Morpheus Data has updated to its cloud management platform by making it easier to dynamically integrate different implementations of automation tasks created using different tools and frameworks any Git or GitHub repository.
In addition, the company has expanded the operating systems it supports to include Amazon Linux 2, Red Hat Linux 8.x and SUSE Linux, in addition to extending existing support for Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Oracle Cloud and Google Cloud Platform.
Morpheus Data has also added support for VMware NSX-T and Unisys Stealth networking software as part of an effort to advance DevSecOps by making it easier to apply microsegmenation to networks to create a zero-trust IT environment. Interest in zero-trust IT environments is on the rise as a way to combat the lateral movement of malware once an IT asset is breached.
Finally, Morpheus Data has updated the graphical user interface (GUI) it provides as a single pane of glass for managing multiple cloud platforms.
Brad Parks, vice president of business development for Morpheus Data, said DevOps teams can now employ the Morpheus cloud management platform to orchestrate tasks developed in Ansible, Python, Groovy, Shell, Powershell, jRuby and even e-mail. Those tasks can then be chained together to create a workflow process, said Parks.
The update to the GUI also makes it possible to create custom views of application instances across clouds as well as export custom datasets into CSV or JSON data formats for analysis, including chargeback, showback and project reporting. Navigation has also been streamlined with updates to global search, navigation and granular sorting of tabular data.
Parks said in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic more IT organizations will need to reduce the total cost of IT. The challenge they face is the IT environment has become more distributed than ever. The Morpheus platform makes it possible to centralize the management of multiple platforms, which should enable IT teams to substantially lower the total cost of IT by applying IT automation more aggressively across a hybrid cloud computing environment. Today most organizations have adopted multiple clouds, each of which is usually managed in isolation. That approach not only requires tools to manage each platform but also dedicated IT support specialists for each platform.
It’s not clear to what degree IT organizations will move to centralize the management of IT in the wake of the pandemic. Many of the cloud platforms that organizations are employing have been funded by line-of-business executives rather than the central IT organization. However, now that many of those business executives are under pressure to reduce costs, the amount of discretionary spending made available to business executives might be curtailed. At the same time, however, many organizations are increasing investments in digital business transformation initiatives that most commonly involve applications being deployed on the cloud.
Regardless of the path forward, the one thing that is clear is the current status IT quo within most organizations is not going to hold.
If you live in the downtown areas of Pittsburgh, Palo Alto, Miami or other AV hot spots, you’ve probably been missing the Ford Fusion Hybrids with the bulky lidar sensors in your neighborhoods. The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in many job cuts as well as work from home orders from the government, and this has forced big driverless car technology companies such as Argo AI, Waymo, Aurora, etc., to halt on-road testing of their vehicles and work remotely.
This would impact many automobile companies partnered with these firms that had plans to mass produce and release their fully autonomous vehicles by the end of 2021, including the Ford Motor Company, Volkswagen Group, BMW, etc. The only way to bring back the accelerated development and testing of these technologies is by realizing their current value in the consumer market, especially when humans need resources to be delivered to them without spreading the virus further.
This article will shed insight on some perks that autonomous vehicles provide in mitigating the widespread impact of this virus, as well as whether these advantages make us realize their value in everyday life.
Home Delivery Without a Human Delivery Worker
We’ve all tried delivery when in a rush or simply when we’re too lazy to go out and buy food or groceries. This used to be an occasional thing for the most of us; something we wouldn’t do every time we purchased an item because the delivery charge was an additional expense. But COVID-19 has changed our entire lifestyle dramatically, and now most of us order our groceries online or through shopping apps such as Instacart or Amazon, so that we can avoid having to physically go to the store. While this seems like a better alternative, it also puts millions of delivery workers at risk of contracting and spreading the virus, making the outbreak worse than it originally seemed.
Autonomous delivery vehicles are a potential solution to this issue, since they allow for driverless home delivery of items that customers have purchased online, limiting physical interactions with the items to two point-contact (store shopper and customer). Nuro, a leading self-driving vehicle startup in the U.S. founded by former Google engineers Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson, recently became the first driverless car manufacturer to obtain permission from the Department of Transportation (DOT) to produce and put driverless cars into action for home delivery. The R2, Nuro’s second generation driverless car after the original R1, is a low-speed vehicle that can interpret and adapt to a wide variety of weather and road conditions, while not posing considerable risks for pedestrian safety. Its maximum speed is sealed at 25 mph with self-adjusting acceleration and braking control in response to traffic flow and obstacle detection.
Like most driverless cars, R2 does not possess a steering wheel, rear-view mirrors and actuator pedals, placing it in the exemption category for vehicle production according to the DOT’s Federal Motor Safety Standards (FMVSS). This is an exemption that is not easily approved by the DOT, with many automobile companies trying their luck at getting their mass driverless car production proposals approved without success, until Nuro recently hit the jackpot.
