring, you let them see a lot of different solutions and approaches, they become very efficient in a relatively short period of time.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, is this, the commando teams going in and stuff, Gal, do you envision them—so, is every job a one-off, or is there a sort of standardized package that you’ll develop for most customers?

    Marda: Well, it’s still in the making, but I am—we are planning to create some packages, because during our experience in last year’s meeting, a lot of different companies and providing them with different services, we realize that there are the same needs that are returning again and again.

    One of them, for example, would be some kind of DevOps analysis, like a gap analysis of where you should be or where you want to be, and what’s your current DevOps state? So, for sure, there will be different types of packages, and inside those packages, of course, a lot of the work will be tailor made because every company is different, and as you know, DevOps is also very culture related and related to many other things in the company. So, for sure, it can’t be the exact same thing that will be provided, but the general framework in the packages will be, different packages will offer off the shelf.

    Shimel: Excellent. So, Shlomi, Gal said the magic word—culture. How does this—you’ve done other acquisitions. You’ve acquired JFrog China, I saw awhile I was in China, I saw them at an event. Some other acquisitions you’ve done over the years. But those were kinda product related companies; this is clearly a service one. How does that—I mean, you have a great culture at JFrog, right? I’ve witnessed it firsthand. It’s admirable. How do you make—

    Ben Haim: Thank you.

    Shimel: – ________ Froggers in the swamp?

    Ben Haim: Well, first of all, thank you, Alan. You know, we acquired four different companies, from Conan with the C++ package manager for DevOps and then CloudMunch, that becomes the JFrog Insight product. And then DMon and now Crenologic, and the one thing, one rule of ________ is the fact that you always, you should always seek for the combination between the strategy and the culture.

    And, the first time that I met Gal, under the idea of the acquisition was at swampUP, in our user conference. So, for me, there is no better place to bring someone and show him JFrog, not just from a technology point of view and a product point of view, but also community relations and also the Frog vibe and the Frog DNA.

    And then, when we started the discussion between us, actually, the two groups that worked hard on this deal were the HR group and the Operations group. And the first thing that we shared with Gal was the JFrog products. So, I think that Gal wouldn’t join JFrog if he would feel that this is not the right fit on the cultural point of view, and the strategy moving forward can be something that will change the world of the Enterprise culture.

    So, the liquid software vision, together with the JFrog culture, I think kind of blended into what Gal believed in and what his team already is doing for the past 10 years. And what we have seen there was an identical picture of JFrog. It was almost like a glove to a hand, and now, after we signed and they are part of JFrog, I can say that this was a love story from the first moment we met.

    Shimel: Alright, and it was a happy ending. [Laughter] So, I have to ask you, Shlomi—so, now, you’ve acquired a services company, Commandos, what’s next? What’s next at JFrog?

    Ben Haim: That’s a perfect question. Actually, you sound like my ________ now. [Laughter] So, on the service level, I think that what Gal and Tali, our VP of Worldwide Sales, are working on now is how to merge these capabilities now with the Enterprise class, the JFrog class from adoption. This is one thing.

    The second thing for JFrog is the extension of our technology. We see the consolidation in the DevOps market happening. There is two buckets that consolidate all the technology. One of them is the code repository, so you see what happened with GitHub and Bitbucket and so on. And the other one is the artifact repository. So, those two buckets are kind of consolidating all the technologies into it, and we are looking at it and we are looking at the landscape, and with the universal solution we provide and with the hybrid solution we provide and with the freedom of choice philosophy to be a developers first and DevOps first company, we will extend the technology.

    So, stay tuned. I promise you that, at the beginning of 2019, we will have more news about technologies that support our goal.

    Shimel: Fantastic. Gal, I’m gonna give you the last word.

    Marda: Okay. Thanks for that, first. I must relate to what Shlomi said about love at first sight and the culture. It was amazing to see. When Shlomi called me, first of all, I was very flattered and surprised. But what I’ve realized very fast is that it’s kind of where we’re seeing the same thing but we were trying to help our customers in different ways. JFrog was doing that with creating great technology, and we were doing that with providing them with the best services we could.

    But we tried to reach the exact same goal, the exact same way—developer first, technology first, and while we appreciate and we are all people persons and see the people and try to say, to maintain a very special culture. So, I think that’s a great fit in that matter, and I think it’s the most important one. So, I totally thank Shlomi for this opportunity to be part of JFrog, and I feel that we’re very much alike to begin with, but it’s a great honor to join a company like JFrog.

