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Tag: devops consulting

Puppet Adds DevOps Consulting Practice

Puppet has launched a DevOps consulting service that promises to help organizations implement best practices that will ultimately make their IT organizations more efficient.

Nigel Kersten, field CTO, Puppet, said the Scaling DevOps Service is especially focused on improving workflows among organizations that have already started down the DevOps path.

Most IT organizations that embrace DevOps eventually encounter bottlenecks that conspire to limit the rate at which they can build and deploy applications. Puppet will make available DevOps experts capable of assessing DevOps workflows as part of an effort to reduce operational friction, said Kersten.

Those consultants can also identify integration opportunities that might further streamline workflows, in addition to providing an overall assessment of an organization’s DevOps maturity based on a model Puppet developed.

Kersten said in many cases, enterprise IT organizations, especially, are trying to adapt DevOps principles that were originally created for small startup companies, with mixed success. Puppet consultants, using observations gleaned from their own engagements with customers that have embraced its tools for automating the management of IT, are often in a better position to identify ways to optimize DevOps workflows across larger IT organizations, Kersten said.

It’s also easy for large enterprise IT organizations to misinterpret how one DevOps principle or another should actually be implemented, Kersten said.

DevOps consulting, of course, has become a cottage industry within the IT services sector over the last decade. Now, almost every systems integrator has a DevOps practice. Most of those practices are focused on enabling organizations to embrace DevOps, versus helping organizations optimize workflows after they have already begun the transition, said Kersten.

It’s not clear to what degree organizations that have not embraced Puppet’s automation framework will embrace consulting services based on a DevOps model created by observing Puppet’s customers. However, it’s apparent many IT organizations have inconsistently implemented DevOps practices across various departments. In many cases, bottlenecks that result in various departments within a larger IT organization are being addressed using a set of manual processes that have been created as a workaround to a specific problem.

Of course, optimizing DevSecOps best processes is only going to become more challenging as emergent technologies such as containers, Kubernetes clusters and serverless computing frameworks are added to the IT mix. More challenging still, many organizations are now trying to shift responsibility for security further left as part of a DevSecOps workflow.

Many IT teams are, naturally, resistant to paying for advice, while others routinely hire small armies of consultants in the hope that ideas and concepts that have worked well elsewhere can make their IT teams more efficient. Regardless of the approach pursued, IT leaders need to remember that DevOps is a continuous journey. Every time a new platform is added to an IT environment, a DevOps workflow will need to evolve. The real issue IT leaders need to come to terms with is how long it will take for their internal teams to adapt, whether it’s via the school of hard knocks or relying on external expertise that has handled most of the issues an internal IT team is likely to encounter.

March 1, 2021
10 Years of DevOps—Transition, Growth and the Future of AIOps

When software development became a cumbersome task of repetitive coding, testing and glitches, organizations had to come up with a solution.

The solution? An organized approach that would not only eliminate the endless cycle of repetitive tasks but also would establish proper coordination and execution in the software development life cycle (SDLC).

That very systematic approach with fewer glitches, more production and exemplary coordination today is called DevOps.

But where did this wonderful process start? How did it make its pathway into our the cycle of IT industry?

The Beginning

It all began one day when Andrew Clay Shafer scheduled a session, “Agile Infrastructure,” at the Agile Conference in Toronto.

However, the DevOps model back then didn’t seem to make much of a difference to those associated with software development. As a result, Shafer closed the session. But something struck developer Patrick Debois that day, who was presenting a paper on “Agile Infrastructure and Operations” in the same vicinity. Shafer’s theme seemed to draw his attention and he went straight to meet Shafer.

A long talk in the hallway that day ignited the fire of DevOps, which started with Shafer and Patrick three months after their first meeting.

Together, they started the Agile Systems Group, with an aim to foster greater collaboration between developers and operators.

Today, the DevOps process continues to survive on the principles of increased collaboration and automation to build, test and release software faster.

Mobile Device and DevOps Adoption

Over the years, DevOps began to grow and pick up fame. And with the emergence of mobile phones, the trend picked up rampant speed.

According to a market intelligence company App Annie, global economic activity concerning mobile applications will be worth USD $6.3 trillion by 2021, five times 2016’s revenue.

Creating software for mobile devices requires an elevated software development approach. Now, organizations have to deliver new, high-quality software to customers as soon as possible to remain atop the competitive market.

In this new approach, organizations need to focus on two prime factors: agility and adaptability. While the former defines the ability to code and recode, the other marks DevOps’ ability to include changes along the SDLC.

Companies are constantly working on getting these qualities into their workflows to promote DevOps concepts of continuous delivery, continuous integration and eliminating bugs to allow users to enjoy a hassle-free software experience.

