We are pleased to announce the 2019 DevOps Dozen honorees. I would say DevOps Dozen winners, but truth be told every single one of the finalists in this year’s DevOps Dozen was a winner.

When I launched the DevOps Dozen in 2015, I hoped they would grow to reflect and recognize the best of the best in the maturing DevOps space. This year, there is no doubt in my mind that the winners are unsurpassed in the DevOps community. In fact, the whole process of nominations was open, from the public making the selections of finalists to the criteria the judges used, with the results showing they really do represent the best in the community.

Congratulations to the honorees in the 12 categories—it is quite an accomplishment to be selected. Congratulations also to all of the finalists, who should be proud to be part of such an impressive list.

Since the nomination process began, our team has gone through thousands of votes to pick out the finalists in each category. It was not an easy task, as we couldn’t automate (DevOps) it; we had to do it by hand. Also, many thanks to the judges—Jayne Groll of the DevOps Institute, Mitchell Ashley of Accelerated Strategies (more on that soon) and Charlene O’Hanlon, managing editor of MediaOps—for making the hard calls. Thanks also to everyone here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud for helping out. Technically, I was a judge this year as well but only voted in the case of a tie. With three other judges, I was spared from having to pick any of the winners this year.

So, without further ado, here are the 2019 DevOps Dozen winners:

Best DevOps Solution Provider

The DevOps Dozen award for the Best DevOps Solution Provider for 2019 goes to GitLab. This year was a particularly hard year to pick a winner. There are so many truly great DevOps solution providers. But GitLab has really separated itself from the pack, from the breadth of its vision for an end-to-end solution to the many different ways that GitLab operates as a company. The venture community has certainly been impressed, investing more than $300 million in the company. The company is literally an open book, from its totally remote workforce and more.  But it is not just that GitLab is different; GitLab has captured a broad swath of the market who feel bought into the company.

GitLab has fundamentally changed the way development, security and ops teams collaborate and build software—helping customers on their DevOps journey in ways no other company can—by providing a single application for the entire DevOps life cycle. The GitLab solution is the result of the collaboration between thousands of community contributors and feedback from the more than 100,000 organizations that have adopted GitLab to power their DevOps transformations. The GitLab community contributes code, documentation, translation, design and product ideas based on their real-world challenges, making GitLab more useful and valuable. Because of the community behind GitLab, in many cases, we see rapid adoption through better developer experience and collaboration.

Best DevOps Practitioner of the Year

Jasmine James is our winner for the DevOps Practitioner of the Year. Jasmine is the IT manager and head of Delta’s DevOps Center of Excellence at Delta Airlines, where she administers, documents and supports the development tools to enable the faster delivery of quality software.

I met Jasmine at one of the many DevOps conferences I attended and had a chance to interview her. I remember telling some of our people how impressed I was with this young woman’s poise, intelligence, ability to communicate and enthusiasm. She embodies the term “star power.” I’ve seen Jasmine at several other events and she continues to impress. I am not surprised by her award for this category.

Jasmine has been in IT for approximately eight years, a journey that has included numerous different roles ranging from Q.E. automation and engineering at a large telecom company to her current role as a DevOps leader at Delta Airlines. In 2019, Jasmine had the opportunity to share Delta’s DevOps and Cloud adoption journey on stage at several different events including DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, GitLab Commit London and the keynote at GitLab Commit Brooklyn. Jasmine’s work at Delta was also covered in quite a few articles that were recently published, including “Mayfield CIO Insights: The Journey to Cloud Native – 3 Key Concepts,” “Nexus Innovator: Jasmine James of Delta,” and “GitLab Commit Brooklyn: DevOps as a Single Application.” Also, check out her recent podcast at Software Engineering Daily as well as recent interviews with Digital Anarchist at GitLab Commit Brooklyn and DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas, where she discusses the process of changing the developer culture within Delta, as well as what it is like to build software for an airline. Jasmine recently added an MBA to her professional portfolio from LSU Shreveport, and has been on the mission to empower developers and enable them to develop secure software: “I consider myself to be, like, an advocate for developers and just making sure that they’re enabled to deliver awesome stuff.”

Best DevOps Solution Provider Executive

Shlomi Ben Haim, co-founder and CEO of JFrog, is the winner of the Best DevOps Solution Executive of the Year.

I consider Shlomi a close friend of mine and couldn’t be happier to see him win this award again. But my feelings for him and our friendship aren’t why Shlomi repeats as DevOps solution provider executive of the year. JFrog is a dynamic industry leader that continues to expand its offering in the DevOps space, but ask anyone what its real strength is and they will tell you it is the amazing culture of the “Frogs.” It is not just the employees themselves; the magic and enthusiasm for JFrog and Liquid Software are felt throughout its vast community.

This best in the industry culture is directly attributable to Shlomi Ben Haim. The company and its culture are a direct reflection of his own outlook and what he brings to our community every day of the year. He is truly deserving of this honor.

