devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: COVID-19

  • Ambassador Insights: Enterprise Digital Transformation

    Ambassador Insights: Enterprise Digital Transformation

    Digital transformation has been on the minds of many organizations for a few years now, but since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic last year the need to transform IT infrastructures has taken on a sense of urgency. The rush to work from home coupled with the shift to online everything has pushed organizations to adopt the tools and technologies necessary to enable IT agility for all users.

    In this inaugural episode of Ambassador Insights, featuring DevOps Institute ambassadors Sean Davis, information security advisor, DevSecOps, at TransUnion; Jennifer Fischer, executive director of the Center of Innovation and Professional Studies at Felician University; and Pankaj Gupta, senior director of Product Marketing, Cloud ADC, and SD-WAN at Citrix, we take a look at some of of the factors driving digital transformation, the need for security in digital transformation initiatives and how organizations can get started on their transformation journeys now, if they haven’t already.

    The video is below, followed by a transcript of our conversation. Enjoy!

    Transcript

    Charlene O’Hanlon:  Hey, everybody, this is Charlene O’Hanlon, Chief Content Officer at MediaOps, and I am just thrilled to pieces to be introducing a brand new segment that we have on TechStrong TV which we’ll also be running on the devopsy.kinsta.cloud website. It is a panel discussion that I’ll be having monthly with DevOps Institute ambassadors—you see three of them right here on the screen with me. As I said, it’s the first in what I hope will be a series of monthly panel discussions with these ambassadors and other ambassadors on the future topics that we have on devopsy.kinsta.cloud.

    The first inaugural discussion will be on Enterprise Digital Transformation, and the featured topic will be changing every single month, so this week it’s Enterprise Digital Transformation, next month it will be on Cloud Native.

    So, I’m looking forward to all these discussions, but I wanna go ahead and kick off this first one with our speakers today. First up, we have Sean Davis, who is Information Security Advisor, DevSecOps, at TransUnion. Hi, Sean, thanks so much for joining me today.

    Sean Davis: Thanks for having me, Charlene.

    O’Hanlon: Next up, we have Jennifer Fischer, who is Executive Director of the Center of Innovation and Professional Studies at Felician University. Jennifer, thank you so much for joining me today. Good to see you.

    Jennifer Fischer: Thank you, Charlene. Pleasure to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Alright, and last but certainly not least, we have Pankaj Gupta, who is the Senior Director of Product Marketing, Cloud ADC, and SD-WAN at Citrix. Pankaj, thank you so much—as always, great to see you.

    Pankaj Gupta: Thank you, Charlene. Glad to be here.

    O’Hanlon: Okay, great. Well, as I said before, the topic of this panel discussion is on Enterprise Digital transformation, which I know is a huge topic to swallow. There are so many things that we can say about Enterprise Digital Transformation, but it’s certainly a topic that has been on a number of organizations’ minds, especially since the onset of the pandemic and the rush to basically align their business practices with digital transformation efforts to be more productive and to stay relevant in today’s fast-paced business environment.

    But as I said before, a lot of things have changed since the onset of COVID, and I want to kinda maybe set the stage a little bit by asking you guys—where do you think digital transformation and these initiatives have kinda progressed since the onset of COVID-19 and that rush to remote work that so many organizations have had to kinda go through? Whoever wants to start?

    Gupta: I can take the first crack, Charlene. This is an excellent question. The impact of COVID is twofold. First of all, it’s realization by IT and business for the need of the digital transformation. So, that’s first, is the faster realization of the need for digital transformation.

     And the second thing is about execution speed of digital transformation has increased tremendously due to COVID in the last one year or so. IT and business are more in lockstep than ever before. IT is more aligned now with the business outcomes. In the last 12 to 18 months, we have seen four phases of it. The first was, it started just with business continuity. How do I get my business moving in this new COVID environment? Then focused more into employee productivity, because as they started working more from remote.

    And then, more people started working remote, workers started working from remote, then security became very paramount, that, “How do I secure all of them?” And I think the next phase which is coming is that digital transformation will be more about hybrid workforce; some of the employees coming back to the office. So, that’s the fourth phase which I see for that.

    And in this environment, talking to customers, I have seen CIOs, the number one priority is to keep employees engaged, remain productive from anywhere, from any device they are working. They want reliable connectivity for every employee whether they are working from home. They also want us to ensure that same application experience, whether they are there in the office or now working from home.

    But what is also keeping them awake is that now these workforces working from home and home networks are not as secure as the corporate infrastructure. So, when employees access these applications or direct Internet access, their endpoints or home network doesn’t become an entry point for vulnerabilities into the infrastructure.

    O’Hanlon: Right, right, right.

    Fischer: Yeah, I fully agree, and I echo the need for a focus on security and a remote workforce. I think that really will become the foundation for digital transformation going forward. And I think it’s really interesting to look at the longer term impacts, transformational impacts on some key industries. So, when we think about things like telehealth and online learning and consumer facing applications like in retail and grocery and food delivery and those types of things, you know, you really have to plan for this hybrid environment as we’ve discussed going on for an extended time.

    And, you know, whether some of it will ever truly sort of come back, right? I think, to some degree, you know, some of the convenience and the productivity and the benefits that have been realized through this will be here to stay for the longer term.

    Davis: Absolutely. I’m thinking about—the pandemic has been a really great pressure test of a lot of these concepts that we’ve heard for years across the industry, remote work being one of them. You know, everyone says, “Oh, we get better productivity because there’s remote work.” But what this seems to have done is, it’s really allowed the business to pressure test how well they can pivot. What does that mean for their customers? Because now customer needs are different, what they’re looking for that’s a priority to them is a little bit different. Internal needs of the organization are different. Now, you know, you’re shifting focus from just delivering those products to ensuring they’re highly secure, right?

    So, a lot of these things we’ve been preaching in the industry for a very long time, especially around DevOps and DevSecOps, are really starting to take a front seat in organizations. One of the brilliant things that I’ve seen because of the pandemic over the last year is, even organizations who don’t have formal transformation initiatives and efforts in place are forced to still go through some type of transformation with their organization to maintain competitiveness or even survive. Because now it’s not just about thriving in the environment, it’s about understanding how to pivot to even survive. We’ve seen a lot of retail industries go bankrupt, we’ve seen a huge shift in real estate, right—so, how businesses decide, even with their hybrid strategies, how they’re gonna renegotiate contracts with all of this office space that’s sitting idle right now, and does it make more sense for them to shift there?

    So, there’s a lot of operational considerations that are being made by organizations as well as some unique opportunities and unique challenges are starting to be presented. I think HR is starting to take a front seat a lot more in initiatives. You look at employee wellness—it’s more important than it’s ever been, and it’s giving the opportunity for these guys to stand at the front lines and finally be cheerleaders or their organizations in a way maybe they haven’t had an opportunity to have a spotlight shined on.

    Because a lot of us think HR sits in the background, and now, a lot of their programs are really pivotal and the cornerstone of how businesses are going to move forward and look at employee care, satisfaction. You know, onboarding is a lot different. You know, it’s pretty reveletional to see just a lot of these things we’ve been talking about in the industry, even before DevOps, that people have played around with and said, “These are better concepts or better ways of business,” but now we’re actually pressure testing them through a real world tragedy and pandemic and seeing how that plays out and what that looks like for each and every organization.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah. You know, it’s interesting, because we’ve been talking about digital transformation for years now, and there was a lot of talk, but not a lot of action. And I think it was because a lot of organizations really just couldn’t wrap their brains around it. You know, they didn’t have, like, a reason to do it beyond, you know, providing customer satisfaction or keeping up with their competitors.