DevOps Over the Past 18 Months

According to Gartner, about two-thirds of organizations were using DevOps to support the certain business process by the end of 2017, which Forrester termed as the “Year of DevOps.”

Forrester awarded the term to DevOps owing to increasing clients’ questions and discussions around, “How do I implement DevOps at scale?” rather than just, “What is DevOps?”

Going by DevOps’ potential to support modern business processes, more and more companies are adopting DevOps, leading to a steady rise in the trend.

As DevOps continues to be successful within and across the organization, the IT industry will continue to see what it looks like to be “DevOps successful.”

The Emergence of DevSecOps

While DevOps continued to change the software industry, however, security within the process still remained an unanswered question.

In 2012, Gartner analysts Neil MacDonald and Cameron Haight introduced the concept of DevSecOps. This meant security’s introduction right from the beginning and continuing throughout SDLC.

Security’s entry into the model made DevOps a more alluring practice. Six years out, DevSecOps has been a much-discussed concept across seminars, conferences and written content.

But it is still a question whether organizations are implementing DevSecOps considering the time constraint, the need for accelerated delivery and the understanding of security’s importance in the cycle.

For many organizations, security is still not a part of their production cycle. But, it is essential for any organization to consider security if they want to remain in the competitive market and importantly at the top.

Negligence in this area may cost them bankruptcy or even elimination from the industry. According to the “Global State of Digital Trust Survey and Index,” one-third of British customers stopped using an organization’s services owing to a security breach.

10 Years of DevOps: What’s Next?

The emergence of AI and automation have made some waves in the IT industry, and DevOps is no exception.

DevOps holds high predictions for the future. In the years to come, AI and automation will change the software development process. Apps will be self-written and coded. Tasks such as integration, security, testing and deploying will be dictated by AI, data and machine learning in the all-new AIOps.

A data-driven approach will have software dynamically adapt its behavior on the basis of what is in its environment, much like other AI-driven technology including Apple’s Siri and Alexa.

Moreover, this significant shift from programmed to non-programmed apps will call for improved security and functionality management and allow developers to focus on value-addition activity.

DevOps is evolving. How about your organization?

— Veritis

November 21, 2018
The Past, Present and Future of DevOps Infrastructure
Infrastructure automation enables organizations to set up operating frameworks that allow smooth functionality with enhanced usage, minimal scope for error and faster deployment of code. The process of infrastructure automation eases development and operations processes by introducing good deployment practices such as computerized testing and versioning.

The need for automation was realized when the demand for deploying error-free applications at a faster rate increased. Additionally, competition from similar businesses forced organizations to look for a way to bridge the gaps between development and operations to deploy applications that would serve their business needs.

The Challenge of Implementing DevOps Practice

The following challenges present a roadblock in bringing out the best results of DevOps practices:
1. The disparate work cultures of the development and operations teams.
2. Non-involvement of DBAs in release cycles.
3. Failure in deployment of error-free codes.
The Emergence of DevOps

The introduction of DevOps practices resolved a lot of problems in terms of increasing business operations efficiency. It created a common operating framework where disparate teams including development and operations teams can work together and deliver applications faster that will, in turn, result in effective business operations and an increase in ROI.

Adopting DevOps involves:
1. DevOps experts outlining of traceable metrics for creating a roadmap by visualizing the desired outcome.
2. Creating a pilot framework that will include the tools of both development and operations teams further integrating these existing tools with the DevOps experts’ robust ecosystem,
3. Analyzing, designing, constructing, automating and implementing the network based on the metrics and resources collated.
DevOps Tools:

The DevOps infrastructure automation process uses several tools that define and drive the success of the implementation process. Here is a short overview of some of the more well-known and widely used tools.
- Jenkins – A Java-based continuous integration (CI) tool contributes to the faster delivery of applications. Jenkins must be aligned with a version control system such as GitHub or SVN. Whenever the code repository receives a new code, a Jenkins server builds and tests the new code and informs the team about results and any changes. Over time, Jenkins has moved from being just a CI tool to being used as an orchestration tool that builds pipelines for application provisioning and deployment.
- Chef – A ruby-based configuration management tool, Chef includes cookbooks that code infrastructure in domain service language (DSL) in combination with a little bit of programming. Chef creates virtual machines and customizes them in accordance with the rules listed in the cookbooks. An agent residing on all the servers that need configuration extracts the cookbooks from the chef master and runs them on the server to get the desired results.
- Puppet – Also, a ruby-based configuration management tool, Puppet was developed with system administrators in mind. A configuration code is written using Puppet DSLs and is wrapped in modules. Puppet performs a similar function to Chef but, unlike Puppet, Chef is a developer-focused tool. It runs a puppet agent on all servers that require configuration and extracts the compiled module from the puppet server and installs required software packages as prescribed by the module.
- Ansible – An agentless configuration management and orchestration tool, Ansible can be used for cloud computing. Ansible has configuration modules called “Playbooks,” which are written in YAML format and are easy to compose in comparison with other configuration management tools.
- Docker – Docker, a process-level virtualization tool, creates isolated environments for applications known as containers. These containers can be transferred to any other system without making any application changes. Docker has evolved as the next step in virtualization. It is beginning to become a favorite of many DevOps practitioners and leading cloud experts.
The Future of DevOps Infrastructure Automation