Shlomi brings more than 20 years of experience in building profitable, high-growth information technology companies. He is a recognized visionary in the DevOps space, having guided JFrog from its inception with just three co-founders (along with Yoav Landman and Fred Simon) to a privately held, global DevOps company with a valuation of more than $1 billion. With the releases of the JFrog Platform, JFrog Pipelines, JFrog Xray and the JFrog Container Registry in the last two years, Shlomi continues to foresee market dynamics and push JFrog forward to deliver next-generation solutions. His next maneuver is into the emerging concept of continuous updates and “leaping” into the DevOps for IoT space. Under his leadership, JFrog has grown revenue 500% in the past three years and the solution has expanded its reach to more than 6,000 customers, including more than 70% of the Fortune 500 as well as rapidly growing JFrog’s DevOps tooling usage to millions of developers worldwide. Shlomi’s efforts have guided JFrog and the DevOps tooling market into mainstream industry recognition, with 2019 awards from the Forbes Cloud 100, Deloitte 500, 451 Research, IDC, Bank of America and more.

Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast of the Year

DevOps Chat: CI/CD Scalability Lessons with CircleCI featuring Rob Zuber, CTO of CircleCI was the Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast of the Year.

While I would have liked to see my podcast with Rob win this award, the podcast he and Mitchell Ashley did was truly worthy.

Additionally, Rob and the entire CircleCI team are well-deserving of recognition. 2019 has been a watershed year for the team there. They have truly broken into the top tier of providers in the CI/CD space based on just about every criteria you could use. Rob’s leadership is a driving force behind that success.

Rob Zuber is a 20-year veteran of software startups—a four-time founder and three-time CTO. CircleCI is now the largest build platform in the world, used by more than 600,000 developers and 30,000 companies worldwide. Rob leads a team of 100+ engineers distributed around the globe across 20 countries. Similar to what you heard in his podcast episode, Rob’s ethos of transparency pulls through in all his work. He regularly contributes to various industry sites with practical feedback for his peers and recently pioneered a video series called “Drawn Out Conversations,” in which he interviews other leaders who share their candid approaches to software development and teams.

Best DevOps Book/eBook

The winner for the Best DevOps Book/eBook for the year is “The Unicorn Project – A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data,” by Gene Kim.

Some may not be surprised that DevOps legend Gene Kim’s follow-up to “The Phoenix Project” won this award. But make no mistake, there were a lot of great books on DevOps published in 2019, including several from Gene’s IT Revolution.

At the end of the day, though, “The Unicorn Project” is a category-defining novel that takes a look at the world of the Phoenix Project from another angle, with a more developer-focused lens.

I know firsthand how much effort Gene put into this book, including gathering feedback from so many leaders in the DevOps space to make sure the message, the methodologies and outcomes described were on target. In every sense, “The Unicorn Project” is a worthy follow-on to “The Phoenix Project.” It has sold roughly 50,000 copies worldwide and is rated 4.5 stars on Amazon with 74 customer reviews and 4.5 stars on GoodReads with 101 reviews. It is a Wall Street Journal Bestseller and is ranked #98 in USA Today‘s list of Best Selling Books.

Top DevOps Evangelist

Rosalind Radcliffe is our winner for the Top DevOps Evangelist for 2019. Rosalind is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for CLM and DevOps and a member of the IBM Academy of Technology and the Academy Leadership team.

Rosalind is perhaps best-known as the IBM Enterprise Systems Z DevOps expert. Some still don’t recognize what has been done to make today’s modern mainframes work so well in a DevOps environment, but that’s in spite of Rosalind’s tireless efforts: She has traveled the world evangelizing that there is very little you can’t do with an IBM Z system from a modern DevOps perspective.

I have interviewed Rosalind many times over the past six years. I am always impressed first of all with her intelligence, but also with her enthusiasm and exuberance in bringing the DevOps-for-mainframes story to market. She is truly a bright light in the DevOps universe and so very deserving of this recognition.

Rosalind is seen as the mainframe DevOps go-to person and as such her conference videos are used by clients as part of their internal DevOps events. Her focus is on much more than just the mainframe, but also bringing DevOps to large enterprises. She is a requested speaker for DevOps at IBM’s Executive Leadership training events to help senior leadership understand how to transform in support of DevOps. Rosalind works tirelessly with customers, analysts, colleagues and vendors to help them understand that DevOps on the mainframe is no different than DevOps in the cloud or on any other distributed platform. She has written several “DevOps for Dummies” books and works with the local chapter of Women in Technology to encourage women to be leaders in this competitive field.

Best DevOps Transformation

HSBC was the judges’ choice for Best DevOps Transformation for 2019. HSBC has done amazing new and innovative work to implement DevOps with Google Anthos. The company is also a very active partner in transforming DevOps not only in its own company but within the DevOps industry.

HSBC has taken a lot of risks and moved boldly forward with its own DevOps digital transformation. The company has a number of new development projects underway to build new and improved applications for its customers, and has evolved from being a financial services organization to also being a leading IT organization. Much is said about the nimble startups that call themselves fintech companies, but HSBC is a nimble giant that deserves inclusion in that category also. Check out this interview with Darryl West, Group CIO, about how HSBC started its journey by simplifying its IT architecture, introducing DevOps and Agile ways of working and using the newest technologies to improve how the company interacts with its customers.

HSBC was also recognized by CloudBees for the success of its DevOps transformation and use of the CloudBees products. The company truly represents a bright spot in a growing galaxy of successful DevOps transformations in the financial industry.

Best DevOps Transformation Leader

Courtney Kissler, vice president, Global Technology at Nike, is our winner for the Best DevOps Transformation Leader of the year.

