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Tag: DevOps Leadership

  • Meet the 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards Winners

    Meet the 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards Winners

    Each year, the DevOps Dozen Awards recognize the best and brightest in the DevOps community and industry, celebrating individuals and organizations making a significant impact. The 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards continue this tradition by honoring those driving innovation, transformation, and excellence in DevOps practices, tools, and leadership.

    We are thrilled to announce the winners of this year’s awards:

    Community Awards

    These awards recognize the leaders, creators, and contributors who have made a lasting impact on the DevOps community:

    • Best DevOps-Related Video or Audio Podcast: The Modern Mainframe
    • Best DevOps Book of the Year: Continuous Testing, Quality, Security and Feedback: Essential Strategies and Secure Practices for DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE Transformations by Marc Hornbeek
    • Top DevOps Community Evangelist: Giorgi Keratishvili
    • Best DevOps Event of the Year: GrafanaCON 2024
    • Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project: Jenkins
    • Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year: Can AI Replace DevOps Engineers? by Alexander Simonov
    • DevOps Enterprise Leader of the Year: Sheree Britt, AVP, Software Engineering Mainframe Modernization, TD Bank Group

    Tools & Services Awards

    These awards honor the most innovative and impactful DevOps tools, platforms, and services that enable teams to achieve more:

    • Best DevOps Industry Implementation: Operation Joined Arrows program for FIS
    • Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research: The Software Supply Chain State of the Union 2024
    • Best End-to-End DevOps Platform: JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform
    • Best Application of AI in DevOps Tool/Platform: GitLab Duo
    • Top DevOps Vendor Evangelist: Tony Anter
    • Best Value Stream Management: ValueOps by Broadcom
    • Best Observability Solution: Splunk Observability Cloud
    • Best DevSecOps Solution: Checkmarx One
    • Best Platform Engineering Solution: Harness Internal Developer Portal
    • Best Testing Service/Tool: Tricentis SeaLights
    • Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution: BMC AMI DevX
    • Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution: EDB Postgres AI
    • Best New DevOps Tool: StackGen
    • DevOps Industry Leader of the Year: Anuj Kapur, CEO

    Congratulations to the 2024 DevOps Dozen winners! This year’s honorees exemplify the innovation, dedication, and leadership that make the DevOps community so vibrant and transformative. Whether they are advancing DevOps methodologies, elevating enterprise practices, or delivering cutting-edge tools and solutions, these honorees are setting new benchmarks for excellence.

    We extend our heartfelt congratulations to all the winners and nominees for their remarkable contributions. Thank you for inspiring the community and helping to advance the DevOps movement.

    Let’s continue to celebrate and support the incredible work being done across the industry. Here’s to another year of groundbreaking achievements in DevOps!

    For more information, please visit the DevOps Dozen Awards website and stay tuned for the DevOps Dozen Awards 2025.

  • Techstrong Group Announces 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards Honorees

    Techstrong Group Announces 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards Honorees

    Boca Raton, FL, January 14, 2025 — Techstrong Group, the power source for people and technology, is proud to announce the winners of the 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards, which recognize exceptional contributions to the DevOps community and the evolution of software development practices. From community leaders to tools and services advancing DevOps, the 2024 honorees represent the diverse and innovative efforts shaping technology’s future.

    This year’s winners have been selected for their remarkable achievements in pushing the boundaries of DevOps. These individuals and organizations have demonstrated leadership, creativity, and a commitment to advancing the industry, creating lasting impacts across communities, and driving the development of groundbreaking tools and platforms. The 2024 DevOps Dozen Awards honor those who have not only embraced the DevOps culture but have also paved the way for others to follow.

    Community Awards

    Best DevOps-Related Video or Audio Podcast: The Modern Mainframe

    “BMC’s mainframe podcast, The Modern Mainframe, is one of the leading podcasts helping to keep the mainframe relevant. With news and analysis of DevOps topics across the mainframe, it has something for everyone. Keep it up!”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best DevOps Book of the Year: “Continuous Testing, Quality, Security and Feedback: Essential Strategies and Secure Practices for DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE Transformations” by Marc Hornbeek

    “Marc Hornbeek’s book shows readers the strategies for transformation success into DevOps, DevSecOps, and SRE methodologies.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Top DevOps Community Evangelist: Giorgi Keratishvili

    “Giorgi Keratishvili has played major roles in Development and Operations, actively growing DevOps/SRE/Platform Engineering awareness in the Georgian community and beyond.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best DevOps Event of the Year: GrafanaCON 2024