    But, you know, having this pandemic occur kinda gave them a reason to really go and say, “Alright, this is what we need to do to (a) keep our employees productive, (b) provide that top quality customer experience, and just kinda keep the wheels on the bus.” And, you know, before, it was more like—okay, well, we’ll see these, we’ll measure by certain metrics and maybe we’ll see an increase, maybe we won’t. Is that enough for us to do digital transformation?

    But I also think that it’s important for—and Sean, you alluded to this—digital transformation impacts so many different areas of the business, it’s not just about improving customer experience. It’s not just about making employees more productive. It’s about keeping them same, you know, [Laughter] with the HR apps and things like that and employee wellness. It’s amazing how, by having that laser focus on digital transformation, once there was a reason to do it, a real, legitimate reason to do it, companies that have undergone the digital transformation and are still undergoing them have really started to thrive and they’ve been able to pivot their business successfully. And that, to me, I think is—you know, it’s a success story. If you really take a seat at, you know, take a look at what’s been done so far and just the fact that so many organizations have been successful so far in their efforts.

    And I didn’t want to take that off the rails, but I wonder how much of that is, when we’re talking about DevOps, where does that fit into a lot of these kinda success stories, if you will, with the organizations? I mean, is it a central core of digital transformation efforts, or is it more of a tool, if you will, within a larger process? Whoever wants to answer that one.

    Davis: I’ll hop in first this time, if you like.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, sure.

    Davis: So, with DevOps, I think there’s a unique opportunity that a lot of organizations are taking. At the core of most digital transformations, at least I’ve been part of and been privy to from peers in the industry, they’re very centered around technology. You’ll hear the term “every business is a software company” being thrown around. Now, while that may not always ring true for everyone, I believe the spirit of what they’re trying to say is, there’s a better way for us to use technology to enable a better customer experience, a more valuable outcome or our customers, and through leveraging that technology, we’re able to see better returns and give back to the community in a lot of different ways beyond just our products.

    DevOps, I think where the real value comes is, there’s been this evolution over the last year or two where people are starting to realize that a value chain, or the supply chain of an organization and the value that’s being delivered doesn’t end when the product is in our customers’ hands, but it’s when value has been delivered to our customers’ customers, right? So, we go to that Nth degree to make sure that not only are we just selling something and saying, “Hey, have a great day” because we got it in your hands as fast as possible, but we’re able to use feedback loops and telemetry to actually say, “How successful is this for your customers? You know, what type of experience are your customers having? How can we work with you and partner to have a deeper relationship than just a buyer and seller?” Right? So, we’re starting to see a lot of that proliferate the industry.

    The pandemic’s also provided us a really great opportunity to take a step back, because everyone is slowing down, everyone’s having to adjust and pivot and say, “How do we overhaul all the systems?” Right? Instead of looking at this, you know, where, “Let’s improve this silo” or, “Let’s improve this area of the business,” we’re able to start bridging a lot of those areas instead of just saying, “Well, you know, let’s throw the hammer down and start busting these silos”—

    O’Hanlon: Right.

    Davis: – “let’s start bridging a lot of these areas and understanding where the challenges are.” It allows us as leaders of our organizations to dig much deeper to understand broader problems with the organization, and we can see that, once again, going back to how that’s being pressure tested, right.

    We all know, as building continuity plans, that looks really great on paper, but if it’s not put into practice every year, and what better way, unfortunately, to practice that than actually experiencing a real outage, a real security breach, a real pandemic do we put those things through the paces to say, “Is the theory and the practice that we put on paper actually practical and applicable to what we’ll do in real life?” and then suss out where those problems or challenges are with the execution of that plan to be able to reinforce that plan and strengthen it so we can deliver better value, both internally to our organization and externally to our customer and market.

    Gupta: I think before the pandemic, for many of the organizations, digital transformation was an initiative. It was a goal, it was a project.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gupta: But during the pandemic, digital transformation has become a necessity.

    O’Hanlon: Yes.

    Gupta:  And when a project becomes a necessity, that means that what you’re really looking for is the agility and speed and ability to respond faster, almost in real time. And this is not just about IT, this is about wall to wall, end to end processes. And IT is that connecting tissue of the overall digital transformation, and the foundation of that is the DevOps. Because DevOps brings automation, brings ability to respond faster. And the technology trends which have happened in the last five years, like the emergence of the cloud, ability to auto scale in cloud, ability to automate things from the cloud, more and more people are working remote. Ability to deploy automation tools which are delivered from cloud, because IT is not going back to the office.

    So, DevOps has become a very critical component to achieve that speed. Every company’s starting point is different. For cloud native companies, they already have a lot of implementation of their IT into the cloud already—if not, more and more companies have started moving. And that is actually creating new opportunities for the DevOps engineers overall. It is their skill set which is tremendously needed in this marketplace, and it will continue to grow. And that’s where the places like DevOps Institute help to build that skill set for IT teams across the world.

    Fischer: Yeah, absolutely. And I would add that, from the point of view of transformational outcomes, you know, one of the key things there is making sure that cultural change has been institutionalized. And so, you know, from the standpoint of DevOps, and sort of coming back full circle to your question, Charlene, around, you know, is it a core or is it something broader—it’s both, right? Because, of course, it’s underlying the technology and the ability to achieve success is there, right, within the pipeline.

    But beyond that, you know, there’s relevance as well, even in business functions, if we’re talking about the opportunity to identify new revenue streams or looking at the overall impact of building a continuous learning culture and the ability to accelerate change—these are things that translate to every area of the business. So, from my perspective, you know, DevOps really has that overall end to end impact to be able to deliver against. And I totally agree with my co-panelists that the pandemic has been that driving force to be able to surface that and really, you know, sort of shine a light on the value that it can add in a time of crisis. But from a long-term perspective, the value certainly continues to be there.

    Innovation as well has a significant role to pay here, too, right? So, just in terms of being able to innovate faster, to be able to look at that pivot point as was described earlier that, you know, that’s a huge learning curve. I mean, there’s some pain that went along with that, you know, having to do it through the pandemic, but there’s also some long-term gains in being able to understand resiliency and responsiveness in that time of crisis.

    O’Hanlon: Yeah, it’s really, it’s been amazing for me to see how quickly organizations have been able to undergo these digital transformation efforts and really understand what their business needs. It’s almost like they—you know, they just kinda launched, if you will. It’s just like, from zero to 60 in, like, nothing.

    Fischer: Exactly.

    Gupta: Mm-hmm, yeah.

    O’Hanlon: But, that said, are we too late for organizations that haven’t started their digital transformation processes yet? I mean, those that may be a little slow to start, they recognize the value, they just haven’t been able to kinda get their stuff together yet to do it, but you know, is it too late for them? And if not—I hope not, I hope not—but if it’s not, what are some of the things that maybe they need to keep in mind as they start to think about undergoing a digital transformation process? You know, what are maybe some of the best practices that they need to consider?

    Jennifer, I’m gonna let you start with this one because, you know, this is your turn, so. [Laughter]

    Fischer: Sure, sure. And I think, you know, interestingly, I think the same principles hold true, right, in terms of best practices for digital transformation, whether we’re talking about, you know, in terms of the pandemic or not, right?

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Fischer: The key thing, the most important thing is that introspection and insights, right? So, really understanding and being honest about and knowing your business, right, understanding what those end to end processes are, knowing and understanding your marketplace, knowing and understanding your customers so that, to Sean’s point, when you do wanna deliver to that Nth degree, you’ve got the insights there as part of your end state, right, that you wanna achieve.

    So, I think all of those things hold true in either case, and then bringing them together into a well-defined strategy that reflects—honestly reflects, right, the strengths and weaknesses of your own organization. And then, last but not least, I think something that often gets not as much attention as it needs to, having metrics in place, right, so that you’ve got that continuous learning ability over time and being able to come back and not only say, you know, “Did we achieve what we set out to?” but on an ongoing basis, where do we need to continually pivot and shift our efforts to make sure that we stay.