I have known Courtney for five-plus years as a result of her presenting at Gene Kim’s DevOps Enterprise Summit. During this time I have seen her lead groups bringing remarkable DevOps transformations at Nordstrom, Starbucks and Nike. In my humble opinion, she is one of the most accomplished and effective leaders of DevOps transformation in the world today.

At Nike, Courtney is focusing on transforming the organization in alignment with a consumer-direct strategy, with some amazing results. She sponsored and hosted the first-ever Internal DevOps Day at Nike, and based on the feedback and success of the first event, she recently hosted a second event that included industry speakers and hosted workshops. She authored and published a Coursera course on DevOps practices, especially the mindset shift, highlighting her personal journey and experience. The course is currently rated at 4.8/5 stars and has received quite a bit of feedback, which has helped broaden her network and reach into the community. She also wrote a foreword for the Shingo Award-winning book “Accelerate.”

She is also a member of the DevOps Enterprise Summit planning committee, where she focuses on senior leadership and demonstrating the partnership between technology and business, connecting key leaders to the community. She also contributes to the DOES conference through panels, facilitating lean coffee breaks and a new part of the program called “DevOps Confessions.” Courtney also contributes to the community through the DevOps Enterprise Forum papers, where she shares her expertise to give back to the community.

Best New DevOps Solution Company

The Best New DevOps Solution Company for 2019 is Armory. Armory seeks to become the enterprise Spinnaker company.

I became aware of Armory at an Insight Ignite conference in early 2019. I met the CEO DROdio and instantly saw the “We want to change the world” attitude that I have seen in successful entrepreneurs for more 20 years.

Since then, Armory has continued to evangelize bringing Spinnaker, which was developed by Netflix and Google, to market, helping large enterprises accelerate their CI/CD transformation and go-to-market.

2019 was a big year for Armory as the company announced significant funding and customer wins and really established its presence in the market. This company is one that bears watching in the months and years to come—Armory has the ability to change the game.

Best DevOps Conference of the Year

DevOps World | Jenkins World was selected as the Best DevOps Conference of the year.

This is quite an accomplishment, considering the quality and popularity of several of the other DevOps conferences including DevOps Enterprise Summit and KubeCon/CloudNativeCon, among others.

The two DevOps World |Jenkins World events (one in San Francisco, one in Lisbon) won our judges’ votes, though. The DevOps World events represent a great balance of training/learning, great session material and a broad focus on all levels of the DevOps value stream. Whether you are a seasoned DevOps executive or a newbie DevOps engineer, there is something for nearly everyone at DevOps World/Jenkins World.

Best DevOps Presentation of the Year

“Workplace engagement and countering employee burnout,” a presentation at DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2019, is the winner of the Best DevOps Presentation for 2019.

While there were many great presentations on various aspects of DevOps that were worthy of winning this award in 2019, this presentation and panel transcended DevOps and really touched on an important subject across all walks of life and careers.

Employee burnout is recognized by the World Health Organization as a valid condition. At the very end of the spectrum, the results can be truly life-threatening. More often, this condition can sabotage the success of your team and organization.

What made this presentation so powerful was the panel presenting it. Featuring three PhDs, including Dr. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and chief scientist, DevOps Research and Assessment LLC; Dr. Christina Maslach, professor of psychology, emerita, University of California, Berkeley, and a recognized leader in this space; Dr. Steve Spear, principal, HVE LLC; and Gene Kim, it as a great dive into the subject and one that I urge you to watch on the IT Revolution YouTube channel.

Following this session, I had the honor of interviewing the panel members (minus Gene Kim) and it was also a fantastic dive into the subject. You can view that on Digital Anarchist.

Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

devopsy.kinsta.cloud article “Mainframes: The Cloud Before the Cloud,” authored by Bob Reselman, is the winner for the Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year.

In his article, Bob shares his insights on why the mainframe was the cloud before the cloud and why the mainframe is a perfect resource for today’s and tomorrow’s cloud computing infrastructure.

You may know Bob also as the creative genius behind devopsy.kinsta.cloud’s RoelBob cartoons, but he is far from just a cartoonist. He has almost 40 years of experience in the tech space. He teaches at several universities and schools and is a sought-after speaker at conferences. He writes and speaks with the voice of experience and expertise.

Bob is a nationally known software developer, system architect and technical writer/journalist. He has written four books on computer programming and dozens of articles about topics related to software development technologies and techniques, as well as the culture of software development.

There you have them, the 12 winners of this year’s DevOps Dozen. Thanks to everyone who voted and nominated candidates. Stay tuned for 2020 DevOps Dozen and, as always, thanks for supporting devopsy.kinsta.cloud and the rest of the MediaOps family of communities. If you have questions, please write us DD@devops.com.

— Alan Shimel

We are proud to announce the 2019 DevOps Dozen finalists. When we first launched five years ago, I hoped the DevOps Dozen would grow into an award that would honor the best of the best in the maturing DevOps space.

This year, we have included three new categories: Best DevOps Practitioner of the Year, Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast of the Year and Best DevOps Conference of the Year.

Our finalist are definitely the most outstanding leaders in DevOps. Congratulations to each and every one of the finalists in the 12 categories. It is quite an accomplishment to make it this far into the process. Whether you’re chosen as a winner or not, you should be proud to be part of such an impressive list, and don’t get discouraged as there will be more opportunities in the future.