    Shimel: Well, congratulations.

    Ben Haim: Alan Shimel? Alan?

    Shimel: Yes, Shlomi?

    Ben Haim: You saw JFrog growing, and I’m very—you know, I’m very excited to have this conversation with you, because it’s like seeing different generations in JFrog. We will make the world of software liquid. We will liquefy software. This is our vision, so stay with us, I promise you we will have more news for you.

    Shimel: I’m not going anywhere, and I have every confidence in you.

    Ben Haim: [Laughter]

    Shimel: Gal, to you, as they say in Boca Raton, Mazel Tov.

    Marda: To dava. [Laughter]

    Shimel: [Laughter] Alright. Shlomi Ben Haim, Gal Marda, JFrog—congratulations, good luck. We’ll check in early in 2019. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and you’ve just listened to another DevOps Chat.

    — Alan Shimel

  • Siemens Acquires Mendix to Advance Low-Code Platform Adoption

    Siemens Acquires Mendix to Advance Low-Code Platform Adoption

    Siemens this week moved to substantially accelerate its transition into becoming a software company by acquiring Mendix, a provider of low-code application development tools, for $730 million in cash.

    Mendix CEO Derek Roos said Mendix will operate as a business unit of Siemens, which has poured more than $10 billion over the last decade to software development as part of an ongoing digital transformation to a multibillion-dollar conglomerate.

    Siemens over the last year determined that Mendix was now a strategic component of that initiative, Roos said, as more applications are shifted to and developed in the cloud. Many Siemens employees already use Mendix tools to develop custom applications with limited to no programming skills. That capability is especially critical in line of business (LOB) organizations that are starting to deploy their internet of things (IoT) applications, he noted. Mendix also recently revealed it is starting to infuse its low-code application development platform with artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities.

    Roos said the $730 million investment Siemens is making to acquire Mendix is larger than all the venture capital investments made in rival companies delivering low-code platforms combined. As low-code tools have gained mainstream adoption, however, Mendix increasingly finds itself competing directly with larger rivals such as Microsoft and Salesforce, he noted.

    The Siemens decision to acquire Mendix comes at a time when archrival GE is throttling back on digital process transformation efforts. Roos said GE’s decision is unique to structural issues within GE versus being a decision that reflects loss of faith in digital process transformation driven by custom application development. Software is now the fastest growing segment of the Siemens conglomerate, he said.

    A recent survey conducted by Mendix in collaboration with ASUG, an end user association for organizations that have deployed software from SAP, finds 64 percent of respondents are experiencing increased demand for custom applications within their organizations. The primary problem is that same survey finds the average custom application development backlog is 24 months. Primary issues cited by survey respondents include high development costs (50 percent), difficulty integrating with existing systems (47 percent) and lack of skilled development resources (45 percent).

    Of course, as Siemens becomes a larger software force, some organizations will start will take into consideration how much they may compete with the company before selecting an application development platform. Mendix is betting that as application development expands well beyond internal IT organizations, its status as an independent business unit of Siemens will provide enough distance between Mendix and Siemens business units that a Mendix customer might compete against.

    In the meantime, organizations that are embracing low-code platforms are simultaneously increasing their investments in DevOps processes. As the number of applications being developed using low-code tools increases, there is a corresponding increase in application release management that requires them to modernize those processes. As Mendix plays the role in enabling applications that can be deployed from the cloud to the network edge, it’s now only a matter of time before the Mendix low-code platform becomes a more significant element of a larger set of DevOps processes driving digital process transformation projects as unprecedented levels of scale.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Accenture Aims to Infuse AI into App Testing

    Accenture Aims to Infuse AI into App Testing

    Accenture plans to infuse greater amounts of artificial intelligence into application development testing following its acquisition of Real Time Analytics Platform Inc., which provides tools that make use of machine learning algorithms, neural networks and natural language processing (NLP) to analyze every stage of the software development life cycle.

    Kishore Durg, senior managing director and growth and strategy lead for Accenture Technology, the IT services arm of Accenture, will incorporate the AI technologies developed by Real Rime Analytics Platform into the Accenture Touchless Testing Platform, which is a suite of open source and proprietary testing tools that Accenture has infused with advanced analytics and cognitive computing technologies.

    Durg said Accenture is committed to automating application testing using AI technologies to help organizations increase the productivity of application development teams. At a time when organizations are investing in a broad range of digital transformation projects, the rate at which applications can be built, tested and deployed has become a critical issue.

