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Tag: conference

JFrog’s swampUP 2023: Ready for Next

In the ever-changing landscape of technology and software development, staying ahead is essential. JFrog has led a pioneering effort to transform DevSecOps since its founding in 2008. Micheline Nijmeh has been chief marketing officer for the past three years, and in that time, she said JFrog has steadily tackled critical issues across the industry.

“JFrog really started off addressing a pain point, which involved being a software supply chain platform that simplifies the DevSecOps processes by automating the entire software build and release process for large enterprises,” Nijmeh said.

On Sept. 13, JFrog will host its marquee event: swampUP. For those anticipating this year’s event, this is more than just a conference. The people heading to San Jose, California, are dedicated to advancing the DevSecOps landscape, and the event is designed to foster a holistic environment for collaboration and learning, Nijmeh said.

“It really brings everyone together. Whether you’re a DevOps practitioner, security practitioner, as well as leaders and managers, all in one place,” Nijmeh said.

Image from swampUP 2022 courtesy of JFrog

This year’s theme, “Ready for Next,” captures JFrog’s dedication to continuous growth, she added. Nijmeh explained that organizations are always evolving and transforming, and that they need a partner that can grow with them.

Among the numerous topics that will be discussed at JFrog’s ninth swampUP event is security and DevSecOps, Nijmeh said, adding that “security is top of mind as always.”

Several keynote speakers will focus on security, including Bruce Schneier, a security guru and New York Times best-selling author of 14 books.

And although security will always be a hot topic, DevOps is expected to generate buzz as well.

“We have John Willis, who’s known as the godfather of DevOps. We’re also having folks from Riot Games, Fidelity, Netflix, CapitalOne and others representing their use cases on how they are addressing not just DevOps, but DevSecOps, in some cases,” Nijmeh said.

With a star-studded roster of speakers, expectations are sky-high. Furthermore, Nijmeh explained that the show has continued to evolve and has grown to be much more comprehensive.

“It’s not just about DevOps, it’s [also] about security. All the way from the left to the right. From development to deployment,” Nijmeh said.

For attendees, JFrog has placed focus on actionable insights, as it aims to provide information and tools that can actually be implemented within their organizations right away. SwampUP aims to provide attendees with practical know-how. Although the goal is to be ‘ready for next,’ it’s vital that practitioners and leaders understand what they can do today as well.

“Anything that we announce at swampUP will be available to our customers,” Nijmeh said. We’ll be sharing some partner announcements and some new innovations that no one has ever seen before.”

Image from swampUP 2022 courtesy of JFrog

September 1, 2023
DevOps World 2022: A DevOps Retrospective

With the seminal IT conference DevOps World 2022 in Orlando September 26 to September 29 upon us, I think about the pivotal industry conferences and events critical to my path to the cloud, DevOps and cloud-native. It brings me to this brief retrospective, highlighting some of the most significant influences that still guide my path today.

I highlight these for you as conferences, books, emerging development tools, and changes in infrastructure delivery all played critical roles in my completely rethinking of how we create software through DevOps.While leading IT for a global R&D industry consortium from 2010 to 2016, I was unknowingly in the middle of a significant shift from designing network protocols to entirely moving to the cloud, creating self-service development portals and automating the development process.

This journey began partly when a friend and colleague, Alan Shimel, creator of the then-new devopsy.kinsta.cloud site, said, “Check out this thing called DevOps … and you gotta read this book!” Looking back at my Amazon order history, I see I first purchased The Phoenix Project in November 2013. The book immediately became the main topic of discussion among my engineering team. While we didn’t label it as a DevOps tool then, Jenkins established the basis of our DevOps toolchain across multiple software-based research projects. Other technologies, including Artifactory, Maven, Git, GitHub, Bamboo and OpenShift, for example, quickly followed, enabling us to spin up development environments for many new software projects. In less than a year, we completely retooled IT from a significant bottleneck to becoming the easiest path to creating new software projects by equipping teams with DevOps, development tools, environments and cloud platforms.