Although this exemption has only been approved “with regulatory certainty” as of now, due to the low speeds that R2 can travel, it has enabled Nuro to get more R2s out working in Houston, delivering customer orders from Walmart, Domino’s and Kroger. The R2 is a start to transitioning to a fully driverless delivery experience, which in our current state, is a great way to prevent the spread of the virus from exacerbating further.
Could Autonomous Vehicles Be Our New Mail Trucks?
Every week, thousands of mail workers across the U.S. hop into their mail trucks and drive to multiple neighborhoods and communities that they serve, in order to deliver mail to residents. Receiving mail in a timely manner is very important for the most of us, since we need to pay our bills for water, electricity, gas, etc., every month and most of these statements arrive by mail. During this pandemic, mail workers have been working long hours to get all of our mail delivered to us without delay. Through this process, they haven’t been able to take many days off to spend with their own families or rest at home if they get sick, making them even more vulnerable to catching the coronavirus.
Autonomous mail trucks are a solution that USPS has been considering since late 2017, and to fulfill this dream the Postal Service has partnered with the University of Michigan and TuSimple, a self-driving truck startup. The plans to put an autonomous mail truck to work have only been extended as test runs to a couple of cities across the U.S., such as Phoenix and Dallas, and about 10 rural routes in Michigan as of May 2019. Although these remain a viable solution to be used in conjunction with traditional mail delivery by mail workers, efforts to develop autonomous mail trucks has declined over the COVID-19 crisis due to other priorities that have sprung up.
Counter to this thought, introducing autonomous mail delivery vehicles during this time to assist mail workers (as originally planned by USPS) or operate independently with robotic assistance in at least a few areas that have already been tested and approved, would highly facilitate the mail delivery process and reduce the stress and workload of mail workers across the United States.
The latter option would allow mail to be delivered directly to customers, with robots inside the vehicles serving as mail workers that sort and place mail in each resident’s mailbox. Residents can pick up their mail directly from their mailboxes without needing to worry about social distancing, spreading the virus to the workers or, counteractively, getting the virus from them. Even if mail workers did accompany the autonomous mail trucks, their work would be halved in intensity, since they would only have to sort and place mail in each resident’s mailbox, without needing to worry anymore about physically driving to every neighborhood that they serve.
Shifting Supplies from One Location to Another on Pedestrian-Free Routes
We’ve long considered autonomous vehicles to be an option to use in factories, truck yards and other less congested routes, primarily to move inventory to different locations. This is a great use for AVs since it involves minimal, if any, contact with humans or pedestrians, so it doesn’t pose a high risk for safety.
The pandemic has raised a lot of new challenges to implementing this idea across the board, in terms of the inability to commit much time at all to these efforts at the current moment, as well as the difficulty in monitoring test vehicles within facilities with very few workers on site to overview the actual process.
Despite these challenges, Phantom Auto, an automotive safety solutions company based in California, recently announced their decision to deploy their new driverless trucks — which they call productivity vehicles — across their truck yards to load/unload inventory on their own, without needing a worker to drive the trucks. Phantom Auto calls these trucks “almost” autonomous in terms of their navigational capabilities, since they may still need a little input from remote workers to guide them to the right docking/undocking locations within the yard, but the workers do not have to be physically present on site or inside the vehicle to drive it over themselves.
This is possible due to new technology called HILT (Human in the Loop Technology), a telecommunication software advancement that allows telemonitoring, remote assistance and, in emergency scenarios, teledriving performed by a worker remotely. Performing these labor-intensive tasks autonomously during normal times would be a great relief on workload for workers employed at truck yards, but during this crisis, this is an absolutely essential step that more factories and truck yards should invest time and efforts on, in order to prevent the spread of the virus amongst their workers.
Mayo Clinic, an American non-profit organization and academic medical center, has also been working to get coronavirus tests and medical supplies delivered to hospitals on pedestrian-free routes in Jacksonville, FL, to prevent workers from getting exposed to the virus. The driverless vehicles being used to transport these supplies are autonomous shuttles from Beep, Mayo Clinic’s new corporate partner from early April of this year.
Currently, about four of these shuttles are working independently on different routes in the Jacksonville area, while being monitored by Beep, Mayo Clinic and the Jacksonville Transport Authority Officials, to ensure that the vehicles don’t steer off route. With these constraints and monitoring methods in place, autonomous vehicles can be deployed across a variety of platforms to perform simple, supply shifting tasks that human workers have been undertaking in addition to their primary responsibilities for years, during the crisis and post-pandemic.