    And, of course, as goals change—I mean, we talked a little bit before about what happens when this is done, right? So, be it a hybrid workforce or some of the other trends that we might expect to see in 2021 with DevOps and, more broadly in business and in the economy, how do we help ourselves and our business partners to be able to continually pivot in that very agile way? And, you know, so to me, it’s about those three things, right? Having the right insights, the right strategy and tactics to find, and then third, the right metrics in place to keep you on point.

    O’Hanlon: Alright. Sean or Pankaj, do you guys have any best practices you want to share?

    Davis: Sure. So, I want to answer your earlier question—no, it’s not too late.

    O’Hanlon: Okay. [Laughter]

    Davis: There is no such thing as too late. Please, if there’s any business out there, you have not gone through a digital transformation now, it is never too late.

    O’Hanlon: Good.

    Davis: Now, the second part of that I will caveat with, because I think it just needs to be said. A lot of the practitioners feel this way, but it’s not often announced, and I don’t believe it’s always heard enough—transformation is not about just carrying you from one state to the other. I really wish that the industry as a whole would start to adopt digital evolution. Because that’s really the truth of what we’re doing. We should be evolving every single day. We’re adapting to the pandemic, and then we will adapt to the next event that occurs within our industry—good or bad.

    We’re constantly adapting to the needs of our employees. We’re adapting to these new technologies and frameworks and ways of doing business every single day. That’s an evolutionary step that will never change. The transformation is just the spark, the catalyst, if you will, for that evolution to begin and to be recognized and, you know, as Jennifer had mentioned earlier, institutionalized in the organization, right? And that’s your culture, that’s your people, that’s your technology, whether it’s DevOps, whether it’s agile—whatever it is, right? There’s never, it’s never too late to start.

    From the perspective of best practices, I know I’m gonna sound like a broken record to all those that have probably seen millions of videos on the culture of transformation, but start with your culture. And I don’t just mean implementing programs that are making onboarding easier or customer satisfaction—employee satisfaction. But I mean, really start by taking stock of where your organization is right now. You don’t have to be light years ahead, you don’t have to be like Netflix, you don’t have to be like Amazon or Microsoft. You are your own unique entity. You will be the next whatever company, right, that somebody is going to want to model the great things that you do.

    I always think back to the TPS system, Toyota Production System, right? Toyota was massively successful in being one of the best manufacturers in the entire world despite giving the secret away to the rest of the world and all these other manufacturers adopted it, but they still were not able to achieve the same level of performance as Toyota, because it was built by Toyota, for Toyota. This was the way they did business, they felt this worked best for them.

    And I think that’s a sorely missed or overlooked area in a lot of transformations is—there’s so many frameworks, there’s so many ways of doing it, there’s so many quote-unquote best practices that are out there. Take a look at where your organization is. Take a look at where your people are and think about where you want to be. And then find things that align to that, that help you be successful, and eventually, you’ll start noticing you’re creating your own processes—you’re creating your own frameworks, you’re creating your own ways forward, and then share those with the world, right? Because it’s not just enough to consume something, see that it works, and move on, but take the lessons that you’ve learned and the things that you’re creating and share that out in the world. Maybe someone else is able to use that and perpetuate their business in a positive direction.

    O’Hanlon: Alright.

    Gupta: I think Sean and Jennifer covered many, many great points, and there are so many great practices. We are in 2020, so if you sum all the numericals in 2020, it comes to the fore, and I’m going to cover the 40 best practices.

    First, I think Sean and Jennifer did a wonderful job explaining that embrace the cultural shift. It is a new way of thinking, it’s a new way of doing. But to succeed in this cultural shift, IT skill set is the most important part. You must shift the culture, all ________ aligned, but if you don’t have a skill set inside that organization, you will not succeed. So, as you are embracing this cultural shift, invest in the IT skill set. That’s the first.

    The second one is design and build for speed. Because the automation and the speed to respond to the market differentiates the winners versus losers.

    So, the philosophy should be to automate everything you can, and that’s where the DevOps comes into the play. Look for every possibility which you can automate. And automation requires the DevOps skill set, but it also looks at your applications in a different way. What I can modernize so I can reuse those functions—that’s what the microservices kind of application brings into that.

    DevOps is also about modernization and connecting them together, so they work like a machine, one after another, one feeding another. So, that’s that whole part.

    Also, start thinking, as we move into 2020 or 2021—how do I build a self-correcting infrastructure? And cloud is already giving you auto scale, resiliency—all those pieces into that. We don’t have to go into detail, but when you’re building and designing for the speed, see what are things that can achieve that.

    Third thing, which is going to be more and more critical, is the security first, security first, security first.

    O’Hanlon: Yes.

    Gupta: The recent SolarWinds example taught us so much. A small component on a broader enterprise, a small crack or vulnerability can impact the whole ecosystem.

    And in this world of application and API, where API has become the lifeline of the businesses and more and more digital transformation related business, are you protected your applications in API? As we move into the world of the multi-cloud, do I have a consistent security posture across multi-cloud? So, those are some of the things, that security first rather than the bolt-on.

    O’Hanlon: Mm-hmm.

    Gupta: And the last is that build for visibility. What I mean by invest into your observability stack, build into tools and mechanisms to give you a visibility inside what is happening in your infrastructure, what is happening in your application. Because if you don’t see, you can’t fix it.

    To summarize—embrace the digital shift, embrace the cultural shift, but make sure you have the right skill set to do that, design and build for speed, security first (no more bolt-on security) and visibility, visibility, visibility. Because if you can’t see, you can’t fix it.

    O’Hanlon: Excellent. Excellent. Well, all are great points, all are great best practices, and I want to thank all of you, all three of you for your expertise today during our discussion. Great stuff.

    If organizations have not begun their digital transformation efforts, now is the time. I think every organization understands the importance of digital transformation now more than ever, and it’s great to hear that it’s not too late—thanks, Sean. And it’s security, as Pankaj and Jennifer both mentioned—super, super important, and it should be an integral part of digital transformation efforts.

    We have lots of information about digital transformation and what’s happening in the space in general and some—you know, again, some of the best practices on devopsy.kinsta.cloud. So, I do urge everybody to check out the website and read up what we’ve got on digital transformation.

    Guys, before we close things out, any parting words, any parting advice on digital transformation or DevOps in general?

    I guess not, alright. [Laughter]

    Gupta: This is the time—this is the time that will create the stories which you will tell to your grandkids.

    O’Hanlon: True. Absolutely.

    Davis: Yeah, I think focusing on doing what’s right for your organization and doing what’s right for your customers, take care of your people, take care of your customers, don’t just do what’s easy. Because there can be so much change that’s going on that it’s very easy to say, “Okay, well, we can revisit this,” right, and generate a lot of cultural debt that never gets paid back off.

    Fischer: Yeah, I was thinking similarly, you know, there’s—in some way, too, you know, the reality of the pandemic conditions has been a level of exhaustion, I think, as well. And even despite that, it’s important not to keep focusing ahead and making sure that things that might be beneficial, particularly, coming up on the radar, trends for ’21 that could be taken advantage of—you know, don’t lose the momentum. Even though it’s been an exhausting past number of months, keep the momentum going and take advantage of the exciting trends that are on the way for 2021.

    Davis: Absolutely.

    O’Hanlon: Excellent. Alright. Well, on that note, I do want to thank all three of you, Sean, Jennifer, and Pankaj. Thank you so much for your time today, thank you so much for your expertise, and love to have you guys back on a future panel discussion or even on TechStrong TV. So, thank you, again, I appreciate it, and thank you, all, for watching and we’ll see you next time.