Jenkins World (now DevOps World) helped me understand the central roles CI and CD played in creating automated workflows and delivering software more quickly from development into test environments. The first AWS re:Invent helped me rethink the cloud, from a data center scarcity mindset to making compute, storage and bandwidth resources harnessed through automation and a credit card. I wrote my first post about DevOps in 2014, The DevOps Journey, where I did my best to make sense of precisely what DevOps is.

As I go back and reread that post, I’m surprised how much of those thoughts still apply in 2022. Today, I continuously read many technical books, learn from thought leaders and attend influential conferences, including this year’s DevOps World. I wonder what will change how we think about and create software again in the next decade!

If you can, join us in Orlando for DevOps World. Techstrong.TV will be broadcasting live from the event; if you can’t make it, we’ll keep you updated on all of the developments announced there. Also, join us in November for our own DevOps Experience virtual event, which will highlight DevOps Everywhere: The Edge and Beyond. Hope to see you soon!

September 22, 2022
Live from JFrog Swamp Up 2021 – The Top 4 DevOps Headlines of 2025

We’re reporting live from swampUP. If you want to join this great session and many others you can still grab your free pass here.

May 26, 2021
The Low-Code/No-Code Revolution: Join the Conversation
Make plans to take part in the low-code/no-code conversation at an upcoming daylong virtual conference

MediaOps, the company behind devopsy.kinsta.cloud, is excited to announce it will be producing Low Code Today, a new live virtual event taking place Nov. 19. The call for speakers is now open and actively accepting submissions.

The low-code/no-code market has been growing and evolving for a number of years. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the need to bring applications to use faster than ever, as well as the increased capabilities of building complex applications with low-code/no-code tools, this area is becoming increasingly important.

We want to hear your stories: How have the economic conditions during COVID-19 accelerated your digital transformation efforts? What tools are you using to work smarter and faster in a world where building cloud-native applications is quickly becoming a necessity?

We’re inviting all professional developers, citizen developers, business executives and creators of low-code/no-code technologies to submit their abstracts before the deadline, Oct. 31.

Low Code Today is a free, multi-track virtual event focused on the low-code/no-code market that’s been developing over the past few years but has seen exponential growth in the past six months. We invite those who are interested in speaking to submit their abstracts for one of the following topics:
- Steering the Charge: Hear directly from CIOs, business leaders and IT managers on their approaches to adopting low-code/no-code from a high-level, organizational perspective. What are the strategic approaches, considerations and challenges with bringing low-code/no-code tools to an organization? How is low-code/no-code revolutionizing businesses? What will the future of app development look like?
- Learning by Doing: The best way to learn is by doing. Tune in to hear experiences and case studies from customers who have brought low-code/no-code technologies to their organizations. You’ll discover answers to questions such as, How has your company used low-code/no-code tools? What was the impact? What lessons were learned?
- Enabling the Citizen Developer: Low-code/no-code technologies have given rise to the “Citizen Developer.” These demonstrations, workshops and how-to tutorials will share how low-code/no-code tools can help business users improve processes and increase productivity.
Whether you’re currently using low-code/no-code technologies or creating tools that can support complex business processes, we encourage you to tell your story with an individual presentation, panel discussion, customer case study, fireside chat or live Q&A session.

For more information, please contact inaara@mediaops.com. Sponsorship opportunities are available. Sponsors to date include ServiceNow, Outsystems and Prodly. Click here to submit your session.
October 19, 2020
DevOps World 2020: 5 Sessions to Put on Your Schedule

DevOps World has established a reputation for delivering compelling, high-quality sessions that challenge and inform its audiences year after year, conference after conference. DevOps World 2020 is continuing that pattern, offering what could be the best program yet.

The conference, to be held virtually this year Sept. 22-24, is rolling out more than 100 keynotes, workshops, panels, breakout sessions and “lightning talks.” Topics range from high-level themes such as promoting diversity in the workplace to on-the-ground technical discussions about automated testing in CI/CD pipelines.

If you have unlimited time and boundless energy, you can experience it all, without leaving your home office. Just sign up for the conference and join at the appointed time to ensure that you take advantage of the back-and-forth discussions each session will enable.

This year, you can do it all. Or, if you’re like most of us, you’ll probably want to cherry-pick the best of the best—the sessions that engage you the most and offer you the best perspective on issues that are important to you.