Everything Considered…
With their day to day work and responsibilities increasing multifold during the pandemic, frontline workers have been doing a lot of overtime, not being able to spend time with their families during and further exposing themselves and their families to the virus, so that the majority of us can stay safe at home and still get our necessities delivered to us. It’s now time for technology to take over, and one possible solution to help ease their work is automating tasks that are laborious, such as grocery and mail delivery, supply shifting, etc.
Autonomous vehicles that have already been approved for deployment, or in the final stages of testing, can help with performing these tasks since they don’t require a driver. These vehicles can be supervised by a physically present or remote worker to ensure that they follow the right routes and operate at the appropriate speeds
A few firms have already started taking the initiative of deploying these vehicles to help prevent the spread of the virus amongst their workers and customers, and are witnesses to the overall simplification and ease of the automated process over the manual labor that they had originally employed. The shift to a more automated future that we had originally planned at the end of 2021 should start when we need it most, which is during this time of crisis. So, at this time, are we willing to make the change and invest more efforts in developing and testing autonomous vehicles to perform our everyday tasks?
In addition, the company announced an update to NGINX Controller that enhances application analytics along with improvements to the declarative application programming interfaces (APIs) that NGINX Controller provides.
Finally, F5 Networks unveiled an update to BIG-IQ, a set of tools for managing application services delivered via its network operating system. Version 7.1 of BIG-IQ adds visibility into legacy application services, streamlines management workflows and adds security management functionality.
Hitesh Patel, senior director of product management for automation, orchestration and ecosystems at F5 Networks, said all three offerings are part of an ongoing effort to make it easier for IT organizations to meld network operations (NetOps) and best DevOps practices. Beacon, for example, ingests telemetry data streams from multiple sources to provide visibility and surface actionable insights via an application-centric view of the IT environment, he said, adding that approach makes it easier for NetOps and DevOps teams to collaborate.
A companion Beacon Insights tool can be employed to detect anomalies and run analytics to determine the root cause of an issue, he said.
Patel noted as IT environments become more complex, the need to eliminate silos that make managing IT holistically has become more pressing. For example, modern applications based on microservices are especially difficult to manage across an increasingly distributed computing environment.
Less clear currently is how much or even whether DevOps and NetOps teams will merge. Network resources increasingly are being exposed via APIs that developers can programmatically invoke to provision resources. However, many IT teams are trying to control how much network bandwidth is allocated to any given application. As a result, many NetOps teams are setting up portals through which DevOps teams are given access to a maximum amount of bandwidth for specific sets of applications.
On the plus side, Patel noted that as applications become more instrumented, thanks in part to the rise of DevOps, it’s becoming easier to apply analytics. That capability makes it easier for developers and NetOps teams to troubleshoot issues using a common set of metrics and dashboards that can feed data back to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, he said.
It may be a while before each IT organization finds the optimal level of convergence between their respective DevOps and NetOps teams. However, as applications become more distributed in the age of the cloud, networking will have a greater impact on application performance. The trouble is, most DevOps teams aren’t sure whether application performance issues are the result of the code written by developers or the latency being introduced by the network. Whatever the root cause, many IT teams are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to determine the root cause of application performance issues.
Dell Technologies today launched a revamped midrange storage platform that takes advantage of NVMe interfaces and solid-state drives (SSDs) to deliver 7x the performance of previous Dell EMC PowerStore platforms, in addition to allowing applications to run locally on an instance of a VMware virtual machine.
Ben Jastrab, senior manager for storage product marketing at Dell Technologies, said the inclusion of a virtual machine in form of an AppsON capability means that rather than having to deploy applications on a server, for example, a data analytics application could be deployed directly on top of the data it needs to access on a storage system. In addition, the latest version of Dell EMC PowerStore adds support for instances of Kubernetes from VMware running on top of a virtual machine. Dell storage systems already provide support for the Container Storage Interface (CSI) needed to provide Kubernetes clusters access to external storage systems.
Dell has also added support for Ansible and VMware vRealize Orchestrator frameworks to automate the deployment and ongoing maintenance of Dell EMC PowerStore systems. As part of that effort to automate the management of storage systems, Dell added built-in machine learning algorithms to automate labor-intensive tasks such as initial volume placement, migrations, load balancing and issue resolution. Dell EMC CloudIQ storage monitoring and analytics software makes it possible to combine machine learning and human intelligence for real-time and historical performance and capacity analysis.
Jastrab noted that many of these innovations are made possible because the storage operating system employed within Dell EMC PowerStore has been completely revamped using microservices based on containers. That approach not only makes the operating system more flexible and resilient, but it also will afford Dell the opportunity to experiment with how it might present storage services in the future, he said.
Automation coupled with technologies such as deduplication and compression will play a critical role in driving the total cost of storage lower in the months ahead, Jastrab said. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, IT organizations will be under increased pressure to reduce costs at a time when both the amount and types of data that need to be analyzed and stored continue to increase, he noted, adding the Dell PowerStore system can provide access to 2.8PB of data when configured in a scale-up architecture and more than 11PB when configured using a scale-out architecture.