A lot of organizations are beginning to benefit from the implementation of DevOps infrastructure automation. And with the pace at which the demand for DevOps services is increasing, infrastructure automation has a long way to go.

As per statistics, by bringing DevOps practices into the picture, organizations can benefit by deploying code up to 30X more frequently and reduce the deployment failure to less than 50 percent.

— Veritis
May 22, 2018
DevOps Chat: DevOps and the Road to Cloud with JT Giri, CEO, nClouds

For many of us in the IT industry, migrating to the cloud is old news. Even the concept of how DevOps can help on the road to the cloud is not a novel idea. However, we need to remember that while many organizations have some cloud-based infrastructure, the real migration to the cloud is still ahead of us. By the same token, while DevOps is more popular than ever, the percentage of organizations that have fully adopted DevOps is still small.

My talk with JT Giri, CEO and co-founder of nClouds, dives into this truth and how companies like nClouds are helping organizations big and small to make the move. As usual, the streaming audio of our conversation is below, followed by the transcript of our chat.

Audio

Transcript

Alan Shimel: Hello, everyone. This is Alan Shimel, editor in chief of devopsy.kinsta.cloud, and we’re here for another DevOps Chat. Today’s DevOps Chat guest is JT Giri, CEO of nClouds. JT, welcome to DevOps Chat.

JT Giri: Hey Alan, great to be here. Thank you.

Shimel: Thank you. Thank you for being here. So JT, let’s start off a little bit about – before we get to nClouds, let’s start off – I don’t know if everyone in our audience has heard of JT Giri and your background. So why don’t we go there first, so you can give us a little background.

Giri: Absolutely. I spent the last ten years doing DevOps consulting before it was called DevOps – so helping companies to streamline their operation and managing complex infrastructure and helping them to put processes in place. My end goal was always to make sure the customer could focus on their end goal, like delivering greater value to their clients. So that’s what I’ve been doing the last 10 years.

Shimel: Got it. And then you founded nClouds. When was nClouds founded?

Giri: Yeah, so it was kind of a transition from consulting to founding this company with the mission of helping companies with cloud adoption and helping them to manage modern infrastructures that would integrate continuous delivery, continuous integration, building better culture. So we transitioned from consulting to a company.

Shimel: And you know what? You’ve done it and congratulations. I’ve done it now several times. And it’s scary, right? It can be a little scary when you – you know, it’s a big responsibility, but ultimately that’s what makes an entrepreneur, right?

Giri: Yeah, absolutely. And I think at some point you realize you can add far more value to your clients if you grow it as a team, especially 24/7 support. One of the DevOps principles is to take ownership, right? So we wanted to provide that to our customers and every gig we do, we make sure we are there for them. You know, we provide 24/7 support and make sure we are responsible for their infrastructure. It’s just simply very hard to do it yourself, you know? So that’s why we transitioned into a company and it’s been great. We’ve done over 100 AWS implementations and the transformation for our clients has been amazing. Before where it used to take them three months to deploy code, now they can deploy everyday. So it’s just been an amazing journey.

Shimel: Yeah, it has. And I mean, you know, again, as an entrepreneur and you having done this too, JT, it’s nice to get some recognition beyond – I mean other recognition is putting the money in the bank and growing the business, right? But it’s also nice to get awards, kudos or some industry recognition that things are moving in the right direction or the arrow is pointing up, as they say in football. And JT, recently nClouds received some recognition like that, didn’t they?

Giri: Yes. Yeah, so we’ve been nominated in the 20 most promising DevOps providers of 2017 and as I was saying, it’s really exciting for us, because we’ve been doing great things for our clients and the transformation has been amazing, where now the customer can focus on delivering value to their clients faster. You know, we help them with cloud migration and streamline their operations. So it feels good to be recognized, definitely. [Note from Editor: Just after our interview, nClouds was named to CIOReview’s 20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers – 2017.]

Shimel: Got it. And JT, you know, nClouds is working pretty closely with Amazon AWS, isn’t it?

Giri: Yes, we are an Advanced AWS consulting partner. We’re also an AWS Managed Service provider and DevOps competency partner.