For those who are looking for a great DevOps World experience, here are five sessions that you won’t want to miss.

“Data-Driven DevOps: The Key to Improving Speed & Scale,” Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Launchable

What better place to start than with one of the most respected, most influential programmers in the history of computing? Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of Jenkins and former CTO at CloudBees, will deliver a session focusing on how development teams can be more successful.

Kawaguchi, who is now heading a new software testing startup called Launchable, will focus his talk on how a software delivery initiative can rise or fall based on the organization’s ability to use available data. Automation produces tons of data, but most of it gets thrown away. At the same time, leaders don’t have a good handle on how to make their delivery projects successful because they’re not mining the right insights from their data. Kawaguchi will draw on his own experiences and specific user stories to share how organizations can leverage their data to move at a faster speed and make developers feel great.

“Automated Testing as a Part of Pipelines,” Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM

Anybody who’s developed software for a long time knows just how important—and how big a headache—testing is. Without a dependable, effective, automated testing capability, teams end up spending way too much time documenting progress and re-doing work.

Automated testing is critical but organizations often struggle to do it when they have a large number of back end applications running on the mainframe. Rosalind Radcliff, IBM’s chief architect for DevOps, will discuss actual use cases for how unit testing and automated regression testing can be added into software pipelines, even for those COBOL and PL/I applications organizations have running. This session is great for web and application developers and system architect designers. Radcliff will drill into test automation approaches and go over CI/CD and DevOps for classic tools and tech stacks.

“Five Reasons Value Stream Thinking Is the Future of DevOps,” Steve Pereira, Visible

DevOps World attendees come to the conference not just to hear about what teams are doing today. They also want to know what the standards are going to be in the future, so they can help their organizations get a leg up on the competition.

One of those futuristic concepts that’s embedding itself into organizations’ DevOps strategies is “Value Stream Thinking.” The value stream, in and of itself, isn’t brand new. Corporate leaders starting with Henry Ford built processes around delivering value. But the emphasis on thinking, managing and mapping their DevOps strategies around the concept of a value stream is taking hold today at companies including Nationwide, Walmart, Barclays, BMW, Verizon, Liberty Mutual, AT&T, John Deere and Adidas.

Steve Pereira, a consultant who describes himself on Twitter as a “value stream whisperer,” will present real-world transformation stories and results achieved with this new form of management.

“Bad Code Kills: Five Essential Quality Gates You Need in Your CloudBees Core Pipeline,” Eric Mizell, OverOps

You can have the greatest ideas, the greatest team and the most well-designed software in the world. But if your code isn’t up to the required standard, your whole software delivery initiative is going to struggle.

Eric Mizell, vice president of solution engineering at development consulting firm OverOps, will discuss ways organizations can improve the quality of their code while continuing to deliver at a high velocity. The session will delve into common challenges and problems with current QA methods, then define and walk through each of the five quality gates teams can build into their pipelines: Dealing with static analysis, new errors, critical exceptions, resurface errors and unique error counts. Attendees can learn how to fill quality and testing gaps left by existing tools and processes and the open source resources available to build these gates into their own CI/CD tooling.

“Successfully Implementing DevSecOps at Scale At a Large Financial Services Organization,” Nagaraju Kakarla, Fidelity Investments

Many organizations with the size and scope of Fidelity Investments struggle to create a functional DevSecOps practice across the organization. They often get trapped into implementing waves of tools or end up doing it in a piecemeal fashion, leading to inefficiency and frustration.

Nagaraju Kakarla, senior director and chapter leader at Fidelity, will present a session detailing how Fidelity scaled its continuous delivery component and integrated security functions earlier in the delivery process. He will share some challenges he faced as an engineer and as a leader in implementing DevOps and SRE at various large organizations.

To take advantage of these and other sessions at DevOps World 2020, register today!

September 21, 2020
The Road Ahead for Security, DevOps Transformation

Qualys hosted its Qualys Security Conference 19 this week in Las Vegas. Hundreds of attendees from around the world have gathered at the Bellagio hotel to learn more about the current state of cybersecurity and what the future has in store. As you might expect, given the technology landscape today, many of the sessions and discussions have revolved around DevOps and how cybersecurity can adapt to DevOps culture.