IT teams will need to determine to what degree they want to rely on proprietary frameworks such as VMware vRealize to automate IT infrastructure versus an open source Ansible framework that can be applied more broadly to multiple platforms. Dell owns VMware, but Jastrab said the company is committed to providing support for multiple IT automation frameworks.
It’s not clear to what degree applications will shift from being deployed on traditional servers to a storage system. Many next-generation applications are clearly more latency-sensitive than their predecessors, so providing more direct access to data over an NVMe interface may present IT teams with a compelling alternative. Regardless of the approach taken, the line between compute and storage continues to blur.
At its core, HPE GreenLake is a managed service that allows IT organizations to pay for IT infrastructure on a consumption basis. HPE meters usage and HPE ProLiant servers and bills customers accordingly. HPE GreenLake Central provides a portal through which IT teams can track usage themselves and provision applications both from HPE and third-party software vendors.
Data management and file management software from Cohesity and Qumulo can be provisioned via the self-service portal. In addition, HPE GreenLake systems can now be co-located in data centers managed by CyrusOne.
Keith White, vice president for HPE GreenLake, said HPE also provides via HPE GreenLake Central integration with Microsoft Azure Access Manager and Amazon Web Services (AWS) Access Manager services to make it easier for IT organizations to compare the cost of deploying workloads on-premises versus in the cloud, in addition to identifying potential compliance issues. IT teams still will need to access a separate portal provided by either AWS or Microsoft to spin up a virtual machine in the cloud.
HPE claims to now have more than 800 enterprise customers consuming HPE GreenLake services. With many organizations opting to focus their efforts on building and deploying software, HPE is now making the case for a service through which it manages ProLiant servers and associated HPE storage on their behalf. In the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, White said HPE expects to see increased demand for consumption-based pricing for IT infrastructure.
Of course, IT teams have been consuming cloud infrastructure using various consumption-based pricing models for years. However, there are many workloads that for a wide variety of compliance, security and performance issues that still do not lend themselves to being deployed on a public cloud. HPE GreenLake provides the flexibility of a cloud service while still employing IT infrastructure deployed in a local data center.
It’s unclear in the wake of the downturn how many additional application workloads might be moving into the cloud. The general expectation is that because many local data centers have been inaccessible during the pandemic, more organizations naturally will shift workloads to the cloud. However, a managed service from HPE also serves to eliminate the need to manage servers in an on-premises IT environment that are managed remotely by HPE. IT teams can remotely log into the HPE GreenLake portal from wherever they are located.
Undoubtedly, the relationship between IT teams and vendors such as HPE is evolving. Many rote infrastructure tasks increasingly are becoming automated not just by the IT team, but also by the vendor that built the server or storage system. Of course, the automation being provided by the IT vendor only applies to their latest generation of infrastructure.
Since the ideation of DevOps, technologists have made great strides to benefit from it. Despite advancements and the success that teams have seen within pockets, many of its core challenges are still prevalent: scaling across the enterprise due to manual processes, poor visibility between dev and ops teams, and tool sprawl that hurts agility. Luckily, there’s light at the end of the tunnel for organizations hoping to get the most from DevOps.
In order to succeed in DevOps and foster agility in this next decade, the secret is pretty simple: Get the right work to the right team at the right time. Here are three ways development and operations teams will get closer to this formula over the coming years.
Change Automation Based on Policies, Data and Automation Will Take Hold
Despite large investments to double down on DevOps initiatives, the reality is most organizations have only made progress on development processes, while downstream gates and processes such as change management are still manual and time consuming. Too often are developers having to log in, create change requests and fill out forms manually–a frustrating, drawn out and overall unnecessary process. The reality is, manual processes in DevOps simply cannot continue in the next decade. They create unnecessary friction, disrupt the flow between dev and ops, and get in the way of other essential work.
However, the tide is starting to turn as organizations look to automate tasks like change management by leveraging dynamic controls through data and policy automation to achieve true CI/CD. As automation becomes more commonplace, developers will spend more time actually developing and will be able to deploy apps faster and with greater efficiency.
Organizations Will Rely on AI/ML and Analytics to Drive Efficiency and Greater Visibility
Despite all the advancements in DevOps over the past 10 years, one hurdle hasn’t been addressed: the limited visibility across all the pipelines from development, and the connection to how those deliverables run in the real world–i.e., knowing what changed, how it’s been tested, understanding the impact and assessing the risk, how something performs in production etc. The lack of visibility presents challenges of its own (distrust among teams, slower approvals, bottlenecks and inefficient processes).