    Gupta: Thank you.

    Davis: Thanks, Charlene.

    Fischer: Thank you.

  • Cloud Growth and Other 2020 Trends

    Cloud Growth and Other 2020 Trends

    Growth continued this year as even the COVID pandemic could not slow down the cloud

    The rise of COVID-19 defined 2020 for nearly every industry. Cloud computing is no exception, though growth in the sector continued this year. Gartner estimates that $257.9 billion will be spent on public cloud services in 2020, up 6.3% from 2019. IDC reports that almost half of IT spending is cloud-based, “reaching 60% of all IT infrastructure and 60% to 70% of all software, services and technology spending in 2020.” These projections came in mid-2020, which proves that cloud adoption and spending were not greatly impacted by the pandemic.

    You can make the argument that cloud computing itself is the trend of 2020. Blockchain, quantum computing, machine learning and AI all deservedly earn a lot of headlines in the tech press. But at a more basic level, cloud computing is changing the way we do business. Whether it is the way they store their data, improvements to agility and go-to-market for faster release of new products and services, or how they develop and operate services remotely in today’s “locked-down world,” cloud computing is benefitting all businesses in every sector.

    In short, cloud computing had a strong year in 2020 despite COVID-19 and appears to have a very bright future. Several key trends, perhaps overshadowed by the pandemic, helped define a dynamic year for the sector. These include the following:

    • Continued Dominance of ‘The Big Four’ – All of the big four cloud providers—AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and Alibaba Cloud—reported strong growth and collectively grew 40% in Q320. Together they still account for 63% of the entire cloud sector.
    • Rise of Managed Services – The global cloud managed services market, in particular, is growing rapidly and is expected to reach $116 billion by 2025, growing from $62.4 billion in 2020, according to a study conducted by Markets and Markets.
    • Serverless and Containers – There used to be some talk about serverless and containers replacing the use of traditional virtual machines (VM). But I mostly see customers realizing that VM infrastructure is not going to disappear anytime soon, though container use certainly rose over the last 12 months.
    • Automation – The push toward greater automation continued in 2020. I noticed users accepting greater automation in their infrastructure environments, and there was simply more demand for it across the board. This is great news as one of the major advantages of a DevOps approach is automating away the manual tasks that bog down critical projects.
    • Growth in home use – This may seem an obvious one, but with the COVID-19 pandemic leading companies across the globe to new “work from home” policies, virtual desk infrastructure (VDI) usage exploded.
    • Security – Especially with a remote workforce, cloud security faced new challenges this year. One example of this playing out is in Snowflake’s massive IPO.

    Other trends of note this year included the continued growth of hybrid and multi-cloud and desktop as a service (DaaS). So, while COVID-19 truly defined 2020 for most people, the cloud sector was busy with the trends discussed above. It will certainly be interesting to see how these trends play out in the year ahead. Whatever new trends arise, it seems likely that cloud computing will continue to transform the way we all do business.

  • Low-Code To Become Commonplace in 2021

    Low-Code To Become Commonplace in 2021

    A new study finds 85% of engineer leads predict low-code and no-code will soon become common

    New findings from an Internal-endorsed study suggest 2020’s software development challenges will undoubtedly carry into 2021. Many businesses are making immediate transitions to a digital-only economy, forcing a ton of new app development requirements. Yet, hiring top engineering talent is especially difficult, amid a developer drought and pandemic uncertainties.

    One in three organizations has implemented a hiring freeze. Respondents also cited rising development challenges and insecure internal software, putting a strain on normal operations. To help address these challenges going forward, a whopping 85.1% believe implementing low-code and no-code will become more and more omnipresent within their company.

    Below, we dive into the report’s major findings, which surveyed 500 IT and engineering workers at medium-to-large enterprises. Using this data, we’ll forecast hurdles software development teams may face in 2021, and gauge if low-code tooling adoption is the ultimate panacea or no more than a Band-Aid for a much larger ongoing problem.

    Development Challenges Will Increase

    In the thick of the pandemic, software is often the only touchpoint many traditional companies have with a user. Naturally, the number of digital experiences required to meet this new reality is skyrocketing. Experts and data show this trend has no signs of stopping.

    In fact, 60.1% of surveyed saw app development increasing due to work-from-home policies. Only 9.7% reported a decrease in app development. One could easily attribute rising app development with growing software requirements brought on by the current digital-first climate.

    In this new economy, finding bold ways to increase productivity is critical. Improving the efficiency of engineering teams was a priority for most respondents and a high priority for 40% of respondents. For small groups with lean margins, improving automation for software delivery could help compete with larger players.

    Talent Will Become More Competitive

    The biggest challenge employers face is finding talent—30.6% of respondents cited increased competition for talent as a top challenge in 2020 and 22.2% also recognized developer drought as a significant obstacle. If you had trouble finding skilled software engineers in 2020, good luck next year …

    Looking to 2021, 45% see competition for talent remains a top challenge. Trailing problems include developer drought, immigration issues and a poor reaction to new work-from-home policies.

    Hiring Practices Will Continue to Shift

    With COVID–19 in full force and a developer scarcity, you’d think hiring would come to a freeze. Yet, the results of this study were mixed—hiring practices are pretty varied across teams.

    According to the report, 34.5% of organizations surveyed had paused hiring new engineers. Conversely, 37.3% have hired more engineers, and 18.5% of organizations reported no change to hiring practices at all. About 10% had layoffs.

    Whereas some tech companies are thriving in the new normal, others may pause hiring due to uncertainness around COVID-19. These companies could be turning to low-code technologies as a replacement. “If you pause hiring, you still need to build, and low-code is a great option for that,” said Arisa Amano, CEO of Internal.

    Low-Code Will Become Commonplace

    To address the above issues, companies are turning to low-code solutions. These platforms help relieve the development burden for internal business tools and open up citizen developer use. And, it’s more than a fad—the report was able to squarely demonstrate an uptick in low-code use.

    Most companies (75.2%) have already implemented a combination of low-code and traditional engineering methods. It appears that low-code is complementing existing software engineering practices at a number of institutions.

    In addition, 28.8% of respondents predict low-code and no-code will become a high priority in the coming months, and for 21.6%, it will become an essential focus. Impressively, 85.1% of developers foresee low-code and no-code as becoming more commonly implemented within their company.

    Low-Code Will Open Doors for Non-Tech

    The citizen developer concept has been gathering marketing steam, but it might not be just hype. Now, data suggests low-code tools are actually opening doors for such non-developers. Seventy percent of companies said non-developers in their company already build tools for internal business use, and nearly 80% predict to see more of this trend in 2021.

    It should be noted that low-code and no-code do not seek to replace all engineering talent; instead, to free them up to engage in more complex tasks. “With low-code, you free up your engineers to work on harder problems, instead of having them work on basic things,” said Arisa Amano, CEO of Internal. She believes this could translate into more innovation companywide.

    Surprisingly, bringing non-traditional engineers into the development fold is not being met with ambivalence—69.2% of respondents foresee that citizen developers positively affect engineering teams, with the rest primarily exhibiting a neutral reaction.

    Improved Access Control Will Boost Internal Security

    The costs of internal security threats are high. Breaches could decrease customer trust, harm brand reputation and lead to escalating legal fees. With cyberattacks a prevalent concern, cybersecurity must come back in style.

    Not only are threats external, but internal too—46.8% of respondents were extremely concerned about employees having access to customer data. The cause for concern is duly noted, as the majority, 58.1%, have experienced internal data security breaches in the past.

    The reasons for internal breaches vary across the board. Respondents attributed the top cause simply to a rise in the number of employees and contractors with access to sensitive information—a surge in employees means a greater chance of human error or leaked credentials. It also means an increase in the number of devices with access to sensitive data—this is particularly tricky, as CISOs face a dilemma on how to govern privileged access for housebound laptops and mobile devices.