Scott Crawford, Research Vice President at 451 Research presents “The Road Ahead for Security, IT, and DevOps” at the Qualys Security Conference

The Shifting Technology Ecosystem

Scott Crawford, research vice president at 451 Research, opened day two of the Qualys Security Conference with his keynote, “The Road Ahead for Security, IT, and DevOps.” Crawford talked about the dramatic changes over the last decade or so—from monolithic to microservices, from standalone applications to integrated software, from Waterfall to Agile, enterprise networks to IoT / OT, from standard networks to 5G wireless, and from traditional IT to DevOps. He discussed the challenges organizations face and the dilemma of doubling down on past success and missing out on innovation.

With all of the changes from this shifting technology ecosystem, there are consequences. Organizations no longer have a single point of control and IT teams are faced with managing and protecting an increasingly complex web of interconnected platforms, applications and services.

Security and DevOps

Crawford also talked about the rise of zero trust. He described it as a sort of mashup of the concept of least privileged access, combined with behavioral analytics and an on-demand, just-in-time approach to managing access. The zero trust paradigm is based on the premise of never trust, always verify—and that means determining who is requesting access, under what conditions they’re requesting access and what actions they intend to perform with that access on a case0-by-case basis.

He shared the Xebia Labs Periodic Table of DevOps tools to illustrate the overwhelming number of options available and stressed the importance of automation. CI/CD (continuous integration/continuous deployment), RPA (robotic process automation), and SOAR (security orchestration, automation and response) solutions have been developed to help address and manage some of the complexity of both DevOps deployments and cybersecurity.

Xebia Labs Periodic Table of DevOps Tools

DevOps and Digital Transformation

Crawford’s keynote was followed by a presentation titled, “The DevOps Transformation of the Qualys Platform: Lessons Learned.” Dilip Bachwani, senior vice president of engineering and cloud operations for Qualys, talked about how the company has addressed the “innovator’s dilemma” and steps it has taken to deal with growing pains as it goes through its own digital transformation.

Bachwani explained that the engineering team at Qualys has expanded exponentially in a relatively short period. That comes with several benefits in terms of how quickly they can develop and implement new solutions, but the team also faced challenges with balancing that growth and trying to maintain velocity at the same time without sacrificing stability or reliability.

Just like every other organization going through a DevOps transformation, Qualys has had to break down silos with people, processes and tools. Bachwani explained that they needed to do things differently to automate as many functions as possible. They decided to view infrastructure and operations as software problems and find ways to fully automate deployment and configuration.

He also emphasized that security must be built in throughout the DevOps life cycle. Qualys adopted a hub-and-spoke DevOps model and developed a robust DevOps toolchain designed to combine and orchestrate an effective set of tools for developing, delivering and maintaining software. Having a standardized toolchain ensures that there is a common platform available to everyone.

Accelerating Transformation With Citizen Developers

At the end of Crawford’s keynote, he talked about the lack of people with the right knowledge and skills. Cyber Security Ventures predicts that there will be 3.5 million unfilled cybersecurity jobs by 2021. That’s just cybersecurity. What about developers and other key personnel? Crawford posed the question, “Where will we find the people to do it all?”

The answer, he said, is citizen developers. What is a citizen developer? It’s a movement to empower employees who are not developers by trade with the tools and support to implement ideas. They are the ones closest to the problem and, arguably, best equipped to understand how to solve it. They don’t need to be professional developers or need experience with coding environments. Low-code and no-code platforms give them the power to turn ideas into solutions.

A few years ago, George Hulme wrote an article on the growing citizen developer movement. Hulme noted, “The organizations that succeed with citizen development will be those that wholeheartedly embrace the movement and cultivate it, with IT’s help and guidance.”

The DevOps revolution isn’t going away. Companies that don’t embrace digital transformation will likely fade into oblivion as they are left in the dust by more innovative competitors, and organizations that don’t figure out how to integrate security into the fabric of their culture will struggle against a rapidly expanding and evolving threat landscape.