    “Grafana Labs’ annual conference in Amsterdam focused on the open-source world of Observability. Of particular note were the live demos, latest OSS developments, and the community winners of the annual Golden Grot Awards.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project: Jenkins

    “The Jenkins open-source project, now boasting over 11 million developers globally, continues to set the industry standard and is a key contributor to DevOps practices.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year: “Can AI Replace DevOps Engineers?” by Alexander Simonov

    “In this article, Alexander Simonov addresses how DevOps professionals can adapt to AI advancements and stay in demand in the evolving tech landscape.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    DevOps Enterprise Leader of the Year: Sheree Britt, AVP, Software Engineering Mainframe Modernization, TD Bank Group

    “Sheree Britt’s leadership in leveraging DevOps practices to transform TD Bank’s culture and processes makes her a standout in enterprise DevOps leadership.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Tools & Services Awards

    Best DevOps Industry Implementation: Operation Joined Arrows program for FIS

    “FIS’s Operation Joined Arrows (OJA) revolutionized their processes with a cohesive and secure software development lifecycle across their enterprise.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research: The Software Supply Chain State of the Union 2024

    “JFrog’s 2024 Software Supply Chain report is essential reading for anyone at the forefront of today’s technological innovations, especially in the realm of AI adoption.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best End-to-End DevOps Platform: JFrog Software Supply Chain Platform

    “JFrog continues to innovate with its DevOps platform, improving speed and efficiency across development teams.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best Application of AI in DevOps Tool/Platform: GitLab Duo

    “GitLab Duo helps organizations adopt AI while ensuring the security of sensitive data, making it a standout in the evolving AI-driven DevOps space.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Top DevOps Vendor Evangelist: Tony Anter

    “Tony’s unwavering passion for DevOps and his advocacy for adopting its principles have earned him this well-deserved recognition.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best Value Stream Management: ValueOps by Broadcom

    “Broadcom’s deep understanding of value stream management and its commitment to transforming this space make ValueOps a leader in the field.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best Observability Solution: Splunk Observability Cloud

    “Splunk’s Observability Cloud allows IT and DevOps teams to detect, investigate, and resolve business-critical incidents quickly and efficiently.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best DevSecOps Solution: Checkmarx One

    “Checkmarx One is an essential tool for DevSecOps teams, enabling secure application development from the first line of code through deployment in the cloud.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best Platform Engineering Solution: Harness Internal Developer Portal

    “Harness’s Internal Developer Portal is revolutionizing platform engineering efficiency, focusing on enhancing both developer and platform engineering effectiveness.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best Testing Service/Tool: Tricentis SeaLights

    “Tricentis SeaLights helps organizations balance code quality with speed to market, improving cycle times and minimizing production risks.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution: BMC AMI DevX

    “BMC’s AMI DevX platform addresses the mainframe’s pivotal role in scaling workloads, providing an improved developer experience for mainframe teams.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution: EDB Postgres AI

    “EDB Postgres AI empowers DevOps teams with a unified, scalable, and secure data platform to streamline the management of transactional, analytical, and AI data.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    Best New DevOps Tool: StackGen

    “StackGen accelerates cloud provisioning with infrastructure as code (IaC), enabling platform engineering teams to deploy resilient, reliable, and secure applications quickly.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    DevOps Industry Leader of the Year: Anuj Kapur, CEO, CloudBees

    “Under Anuj Kapur’s leadership, CloudBees has made remarkable strides, driving transformation in DevSecOps, acquiring Launchable, and positioning itself as a leader in scaling AI innovation within the DevOps ecosystem.”
    — Alan Shimel, Techstrong Group

    The DevOps Dozen Awards winners will receive digital and physical trophies and badges to celebrate their achievements.

    For more information regarding the entry process, awards, timing, or any technical issues regarding the website, please contact us at DD@devops.com.

    About Techstrong Group

    Techstrong Group is the power source for people and technology. Techstrong Group accelerates understanding of technologies that drive business. With a broad set of IT-related communities and offerings, Techstrong Group is the only media company serving the needs of IT leaders and practitioners with news, research, analysis, events, education, and professional development. Our focus is DevOps, cybersecurity, AI, digital transformation, cloud native, ITSM, and platform engineering. Techstrong Group business units include Techstrong Media, Techstrong Associations, Techstrong Research, and Techstrong Learning. Techstrong Group helps tech vendors stay ahead of the game by sharing their stories in the most powerful way and engaging with their target audience to build a strong online presence and generate valuable leads.

    Techstrong Group is based in Boca Raton, Florida. For more information, visit us on the web and follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram.