Since the nomination process was opened to the public, our team has gone through thousands of votes to pick out the finalists in each category. It was not an easy task, as we couldn’t automate (DevOps) it—we had to do it by hand. Many thanks to the everyone here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud for doing this.

The next step in the process is for the finalists in each category to submit a presentation on why they deserve the award. Please email your final presentation to dd@devops.com by Dec 15, 2019. That information will be passed onto our panel of judges who will then select the winners. The 12 (it is the DevOps DOZEN, after all) winners will be announced in December.

Here Are the 2019 DevOps Dozen Finalists

1. Best DevOps Solution Provider

• Broadcom
• CloudBees
• GitLab
• IBM
• JFrog
• Plutora

2. Best DevOps Practitioner of the Year

• Dinesh Ramamurthy, Engineering Manager, Mercedes-Benz Research & Development North America, Inc.
• Mark Moncelle, IT Architect, State Farm
• Daniel Ritchie, Distinguished Engineer, Broadridge Financial Solution
• Mirco Hering, Global DevOps practice lead, Accenture
• Jasmine James, IT Manager – DevOps CoE, Delta Air Lines

3. Best DevOps Solution Provider Executive

• Ashok Reddy, SVP & GM, Enterprise Software Division, Broadcom
• Barry Baker, Vice President, IBM Z Software
• Chris O’Malley, President and CEO, Compuware
• Sacha Labourey, CEO, CloudBees
• Shlomi Ben Haim, Co-Founder and CEO, JFrog
• Sid Sijbrandij, CEO GitLab

4. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast of the Year

• CI/CD Scalability Lessons – Startup to Enterprise, CircleCI
• Red Hat Developer Experience in the IBM Era, Brad Micklea
• Cisco DevNet – DevOps and the Programmable Network, Susie Wee
• Shift Right DevSecOps w/ Capsule8 & Pete Markowsky
• Jfrog Acquires Shippable – An Executive Conversation 

5. Best DevOps Book/eBook of the Year

• The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data – Gene Kim
• War and Peace and IT: Business Leadership, Technology, and Success in the Digital Age – Mark Schwartz
• DevOps Paradox: The truth about DevOps by the people on the front line – Viktor Farcic
• Team Topologies: Organizing Business and Technology Teams for Fast Flow – Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais
• Project to Product: How to Survive and Thrive in the Age of Digital Disruption with the Flow – Mik Kersten
• Engineering DevOps: From Chaos to Continuous Improvement … and Beyond – Marc Hornbeek

6. Top DevOps Evangelist

• Baruch Sadogursky, Developer Advocate, Jfrog
• Brian Dawson, DevOps Evangelist, CloudBees
• Jeff Keyes, Director Product Marketing, Plutora
• Matt Stratton, DevOps Advocate, PagerDuty
• Robert Reeves, CTO, Datical
• Rosalind Radcliffe, Distinguished Engineer, Chief Architect for DevOps z Systems, IBM
• Sanjeev Sharma, Vice President, Global Practice Director, Data Modernization & Strategy, Delphix 

7. Best DevOps Transformation

• Allstate
• HSBC
• Broadridge Financial Solutions
• Zions Bancorp
• Royal Bank of Canada
• Societe General
• Sony Pictures Entertainment

8. Best DevOps Transformation Leader

• Courtney Kissler, Vice President, Global Technology, Nike
• Fernando Cornago, Senior Director, Platform Engineering, Adidas
• Rajeev Mahajan, CIO Engineering & DevOps, HSBC
• Russel Webster, VP & Sr. Manager, Delivery Tools & Services, Zions Bancorp
• Shahin Mohammadkhani, Executive Director, Information Technology, Sony Pictures Entertainment

9. Best New DevOps Solutions Company

• RAFAY
• Altitude Networks
• Omnition
• Armory
• Lumigo
• Capsule8

10. Top DevOps Conferences

• DevOps Enterprise Summit
• Red Hat Summit
• DevOps World | Jenkins World
• JFrog SwampUp
• KubeCon & CloudNativeCon

11. Best DevOps Presentations of the Year

• Expert Panel: Workplace Engagement & Countering Employee Burnout, Dr. Nicole Forsgren, Dr. Christina Maslach, Dr. Steve Spear and Gene Kim
• Infrastructure as Code (Yes, it applies to z/OS as well) – Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM
• Fireside chat with Chris O’Malley and Joe Aho of Compuware with Gene Kim
• Jenkins Performance: Avoiding Pitfalls, Diagnosing Issues & Scaling for Growth by Owen Mehegan & Ryan Smith. CloudBees
• Deliver Results, Not Just Releases: Control & Observability in CD by Dave Karow, Split.io

12. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

• Mainframes: The Cloud Before the Cloud By Bob Reselman
• Why DevOps is Like Football by Brian Dawson, CloudBees
• Focusing on the True DevOps North Star: Continuous Improvement by Rick Slade, Compuware
• DevOps Tools Democratize the View From Both Sides by Dave Karow, Split.io
• Three Insights from the World’s Leading IT Organizations by Deepak Jannu, OpsRamp
• Linus Torvalds Sees Lots of Hardware Headaches Ahead by Mike Vizard

Thanks to everyone who voted and nominated candidates. Good luck to all of the finalists!