At this point, these things are like the ocean tide. It is coming whether you like it or not, and it will destroy those who are not prepared. Crawford wrapped up by asking the audience to consider what their role is going to be in building and maintaining the future of DevOps and cybersecurity.

— Tony Bradley

November 22, 2019
Insight IGNITE: DevOps, Cloud and Cyber From Iceland With Love

I had the pleasure recently of attending my first Insight IGNITE event, which was held at the ION Adventure Hotel in enchanting Iceland. It was also my first trip to Iceland. These two new experiences combined to deliver an excellent learning and networking experience, resulting in me realizing more than several new insights (pun intended) around DevOps, cloud and cybersecurity, as well as mindfulness and contentment.

The agenda for this particular IGNITE event featured some great examples and discussion around DevOps, cloud migration and infrastructure and cybersecurity, among several others. All three of these were right in my wheelhouse, so I really enjoyed the presentations and discussions. I couldn’t type fast enough to keep up with all of the insights I was soaking in. Of course, I was also trying to contribute to the conversations, which are held in a very open, communal manner under Chatham House Rules.

You may not be familiar with the Insight IGNITE Innovation Roundtable Series. They are the brainchild of Insight Partners’ Emmet B. Keeffe III. Emmet is beyond passionate about digital transformation (among several other passions including Formula One racing, world peace and now mindfulness/contentment). Utilizing his vast network (and it is vast), Emmet founded Insight IGNITE, an innovation program that delivers Innovation Briefings, the Innovation Roundtable Series and Growth Advisory Board opportunities to global IT leaders. I know that sounds like marketing speak, but let me explain.

Basically, Emmet holds about one of these events a month at some of the most fascinating venues on earth. Each one has ~50 people. There is a mix of C-level executives from some of the 200+ Insight Partners portfolio companies, along with executives past and present from large global enterprises, sprinkled in with a mixture of technology experts and subject matter experts (I guess that is what got my ticket punched). The agenda is an exhilarating mixture of roundtable discussions and presentations on subjects touching on Digital Transformation, along with exciting activities that allow attendees to experience the local venue.

The events are open to Global 2000 executives and other business and technology experts who think they could both benefit from this type of experience as well as have something to offer. You can reach out to Emmet’s team if you are interested in attending one of these events. Most attendees have to cover their own airfare/hotel. While not cheap, it is well worth the money, and the IGNITE team, who are extraordinary, do an amazing job of keeping it fresh, fun and challenging.

The real special sauce of the IGNITE Roundtable Series, though, is the passion, caring and love that they receive from Emmet’s team. It is infectious and spreads to the attendees as well. I have attended hundreds of conferences over the years and don’t remember one where I made as many connections, had as many great side conversations and really felt part of a group. I am sure many of the people I met at this event I will be in touch with and doing business with in the months and years ahead.

I met Emmet about three or four years ago in London (where he lives with his family now) and was invited to a previous event or two but was unable to make it. Since then, it seems Insight Partners is investing in so many of the companies that we work with here at MediaOps in DevOps, containers and cybersecurity—including Tricentis, JFrog, Aqua Security, Firemon and others. If you can’t beat ’em join ’em, as they say, so I decided to take Emmet up on his kind invite and check it out.

The IGNITE event in Iceland had several great presentations about disrupting your own company product by spinning up the disruptor internally. We heard from “a queen of transformation” who has led transformations at several large multinational and government agencies. Another presentation focused on how an energy company keeps transforming as it stays ahead in today’s ever-shifting market and sets the bar for what the energy company of tomorrow looks like. In addition, there were some great panel discussions on the current state of DevOps and Agile, another on the state of cloud migrations, hybrid cloud and next-generation infrastructure. Also on the agenda was a great discussion regarding what is happening in cybersecurity and how critical it has become as part of any transformation. All of these were great, but what made them better was the great discussions they sparked among the attendees.

That was not the full roundtable agenda, though. We also had a private briefing with the first lady of Iceland, discussions on some new fintech companies and technologies, AI/ML and more.