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    Veronica Haggar
    Techstrong Group
    veronica@techstronggroup.com

  • What DevOps Leadership Should Look Like

    What DevOps Leadership Should Look Like

    Implementing DevOps has become a major focus, but the practice’s attempt to provide organizational support and streamline production systems simultaneously leaves developers with no clear hierarchical structure. We know we need DevOps and we know it helps, but we also know that without proper leadership or structure, it can be misunderstood and undervalued. To build a strong collaborative culture, DevOps leadership, like most other leadership roles, requires a different type of skillset—a skillset that isn’t always prioritized in software development. The ability to understand programming languages, to be versatile and be attentive to detail will take a developer far in their career, but once they’re in a management position, what is needed to be an effective DevOps leader?

    First, what does an effective DevOps leader look like? To start, they need to lead. But to lead a DevOps team, it’s important to not only understand development—including reasonable goals and how to accomplish challenging tasks—but a DevOps leader needs to be able to create an environment that fosters collaboration between teams.

    This is why a DevOps culture is a core value for any high-performing DevOps team. This is due to the cross-functional nature of the practice. The stages of the DevOps cycle (plan, build, test, deploy and manage) rely on different teams with different skill sets.

    Build a Culture Of Ownership and Teamwork

    To effectively collaborate, a strong cross-functional culture of ownership, teamwork, intensity and smart application is needed.

    Clarity can transform a team, and it starts with ownership. Ownership is essential for cross-functional DevOps teams to understand their roles and what they are responsible for. In order for clarity to exist, leaders need to provide clear direction and guidance. It is a leader’s responsibility to set realistic goals and offer support. Group trust is built when a team has a common goal and clear roles and responsibilities are identified.

    Ownership is the foundation of teamwork, and with it, team members can see their individual contributions to a project and can celebrate their successes together. This teamwork then breeds collaboration, improved performance and a cohesive dynamic within the team’s culture.

    Lead With Strategic Intensity and Smart Application

    A DevOps leader can empower their team through ownership and teamwork, but we can’t forget the value of knowing the right level of intensity for a project. Leaders need to understand a situation, the context and how to approach it strategically to avoid burnout and bitterness. They must know when to apply intense sprints and when to pull back and move resources—a leader must know how to play smart with the resources they have.

    Use Soft Skills

    People management skills can be overlooked in a lot of leadership positions. For example, we might see it when a startup chooses a CTO or an engineering lead position based on seniority or developer skills without regard for their ability to actually manage people or their desire to be in such a position. Often, the person in charge of a DevOps team is given this role because of their previous development accomplishments, but they lack the necessary soft skills of communication, conflict management and/or teamwork. Using the four principles above can help accelerate the foundation of culture as well as help compensate for a leader’s lack of soft skills

    DevOps leaders need soft skills. Soft skills include the ability to think critically and project manage while having enough emotional intelligence to inspire, motivate and retain a team of smart engineers. Every leader needs to be able to see their team’s strengths and weaknesses, listen and influence and further develop their members to succeed. The challenge for this role is that, to be successful, it takes both technical expertise and soft skills and knowing how to balance the two.

    Unfortunately, soft skills haven’t been prioritized in the training and career development of most software engineers. Only recently have soft skills been seen as a differentiator in the engineer hiring process or seen as a value-add to an organization. For years, technical skills took precedence and we ignored the areas that would take a software engineer to the next level – the soft skills that will lead to leadership. But it’s a bigger problem; employers say most college grads aren’t learning these soft skills in school.

    Remember the Not-so-Secret Sauce

    Soft skills empower a leader to thrive both within a DevOps team and in collaboration with other departments. The ability to work across teams can exponentially improve business operations. A strong DevOps leader can offer solutions and problem solve for internal issues and customer-facing problems. They are able to bring DevOps into new areas of the company in a strategic and effective way. Collaboration requires working with others, seeing the bigger problem, understanding the business goals and using soft skills to get things done.

    It’s the not-so-secret sauce that makes all the difference when running a powerful DevOps team. A culture of collaboration starts with the leader. A leader’s relationship skills can increase the likelihood of bigger budgets, more tools and recognition. DevOps leaders can build a strong team by leveraging the soft skills within themselves and their team members, applying the right level of intensity and encouraging a culture of ownership, teamwork and collaboration. If these things are missing, whether DevOps or another team, the unit will fall apart.

    This is why a DevOps leader needs to take personal ownership and responsibility for the success of their team and see motivating others, setting a standard of operational excellence and representing the DevOps team as an integral part of their role. Luckily, there are resources to learn and exercise these skills so every leader, newly appointed or veteran, can ensure their team can excel.