Organizations are starting to recognize and address this challenge, realizing the gains from local optimization within departments along the way. As this continues, they will increasingly rely on analytics to drive efficiency and end-to-end visibility across processes. What’s more, analytical tools will draw planning, repository, test, deployment and performance data from across the DevOps lifecycle to provide insights into reducing cycle times, risk and improving project outcomes. AI and ML will play a role in leveraging that information to better direct work, to adjust stage gates and policies based on prior performance and more.
At its core, analytics enables IT teams to make changes at the pace of DevOps, while unprecedented visibility assisted by ML puts IT at the center of developers’ culture and mindset.
Tool Sprawl Will Continue to Be a Problem but DevOps Management Platforms Will Emerge
With continued adoption of cloud and microservices architectures, new tools will continue to emerge–different teams within an organization often use different tools for planning, version control, build automation, testing, deployment, etc. But, a new trend is emerging as the industry moves toward platforms that streamline management across various tools and teams to improve development speed and agility. Platforms also enable IT teams to quickly accommodate the rapid addition of features to software, while automating the approval process–making product development faster and more efficient, while also breaking down silos.
The Bottom Line
Despite advancements from the last 10 years, there are still many ways to deliver on the value of DevOps and grow adoption. The vast number of tools used by developers and IT makes it difficult for leaders to get a holistic view of how each team is performing. Lack of visibility paired with manual processes slows the behavioral and cultural change needed to succeed with DevOps.
But, as we enter the next 10 years of DevOps, the combination of automation, analytics and workflow platforms will arm teams for success.
As we move toward 2020, the expectations are high, the software industry is moving faster and the demand for rapid and continually improving digital experiences have raised the standard. To match the needs and demands of the market, firms around the world are embracing the DevOps culture to ensure and streamline the development, packaging, testing, deployment and maintenance of software at scale.
Every DevOps organization is defined by its own leadership, culture, practices, policies, leadership style, structure, talents, skills, technical capabilities, processes and tools. However, there are certain common characteristics that are important to consider before deciding a better DevOps platform to use in your organization. Today, we will discuss such important features that can help you while selecting your DevOps platform.
What is DevOps?
DevOps is a mindset in an organization that enforces a set of collective practices to ensure easy collaboration between dev and ops so the business can run smoothly without any hassle. DevOps aims to fasten the time to market through frequent and incremental improvements to deliver quality software updates to customers.
The meaning and definitions of DevOps can vary from company to company. Automation being the focal point, firms want to focus on achieving zero-touch automation, with utmost security and governance as a priority in the delivery pipeline.
Even though the meaning of DevOps varies, several inherent DevOps principles cannot be replaced, and they repeatedly insist on collaborative relationships, developing early, failing early, shared learning and continuous feedback. These DevOps principles enhance quality with improved deployment rates while simultaneously improving predictability, scalability and security of the production environment. Tech leaders in the company need to view DevOps as a holistic approach rather than a small set of guidelines for the teams, and DevOps guidelines should be aligned with the company’s long term technology vision and objectives.
Here are some facts to consider while deciding a better DevOps platform for your organization.
A Mindset of a Unified Culture
Culture plays a significant role in establishing the guidelines while embracing DevOps in any organization. Through DevOps culture, companies seek to bring dev and ops teams into harmony to promote collaboration, automation, process improvements, continuous iterative development and deployment methodologies. But above everything else, a sound DevOps culture fundamentally solves one of IT’s biggest people problems: bridging the gap between dev and ops teams to get them to stop working in silos and have common goals.
According to Gartner estimation, DevOps efforts fail 90% of the time when infrastructure and operations teams try to drive a DevOps initiative without nurturing a cultural shift in the first place. It is not just about the efficient tools or experts working; it is about the behavioral modifications and mentality necessary to effect cultural change.
Hence, it is important for the firms to consider the culture of the company before selecting its tool as a potential DevOps tool for their development.
Automation Inside and Outside
Automation is one of the key principles of a strong DevOps team because it has such a high return on investment.
Automation makes up as a large part of DevOps culture to standardize production platforms, and even firms believe it as true because standardization and automation help make deployments more predictable, easy and less prone to human errors.
Automate everything as part of the workflow process, including infrastructures, compliance and continuous delivery pipeline. For example, tools such as Artifactory can manage and control all your binary repositories to help your developers and ops collaborate and automate build and deploy tasks easily. Similarly, Docker allows development teams to containerize applications and automate application deployments with speed.
By reducing manual, non-important and repetitive tasks, you will increase your development and testing speed while cutting down on human and unnecessary errors. Additionally, by automating tedious and repetitive tasks, firms free up team members to work on higher-level and more important tasks.
Important to note here, JFrog Pipelines is an innovative DevOps automation solution that well integrates and connects all critical processes in the software delivery lifecycle in the company, from development to testing to production. Using minimum code, it allows you to create smart and event-driven workflows across tools and teams easily, to speed up the release of software applications. This helps you achieve continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment and continuous monitoring in DevOps.