But perhaps some of my favorite presentation and discussions were on a new passion of Emmet’s called the Contentment Foundation. This is a breakthrough effort to bring a new take on making education better for the world of today and tomorrow. Led by Dr. Daniel Cordaro, it recognizes that children are truly our future. How can we make them more content and mindful, better equipped to handle the world of tomorrow and the challenges they will face? The Contentment Foundation has developed a curriculum that is available to just about any school in the world. If you know a school that you think could benefit from this, I encourage you to reach out to them.

All work and no play would make for a boring event, though. My trip to Iceland at the Insight IGNITE Roundtable was far from boring. We visited the famous Perlan Planetarium (which, unfortunately, was as close as I got to seeing the Northern Lights on this trip); ate in a Viking-themed restaurant; and rode ATF vehicles through the rugged, lava rock-strewn, stream-filled Icelandic countryside. We explored a lava tube cave and more. Unfortunately, the weather didn’t cooperate, so we had to cancel snowmobiling, whale watching and dinner on an island off the Iceland coast. I stopped off before heading to the airport to explore a bit in the capital of Reykjavík, which is a great little city with great cafés, shopping and sights.

Even the social activities provided some great bonding and networking opportunities. It is rare for me that I not only make business acquaintances, but also form friendships at events like this. To me, this was yet another unique feature of the IGNITE Roundtable: People were there genuinely to share their experiences and discuss the burning topics at hand.

All in all, one of the best events I have attended in a long time. I highly recommend attending at least one of these IGNITE Roundtables, if this sounds like something you may be interested in. As for me, I am already looking at what is the next one I will be able to attend. Once I have had a chance to digest and percolate on some of the insights I experienced, I will share a follow-up article to share them with you.

Thanks, Emmet and IGNITE team, for a great experience.

— Alan Shimel

April 23, 2019
SauceCon Speaker Profile: Titus Fortner

This is the third in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

The old adage says, “Third time’s a charm.” When it comes to SauceCon speaker Titus Fortner, the cliche proves true: Testing is his third career. Titus first went to the Naval Academy, studied nuclear engineering and became a submarine officer—traveling the world doing everything from launching ballistic missiles to helping automate and streamline communication among the senior staff of the commanding general in Iraq. When he left the Navy, Titus went back to school for a year to learn computer science, then got a job as a junior developer at a startup. Focusing on test automation was an accident, but the influence testing had on the overall system and process was immediately appealing to him.

Titus then became a core contributor to the Selenium project and the project lead for Watir, an open source testing library built on top of Selenium, as well as numerous other testing related Ruby gems. He also implemented automated testing solutions at five different companies before joining Sauce Labs as a Senior Solutions Architect. Today, he works closely with customers to help improve their testing practices.

At SauceCon 2019, Titus will present, “Page Objects: You’re Doing It Wrong.” Although Page Objects enable newer users to write sophisticated tests against an application, Titus has found that the Page Object Pattern is often misused. “There are lots of different ideas on what makes a good implementation, and I’ve actually tried most of them at one point or another and have personal experience that informs my recommendations of certain approaches over others,” he said. “Smart people disagree with me on some of these, and my goal at SauceCon is to present both sides while explaining my reasons for the preferences I have.”

When he isn’t convincing customers how to better use Page Objects, Titus reads, writes open source code and takes day trips with his blind dog who loves car rides.

You can hear from Titus and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third-annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

— Rebecca Cramer

February 5, 2019
SauceCon 2019 Speaker Profile: Dave Haeffner

This is the first in a series of articles highlighting speakers at SauceCon 2019. SauceCon brings together the global community of Sauce Labs users and continuous testing experts to learn from each other and level up their automated testing and continuous delivery skills. This year’s event will be held April 23-25 in Austin, Texas.

SauceCon 2019 speaker Dave Haeffner says he dabbles in Selenium—but it might be more accurate to say he eats, sleeps and breathes it. In fact, Dave is the writer of the Elemental Selenium tip newsletter, which is read by thousands of testing professionals, as well as the creator and maintainer of the-internet (an open source web app that’s perfect for writing automated tests against), author of “The Selenium Guidebook,” and an active member of the Selenium project.