  • Best of 2022: Making the Move From Developer to Team Lead

    Best of 2022: Making the Move From Developer to Team Lead

    As we close out 2022, we at devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the latest in our series of the Best of 2022.

    After working in their role for some time, software developers may wonder what career opportunities await them beyond coding. Certainly, taking the next step is not obligatory. Some people feel comfortable remaining developers for their entire professional careers.

    However, for those who wish to explore other options, there are a number of different growth paths to choose from—whether it’s working as a solution architect, a Scrum master or a product owner, just to name a few examples.

    Another option to consider is a team lead—considered by many to be a position that is a culmination of long-time efforts, passion and dedication as an IT specialist. But is becoming a team lead an opportunity that an ambitious developer should consider?

    What Makes a Great Team Lead?

    Unlike developers, who usually work on a specific aspect of a project and communicate mainly with other developers, team leads—as the title suggests—are focused on coordinating the activities of and collaborating with the entire team. They also spend far less time dealing with technical issues. A team lead is a leader, a representative and a manager of the team and, as such, their responsibilities involve communicating with both the team members and stakeholders within and outside the company.

    A team lead is the first person a developer would go to when a problem occurs and is the person responsible for suggesting a solution. Bug fixes, tooling and library choices or thoughts on how to approach a specific code-related problem—these are the team leads’ specialties since their technical knowledge and experience are what propelled them into a leadership role in the first place.

    The Go-To Point of Contact

    If you want to improve an application or a test, the team lead is the person to talk to about it. They should know the ins-and-outs of technology solutions and be able to explain to less-seasoned developers why something works and something else doesn’t, or why it may be a good idea to do X instead of Y.

    This doesn’t mean, however, that they are all-knowing. Asking other experienced developers for their insight, opinions or to share their knowledge is something good team leads do without fear of losing their authority. They should always be open to other people’s suggestions and welcome innovative ideas.

    In addition, team leads should think about a project as a whole, including all the people who are working on it. They can direct developers’ efforts and tell their teams what to pay attention to while making improvements, sharing best practices and taking care of code infrastructure and project architecture.

    When to Step Up

    It seems obvious that experience, knowledge, passion and communication skills are all things that ultimately make a good team lead. And these skills aren’t developed overnight—they often start as junior engineering or DevOps professionals and gain technical, social and leadership skills before they can guide an entire team or teams.

    Sometimes, this progression is a natural consequence of an individual’s personality and work style. A team may notice that one member has more extensive knowledge and/or that one particular person is a natural leader who can motivate others and direct their activities. At other times, team leads emerge spontaneously because of their technical knowledge or they volunteer to gain valuable experience.

    For a developer, taking the next step may seem like getting thrown into the deep end. But many current developer skills will be useful in their new role.

    For instance, attention to detail—something most developers are known for—can be invaluable as a team lead. Relentlessly analyzing and improving code, for example, is likely to come in handy in a team lead’s work.

    The Importance of Soft Skills

    Technical know-how, experience, passion, hard work and conscientiousness are the keys to becoming a successful team lead, but it’s also necessary to enjoy working with other people.

    A team leader’s job requires communication, collaboration and people skills more than ever before. Collaborating with team members as well as other stakeholders within and outside the company means that a team lead is a central figure in the IT and business processes. Being tech-savvy is great, but leading a team goes far beyond that since it’s about knowledge and experience and being able to communicate about that knowledge and experience.

    Another key competency is fluency in English. Using English for coding purposes and communicating in English are two different things. As a team lead, you must talk to your clients and team members, many of whom work remotely and may be in different countries. Of course, you can develop your language skills as you go when you’re a team lead; as with most skills, learning by doing can help with confidence and fluency.

    Building language skills can happen simultaneously with building technical and interpersonal skills. Knowledge of various technologies, frameworks and functionalities; experience in working with them; finding ways to change and improve things—all of these give team leads a good reason to practice language skills by talking with colleagues, supervising projects and advising their stakeholders within and outside the company.

    Making the Move to Team Lead

    With their bottomless willingness to work harder, learn more and take on more responsibility, team leads are an incredibly important role in software development. If you feel that constant development—both technical and interpersonal—is the right course of action for you, then consider becoming a team lead.

    Paulina Gatkowska, test automation lead and Robert Musil, Python team lead at STX Next contributed to this article.

  • Why You Must Lead With AI

    Why You Must Lead With AI

    AI will soon be a necessary part of doing business. Every company will have an AI strategy in the same way that they have a social media strategy, branding strategy, talent strategy, etc.

    So if you want to stand out from the competition and gain an edge, you can’t just use AI; you must lead with AI.

    What does that look like?