Shimel: Got it. And how is that, JT? Because again, for our folks out in the audience, I’m sure many of our listeners are actually working on AWS-hosted infrastructure right now. But you know, from my experience anyway, there’s people who work directly with AWS and they muddle through it. They may get some training and maybe they’re old hat at it. And then there’s a large segment of I think the industry and of the customer base who really, they need the nClouds of the world. They need AWS expertise to help them make it happen. And I’ve got to assume that that forms a good chunk of your customer base right now, yeah?

Giri: Yeah, absolutely. So Alan, you know, you’re in the space and you know how confusing things are right now. You know, there’s people already moving to server-less and there’s Kubernetes, Nomad, and you know, there’s like five or six container schedulers … They want to be like Amazon or Netflix or Google of the world, but it’s very hard to get there. Since we’ve done this so many times, we have experience working with the client and taking one step at a time. Because if you’re starting out it can be intimidating, because you don’t know – you have a good vision and you want to release code fast and you want to make sure you can innovate fast. You want to migrate to AWS, but it’s very, very tough. And Alan, when we speak with customers, some of them are still starting with the config management conversations, right?

Shimel: Mm-hmm.

Giri: And so we have to kind of tone it down for them. For them, the next step is, “Hey, let’s figure out – maybe we need to work on implementing some kind of config management for you before we even think about micro services,” right? So that’s when someone like us can come in and help you to understand, where can we get the biggest bang for the buck? What should be the next step? And really help you pave the way to go to this transformation with a DevOps path.

Shimel: Yep, agreed. So JT, you know, when we start talk about it though – I want to turn back – you actually wrote an article back in May that was up on devopsy.kinsta.cloud about why your company needs an automated infrastructure now. And when you were talking it kind of triggered that for me. For our listeners out there, why do their companies need an automated infrastructure right now?

Giri: So if you subscribe to lean thinking, anything that doesn’t add value to your customer is a waste, right? So you need to define your work rigorously to be used that way. With automated infrastructure you can actually facilitate that. You can scale up and down based on your customer needs. And then you can focus on adding value to your customer and you can also lower the cost, where you just scale based on the client’s needs – and all this can yield better reliability. You know, the customers will be happy. If you’re not leveraging automation and if you’re treating the cloud infrastructure like on-prem, then you’re not really getting any value out of the cloud. So that’s why I wrote that article, just illustrating that you have to focus on automation and the cloud so you can lower the cost, have efficient workflow, and in return deliver better reliability and better customer experiences.

Shimel: Excellent, excellent. So you know, JT, you and I and people like us, we’re living in a DevOps bubble. We think DevOps is great. We think this type of methodology, this way of thinking, this kind of cultural organization is a no-brainer and of course it has to make things better. But there are a lot of people who maybe haven’t drunk the Kool-Aid, or they just don’t see it. And they’re saying, “Okay, that’s cool. That’s this week’s buzzword. What’s next? How do we keep this going?” Where do you see this going, JT? And when I say this, I mean this whole sort of – I call it Agile IT, because I heard someone at Gartner use the term. But DevOps, Agile, this new way of doing things – where do you see it going

Giri: Yeah, so I think we have a long way to go, Alan. As I mentioned earlier, you know, we are in the Valley and we are drinking this DevOps Kool-Aid. And because we have experienced this, right? Like I’ve done a lot of DevOps transformations and I can see before and after and it’s just amazing when you get the results. But there are a lot of companies out there, as I was mentioning earlier – they’re still beginning to think about config management systems, right? And they’re still doing config management in Pearl. And another challenge I face, especially when we’re working with enterprises, people have gotten used to doing things a certain way and all of a sudden there’s like so many better ways to manage your infrastructure.

So Alan, I think we have a long way to go and I think when people feel like, “Oh, this is just a buzz,” what we try to do with companies is take small steps, right? If they’re still working on config management, try to implement that and show them metrics on how things were before the implementation.

Shimel: So JT, what about nClouds? What’s next with nClouds? I know recently you guys have added some talent there and you’ve got this award going on and you’re getting buzz in the industry. Where do you see the company going?

Giri: Yeah, so our mission from day one has been to drive this cloud adoption and help companies with DevOps transformation. So companies like Google or Netflix, the unicorns, they can really attract a lot of DevOps talent. But there are a lot of companies and a lot of enterprises out there and they’re not able to attract that kind of talent. So our mission is to bring DevOps transformation to all of these companies, right? That’s why we’ve been hiring. And Randy Newell joined recently, so we’re very excited about that, and we have been hiring very talented engineers.