Support Both Hybrid and Multi-Cloud
What is Multi-cloud?
Multi-cloud is the use of cloud computing from two or more public cloud providers in single network architecture to meet their business objectives. A multi-cloud strategy has many advantages. It avoids vendor lock-in, decreases latency, enhances business continuity, overhead cost reduction and maximizes flexibility for development teams. However, multi-cloud management comes with some challenges that require careful orchestration, and needs to pay close attention to security and governance issues.
What is Hybrid-cloud?
A hybrid cloud is a mixture of on-premises and off-premises IT resources. Based on business and compliance requirements, the hybrid cloud allows firms to move data and applications between private and public environments.
Hybrid cloud computing allows instant transfer of information between public and private environments, allowing enterprises to experience the benefits of both environments efficiently.
Flexibility, scalability and cost savings are some of the top benefits of hybrid-cloud.
Considering a platform that supports both multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud is the best solution for the enterprises moving toward the digital transformation ladder.
Continuous Updates
Frequently rolling out updates, in a continuous sequence, to bring service improvements to consumer devices more rapidly and efficiently is what every firm is trying to do these days. The customer wants new features as early as possible and continuously. That is one reason why companies embrace automation and follow practices like continuous integration, continuous deployment and continuous delivery through tools such as GitHub, Artifactory, Circle CI, Docker, Kubernetes, etc.
The DevOps platform should be able to manage your DevOps pipeline from a single pane of glass. A platform that can provide a universal end-to-end solution that integrates with your ecosystem to orchestrate and optimize all critical processes in your CI/CD pipeline. Boosting fearless updates continuously from code to the edge in self-managed, on-prem, hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
A Robust Community
All successful companies have built their own communities through their products and services. DevOps is all about the culture shift. Changing existing culture and moving forward is one of the hardest things to do—despite the benefits that DevOps offers, such as speed and agility. No matter what changes a team implements, embracing DevOps often comes to a halt once the companies realize it requires a change in culture and mentality of all the teams involved. This is where the value of community comes in, by fostering the development of a more open communication, easy and supportive feedback, and collaborative culture within teams, companies can be able to drive this DevOps culture. This mindset should come from within and outside of the organization by tapping into this sense of community-based collaboration. Communities are required because they ensure the well being of many of the technologies we use daily.
Your favorite DevOps platforms—Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes, Artifactory—and their popularity is because of the communities they have created around the tools.
A well-focused DevOps platform gives power to people who listen carefully to what the market is saying, gets the feedback and utilizes it effectively. Hence, community is a very important feature of a DevOps organization.
Conclusion
Companies around the world are embracing DevOps, and the demand for DevOps skills soars as organizations spend their time and money on digital transformation. DevOps has become a modern approach to IT that helps companies to think and execute broader business strategies. DevOps can drive significant brand value by accelerating speed to market, better collaboration, ensuring better testing and automation. A DevOps platform should have all the qualities mentioned above to succeed in this highly competitive market.
Current events have revealed that there are two worlds in the employment landscape. One is digital, the other analog. For the most part, those in IT—the digital workers—have been unaffected by the spike in unemployment due to the economic side-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. But, it doesn’t mean they’ll be untouched in the long-term. As current events demonstrate, when it comes to the essentials in life, we’re all connected. Yet, the divide will continue to separate us to the detriment of all unless we do something about it.
When observing current events, I can’t help but think about Fritz Lang’s 1927 silent movie, Metropolis. It’s a science fiction film that depicts a world in which a small number of people live a privileged life in skyscrapers that tower high above the city. The rest of the population toils away below ground, doing the mundane work required to keep the city running. It’s a stunning piece of cinematography. The sets and special effects are breathtaking. What’s also impressive is that, for better or worse, so much of what Lang presented nearly 100 years ago has come to be.
You can view the full-length version of Metropolis here.
Figure 1: Scenes from the 1927 silent movie, Metropolis by Fritz Lang.
Lang’s vision of the future has a strange, almost eerie prescience for me, particularly as someone who has spent most of his adult life working in IT. It’s one that’s entirely possible, yet one I hope we avoid.
Allow me to elaborate.
Life Is A-OK in the Cloud
There’s a good argument to be made that today we live in Lang’s Metropolis, a world in which those who are doing really well live in the light of society while those who are just getting by live below ground in darkness.
The widening gap between prosperity and economic hardship is a trend that’s been unfolding over the last 30 years. We’ve become accustomed to it. Sadly, it’s no longer newsworthy.
What is newsworthy is the dramatic spike in unemployment due to the business shutdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The uptick in unemployment reveals a troubling set of circumstances: If you’re a digital worker chances are you’re still working. If you work in the analog world, that place where factories, restaurants, airlines, movie theaters, hotels, cruise ships and warehouses exist, there’s a good chance you or someone you know is out of a job, for now anyway.