Stay tuned and, as always, thanks for supporting devopsy.kinsta.cloud and the rest of the MediaOps family of communities. If you have questions, please write us DD@devops.com.  Also if you want to be included in next years DevOps Dozen awards you need to subscribe to devopsy.kinsta.cloud and look for announcements next September.

— Alan Shimel

We are pleased to announce the 2018 DevOps Dozen honorees. When I launched the DevOps Dozen, I hoped they would grow to reflect and recognize the best of the best in the maturing DevOps space.

This year, there is no doubt in my mind that the winners are unsurpassed in the DevOps community. In fact, the whole process of nominations was open; from the the public making the selections of finalists; the judges and the criteria they used, it really does represent our best efforts.

Congratulations to each and every one of the winners in the 12 categories. It is quite an accomplishment to make it this far into the process. But congratulations not only to the honorees—all of the finalists should be proud to be part of such an impressive list.

Since the nomination process was opened, our team has gone through thousands of votes to pick out the finalists in each category. It was not an easy task, as we couldn’t automate (DevOps) it; we had to do it by hand. Also, many thanks to the judges for making the hard calls and thanks to everyone here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud for helping out.

So, without further ado, here are the 2018 DevOps Dozen winners:

Best DevOps Open Source Project

Jenkins X is the winner of the Best DevOps Open Source Project for 2018. Jenkins X enables developers to take advantage of Kubernetes to develop cloud-native applications without having to learn the intricacies of Kubernetes. Developers can quickly establish CD best practices and cloud development by using the Jenkins X guided workflow that takes full advantage of GitOps, or environments managed as code. The power of GitOps allows developers to easily define, manage, deploy and scale environments with full history and traceability. Jenkins X leverages and packages many other open source projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation community around Kubernetes such as Knative, Helm, Prometheus and Vault, providing automatic integration with them and saving users the trouble of integrating all of these components themselves.
Learn more: https://jenkins-x.io/

Best DevOps Commercial Solution

JFrog Artifactory from JFrog is the winner of the Best DevOps Commercial Solution for 2018. JFrog Artifactory is the world’s only universal repository manager, with more than 5 million developers worldwide supporting development organizations across more than 4,500 global enterprises, and supporting all major packaging formats (more than 25), build tools and CI server. In 2018, JFrog Artifactory also won an Innovator award from IDC and the Firestarter award from 451 Research. Artifactory integrates with your existing ecosystem, supporting end-to-end binary management that overcomes the complexity of working with different software package management systems, and provides consistency to your CI/CD workflow. Artifactory is available in OSS and commercial versions, supporting hybrid development and deployment across the enterprise. Learn more: https://jfrog.com/artifactory/features/

Best DevOps Solution Provider Executive

The voting in this category actually resulted in a tie between two of the leading CEOs in the DevOps space. Sacha Labourey is the CEO and founder of CloudBees, the company powering the continuous economy by building the world’s first end-to-end system for automating software delivery. Sacha is also a member of the board of advisors and an investor at Codenvy (formerly eXo Platform), as well as a board member and investor at Wallix. He is praised as being a visionary with a strong understanding of technology and business. Sacha is experienced in open source, cloud computing, software development and more.

Shlomi Ben Haim is co-founder and CEO of JFrog. He brings more than 20 years of experience in building profitable, high-growth information technology companies. Shlomi is a recognized visionary in the DevOps space, having now guided a company from its inception with just three co-founders (along with Yoav Landman and Fred Simon) to a privately held, global DevOps company with a billion-dollar valuation. With the releases of JFrog Xray and the JFrog EnterprisePlus platform in the last two years, Shlomi continues to foresee market dynamics and push JFrog forward to deliver next-generation solutions.

Best DevOps Solution Provider

Electric Cloud was recognized for the third year in a row by Gartner as the leading solution in Application Release Orchestration, scoring highest in three out of three use cases in Gartner’s 2018 critical capabilities for application release orchestration. In Q4, 2018, Forrester ranked Electric Cloud as a leader in the newly released report, “The Forrester Wave™: Continuous Delivery and Release Automation (CDRA).” Additionally, ElectricFlow has been selected by EMA Research as a Top 3 enterprise software product in its new report, “EMA Top 3 Enterprise Decision Guide for Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML).” The report provides pragmatic guidance to enterprises on how to optimally benefit from AI and ML and continuously release better software. Electric Cloud is also the founding partner of DevOps Enterprise Summit USA.

Most Innovative DevOps Solution of the Year

CA Brightside is the winner of the Most Innovative DevOps Solution for 2018. CA Brightside is the first cross-enterprise DevOps solution designed to greatly improve the productivity and efficiency of development teams to control, script and develop for the mainframe like any other cloud platform. CA Brightside is also a foundational element of the Open Mainframe Project’s Zowe initiative, the first open source project for the mainframe which strives to attract a new generation of IT administrators to mainframe platforms and make it easier to include mainframes within the larger scope of an integrated set of DevOps processes that span multiple platforms. CA Brightside is designed to make it easy to integrate the mainframe into enterprise DevOps workflows by allowing development teams to control, script and build for the mainframe just like they would for any other cloud platform through the use of familiar open source tools such as Jenkins, Gradle and IntelliJ via a command line interface (CLI). Learn more: https://www.ca.com/us/products/ca-brightside.html