And we also released a product called nOps.io, which manages security and change management of the cloud. So over the last several years the focus has been a lot on infrastructure tooling, like Terraform and (AWS) CloudFormation. And I think we’re missing the process piece of the puzzle in this DevOps. So that’s what we’re trying to bridge, where if there’s a hundred people or ten people making changes in your infrastructure, how do you manage those changes? How do you make sure security is not an afterthought? How do you make sure every single change is documented and traced without slowing people down? So we’ll continue to innovate and help companies in the DevOps space, yes.

Shimel: Got it, got it. All right, well JT, we’re about out of time here. Thanks for coming up and appearing on this episode of DevOps Chat. Continued success with nClouds. And we’d like to see more articles from you up on devopsy.kinsta.cloud, actually. I’m sure our audience – our audience really liked the first one, and we’d like to see a lot more.

Giri: Thanks, Alan. Thanks for having me.

Shimel: But good luck. Thank you. All right. Hey, JT Giri of nClouds – CEO and founder of nClouds, thanks for being this episode’s guest on DevOps Chat. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chat. We’ll see you on the next episode of DevOps Chat.

— Alan Shimel

August 16, 2017
Tips to Optimize the Cloud for Scaling

When I first started migrating companies to the cloud (about seven years ago), companies would ask me, “How come the app isn’t scaling? How come users are still complaining about the slowness?” I would explain that the cloud enables auto-scaling, but you still have to make sure your app can scale in the cloud. In people’s minds, auto-scaling and the cloud was synonyms.

I don’t get asked that question anymore (maybe people realized the cloud is not as magical as it seems). But now, people think the cloud is synonymous with speed, agility and cost-effectiveness. Sure, cloud enables all that. But you still need to make sure you optimize the cloud to facilitate that. I see many companies in the opposite situation: their accounts full of resources with names such as test1, test2 and finaltest2, or they put together a SWAT team to reduce an AWS bill, or security is an afterthought. So many engineers are making changes, it’s hard to know who is doing what.

Before you run into this situation (maybe you’re already there), you have to create tools and processes to optimize your cloud for scale.

Establish Strong Policies

The magnitude of changes in cloud infrastructure is high. Unless you establish strong policies, managing all the resources across multiple cloud accounts get out of control pretty quickly. The most effective way we have seen is using tags for resources. For example, use tags that identify whether the resource is from a certain department are added to each resource. Typically, it works very well when the tagging process is embedded into the automation. If there are new resources that don’t comply, automation should terminate these resources. You should enforce policies like these sooner than later.

And just because these resources were provisioned with proper tagging, it doesn’t mean they are provisioned for its full capacity. You should build automation to find underutilized instances and establish a process for downsizing. To ensure everyone complies with these policies, you should also establish change management process.

Change Management and CMDB

The objective of the change management process is to ensure all the infrastructure changes cause minimum disruption and meet internal guidelines. Many say that ITIL change management process is not compatible for fast environments such as cloud. I agree that the traditional way of doing change management by tracking changes manually just doesn’t work, due to the magnitude of changes. But in the cloud, you can leverage automation to streamline the change management process; for example, you can use automation to filter normal changes versus manual changes. Once all the AWS changes are reviewed and approved, in addition to bringing visibility to all the changes for security and reliability change management can simultaneously help reduce waste.

Most companies heavily leverage auto-scaling, where new resources can be launched based on specified metrics. However, this behavior makes approving changes difficult. If new resources are appearing and disappearing, how do we track what truly changed in the infrastructure? To gain a true picture, you need an infrastructure delta, which shows resource updates for the still-running resources for a given time period. You can also use automation to build a dynamic change management database, and use auto-discovery to keep CMDB in sync.

Shared Responsibility

DevOps calls for breaking down the walls between operation and development team to deliver code faster. If you release software fast, you can rapidly add value to your customer. The cloud enables this culture because developers no longer have to wait for IT to provision resources. What doesn’t work well, though, is when no one takes responsibility for optimizing cost and maintaining security. If engineers can launch resources, they are also responsible for cost and security—it’s a shared responsibility. You should provide visibility to the cost for each department, based on tagging we talked about earlier, so they know the cloud is not free 🙂 Anyone can launch resources as long as they understand the security best practices for each service they are using.

Conclusion

Lean thinking calls for reducing waste. What’s waste? Anything that doesn’t add value to the customer. You should work fearlessly to reduce waste. You move to the cloud because you can innovate fast and it’s cost-effective, so you can quickly add value to your customer. You should continue to optimize your cloud infrastructure to ensure it’s meeting its original intent.

About the Author / JT Giri

JT is the creator of nOps – AWS cloud security tool. He spent last 10 years helping companies migrate to cloud and build automated infrastructures. nOps is a next generation security and collaboration solution for the cloud. nOps applies change management practices to deliver integrated security and reduce cloud waste.