Take a look at the graph from the US Private Sector Job Quality Index, a project from Cornell University Law School and others, by way of vox.com. It lists the jobs that are most vulnerable to layoffs due to the COVID-19 pandemic. IT workers don’t even make the list. It’s as if we live in another world.
Figure 2: Information workers are absent from the list of jobs at risk due to COVID-19.
The long and the short of it is that for developers, sysadmins, SREs and all the other people working in information technology, the recent economic downturn is but a blip in the daily news feed. For those manning a cash register, taking a ticket at the local cineplex, cutting hair or driving for a rideshare service, it’s a life-altering event. Or, to put it terms of Lang’s film, those of us who live in the clouds are doing well, and for those on the ground, it’s a different story.
Now, consider this: What if all the people who are presently laid off from their jobs find out there are no jobs to go back to? What if the economic recovery is slower than anticipated or society gets so accustomed to doing without that consumption doesn’t resume? Is such a scenario possible? Yes. Is it probable? Dunno. Will those of us in IT who work remotely all over the planet, from the comfort of our wired office, suffer? I doubt it. But, as for the rest, what then?
Let’s go back to the movie.
A Workforce Divided
There’s a point in the film when the protagonist, Freder (the son of the industrialist who built Metropolis), goes to his father to inquire about a catastrophic underground explosion shown earlier in the film.
The son asked,“Your magnificent city, Father, and you, the brain of this city, and all of us in this city’s light … and where are the people, Father, whose hands built your city?”
The father responded, “Where they belong.”
The son asked, “Where they belong? In the depths?”
His father nodded his head yes. (See the scene here).
There you have it. With that one physical gesture, Lang foreshadows a future which might very well be at our doorstep. As I mentioned earlier, it’s eerie, it’s prescient and it looks as if it’s coming to be.
What Does This All Have to Do with DevOps?
Those of us in DevOps have made valuable contributions to the world. We’ve done dramatically more good than harm. We’ve also been well compensated. The average salary for a SRE in the USA is $131,340, with a low of $60K and a high of $192K. Yet, the top salary for grocery clerk at Ralph’s supermarket is $22 an hour, which comes out to $44K a year over a 50 week year.
Do SREs deserve such a high salary? Of course, they do. Does a grocery clerk deserve only $44K a year in comparison? At the end of 2019, it would have been easy to say, yes. It’s a low skill, low education job. But that was then, and this is now. As of this writing, toilet paper is a premium commodity and the shelves need to be stocked with it. I’ll wager that in some circles, paying someone $50 an hour to get the rolls on the shelf is reasonable compensation. It all depends on how much people want toilet paper.
Am I being a bit dramatic? A little, but still, it’s worth thinking about.
So, what’s the important take away? Let’s go back to Metropolis one last time.
At the beginning of the film, there’s a scene in which the protagonist, Freder, was frolicking about in a lush arboretum-like greenhouse atop a skyscraper. He was surrounded by pretty maidens dancing. An elevator door opened into the garden. Freder observed as a group of raggedy waifs from beneath the city exited out of the elevator. A woman leading the waifs was at the head of the group. The waifs looked around in amazement at such luxury. Then, Freder’s servants ushered the group back into the elevator to exit. Freder was obviously affected by the waifs. He went into the depths of the city to investigate.
Shortly thereafter, Freder went to see his father to inquire about the explosion I described earlier. His father asked, “What were you doing in the machine halls, Freder?”
The son responded, “I wanted to look into the faces of the people whose little children are my brother, my sisters…”
It’s a powerful scene. It makes me wonder how many of the faces I’ve seen of those who were working in February are now sitting home, unemployed and unable to pay the rent in April.
The takeaway is this: We’re all connected at a level much deeper than the trivial interactions of the given social network. Current events have demonstrated the fact in spades. COVID-19 was first reported in China around November 17, 2019. On April 4, 2020, less than six months later, there were 240 cases reported in the state of South Dakota in the United States. If that’s not connection, I don’t know what is.
Those of us who work in the cloud are doing quite well, despite the setbacks caused by the global pandemic. But, there’s a growing number of us who are not doing so well and won’t be for the foreseeable future. It’s easy when everything is peaches and cream to be unaware of a world in which six-figure salaries are not the norm. But, when things go south and there’s no toilet paper to be had, the realization that we’re all in this together smacks us square in the face, like it or not.
The question then becomes, given that we’re all connected, what type of world do we want to share, the one in Lang’s Metropolis or something better?
It’s something worth thinking about. The pandemic will pass, but the underlying disparities will remain unless we do something about them.