Best DevOps Evangelist

Chris O’Malley, Compuware’s president and CEO, is the Top DevOps Evangelist for 2018. Chris is a highly vocal, incredibly passionate evangelist for DevOps and, more specifically, Agile and DevOps on the mainframe. Having led the Agile transformation at Compuware, he speaks from the heart. No other executive in the industry comes close to exhibiting the energy Chris brings to every engagement, whether it’s a customer meeting or a LinkedIn update. Chris is unwavering in his commitment to make Compuware customers successful and believes DevOps on the mainframe plays a critical role in facilitating that success. Since late 2014, Chris has spearheaded an effort to educate the marketplace on the benefits of DevOps and Agile on the mainframe, as well as create a new generation of mainframe software that speeds this effort. Chris’ extensive media coverage and social outreach in 2018, included more than 25 articles, blogs, interviews, podcasts and conference presentations. Check out a few of his recent posts on ZDnet, Forbes, InformationWeek, eWeek, devopsy.kinsta.cloud Chat, AgileCXO and DevOps Enterprise Summit, as well as more than a dozen LinkedIn posts in 2018.

Best DevOps Transformation

Capital One was the judges’ choice for Best DevOps Transformation for 2018. As one of the most well-known brands in America and among the top 10 largest banks in the nation based on deposits, Capital One offers a wide range of financial products and services to commercial clients, small businesses and individual consumers, both online and in-person at branch locations. The company was founded on the vision that the power of information, technology and testing could be harnessed to bring highly-customized financial products directly to consumers. The thousands of software engineers, testers and other professionals in the Capital One software development organization are making this vision a reality. Beyond their financial success and size, Capital One has a well-known and well-deserved reputation in the tech industry for being one of the most innovative and open source-friendly enterprises in the market.

Checkout this Case Study: Capital One Invests in Continuous Delivery to Automate Software Development Pipelines

Best DevOps Transformation Leader

George Swan is the winner of the Best DevOps Transformation Leader for 2018. George is director of Engineering Solutions at Autodesk, where his responsibilities include modernizing and optimizing Autodesk’s development and deployment capabilities using CI/CD solutions and best practices. George spearheaded the Engineering Solutions team tasked with modernizing the development and deployment solution based on CI/CD methodologies. The team built a source code solution using GitHub Enterprise and a binary management solution using Artifactory. Next, Autodesk standardized on CloudBees Core for orchestration and began implementing secure, automated Jenkins Pipelines. These pipelines enabled both continuous integration and more frequent deployments with shorter lead times via continuous delivery. Swan and his team delivered amazing results: “Productivity increased up to 10X. There is a team within Autodesk that saw a 10X improvement in productivity when they adopted CI/CD. If we can replicate even a fraction of this across the engineering organization, that will have an incredible impact.”

Checkout this Case Study: Autodesk Powers Cloud Initiative and Faster Releases with CI/CD

Best New DevOps Solution Company

ShiftLeft Inc., winner of the Best New DevOps Solutions Company in 2018, is an innovator in application-specific cloud security, delivering the industry’s first fully automated security-as-a-service (SECaaS) solution that understands the unique security needs of each version of each application and creates custom security and threat detection for it. With ShiftLeft, DevOps can make threat detection part of their CI/CD process. ShiftLeft’s approach allows teams to both protect their applications immediately and enhance the security posture of their code. The company was founded by a team with extensive backgrounds in security and cloud infrastructure who were early innovators of technologies such as sandbox, next-generation firewall, next-generation electronic payment network and fraud modeling, as well as several open source initiatives. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., ShiftLeft is backed by Bain Capital Ventures and Mayfield. For more information, see https://www.shiftleft.io/.

Best DevOps Book/eBook

“DevOps for the Modern Enterprise,” by Mirco Hering of Accenture, won the Best DevOps Book Award for 2018. In his book, Mirco, a thought leader in managing IT within legacy organizations, lays out a road map to success for IT managers, showing them how to create the right ecosystem, how to empower people to bring their best to work every day and how to put the right technology in the driver’s seat to propel their organization to success. But just having the right methods and tools will not magically transform an organization; the cultural change that is the most difficult is also the most impactful. Using principles from Agile, Lean and DevOps, as well as first-hand examples from the enterprise world, Mirco addresses the different challenges that legacy organizations face as they transform into modern IT departments. Mirco’s book is also featured by BookAuthority in the list of “26 Best New DevOps Books to Read in 2019.”  View on Amazon.

Best DevOps Presentation of the Year

“Project to Product: Practical Realities at a Large Scale Enterprise,” a 30-minute presentation at DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018, is the winner of the Best DevOps Presentation for 2018. The presentation featured Carmen DeArdo, currently working as senior VSM strategist at Tasktop, and Nicole Bryan, vice president of Product at Tasktop. Carmen DeArdo was the DevOps technology director at Nationwide Insurance, where he was part of the leadership team implementing DevOps practices and technologies across the 20+ IT areas at Nationwide. He is considered a DevOps industry leader, speaking at conferences and writing regularly on these topics at devopsy.kinsta.cloud. He is also regularly interviewed by analysts (e.g. Forrester) and technical publications such as TechBeacon for research and articles. He has presented at previous DOES U.S. conferences. Check out Carmen’s Reflections from DevOps Enterprise Summit 2018 as well.

Nicole has more than 20 years of experience in software and product development, focused primarily on bringing data visualization/infographics and human factors considerations to the forefront of Agile and DevOps. She is passionate about increasing representation of women in technology and improving how software is created and delivered—making the experience enjoyable, fun and even delightful.

Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

“Continuous Discussions, Episode 90: Gene Kim and DOES18 Speakers,” by Anders Wallgren won the Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year Award for 2018. Anders hosted Gene Kim and several speakers from the upcoming DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas (DOES18) conference to talk about DevOps, the conference program and emerging conference theme of next-gen operations and infrastructure.

The panel of DOES18 speakers included Cornelia Davis, senior director of technology at Pivotal; Damon Edwards, co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Rundeck; Mik Kersten, CEO of Tasktop; Tom Limoncelli, SRE at StackOverflow.com; Gene Kim, founder of IT Revolution and co-author of “The DevOps Handbook,” “The Phoenix Project” and “Accelerate”; and Electric Cloud’s Sam Fell and Anders Wallgren.

Check out the blog to find out the top takeaways from their discussion.

Thanks to everyone who voted and nominated candidates. Stay tuned for 2019 DevOps Dozen and, as always, thanks for supporting devopsy.kinsta.cloud and the rest of the MediaOps family of communities. If you have questions, please write us DD@devops.com.

— Alan Shimel

We are very pleased to announce the winners of the third annual DevOps Dozen Awards. In many ways this year was a watershed year for the DevOps Dozen, as the process of selecting, voting and choosing the winners was much more refined and mature. In each of the 12 (it is a dozen, after all) categories the winners were absolutely deserving of the award and recognition.

Many thanks to our all-star panel of judges: Jayne Groll, Robert Stroud, Helen Beal, George Hulme and Ericka Chickowski. I was the tie-breaker judge and had to cast a vote in just one category. I should also say that almost all of the categories were very tight. Every one of the finalists was deserving of the recognition!

These awards are a reflection of some of the great work being done in the DevOps community. They are not exhaustive; there are many, many worthy companies, people, projects and products out there. But here is our take on the best of the best in DevOps.

So, without further ado, here are the 2017 DevOps Dozen winners:

Best DevOps Open Source Project

 Jenkins is the winner of the Best DevOps Open Source Project for 2017. Originally created in 2004 as a fork of “Hudson,”  Jenkins is one of the leading open source automation servers available. Jenkins has an extensible, plugin-based architecture, enabling developers to create 1,400+ plugins to adapt it to a multitude of build, test and deployment technology integrations. In 2017, Jenkins surpassed 155,000 active installations (these are active installations that report usage back to the Jenkins project—only a fraction of total installations), and approximately 1.5 million users, making it the most widely deployed continuous delivery automation server in the world. Learn more: https://jenkins.io/

Best DevOps Commercial Solution

ElectricFlow from ElectricCloud is the winner of the Best DevOps Commercial Solution for 2017. ElectricFlow is an enterprise-grade DevOps release automation platform that simplifies provisioning, build and release of multi-tiered applications. A shared, model-driven approach to managing environments and applications allows teams to coordinate multiple pipelines and releases across hybrid infrastructure in an efficient, predictable and auditable way using the tools and stacks teams already know and love. Learn more: http://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow/

Best DevOps Solution Provider Executive

The winner in this category was actually a 1/1a entry of the CloudBees team of CEO Sacha Labourey and CTO Kohsuke Kawaguchi. Sacha’s background prior to CloudBees was as CTO and key person at JBoss. KK was a Sun engineer when he first became involved with Hudson and later founded Jenkins. Together, they have built CloudBees into a powerhouse in the DevOps and CI/CD space. While working closely with the Jenkins community, they also have been instrumental in the continued growth and popularity of the Jenkins project. Together, they are a formidable team worthy of this award!

Best DevOps Solution Provider

CA Technologies, which now includes Automic, BlazeMeter, Runscope and Veracode, is the winner of the Best DevOps Solution Provider for 2017. From a toolchain perspective, CA Technologies provides the widest array of highly automated solutions necessary to build and optimize integrated workflows across application development, delivery and operations. Spanning the entire application life cycle—including planning, development, testing, release and operations—only CA Technologies offers the full range of capabilities needed to deliver secure, quality applications quickly with an unparalleled customer experience.

Most Innovative DevOps Solution of the Year

The Most Innovative DevOps Solution of the Year 2017 goes to Habitat from Chef, the leader in Continuous Automation. Habitat is a SaaS-based service that provides the fastest way to package apps simply and consistently for deployment and management across flexible cloud-native architectures such as those comprising Docker Swarm, Kubernetes and Cloud Foundry, both on-premises and in-cloud. Habitat gives developers and operations teams complete control over the containerized application life cycle. Learn more: https://www.habitat.sh/

Best DevOps Evangelist

Derek Weeks VP and DevOps Advocate at Sonatype (co-founder of All Day DevOps) is the Top DevOps Evangelist for 2017. This year All Day DevOps offered 100 free online sessions led by DevOps practitioners to 33,000 professionals around the world. Since its founding, the community has attracted, educated and supported more than 40,000 DevOps professionals. The conference also brought attention to more than 250 DevOps-related communities, meetup groups and organizations that are helping to educate practitioners around the world. In 2017, Derek delivered 18 DevSecOps-related keynote addresses, conference speeches and meetup presentations in the United States and Europe. He also produced more than 75 DevOps-related blogs over the year, covering topics from continuous delivery to DevSecOps, modern infrastructure and cultural transformations. The blogs not only delivered first-hand experiences, but also highlighted the work of more than 40 DevOps practitioners from different companies around the world.  The blogs can be seen at Sonatype, All Day DevOps, devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Dzone. In addition, Derek championed a number of DevOps reports and surveys in 2017, including the “State of the Software Supply Chain Report” and “2017 DevSecOps Community Survey,” to shed light on industry best practices and areas in need of attention or evolution.