July 3, 2017
Why Your Company Needs An Automated Infrastructure

IT teams and software have started to embrace automation across all levels of the development life cycle, from planning and testing to deployment and maintenance. With the advent of DevOps, and the cloud, it’s now entirely possible for technical teams to spin up new environments in a matter of minutes instead of days.

The process of applying continual automation to the software development life cycle is known as continuous delivery. With continuous delivery, businesses can continually perform integration tests, unit tests and code analysis. They can provision and configure servers and deploy software into their cloud environments. Each step in the continuous delivery process can be repeated several times a day depending on how much new software needs to be released.

The Benefits of Infrastructure Automation

There are several benefits to implementing infrastructure automation and a continuous delivery model in your organization. This blog post will explore five of the most considerable advantages you’ll experience when you transition from manual software development to an entirely automated process.

Efficient Workflows

The biggest benefit of continuous delivery is that it allows organizations to automate a variety of tasks with greater efficiency and accuracy. Each task within a workflow also can have separate dependencies to ensure that they are executed only when certain conditions are met. For example, you could set a condition to provision server only after certain tests are done.

Lower Costs

Because automation doesn’t require team members to perform a lot of manual steps, companies can save up on staffing costs. For companies that have larger teams and more complex infrastructures, the savings could be substantial. The best part about it all is that reducing staffing costs won’t have an effect on the end-product quality. In some cases, the product quality will be better than if the company used a manual process.

Better Reliability

Continuous delivery is typically more efficient and consistent than other software development models. It significantly improves business agility and stability and ensures that companies remain compliant at all stages of the software development life cycle. With an automated infrastructure, companies can also implement sophisticated monitoring and analytics to track the performance of their environment at any given time. By doing so, they’ll be able to identify issues before they pose any serious risks.

Improved Collaboration

One of the main reasons why DevOps and the idea of automation have gained popularity in recent years is because they enable collaboration between different teams in an organization. Automation gives software developers and IT teams the ability to communicate, which leads to better efficiency and more releases. This cross-team collaboration becomes especially crucial when working on large-scale projects and releases.

Faster Updates

Customers continually demand better and newer products, which why it’s important for software development and IT teams to use automation. Automation not only streamlines the process of releasing new software, it also significantly reduces the amount of time it takes to fix bugs and other issues that may affect the customer’s user experience.

Summary

Although the benefits of automation are clear, there are few downsides that you should also be aware of before going all-in and implementing a fully automated continuous delivery model. The biggest downside is that transitioning to an automated process typically has significant costs, which could have a temporary adverse effect on your bottom line. Furthermore, if your business has been using traditional software development models for years, it will take some time before the entire team gets on board with an entirely new system.

How do you use automation in your organization? Let us know in the comments below.

About the Author / JT Giri

JT Giri is CEO of nClouds. He a seasoned DevOps professional with a decade of experience in building large-scale and distributed infrastructures. He co-founded nClouds, a leading DevOps solution provider, which helps companies with cloud migration and DevOps solutions. He is passionate about transforming organizations by implementing DevOps methodologies.

May 25, 2017
DevOps Chat: John Harris, LeftShift on DevOps Consulting and Continuous Testing

This episode of DevOps Chat has us speaking with John Harris of LeftShift IT. LeftShift is based in London, but has customers the world over. He speaks with us about DevOps consulting and continuous testing. John has some great insights to share that I think you will find interesting.

Alan Shimel:                Hi, everyone. Alan Shimel – devopsy.kinsta.cloud here for another DevOps chats. This episode’s guest is John Harris of LeftShift IT. John, welcome.

John Harris:               Thanks, Alan. Good to be here.

Alan Shimel:                Thank you. So John, what exactly is your role with LeftShift

John Harris:               My role is the Head of Continuous Delivery in DevOps with LeftShift.

Alan Shimel:                Okay. And John, you know what? Some people in our audience are probably not familiar or may have not heard of LeftShift IT before. Why don’t you give us quickly a background of LeftShift?

John Harris:               Yeah. We’re primarily a services consultancy in the continuous delivery – DevOps continuous testing space. We work quite a lot with IBM, a lot of other different vendors. Based in London and the UK, but we have a lot of our business offices based in the U.S. as well.

Alan Shimel:                Sure. And John, before we jump into the subject of today’s chat, which is around continuous testing, I want you to take a moment and just talk about this burgeoning field of DevOps consulting. It seems to be exploding. I was in London for the DevOps Enterprise Summit last month and I was absolutely blown away with the diversity of firms from big to small that are offering DevOps consulting services. How long has LeftShift been in the DevOps consulting space?