There is little argument that automated testing has emerged as an industry best practice. Yet, there remains a wide variety of adoption and maturity in the market. While automated testing is imperative for DevOps maturity and success, I see in my work several popular canards that often stand in the way.
Reject these five common myths within your organization to improve your testing maturity and propel your DevOps objectives.
Myth One: We Don’t Have the Time to Slow Down and Add Automation
You don’t have the time not to add automation. Your competitors are most likely already automating their test processes, and are reaping the benefits from it. For example, companies like Amazon and Netflix have instituted end-to-end automation that allows them to push builds to production in record time. Organizations like this have become juggernauts as they are able to quickly address customer expectations with new software and services at the speed of the market.
While Amazon and Netflix are obviously examples of extreme automation, moving down the path to automated tests will begin the process of adding distinct benefits to the organization. Benefits that will grow key business goals like reducing time to market, and growing quality that ensures customer satisfaction. For example, automated testing brings with it higher accuracy rates, greater code coverage, enhanced detection of bugs and greater reusability.
Myth Two: Automated Testing Is Too Difficult and Frankly, Just Not Worth It
Automated testing is worth the investment. Much like insurance, the added time and expense to begin integrating automated testing into your processes are necessary trade-offs to reduce business risk. Automated testing helps reduce failures, avoiding all-hands-on-deck type emergencies—and, honestly, at 5 p.m. on a Friday, wouldn’t you rather not fight a four-alarm blaze? That said, automated testing should not be a singularly focused QA effort. Good quality efforts really should be organization-wide initiatives.
Automated testing is less difficult than trying to engineer quality at the tail end of anything. If you do not have any test automation in place today, consider starting with an assessment. Identify areas where automated testing is needed and begin addressing those gaps in a prioritized manner. While your ultimate goal may be to automate every gap on the list, start small, take steady steps towards your goal and be sure to celebrate early wins. A parallel approach enterprises take when getting started is to build automation into greenfield projects, which gives them automated tests out of the gate.
Myth Three: We Have to Hire a Specialized Person
I think the Washington Post would give this claim four Pinocchios as it is blatantly untrue. Anyone on your team can learn the needed skills to start down the path to automated testing. And, honestly, learning and growing in your field is an important skill in-and-of-itself as new trends, technologies and tools emerge on a seemingly daily basis. Learning how to add automation to the testing process can help create a virtuous cycle, too, where you will see dividends paid back in time savings from the time you took to learn these key skills. And, the faster feedback loops will make you and your peers more efficient and effective.
Some may counter-argue that there are specialty testing types such as PCI testing, for example. And, that a specialist is needed for these. Yes, many teams have special circumstances that require special tests. However, don’t let this myth be an artificial roadblock here, either. For, there are many automated tools on the market that will help ensure success with these special cases. Moreover, many of these tools are platform-agnostic, making for easy adoption.
Myth Four: We Have to Automate Everything
This all or nothing viewpoint is just not true as it is not possible to automate everything. While I would encourage some tests, such as unit tests, to have a test for every line of code, other tests like front-end tests would be particularly challenging to automate. The greater the organization’s maturity, the more nuanced their view of when and what to automate. Conversely, an “automate everything” approach is a sign of a less mature enterprise.
On one hand, I see organizations that have completely automated unit testing and have developed a tailored approach for front-end and performance testing. On the other hand, I see organizations with little to no automation where software is rushed out the door and dev is not given any time to develop unit tests. In these cases, software sent to the market is not fully tested—and while rare, sometimes it’s not tested at all.
Bad code is risky to a company’s customer satisfaction, reputation and customer loyalty. Going back to test code once it has shipped is a multi-fold lift compared to doing it as an automated part of the development process. Automation also makes it easier to make improvements to existing features in your software or infrastructure. When you have automated tests in place (especially unit tests), you drastically reduce the amount of time refactoring and enhancing takes.
Myth Five: Continuous and Automated Testing Are Synonymous and We Don’t Have the Resources for Continuous Testing
While continuous testing and automated testing are related, they certainly are not the same thing. You can’t obtain continuous testing without the help of automation. However, you can have automated testing without continuous testing. On the spectrum of testing maturity, continuous testing is certainly at the far end as it requires DevOps processes, pipelines and automated reporting as prerequisites. If your organization isn’t at this level of maturity yet, that is OK. Start small and work your way toward continuous testing as a gold standard. For example, consider running unit tests with each new build, implementing a fast feedback loop to development several times a day.
According to a survey by QASymphony and TechWell of testers and QA leaders at mid-size and large enterprises, “widespread test automation adoption still has a way to go, with more than three-quarters of respondents automating less than 50% of their testing.” Yet, it’s important for organizations to speed their processes in order to stay competitive in a quickly evolving marketplace. Dispel these myths within your organization to begin competing more effectively as you progress your automated testing maturity.