Despite his background, believe it or not Dave stumbled into automated software testing circa 2009 with Selenium IDE. He was a network engineer who didn’t have a background in programming or software testing. He and his new teammates eventually evolved their automation practice into a test harness written in Ruby (in fact, they were Sauce Labs’ first Ruby customer!). Today Dave considers himself fortunate enough to be paid to work full-time on open source software—Selenium IDE in particular.

The Sauce Labs team is fortunate to have Dave present again at SauceCon 2019. At this year’s event, Dave is on a mission to break the stereotype that record and playback is a bad thing. He used to believe it, too, but wants to help squash the stigma. In this talk, Dave will show examples of how Selenium IDE can reliably augment and level-up your testing practice regardless of your team’s test automation maturity or your level of technical experience. “If people take away just one thing from my talk, it’s that record and playback with Selenium IDE is worth a shot,” he said of his planned presentation.

Want to give it a try? Download the latest version.

Outside of work, Dave spends time with his wife and daughter, exploring the new city they call home, Tel Aviv. He also enjoys learning and practicing Hebrew.

You can hear from Dave and more than 30 other expert speakers at SauceCon 2019, the third annual Sauce Labs user conference. To see a full list of presentations or to register, visit the SauceCon website.

— Rebecca Cramer

January 22, 2019
AWS re:Invent 2018 Product Launches: An Overview

AWS re:Invent is always rich in product launches. Some products are entirely new, while others are updates or enhancements to existing tools. The 2018 event was no exception. In case you missed it, here’s a drive-thru on some of the best products—and one important statement—from this year’s show.

AWS Marketplace for Containers

Announced at the Global Partner Summit keynote, the AWS Marketplace for Containers is the next logical step in the Marketplace ecosystem. Vendors will now be able to offer container solutions for their products, just as they do with AWS EC2 AMIs. The big takeaway here is just how important containerization is and how much of a growth we see in the implementation of containerized products and serverless architectures in general. Along with the big announcements around AWS Lambda, this solidifies the push in the industry to adopt serverless models for applications.

AWS Marketplace – Private Marketplace

The AWS Marketplace has added the Private Marketplace to its feature set. You can now have your own marketplace that’s shared across your AWS organizations. This is neat and all, but I think what’s even more interesting is what it hints at in the background. It seems to me that to have a well-established marketplace at all, your organization needs to begin its journey on the DevOps trail. This news shows that a good deployment pipeline is really the best way to handle a project, for both external and internal customers.

Firecracker

This looks really cool. Firecracker is a virtualization tool that is built specifically for micro VMs and function-based services such as Lambda or Fargate. It runs on bare metal … wait, what? I thought we’re trying to move away from our own hosted servers? That’s true. However, consider all the new IoT products and features that were announced at the conference and you’ll see there’s still a lot of bare metal, both in use and in development. I don’t think Firecracker is meant solely for large server farm-type setups, but quite possibly for items in the IoT space. The serverless/microservice architecture is a strong one, and this allows that to happen in the IoT space. In fact, I’m currently working on installing it onto my kids’ Minecraft microcomputer.

Andy Jassy Says What?

In the fireside chat with AWS CEO Andy Jassy in the partner keynote, there were several things I found interesting. But one comment stood out from the rest:

I hear enterprises, all the time, wanting help thinking about how they can innovate at a faster clip. And, you know, it’s funny, a lot of the enterprise EBCs I get to be involved in … I’d say roughly half the content of those are enterprises asking me about our offering and how we think about our business and what we have planned in the future, but a good chunk of every one of those conversations are enterprises trying to learn how we move quickly and how we invent quickly, and I think that enterprises realize that in this day and age if you are not reinventing fast and iterating quickly on behalf of your customers, it’s really difficult to be competitive. And so I think they want help from you in how to invent faster. Now, part of that is being able to operate on top of the cloud and operate on top of a platform like AWS that has so many services that you can stitch together however you see fit. Some of it also is, how do people think about DevOps? How do people think about organizing their teams? You know … what are the right constraints that you have but that still allow people to move quickly.

He said DevOps! Apparently, larger companies that are looking to change don’t just want fancy tools and new technology. They also need help getting better at effecting change. That’s absolutely outside the wheelhouse of AWS, and clearly a call-to-action for the partner community.

— Lars Cromley

December 21, 2018