John Harris:               We’ve been in the area kind of on and off I guess you could say ten years. I guess most people would say DevOps has only been around since that original kind of DevOps coining days again in Belgium, but I guess a lot of people say the discipline itself had been around before the name, so I guess the processes around DevOps you could say we’ve been involved in for quite some time I guess.

Alan Shimel:                Sure. And John you know I don’t think we would be seeing this explosion of DevOps consulting if there wasn’t a wanting audience for DevOps consulting continuous delivery consulting services. Is that pretty much what you’re seeing with LeftShift? I assume business is good.

John Harris:               Yeah. It’s one of those interesting areas where one of the things I guess the DevOps consultants could say is you don’t just want to create a new DevOps practice in your company. You don’t just want to bring in these pieces, but it’s a difficult loop because you’ve got to then support those processes and you’ve got to get that knowledge into the organization somehow, so I think our model is firmly to go and help people get started and gussy up their own practice and their own good processes and then kind of lead them to it, so yeah absolutely.

Alan Shimel:                Got it. So John, let’s pivot a little bit here and talk about continuous testing. So, I will tell you that on devopsy.kinsta.cloud the whole notion of testing, continuous testing, automated testing is one of the most hotly debated and in some ways controversial topics within DevOps. Wondering if you see similar?

John Harris:               Yeah. I think so. I mean I think traditionally in so far development, testing has traditionally kind of been seen as just the necessary part that you have to do at the end, but I think now that continuous delivery is becoming a real discipline and people are being forced to go faster and faster for getting ahead of the market and things like – can’t afford to see testing as a poor cousin of development anymore and I think testing is really becoming – people realize I can throw stuff out into production as quick as I want really, but actually it’s throwing it out with the quality that it needs to – that product to still be viable in the market. So I think absolutely. The drive towards testing is long overdue, but it’s definitely getting started.

Alan Shimel:                Got it. And John, can you have continuous without the automation though?

John Harris:               Personally I don’t think so. I think that DevOps really – one of the biggest buzz words for me – DevOps and continuous delivery is really the organization. I think you have to have the process behind it, but I think when you go towards anything delivering more rapidly through all of these stages in our development life cycle in production, I think you just cannot scale at the size that we need to in order to get that stuff out without automating the process.

I mean when you talk about the union it forms like Netflix and Etsy and all of those guys, now three, four years ago, there’s no way you can deliver that kind of scale without putting in the automated tool in and also the processes and the culture around that to enable that to where it will have the effect that you need.

Alan Shimel:                Sure. So John, I think one of the controversy – not controversy, but one of the big discussion points around this though is what does this mean for the traditional Q/A role and for the people in the Q/A space?

John Harris:               Yeah. I think teams have traditionally kind of been split. I mean obviously we have these silos and DevOps as kind of trying to address the silos of development and testing and ops and those kinds of things. I think again, testing’s one of the things that gets left out of that, but certainly in the customers that we work with, we’re seeing a lot of Q/A teams being retrained in certain ways, brought into the development side of the organization, having their practices changed to more of a development software engineering kind of way of working.

We’re certainly seeing some of the geographic splits that have been traditional in this area kind of being broken down, perhaps testing, quite a lot of off shoring work in testing. Some of that’s coming on shore. Testers are becoming more technical but yeah, retraining and the different skills required now for the Q/A role, to bring that into more of a technical automation. That’s certainly a question a lot of our customers are grappling with right now and I think the decisions they aren’t just technical, but they go into the culture side of the company and how the company has organized itself. So yeah, it is a contentious area. I agree.

Alan Shimel:                Yeah. It certainly is and it’s really one of those – for people in the Q/A space, it’s a pocketbook issue, right? They perceive a threat to a livelihood, even though I don’t think that’s the case. I think it allows them actually to soar and higher and do bigger and better things, but there’s certainly that element to it.

John, I want to talk for a moment about service virtualization and we actually have a webinar coming up on I think it’s August 23rd where we’re going to looking at a real unicorn company – Mertz Shipping Lines, which is I think is 80 years old or something in traditional shipping, not what you would think of as your Google, Facebook kind of company. But they’re going to be talking about service virtualization, shifting left. Thoughts on that at all?

John Harris:               Yeah. Service virtualization is an area that we work with quite a lot, especially around the IBM tool set. And yeah, Mertz is doing great work. Almost all of the organizations that we work that are trying to do some kind of parallel development, I mean one of the patents that we see is building the y and Rex API layers on top of some of their legacy – so business services and things like that and they want to do some parallel development with the ____, with the Rex, with the user in space layers. So SV’s really able to give those teams a really solid platform because everything’s based on their service interface definitions and it can really do some proper parallel development there and we’re seeing some great shifts left with those development teams and actually the ability to identify a whole bunch of defects before they would even go and integrate with each other.