    Respondents also noted the increasing complexity of technology and the overabundance of new cloud applications. It’s hard to expect DevOps to secure modern infrastructure when they’re still trying to figure out how it works! As a knowledge gap could quickly introduce vulnerabilities, 62.7% of respondents are actively investing in increased employee security training.

    Other security problems, such as a lack of granular access control or lack of logging and audit trails, seem like they could be mitigated with the right configurations and DevSecOps approach. In fact, 55.4% of respondents are in the process of baking in fine-grained access controls. “Having that at the forefront of internal tools is key,” said Bob Remeika, co-founder, Internal.

    Shifting security left could correct an age-old trend of adding security after the fact, which only prolongs the problem. On the whole, companies require a combination of better access enforcement, multi-factor auth and increased monitoring to mitigate mounting threats.

    Low-Code Becomes Mainstream in 2021

    Software development teams face many challenges in the coming year. Demands for new software will increase and processes to increase efficiency will fall under the microscope. Rising engineer competitiveness and developer drought will also continue to shift hiring practices.

    Companies that weren’t 100% digital will be forced to embrace the new norm and develop internal software and automation. Yet, building internal tools isn’t straightforward and will be especially difficult for companies less technical than their software-as-a-service counterparts. All this, paired with ongoing security threats, means internal app development in 2021 has its challenges.

    Although conditions look dicey, the underlying issues are not unusual, Remeika said. They have just been amplified. “There’s always been a developer drought, companies have always been trying to find ways to do more with less, and competition for talent is never getting less fierce,” he said.

    Though we’ve seen a spike since COVID-19, the desire to offload work has been everpresent. Remeika believes sophisticated low-code platforms will empower technical non-engineers and assist with things people typically tend to disregard when building internal applications, such as security, deployment, testing and review capabilities.

    Nevertheless, development team output appears to be resilient throughout work-from-home policies. And as I recently covered, a low-code movement could also enable a democratization effect, helping SMEs who can’t afford the top talent to still compete at the same table as large tech companies. We expect low-code and no-code adoption to spill well into 2021, seemingly, as a panacea to these mounting concerns.

  • JFrog CEO Sees Slight Slowdown in New DevOps Projects

    JFrog CEO Sees Slight Slowdown in New DevOps Projects

    Following the company’s filing of its first quarterly report as a public company, JFrog CEO Shlomi Ben Haim said this week the rate at which new application development projects being launched since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring has declined.

    While most existing application development initiatives launched prior to the pandemic are continuing apace, Ben Haim said it might not be until next year that the velocity of new projects increases.

    JFrog revenue for the third quarter was $38.9 million, an increase of 40% from $27.8 million for the third quarter of 2019. Revenue for the first nine months of 2020 was $108.1 million, an increase of 46% from $74.0 million for the first nine months of 2019. In the current fourth quarter, JFrog is projecting revenue between $40.9 million and $41.9 million, with full-year results falling between $149 and $150 million.

    Ben Haim said most of the new activity on the JFrog platform stems from a free tier the company launched last month. Much of that individual developer activity hopefully will lead to more formal projects being launched next year, he added.

    The biggest challenge DevOps teams have encountered is keeping existing projects on track as most members began to work remotely almost overnight. While application development was often distributed across teams prior to the pandemic, many organizations are still working through how to optimize workflows now that most, if not all, their DevOps teams will be working from home well into the next year.

    The economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic has varied widely by industry. Some industries have been adversely impacted to the point where there is not enough revenue to fund new IT projects. Other vertical industries are accelerating investments in digital business transformation initiatives that research firm IDC projects will grow at a 15.5% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) to reach $6.8 trillion by 2023. Many of those initiatives are becoming the core business continuity strategy around which entire companies are being reorganized.

    In fact, Ben Haim noted most of those digital business transformation projects are being driven by cloud-native microservices that require a DevOps platform, which is why the total addressable market for DevOps platforms still remains north of $22 billion, he said.

    It’s not clear whether DevOps teams will return to an office once a COVID-19 vaccine has been approved and distributed. In the short term, however, the number of lockdowns around the globe is again on the rise.

    In the meantime, whether DevOps teams are more productive working from home than in the office has yet to be proven. The one thing that is certain is managing DevOps teams has never been more challenging. As such, Ben Haim said the most important thing for any DevOps team to make sure they are prioritizing their efforts around the projects that will have the most immediate positive impact on the business.

  • Achieve Cloud Resilience Through Systematic (and Chaotic) Testing

    Achieve Cloud Resilience Through Systematic (and Chaotic) Testing

    Constantly testing the cloud in systematic and chaotic ways will help companies avoid cloud failures in a time when downtime means disconnect

    Professionals fortunate enough to shelter in place and work from home can thank cloud for their ability to shift over so seamlessly during the COVID-19 pandemic.

    Imagine a lockdown without the cloud. Availability and uptime of grocery order systems would depend on a company’s on-prem data centers. Streaming services would stutter and stall during peak hours (after dinnertime and other high-demand times. Critical personal and professional interactions would be limited to voice calls instead of rich collaboration apps, video conferencing or dynamic social media. Many companies would simply just be closed to business, unable to respond to market changes and consumers.

    Now imagine a COVID-19-induced work-from-home scenario with downtime in the cloud. Teams working remotely would fall apart. Deliveries would be scrambled and lost. More importantly, emergency services would see bigger surges with fewer tools to manage them. Medical research teams around the globe currently sharing coronavirus research and data would lose contact with each other, delaying and slowing efforts to treat and cure the COVID-19 virus.

    It may seem that the cloud was built just in time to help with our current predicament. But the concept and foundational systems of cloud computing go back more than 50 years. Popular, practical cloud applications developed more rapidly in the past 20 years, starting with the early iterations of Salesforce.com and more recently with web-based enterprise applications such as Google’s G Suite and Microsoft’s Office 365. It’s the simplicity of these relatively newer tools that have led to their broad adoption. But this surface layer masks a mind-bogglingly complex undergirding that must be fully understood and tested to be maintained.

    Clouds are strained right now. IBM endured a cloud outage of roughly two hours on June 9. Network monitoring company ThousandEyes told tech news site Fierce Telecom that the global nature of the outage suggested a control-plane issue rather than a physical failure such as a fiber cut or router failure. Microsoft’s Azure Cloud Data Center capacity in Europe has shown signs of stress as companies shift to remote work and usage of its communication and collaboration platforms, including Teams balloons. To relieve that stress, Microsoft restricted access to free and trial accounts. Google Cloud’s Kubernetes platform and networking services on parts of the U.S. East Coast went dark for a few hours on June 29.

    To avoid downtime due to cloud failure, companies must build resilience into their cloud structure by testing it in continuous and chaotic ways.

    Conventional testing fundamentally ensures that key applications have been migrated or set up in the cloud and are working properly. This is a great and proven way to ensure that cloud systems meet design considerations and do not change based on application performance. However, conventional testing does not probe for unexpected situations. To do that, advanced operations turn to chaos testing, a technique pioneered by Netflix during its own migration to the cloud starting in 2011. Chaos testing creates turbulent situations that will bring points of failure to light and influence design. Modern cloud systems bring hardware and software together in such complex and fluid ways that standard testing will never suffice. By engaging in systematic and chaotic testing, companies can develop greater resilience in the cloud and through their entire technology systems.

    To achieve resilience, IT must find vulnerabilities not revealed in normal “happy path” testing scenarios. Seeking resilience provides a glimpse into a systems’ reliability and recoverability by executing a carefully planned set of disasters. Such a disaster sequence could include:

    1. Pulling down the network connection for 10 seconds.
    2. Taking a service or server offline.
    3. Choking middleware and watching for anomalies.