Best DevOps Transformation

CapitalOne was the judges choice for Best DevOps Transformation for 2017. Over the past few years, the 20-year-old financial services giant has been transforming itself, tapping DevOps to establish a continuous software delivery cycle. Topo Pal, a senior director and senior engineering fellow, told a packed room at the recent DevOps Enterprise Summit in San Francisco the company’s journey suits its entrepreneurial spirit. “We consider ourselves a startup, and like any startup, we have different DNA,” said Pal. “For instance, we build our own software.” All the better for adopting DevOps. The company does just about everything (including back-end processing) in the public cloud now, with a focus on building microservices using open source technologies. Having spent the previous three years building out automation steps, scaling DevOps, adopting open source and cloud and starting to measure its success, Capital One is now turning its attention to continuous delivery. Learn more:

• DevOps at Its Core
• This is Why We Push for DevOps
• The Four Stages of DevOps Maturity
• How Capital One Became a Leading Digital Bank
• Case Study: Capital One Invests in Continuous Delivery to Automate Software Development Pipelines

Best DevOps Transformation Leader

Paula Thrasher is the winner of the Best DevOps Transformation Leader for 2017. Paula is Director of Digital Services at CSRA Inc. Paula  Thrasher has 20+ years experience in IT and has spent the last 15 years trying to implement Agile culture in the federal government. Her first Agile project was in 2001; since then, she has led more than 15 programs and projects as an Agile developer, technical lead, Scrum master or Agile coach. Her teams have helped two federal agencies migrate applications to Amazon AWS GovCloud and done some other amazing DevOps ninja work along the way. Paula is also the executive lead for CSRA’s corporate giving group’s search for a STEM charity and joined forces with Girls Who Code to bring summer programs and after-school clubs focused on closing the gender gap in IT. She also participated in the DevOps Forum 2017, co-authored a paper on DevOps learning in organizations,”Continual Learning: Building a DevOps inspired Career Track,” and peer reviewed other paper topics produced by the forum this year. Paula has spoken publicly at multiple industry conferences including AllDayDevOps  2017, Red Hat Government Symposium and DevOps Enterprise Summit 2017.

Best New DevOps Solution Company

nClouds is a provider of DevOps and cloud services, products, and solutions, specializing in modern infrastructures on AWS — and winner of Best New DevOps Solutions Company for 2017. They work as an extension of their customers’ teams to build and manage modern infrastructure solutions that deliver innovation faster. nClouds is a certified AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with 250+ DevOps AWS implementations, 500+ deployed pipelines, and 10,000+ managed servers. They call their new SaaS offering, nOps, modern change management at the speed of DevOps. nClouds was named to CIOReview “20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers – 2017” and “20 Most Promising IT Service Management Providers – 2017”.

Best DevOps Book/eBook

“The DevOps Adoption Playbook” by Sanjeev Sharma of IBM won the Best DevOps Book Award for 2017. The book lays out a clear “how-to” for DevOps, including topics such as value stream mapping, how to lead the transformation of culture and scaling DevOps to the enterprise. As Sanjeev himself says, the book started from a Powerpoint deck of best practices he created to take in everything he had learned.

This book represents the culmination of years of learning by not only Sanjeev, but by IBM in general, and includes some of the leading names in DevOps that he learned from during this time. Sanjeev also stays true to the “playbook” paradigm, making references to cricket, soccer and other sports throughout. It is a good read and well-organized. To learn more, listen to this DevOps Chat: ‘The DevOps Adoption Playbook’ by Sanjeev Sharma.

Best DevOps Presentation of the Year

“DevOps: The New Reality for Enterprise Transformation,” a 45-minute keynote presentation at IBM InterConnect 2017, is the winner of the Best DevOps Presentation for 2017. It features Gene Kim, John Comas, NBCUniversal and IBM execs and  distinguished engineers including David Lindquist, Angel Diaz, CJ Paul and Michael Elder. Are you dabbling in DevOps? Maybe you’ve run a great pilot project or have a terrific two-pizza team that’s innovating new apps. How do you scale their success to your whole organization? The answer lies with a combination of cultural, personal and technical transformations that blend methodologies and cloud-native approaches with proven automation patterns and existing on-prem development. The presentation includes client stories and demonstrations of the latest IBM solutions to help companies transform their teams and build, deploy and manage their apps for large-scale enterprise IT environments.

Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

“Continuous Integration vs. Delivery vs. Deployment: What’s the Difference?” by Chris Tozzi won the Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year Award for 2017. Christopher Tozzi has covered technology and business news for nearly a decade, specializing in open source, containers, big data, networking and security. He is currently Senior Editor and DevOps Analyst with Fixate.io and Sweetcode.io.

Again congratulations to the winners—well-deserved recognition for all of your efforts.

For those interested in next year’s DevOps Dozen, information will be out in July or August of this year.

— Alan Shimel