    Most organizations on their own won’t be able to aggregate enough data to drive machine learning algorithms and neural networks to drive a meaningful AI model. Those models require access to massive amounts of data to be trained to identify potential issues within any application. Because of the size and scope of the projects Accenture works on, organizations that employ its service can benefit from all the data that Accenture can bring to bear to train AI models, Durg noted.

    The quality of the data used to train those AI models is also as important as the amount of data, added Durg. Accenture has the resources required to cleanse data before it gets fed into an AI model, as well the expertise needed to eliminate any biases that might get built into any algorithm being applied to that data, he said.

    As AI continues to evolve, it won’t be long before every application incorporates some form of an AI model. Each of those models not only needs to be trained, but they also need to be updated continually—and eventually replaced by more sophisticated models as more data becomes available. In effect, that requirement will create a need to extend DevOps processes to how AI models are incorporated within an application.

    At the same time, it’s clear that large swaths of DevOps processes involving, for example, application testing can be increasingly automated using a variety of machine learning and network networks, also known as deep learning algorithms.

    In theory, that should accelerate the rate at which applications are developed and deployed, while testing processes that are augmented by AI technologies should result in applications that are more secure, as many more vulnerabilities will be discovered long before an application gets deployed in a production environment.

    In fact, the inclusion of advanced algorithms across a DevOps toolchain might accelerate adoption of DevOps processes. After all, most IT organizations today have embraced DevOps unevenly largely because of the complexity involved. AI technologies one day soon may eliminate that issue altogether.

    — Mike Vizard

  • Compuware Adds Testing Tools to DevOps for Mainframe Portfolio

    Compuware Adds Testing Tools to DevOps for Mainframe Portfolio

    Compuware is extending its ongoing campaign to bring DevOps processes to the mainframe by acquiring XaTester, a provider of tools for creating unit tests for both batch and CICS-based programs written in COBOL, PL/I and Assembler.

    In addition, Compuware announced it has formed an alliance with Parasoft, a provider of tools for testing application programming interface (API) calls between mainframe and non-mainframe systems.

    Finally, Compuware revealed it has added support for automated unit testing for the IBM Management System (IMS), a hierarchical database that is used to run both transaction and batch-oriented applications.

    Those latest editions  come on the heels of an update to the Topaz for Total Test platform that, among other things, make it easier to extract data from mainframe applications.

    Compuware CEO Chris O’Malley said all these new capabilities will expand the reach and scope of Topaz for Total Test platform that makes it possible to apply DevOps practices to both new and legacy applications being developed and deployed on IBM mainframe platforms.

    Despite being more than five decades old, O’Malley noted that mainframes are still widely employed to process both transaction and batch-oriented applications at a level of scale other platforms still can’t match. The challenge now is to integrate the wealth of applications running on IBM mainframes within the context of a modern application development process, he said. That requires putting new application development and deployment tools in place that are optimized for DevOps versus traditional waterfall approaches still widely used in mainframe environments.

    CICS and IMS applications are at the heart of some of the fastest transaction processing applications running in the enterprise. Rather than rewrite those applications, O’Malley said organizations that have invested in mainframes want to be able to expose those applications as a service using APIs. Testing those integrations requires mainframe teams to adopt frameworks that enable them to become more agile, he noted—for example, organizations integrating applications need to be able to easily engage in A/B testing to be able optimize performance.

    As the lines between mainframes and distributed computing systems continues to blur, most organizations are working toward having one team support both platforms. As part of that effort organizations are introducing DevOps practices that have proven themselves on distributed computing platforms to mainframes. That approach helps mitigate a mainframe skills shortage that is occurring as more IT professionals with mainframe skills leave the workforce.

    It may take a little extra effort to get IT staffs managing mainframes to part ways with legacy approaches to building and deploying applications that have clearly stood the test of time. But as more organizations embrace digital process transformation the rate of change in mainframe environments clearly need to accelerate, O’Malley said.

    In fact, IT professionals with mainframe skills that are also literate when it comes to DevOps just might find themselves among the most sought-after people in enterprise IT. After all, the number of IT professionals that can play both side of the mainframe and distributed systems ball are very few indeed.

    — Mike Vizard

  • SUSE Preps Independent DevOps Path

    SUSE Preps Independent DevOps Path

    Once SUSE completes a separation from Micro Focus sometime next year, the goal for the again independent company will be to drive continued investments in a range of open source technologies that collectively advance DevOps.