I think we had one team who identified over 100 defects in the early testing stages using service virtualization before they even would have integrated with the other services. They were able to get those fixed even before they went into their next integration environment, so that was a really great success story – service virtualization.

Alan Shimel:                Yeah, absolutely. I think I interviewed the Mertz guys at Interconnect last year and it was an interesting case study. I guess we should mention – there is a Service Virtualization for Dummies book that people can download and I don’t have the URL in front of me. I’ll try to include it in our notes. I think it comes out from IBM for people who are interested in this. But John, let’s return – what do you see – what in your role with LeftShift, what do you see as sort of the next frontier where the – not the battle, but where there are points to be made, where there are battles to be won for lack of a better word in the near term future?

John Harris:               I think the biggest one really and we’re starting to see the shift now, but it’s still early stages and the custom is that – for the unicorns and the startups, this is probably not going to be a big bull, but certainly for enterprise – user interface testing is still very prevalent and we talk about the testing pyramid how most of our tests are one of the unit tests and then we’re gonna have a good base of integration tests and then a small percentage of UI test if you want.

I think currently a lot of our organizations have one of them that’s flipped on its head because it’s easy to do UI testing and reason about it going to the business, but now when we go faster, I think the traditional focus on UI testing is going to have to go away, but when we talk about APIs on top of everything and things like the API economy and a lot of systems now just don’t have UIs. Coming out with a lot of systems that are all API driven and smart devices.

I think everything’s going to have to be integration tested. I think the APIs and the logic behind them is really where the core business functionality is, so I think that’s where the importance is gonna be and it’s going to be moving organizations and showing them that integration testing and API testing is not the way to go and obviously automating that as part of their delivery pipeline, which is sometimes a little more difficult to do on the UI side.

Alan Shimel:                Yeah. Quick question on that because I thought about how to deal firsthand with this issue. Shouldn’t the API testing – at least the tests themselves come from the same people who are writing the API? In other words, where’s the burden? Should the people who are providing the APIs also provide the testing for it or is that sort of letting the wolf in the chicken coop, right? Where you’re using someone else’s API. The burden is on you to make sure that that is in fact working with your system.

John Harris:               Yeah. That’s a really interesting point I think and there are different kind of philosophies around it. Myself, we work a lot with the virtualization and the testing side of it, so we would say that if you’re developing the interface then you’re also in charge of developing the basic virtual service for that to integrate with your consumers, but I’m very much on the side of consumers developing the API test or the APIs that you consume, because if you think about the case where I’m a consumer, I may not need every field in an API. I may just use a few if I’m developing loosely coupled micro services let’s say.

So I’m really in favor of each team who consumes an API developing their own tests and then contributing those tests to the API team so they can be run as call, every build or every deployment. So then if I change functionality and those tests fail, I know which team gave those tests to me and I can go and alert them, “Well, look I’ve made a change and I’m just going to break your implementation or your call of this API, but I may not have broken anyone else’s.”

I mean I think putting the burden to test every piece of functionality, especially as we go to more loosely coupled services is kind of an unreasonable burden on the team developing that API.

Alan Shimel:                Got it. You know what, John? Believe it or not as I told you I think before we went live, time goes really quick on these and we’re coming up on the end. If someone wants to find out more about LeftShift, where can they go?

John Harris:               I think it’s LeftShiftIT.com and we’ve just revamped out website, so they can find out all about our services and products and everything we offer on there.

Alan Shimel:                Okay. And then finally John, I wanted to end with the kind of question I guess I ask just about every guest, which is for our audience out there, if they’re gonna read, what should – if they –hopefully if they do read everyone should read books. What do you recommend is the next book our audience reads?

John Harris:               I’m a big Jez Humble fan and I’m not going to recommend Continuous Delivery, because I’m sure everyone’s read that who’s listened to the podcast, but is Lean Enterprise book – How High Performance Organizations Innovate at Scale and it’s Jez Humble, Joanne Molesky and Barry O’Reilly is an awesome book for any enterprise looking to get into this kind of area.

Alan Shimel:                Absolutely. I actually have it on my book shelf in the office. Good one, John. Anyway, I think that’s gonna use up our time here on this edition of DevOps Chat. John Harris, LeftShift IT, thank you very much for being our guest and we look forward to hearing more about LeftShift and continuous testing service virtualization going forward and continued success.

John Harris:               Great. Thanks for having me, Alan.

Alan Shimel:                Thank you. This is Alan Shimel for devopsy.kinsta.cloud and DevOps Chats. Until next time, have a great day.

August 16, 2016