    Enterprises just embarking on their migration to cloud must first study and choose a service model that fits best. Firms looking to migrate a whole workload to the cloud should choose the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) option, which allow teams to rapidly orchestrate their test environments on the cloud and quickly set up systems for storage, backup and recovery.

    Organizations already in the cloud or partly migrated must take time to understand their cloud service models. This could prompt the question: Is this model right for my organization in the years ahead?

    While operating in the cloud, these companies can start planning testing scenarios to gauge their systems’ resiliency. In doing so, companies should set an objective and time window for running the tests. Then, the results of these tests help inform the requirement design phase of their cloud setup.

    With all systems and applications in a virtual cloud context, future digital transformations will become more fluid. Properly tested clouds also handle demand spikes more readily and will handle the viral adoption of an application or a rapid location switch or expansion of workforces.

    To become resilient, companies must create resilient IT systems. These systems will rely partly or wholly on cloud infrastructure. Cloud infrastructure grows more resilient through constant, systematic, and chaotic testing. Consistent, creative testing has its own value that allows businesses themselves to become more flexible and resilient enterprises.

  • Engaging Developers in a Post-COVID-19 World

    Engaging Developers in a Post-COVID-19 World

    The time for platforms to rethink how they engage developers is now

    How we communicate, socialize, look up information, work, shop and travel have all been transformed by platform companies. COVID-19 has only increased our reliance on these platforms, as people spend more time on the internet and businesses migrate from offline to online offerings.

    These shifts present challenges to the platforms themselves. With people increasingly using low-latency applications such as teleconferencing and video streaming, there’s much more demand for data to be delivered without noticeable delays. As more and more varied businesses migrate their services online, it creates additional burdens on platform infrastructure and stretches the limits of their functionality.

    It’s a challenging environment for platform companies. But disruption also presents opportunities. The question becomes, “What do platform companies need to do to remain relevant and to improve their products and services?“

    The Importance of Developers

    There are some obvious starting points. Platform companies will need to rapidly adapt their offerings according to their evolving user base. They’ll also need to plan for commercial sustainability and make sure that they balance short-term expenditure with longer-term profitability.

    But they will not be able to do these things alone. With almost 24 million developers in the world today, external developers are central to any platform’s effort to adapt their products and expand commercial sustainability. As the technology industry continues to be subject to disruption, the developer ecosystem is ideally placed to drive expansion at a sustainable scale, enable product differentiation, reduce time-to-market and ensure relevance through product-driven growth.

    Those platforms that can successfully engage developers will stand out from the crowd and win the increasingly competitive fight for developer loyalty. Similarly, as developer ecosystems increasingly become a key differentiator, the platforms that fail to engage developers may also fail to keep up with the rapidly changing technology landscape.

    Developing Developer Partnerships

    It’s clear that platforms will need to make engaging developers a priority moving forward. The question is, how?

    For a start, organizations need to have a clear sense of which parts of their ecosystem can be opened up quickly and which integrations need to be built into the platform. With these established, the next step is to engage the developers that are best placed to help.

    At the core of engaging developers successfully is the recognition that different developers will have different priorities, needs and core skillsets. All developers need to secure ROI by engaging with the platform and its ecosystem. But their perception of value will differ. Enterprise developers, for example, rate ease of use, peer perception, strong developer tools, accurate content and enterprise-level support. Independent software vendors (ISVs), however, care most about revenue, lead generation and being pulled into deals.

    Segmentation, Segmentation, Segmentation

    Investing in areas that will attract the right developers is key to long-term sustainability. And there are a few key areas that will require especially close attention. First and foremost, developer segmentation will be absolutely vital for every platform. As the product landscape expands, platforms need to be clear which new developers may want to engage with their platform.

    By revisiting developer segmentation, new product use-cases can be included to ensure that content, support and messaging match what developers need. For example, if low-code/no-code developers are a new demographic, platforms need to extend content the scope of their help materials to include more basic explanations (including generic technology terms) and extra links to FAQs.

    On the other end, platforms also will need to invest in tools that match the needs of different developer groups. Experienced, full-stack developers using the latest languages and patterns will expect sophisticated tooling, services and frameworks as well as DevOps tools.

    Either way, continued focus on self-service will ensure cost-effectiveness by allowing platforms to manage extra usage without the need to apply extra resources.

    Scaling New Heights With the Cloud

    If transitioning critical services to the cloud isn’t already on the agenda for every platform business, it should be. A seamless service transition to cloud, with future-proofed expansion capabilities, is imperative for any platform that wants to engage developers. Why? Because as well as supporting service-based pricing, transitioning to the cloud facilitates scale and allows developers to access the platform securely from any location. Above anything else, a robust cloud infrastructure makes platforms more flexible, facilitates collaboration between platforms and developers and enhances the platform’s overall performance.

    Thriving With Developers in a Post-COVID World

    The time for platforms to rethink how they engage developers is now. Building a developer ecosystem will be vital for any platform wanting to scale at speed. If equipped with powerful tools, enabled through self-service and supported through effective educational resources, developers can be the difference between platforms that struggle in a post-COVID-19 world and those that thrive.

  • Debunking Misconceptions About Engineering Management in 2020

    Debunking Misconceptions About Engineering Management in 2020

    2020 will be a year we all remember for so many reasons. It has been a year full of uncertainty and confusion, and also one in which misconceptions abound. In the world of software engineering, we feel this acutely as all eyes are on the engineering team to continue building innovative new products and solutions—maintaining the lifeline of the business—even as we grapple with new realities of universal remote work, new constraints on resources and countless distractions.

    Given all of that, it should come as no surprise that go-to-market and other business leadership has grown increasingly concerned with the performance and success of the engineering teams on which they depend. Some of their worries are legitimate, but many are merely misconceptions about the state of software engineering and the efficacy of engineering management. To help foster alignment, the Jellyfish Data Science team investigated by looking at engineering management and team data across dozens of software development teams representing thousands of engineers. Below, three important misconceptions about engineering management in 2020 are debunked.

    Misconception 1: Software engineering teams are working less or being less productive amid COVID-19, universal remote work and lack of management oversight

    The idea that teams are being less productive is not altogether unfounded. Nor is it surprising given the fact that it’s much more difficult to see what’s being built by the engineering team and how the team is being managed directly. It’s true that among the many teams sampled, productivity decreased across the board about a month or two after the shift to universal remote work (after a spike in productivity initially). However, as things have settled into a new normal, productivity metrics on engineering teams have rebounded and in many cases even increased.

    The reality is that engineers are working almost the exact same amount of time as they had been before the pandemic. In fact, the average number of coding days per week has increased 2% (it stands at about 2.2 days). The difference is that engineers are adjusting their working hours to accommodate family schedules. Peak coding hours have shifted four hours earlier, and software engineers are working longer and less regular hours during COVID-19.

    Across the board, engineering metrics suggest productivity is up relative to the same period last year. The number of commits has increased, merged pull requests are up more than 10% and the number of issues resolved has increased a whopping 8.7%. The exception here is issue cycle time, which has increased more than 21%. Engineers may be taking on meatier projects, and are working equally, if not more diligently, to ship them.

    Misconception 2: Communication on engineering teams is breaking down due to remote work during COVID-19

    Again, this worry is not unfounded, especially for older companies where co-located work was important for effective communication and for larger companies where communication is crucial to maintain business continuity across divisions and departments. But among younger, and especially software companies, the move to remote work was not so painful and communication did not break down nearly as much as might have been anticipated given the already widespread adoption of videoconferencing tools such as Zoom or Google Hangouts and messaging platforms such as Slack.