    Michael Miller, president of strategy, alliances and marketing for SUSE, said the acquisition by EQT, a private investment firm, is part of a three-to-five-year plan to invest in technologies that complement existing SUSE products and services. Core products and services are centered around a distribution of Linux, the OpenStack cloud management framework, the Cloud Foundry platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment and Kubernetes container orchestration software, he said.

    As part of that strategy, Miller said that may mean acquiring complementary open source or proprietary security and management technologies. Any proprietary technology that SUSE would acquire would be turned into an open source project later, he said.

    Because it has been operating as an independent business unit, no one should expect to see any significant changes to the overall SUSE strategy beyond making additional investments in products and services or how the company will be going to market in 2019, he noted.

    At the core of its strategy is a portfolio of open source PaaS and container-as-as-service (CaaS) environments that organizations of all sizes are employing to drive digital process transformation using custom applications that have now easier to deploy and maintain, Miller said.

    Unlike many other investments involving private equity firms, EQT’s decision to acquire the company is being driven by a desire to invest for the long term rather than sell assets off in a piecemeal fashion, Miller noted. Micro Focus this week agreed to sell SUSE to EQT for $2.54 billion in part to help pay for the software assets it gained following a $8.8 billion merger with the software business unit of Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE). The company has been part of Attachmate, which Micro Focus acquired in 2014. Earlier this year, Micro Focus CEO Chris Hsu was replaced by Stephen Murdoch, who was COO of Micro Focus.

    Once the deal closes, SUSE will become an independent company for the first time since 2003, when it was acquired by Novell. Attachmate acquired Novell in 2010.

    It remains to be seen whether SUSE will be spun out as public company or sold off to yet another vendor. For now, however, it may end up with more resources to combat its rivals, including Red Hat, than it would have had as a unit of Micro Focus.

    In the meantime, the company—much like Red Hat—should continue to benefit from the massive amounts of research and development being poured into projects such as Kubernetes and OpenStack. At the same time, it continues to invest in Linux. The company recently released SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, SUSE Manager 3.2 and SUSE Linux Enterprise High Performance Computing 15 as part of an effort to drive a multimodal IT strategy around a common code base that includes MicroOS, which is optimized for containers and makes use of the same code base as SUSE Enterprise Linux.

    While Red Hat may be the dominant provider of open source operating systems, SUSE has not given up. Meanwhile, the battle for control over open source PaaS and CaaS environments is still in its early stages. In fact, DevOps teams distributed across the enterprise most likely will determine the ultimate victor.

    — Mike Vizard

  • 10 Views on What Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Does for DevOps Users

    10 Views on What Microsoft’s GitHub Deal Does for DevOps Users

    The DevOps and open source communities have been in a tizzy all week over the massive $7.5 billion Microsoft acquisition of GitHub. Even as many developers rage on Twitter about the deal and still others are rushing to migrate their repositories to alternative solutions—#movetogitlab has trended heavy this week—for the most part the DevOps community is taking it in stride. As devopsy.kinsta.cloud’s Don MacVittie explained, complaining or planning a move away from GitHub solely due to long-held grudges against Microsoft seems pretty counterproductive at the moment.

    He’s not alone. A lot of developers, evangelists, CTOs and other GitHub users out there doing the work that drives applications into production are looking at this as a potentially great thing. Others are more cautious, but at least believe this won’t set the movement backward. We’ve gathered a few thoughts from these professionals to help balance out the dialogue.

    Ensures GitHub Viability

    “For those developers that may be anxious and thinking about jumping ship, I am sure they also must realize the hard truth that for GitHub to succeed moving forward it needed an influx of cash. Inevitably, there would come a point where GitHub would need to start to actually turn a profit, something it has yet to achieve, before it would have to shut its doors. ”

    —Adam Mansfield, Microsoft practice leader at UpperEdge

    Provides Much-Needed Leadership

    “Satya Nadella has so far done a great job dropping the Windows religion to embrace the reality of the iOS, Android, Linux and multi-cloud world, which he will hopefully continue with the GitHub community. By putting Nat Friedman—former CEO & co-founder of Xamarin—in place as a technical CEO, Microsoft is sending a clear message that they’re committed to GitHub and the larger developer ecosystem.”

    —Jyoti Bansal, former CEO of AppDynamics and current co-founder of DevOps platform Harness

    GitHub Champions in Enterprise Have Easier Sell

    “For one, I wouldn’t be surprised if we start to see corporate firewalls allowing access to GitHub now that it’s a Microsoft owned property, and perhaps considered ‘enterprise-ready.’ Microsoft knows how to make products that make enterprise architects feel confident, so their blessing and ownership of GitHub could really encourage social coding within enterprise organizations.”