    The reality is it’s difficult to say what has happened with communication. Certainly, informal office banter and hallway catch-ups have taken a nosedive. But communication about engineering work—communication that is measurable—has actually increased, possibly enough to fill those gaps. Review and comments on pull requests, for example, have increased by 5% and 4% respectively, and Slack’s CEO reports the number of Slack messages per user per day has increased 20% (which echoes our findings that Slack messages in engineering work channels have increased). The conclusion is that while informal communication may be down, measurable communication—especially around engineering work—has actually increased.

    Misconception 3: Engineering management has lost visibility into the work their teams are doing as their teams have gone remote and they can no longer walk the proverbial “floor”

    Visibility into the work of engineering teams has not broadly decreased in recent months, but that doesn’t mean visibility is not a problem. Visibility remains a top challenge among engineering leadership.

    The reality is engineering management has had poor visibility into their teams’ work long before they went remote. According to the “2020 Engineering Management and Alignment report,” this poor visibility has led to a misunderstanding and misrepresentation at the highest levels of what types of work need to get done and how many resources they’ll require. The report found, for example, that engineering leaders polled overestimated the amount of resources available for road map and new feature work by 62%! Without a more complete understanding of what work is being done, the study asked, how can engineering leaders take corrective actions and ensure the right projects are being prioritized?

    But not all is lost in this regard. The study also found that visibility dramatically increases, by 60% on average, on engineering teams that have implemented engineering management platforms. Those teams report 16% less time spent on customer support work and 35% more time available to work on “road map work or strategic customer development—the work that moves the business forward.”

    Ensuring alignment with the business is critically important for technical leaders during times of uncertainty. If you can get ahead of these misconceptions, you will better enable your team for success now and in the future. Data-driven engineering leaders already know this to be true when times are good and resources are easier to come by. If you’re not already, strike the misconceptions your business leaders may have by sharing the realities on your team.

  • Feature Flags: The Cure for DevOps Remote Work Stress

    Feature Flags: The Cure for DevOps Remote Work Stress

    Feature flags can help reduce the stress associated with DevOps during WFH

    The world has drastically changed. As a result, we have had to adapt the way we shop, socialize, educate and work. Businesses have had to adapt to keep operations going, and the biggest change they’ve had to make has been the move to remote working. For most, this has meant bringing a laptop home from the office and setting up at a home desk or dining table. For teams used to collaborating in-person, it may feel like the world has turned upside down.

    DevOps teams have been thrust into a decentralized environment at the very time they are facing record traffic and the pressure to return to or even exceed their prior cadence. The current climate has accelerated demand for fast and efficiently running online services, such as e-commerce, streaming services and video conference platforms. Digital platforms not only are facing greater demand, but they are also seen as more mission-critical than ever.

    The stress of all this can be daunting, but it’s useful to remember that the very idea of DevOps emerged as a way to move faster with greater resilience. We need to trust the patterns and tools that were emerging as the “new normal” even before the current crisis emerged.

    One of those patterns, which is sometimes referred to as progressive delivery, is the idea of decoupling deployment from release. The tool many have chosen to accomplish progressive delivery, especially to meet the needs of decoupled and decentralized teams, is feature flags.

    Feature flags allow teams to deploy new features in production while restricting access to only a subset of users. The ability to control exposure without requiring further deployments or infrastructure changes in turn makes testing in production (exposing the feature to internal dev and test users only) and canary testing (exposing the feature to a small number of real users before ramping up to 100%) straightforward and repeatable processes.

    This “fewer moving parts” way of promoting features eliminates the need for the large-scale coordination that an all-or-nothing “big bang” release requires. That’s why feature flags are particularly well-suited for teams to work remotely, in decentralized environments.

    Feature flags allow for time to make sure everything is working properly before the switch is flipped. It is the equivalent of changing the plane while you’re flying, without the passengers falling. For this reason, DevOps teams that were using feature flags prior to global shelter-in-place orders were much better positioned to continue development efforts without interruption while working remotely. Feature flags allow for DevOps teams to operate in gradual stages with the ease of experimentation and rollbacks, significantly reducing the stresses of remote work.

  • Developers Are Running With Scissors. Here’s How to Do It Safely

    Developers Are Running With Scissors. Here’s How to Do It Safely

    We’ve all heard the stories. It takes too long to make changes to applications, right?

    Well, until COVID-19, that was true.

    Many enterprises have found that the global pandemic brought on by the novel coronavirus has given them the will to find the way to move faster. As one customer recently relayed: “Before COVID it would take us six months to a year to roll out a new app, but with COVID it took just six weeks. An existential crisis will do that for you.”

    Enterprises have always felt compelled to go faster, improve online experiences and bring new applications to market. But COVID ratcheted up the urgency, to put it mildly. All the processes and politics were pushed out of the way and companies just told their developers to run. Developers planned, prototyped and pushed code into production in a fraction of the time.

    The problem? These enterprise developers are running with scissors. We all recall our favorite kindergarten teacher telling us not to do so. But if you’re facing an existential crisis, do you really have a choice? The fact of the matter is that a developer’s new code (the scissors) could break something, potentially taking down mission-critical applications, affecting the company’s reputation or its revenue, or even compromising customer data. However, if we yell at the developers to slow down and walk, then we risk revenues falling too precipitously.

    Moving at that speed works fine for cloud-native companies built entirely on modern architectures. They have no legacy. They were architected from the get-to to roll out several changes per day. But in normal times a large bank or insurance company might make the same number of changes per month, not per day. Like your favorite teacher, these enterprises prohibit their developers from running with scissors.

    This leads to almost-diametric friction between the developers and the infrastructure teams, whose job is to improve reliability and uptime and make sure the business doesn’t get breached.

    Now that we’ve had COVID as a forcing function in the world, the time-to-market and time-to-change pressures are forever going to be too fast for manual governance processes. So companies need to resolve this tension. They need to allow developers to run safely with scissors.

    Luckily, all the team, tools and technology know-how exists. We know that DevOps teams help automate the release process. We know that continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) and orchestration tools are mature. And we know that technology shifts in containers, Kubernetes and cloud-native architectures are production-ready. It’s really just a matter of pulling it all together.

    At the epicenter of this is the concept of microservices: breaking an application down into small, discrete functions. Each is reusable and optimized for the teams, tools and technologies described above. With microservices, if the developer breaks something, they’re breaking one small piece. The vast majority of any given app—and therefore the business runs it—is not going to go down. Enterprises deploy these microservices environments alongside their legacy apps, creating a hybrid architecture.

    Decoupling from the architecture allows developers to self-service the capabilities they need to test and deploy new app features that require changes to traffic rules. They can conduct canary testing, blue-green testing and A/B testing without ever having to contact their infrastructure counterparts or opening up an IT ticket and waiting for a change window.

    Presto, right? But no. It’s a good solution, but it only takes you halfway. There is still the challenge of visibility and stitching the workflows together so everyone is on the same page. For many companies with complex workflows, it almost doesn’t matter how quickly developers can move on a change—it still winds up in purgatory, waiting for a security person to audit the code or change a firewall rule. It’s not uncommon that 50 separate app teams, each working on their own microservice, need to coordinate changes with security acting as a shared services team and, unfortunately, the new bottleneck. At least it’s not the network team’s fault anymore.

    Investing in the abstracted layer that sits above the application delivery infrastructure solves the software-versus-network integration issue, but if those layers aren’t talking, then you’ve really just introduced another silo. You’ve moved the same problem out of the hardware and into the software. Half the equation can go fast, but the other half can’t.

    If latency is how long it takes to complete a round trip, then think of this as human latency. As technologists, we love to measure application latency. We can take an app down from 100 milliseconds to 10 milliseconds and congratulate ourselves on a job well done. But if your security team is still taking 60 days to approve code and implement new policies, then you still have more than 5 billion milliseconds of human latency. Your 90% reduction in application latency only compressed a tiny portion of the problem.