    —Matt Stratton, DevOps evangelist at PagerDuty

    Net Neutral Immediate Impact

    “Developers should not be anxious about this acquisition nor should they be excited. I honestly think this is an ‘oh well’ moment. Unless Microsoft has some crazy plan to sunset features or support for one vendor or another, everything should behave as business as usual for the foreseeable future. The only thing developers should watch is license fees and terms and conditions. Expect Microsoft to monetize the solution better in the coming months and potentially tie usage into MSDN.”

    —Morey Haber, CTO of BeyondTrust

    GitHub Already Had Its Own Problems

    “GitHub is not strong in this area (DevOps) and never has been; maybe if Microsoft made it easy to deploy to Azure it could be seen as an improvement. As a tangent, GitLab which is now the attractive alternative, has its own CI/CD tooling and can also be self-hosted for free. This is a major advantage over GitHub, and I’m wondering if corporate America will start looking more closely to the FOSS alternative to GitHub Enterprise.”

    —Mitch Pirtle, longtime developer and consultant at SpaceMonkeyLabs, former Tech Fellow at Capital One

    Opens Eyes for About Dangers of Centralization

    ” My hope is that – one way or another – this leads to greater competition, more innovation, and less reliance on any one single platform. I don’t feel that centralization around any one platform is good for the DevOps and FOSS communities. I also don’t feel consolidation to larger companies is a good thing, as it creates conflicts of interest and generally a lack of innovation. This consolidation could result in a more decentralized approach to both software development and DevOps integration, which will hopefully drive more innovation. I think that could ultimately be a positive outcome of this acquisition.”

    —Jeremy Steinert, CTO of WSM International

    Expect Better Integration for More Seamless CI/CD

    “Longer term, I expect GitHub’s integration with Azure to expand substantially, enabling some truly exciting developments for one-click code deployment to a Cloud infrastructure. DevOps for smaller companies will gain easier access to Azure resources. For DevOps as a whole, we will see acceleration of seamless code management within the context of actual deployment to containers. DevOps for enterprise has the greatest potential for improvement with this deal. There will be massive investment in improving developer interactions between infrastructure and code.”

    —Clint Wilson, VP of product management at DigiCert

    Here Come Better Enterprise DevOps Features

    “While I think the development community will have mixed emotions about the news, ultimately this is a massively positive moment for GitHub. GitHub is at the center of the developer community, but as a business, they have faced challenges in reaching the enterprise buyer—something Microsoft is extremely well-versed in. With Microsoft’s resources and expertise, GitHub no longer has to wrestle with the internal struggle of being open to the community and being open for businesses, ie. selling to the enterprise. Assuming it’s kept a separate entity and is not beholden exclusively to Azure, this acquisition gives GitHub the opportunity to deliver the features enterprise DevOps and development teams need.”

    —Tal Weiss, co-founder and CTO of OverOps

    Accelerates GitHub’s Servicing of DevOps Market

    “The new Microsoft is not the bogey of the past — VS Code is great; TypeScript is terrific; Microsoft has not merely accepted open source, but become an open source leader through its GitHub contributions. From a business perspective, I think the deal will pay off. Unlike competitors such as IBM and Oracle, Microsoft not only understands developers, but has a proven ability to sell to the SMB as well as to the enterprise market. Microsoft can probably grow the GitHub business substantially by executing better on GitHub’s existing strategic objectives, such as GitHub Enterprise, without alienating users. It may also be able to create significant value by applying its AI technology and VS Code innovation to GitHub’s enormous corpus of code.

    —Rod Johnson, co-founder and CEO of Atomist and creator of Spring

    Validates Value of What Open Source and Devs Do

    “I think overall this is good for the DevOps movement, and open source in general. It’s a very strong validation of how important open source is not just to open source developers, but also the business world. Developers have a right to be anxious, but there are many viable options for open source hosting in this day and age, so if Microsoft does not prove to be a good steward of GitHub, they have other options. However, Microsoft could very well keep GitHub going.”

    —Logan Abbott, president of SourceForge.net

    — Ericka Chickowski

  • Microsoft Snaps Up GitHub for $7.5 Billion

    Microsoft Snaps Up GitHub for $7.5 Billion

    Recognizing the role GitHub plays in the larger developer and DevOps ecosystems, Microsoft is acquiring the software development platform for a cool $7.5 billion, the two companies have announced.