    To solve for the ultimate problem of human latency, there needs to be a way to provide visibility, orchestration and automation that removes the handoff points and the resulting friction across the different teams of Dev, DevOps, Infrastructure and Operations and Security—just like cloud-native companies have done.

    Previously, one way to solve this would be to get a vertically integrated platform that does it all for you. This is the approach that platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers take. The downside is you’ve coupled your application services to your underlying infrastructure. The simplicity of the all-in-one approach allows you to go fast in the beginning, but you may find later that you have hampered your ability to adapt. If there’s a major change like an acquisition, for example, you can’t quickly merge systems, port to a new cloud or repatriate an app back on-premises.

    Think of this as vertical integration, in which the app, the app services and the infrastructure are all tightly coupled. Now consider a different approach where you horizontally integrate across your silos. There is more value in integrating left to right across people rather than top to bottom across the technology stack. The solution is to invest in new technologies, but in a way that provides visibility, workflows and APIs across all the stages of the application life cycle. Now you have a relay race where each team runs with scissors, enabling security to ensure it’s done safely.

    Fortunately, the technologies to enable this model in an open, loosely coupled way are here today. For enterprises with legacy and hybrid infrastructures, your capability to go fast and compete with cloud-native companies has arrived, and you don’t have to hire a thousand Silicon Valley software developers to compete with cloud-native organizations.

    By investing in the abstraction layer that automates and maintains application delivery and application security left to right across your organization, you can encourage your developers to run faster. Take that, Mrs. McGonagle. Kindergarten will never be the same.

  • Help Us Low-Code, You’re Our Only Hope

    Help Us Low-Code, You’re Our Only Hope

    Will low-code solve 2020’s most pressing issues?

    2020 is a challenging year. IT timelines are accelerating. The global pandemic pushes more online interaction, and digital transformations slated for years are shortening down to months or even days. As many departments face a nationwide developer shortage, companies have turned to low-code tools to keep pace.

    Naturally, interest in low-code is booming. Gartner estimates that by 2024, low-code will be behind at least 65% of application development initiatives. Today, low-code is already at the heart of many digital transformation initiatives—some vital to human life.

    I recently met with Ryan Ellis, SVP, Product Management, Platform at Salesforce. He shared how low-code is at the forefront of some very critical areas, such as COVID–19 testing, PPP loan processing, remote meal delivery, workplace safety and more. In this article, we’ll see how low-code tools are helping organizations quickly respond to these unprecedented issues.

    Low-Code Solves 5 Top Issues of 2020

    1. Meal Delivery

    Sun Basket uses low-code to scale omnichannel support rapidly

    What does digital transformation mean nowadays? It used to refer to new ways of meeting your customers online—i.e. brick and mortar business adopting eCommerce. Now, digital transformation is about providing omnichannel support for customers: phone-in, email, chat, social message and more, noted Ellis.

    Since the COVID-19 lockdown began, Sun Basket, a meal kit delivery platform, has experienced a massive increase in demand. To answer the surge in customer support, Sun Basket used a low-code platform to build a chatbot to enable users to track or edit their orders using natural language. Since investing in low-code, Sun Basket has increased the number of customer support cases handled simultaneously by 50%. This “ability to pivot to the surge in demand” is what gives low-code platforms an edge, he said.

    2. COVID-19 Testing

    UC Berkley adopts low-code to facilitate rapid COVID-19 testing

    To help underserved communities in the fight against COVID–19, researchers at UC Berkeley’s Innovative Genomics Institute recently rapidly transformed a CRISPR study lab into a pop-up COVID testing facility with the help of low-code tooling.

    The lab constructed a web portal for remote diagnosis and automated patient test scheduling. The system needed to catalog samples by barcode, synchronize the flow of information between researchers and doctors, and automatically deliver test results to patients—all while using regulatory-compliant code.

    This is one area where low-code shines: The researchers could quickly utilize pre-built components with the right data privacy measures to become operational in three weeks. “HIPPA compliance and security are built-in advantages,” said Ellis. IGI is an inspiring model for how science and technology can unite amid a global crisis.

    3. CARES Act And PPP

    Banks adopt low-code to automate loan approval processes

    With the passing of the CARES act, 70% of small U.S. businesses impacted by coronavirus quickly applied for federal loans. “Banks had to respond to a huge influx of demand and process these loans,” Ellis said. At many banks, the sheer number of applications became unmanageable.

    To handle the volume at Academy Bank, a savvy employee realized the need to automate some tedious, repetitive tasks. They used a low-code platform to build a tool for tracking application statuses and generating reports. This created an end-to-end loan approval process, which helped process more Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) applications, reduced manual repetition and improved visibility.

    Another financial service that relies heavily on low-code is nCino, a cloud-based bank operating system. nCino, which recently had one of the highest U.S. tech IPOs in recent times, built an entire automated business on top of Salesforce using a combination of some-code and cloud-first strategy.

    As banks behave more like tech companies, they need to evaluate their DevOps approach. “Leverage scale from low-code and cloud combined,” recommends Ellis. “Use the power of the cloud to push solutions to a broad base of customers all over the world.”

    4. Workplace Safety

    Low-code helps build corporate social distancing applications

    Many companies are considering their post-pandemic return to the workplace. Purpose-built low-code applications could be utilized to keep a log of fever checks and enable limited-exposure collaboration.

    Work.com, for example, offers employee health tracking, contract-tracing and workplace-planning applications to reduce risk and enforce social distancing guidelines. For example, elevator use could be optimized to avoid crowding a tight space, Ellis said.

    5. Distance Learning

    COVID has forced many schools online. Some, like Case Western, are getting creative with augmented reality HoloLens. Other schools are implementing things such as financial aid chatbots or updating their old ERP systems.

    Low-code could assist these distance learning initiatives or complement the EdTech platforms already in use. Over 100 universities worldwide already use low-code platforms within their online education curriculum.

    Digital Transformation 2.0 Is All About Automation

    Digital transformation initiatives have been brewing for years. But now, greater forces are driving immediate change—and this time, we’re all in on automation.

    The emphasis is now on optimizing and refining digital processes. “Utilizing low-code, businesses are taking processes that were very manual, error-prone, simplistic or repetitive, and automating it into a process that ensures consistency,” said Ellis.

    The above case studies demonstrate how low-code, in practice, is not only reshaping brick and mortal and traditional IT but ushering a new focus on automation and event-triggering for digital organizations, helping them adapt to turbulent times.

    The need to automate business processes pervades all companies. Ellis positively identifies an “uptick in low-code momentum these days across all customers.” For example, over two months, Salesforce noticed an increase from 160 million screen flow executions (automated workflows) to 200 million screen flows per month.

    Low-Code In Our Desperate Hour

    2020 is a challenging year. Now in the thick of a global pandemic, economies have been severely affected. However, citizen development technologies offer solutions. According to Ellis, low-code is truly “saving people—in terms of lives, businesses and livelihoods.”

    Of course, low-code platforms are no silver bullet and present a trade-off. Companies gain speed and agility, yet they move infrastructure dependencies to a third party. If not well-adopted or governed properly, low-code could enable shadow IT to proliferate. Ellis believes these concerns are negligible. “The value you bring is expertise and industry knowledge,” he said. The abstraction layer is worth it to “to move away from having to reinvent the wheel.”

    For Ellis, broader low-code adoption is on the horizon. “We’ve seen huge increases and inbound interest and use of low-code technologies. More and more people are opening up to it,” he said. Though low-code is certainly in vogue amid the pandemic, low-code tools leveraged today could be here to stay for the long-term.