    GitHub, the world’s leading software development platform, has more than 28 million users who “learn, share and collaborate to create the future,” according to the press release announcing the acquisition.

    “Developers are the builders of this new era, writing the world’s code. And GitHub is their home,” wrote Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella in a blog post. He noted Microsoft is the most active organization on GitHub, with more than 2 million commits made to projects.

    “Microsoft has been a developer-focused company from the very first product we created to the platforms and tools we offer today. Building technology so that others can build technology is core to our mission to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more,” he wrote.

    GitHub CEO Chris Wanstrath was quick to point out the irony of Microsoft, once a bastion of proprietary software and apps, purchasing a repository for open source code.

    “When GitHub first launched ten years ago, I could have never imagined this headline,” he wrote in his blog. “Git was a powerful but niche tool, clouds were just things in the sky, and Microsoft was a very different company. Open source and business, people said at the time, mixed as well as oil and water.”

    That said, there is a certain synergy between the two companies, he noted. “We both believe that software development needs to become easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and more open, so more people can become developers and existing developers can spend more time focusing on the unique problems they’re trying to solve.”

    Under the terms of the agreement, Microsoft will acquire GitHub for $7.5 billion in Microsoft stock. The acquisition is expected to close by the end of the calendar year.

    Keep checking devopsy.kinsta.cloud for updates on analysis on Microsoft’s purchase of GitHub and its potential impact on the DevOps community at large.

    — Charlene O’Hanlon

  • GitLab Acquires Gemnasium to Advance DevSecOps

    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:

    How Developers Can Take a More Proactive Approach to Security

    CA Technologies Survey Uncovers DevSecOps Challenges

    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

  • AppDynamics Buy Expands Cisco’s DevOps Agenda

    AppDynamics Buy Expands Cisco’s DevOps Agenda

    AppDynamics’ $3.7 billion acquisition by Cisco Systems has two major implications for the DevOps space. On a tactical level, Cisco has committed to distributing AppDynamics’ agent software everywhere from the public cloud to individual devices connected to the Internet of Things (IoT) and in between. On a more strategic level, the company is positioning itself to be able to uniquely correlate IT operations data generated by applications and IT infrastructure to give organizations comprehensive visibility into their entire DevOps environments.

    During a briefing with analysts and the media this week, Rowan Trollope, senior vice president and general manager of Cisco’s IoT and Applications Business Group, described how his company sees AppDynamics as a linchpin acquisition that propels the company well beyond its well-established networking and server infrastructure base. After the merger is completed, expected sometime in the third quarter, AppDynamics will continue to operate as an independent business unit within the IoT and Applications group, and current AppDynamics CEO David Wadhani will report to Trollope.

    Trollope described AppDynamics as a complement to Cisco’s ongoing efforts to drive more recurring revenue. The company, which offers an application monitoring service delivered via the cloud, was poised to shortly go public prior to being scooped up by Cisco. AppDynamics is employed mainly by IT organizations to monitor applications running on public clouds. But Wadhani noted one of the fastest-growing segments of AppDynamics’ business is monitoring applications running in private clouds.

    The data AppDynamics gathers in those environments can be correlated against, for example, the data Cisco collects via its Tetration analytics application, which the company launched last year. That capability, Trollope said, will significantly increase the total Cisco value proposition.

    In fact, as hybrid cloud computing scenarios based on microservices and containers become more common, Wadhani noted that monitoring of complex applications running in production across multiple clouds will become a more crucial requirement. AppDynamics recently extended its monitoring service to include support for containers deployed in these environments.

    Under the leadership of CEO Chuck Robbins, extending Cisco’s reach across the enterprise has become a high priority. Cisco recently abandoned a cloud interoperability service strategy. But its acquisition of AppDynamics suggests the company is shifting its focus to higher-margin software that generates recurring revenues across multi-year contracts.

    Following the acquisition, Trollope said Cisco also plans to take advantage of its existing relationships with senior business and IT leaders to advance a vision of DevOps that provides organizations with visibility all the way down to how each customer engages with their IT resources. The issue Cisco needs to navigate is the degree to which those senior executives actually exercise control over DevOps. To date, DevOps has been more of initiative led by developers and IT operations staff than mandates from senior executives.

    Wadhani said Cisco’s direct and indirect sales staff should significantly expand the number of organizations that are exposed to AppDynamics services. That means one way or another, DevOps is about to become a much broader discussion across the enterprise.

    — Mike Vizard