    To lead with AI, you can’t simply set up a small innovation team to solve point problems. You must embed AI throughout the organization, such that every team is taking advantage of the technology and incorporating it into their operations.

    The specifics will vary from company to company, but there are some general strategies that will help you begin leading with AI.

    Be Persistent

    Leading with AI doesn’t just happen in the blink of an eye. It’s going to take time and hard work, and it’s critical you stay persistent.

    Amazon, a leader in machine learning technology applications, didn’t start out using advanced AI techniques on day one. Just like everyone else, they had to go on a journey filled with discovery, successes—and the occasional course correction. For example, in 2017, Amazon launched a TV ad that accidentally triggered Alexa devices in its customers’ homes to purchase an expensive dollhouse. Not ideal, and not the best advertisement for the convenience of their machine learning devices.

    They stuck with progress, though, and learned from their mistakes. They were persistent, even though they started out behind the pack. Their focus on incremental progress meant that it only took five short years for Alexa to beat out Siri and Google Assistant in the smart home speaker market. Alexa may have had a slow start, but now she’s a very strong player in the market.

    Persistence and determination are the ingredients that build leaders in AI—not perfection from the start.

    Train Your Leaders to Look for AI Solutions

    Before a business can lead with AI, it has to identify problems AI can solve. You can’t accomplish this by building an AI tiger team and turning them loose to hunt through each department for inefficiencies. That AI team wouldn’t have the necessary context, and all its time would be spent coming up to speed on the operations of the various departments.

    Each division or department is familiar with its own operations and has the context to identify the most important problems. What they might lack is an understanding of AI and the types of problems it can solve. Giving them that training is the first step.

    Organizations that do this successfully start with the belief that every department can use AI to solve some of its problems and work toward enabling their leaders to identify and solve those use cases. For example, a CFO, who is presumably good at what they do, probably doesn’t have any experience in AI—their expertise lies in finance. That CFO will need training to develop an AI-aware mindset, the ability to identify the places within the finance department where AI can solve problems.

    Obviously, your leaders don’t need to understand everything about AI; they just need to know enough to be able to identify when AI is a good solution.

    Create Cross-Functional Teams

    When you think of AI, your mind might jump to data scientists, but there’s a lot at play in an AI model. It’s a marriage of technology and business, which means you need cross-functional teams to develop the best solutions. Because of this, the organization as a whole must become highly effective at multidisciplinary communication and collaboration.

    At its simplest, this might involve rolling out something like Slack to improve communication across departments. Some companies might adopt Agile processes and workflows to encourage collaborative planning of requirements, or they might institute regular all-hands meetings to sync up business priorities all at once and provide transparency.

    The details will be different for every organization, but every company will have a need for departments to collaborate more than before to identify common problems, prepare and share data, and develop related models. In some cases, this may be best served by restructuring the organization and reporting lines; in others, a department that expects an extensive adoption of AI—marketing, for example—may need to establish its own data science team.

    This degree of change may seem overwhelming. It’s important, however, for organizations to avoid the short-term solution of creating an AI team that’s shared across the company, or that team will end up being the primary bottleneck blocking AI adoption.

    Budget and Allocate Resources

    Nothing happens in a company without a budget and allocated resources. Finding the budget to implement AI solutions—to buy off-the-shelf products, hire people with the needed skills, spend time and resources annotating data—is critical, but challenging, especially because a good portion of the investment in AI has to be made company-wide up front.

    Leading with AI can necessitate reallocation of significant money and people, both of which are, in most cases, already budgeted out to normal operations. Deciding how much to reallocate and from where will impact the entire organization.

    Cutting costs is always unpopular, but you must look at it as an investment. Take, for example, a company eager to invest in AI that runs a call center to capture support calls, return requests and complaints. There’s no magical pool of money sitting around to invest in AI to improve this call center.

    Instead, the company will have to take money out of the yearly budget to spend on the AI initiative and just accept that the time to handle a call will go up for a period because fewer agents are deployed to receive those calls. The promise, of course, is that the investment in AI will lead to a chatbot that can divert 15% of those incoming calls, requiring fewer agents to handle calls and improving the call-handling time overall.

    Clearly articulating the long-term gains of AI will make it easier to secure buy-in across the company, so that the needed resources will be allocated.

    Leading With AI

    Leading with AI is hard. It will take time and massive investment. It’s never easy to switch up the operation of huge chunks of a business, reorganize reporting structures and refocus priorities; it will almost certainly require killing some sacred cows.
    Amazon, for example, spent years and a lot of investment to make the transition to leading with AI. Now, on the other side, they’ve maintained their status as a leader in their industry, with the infrastructure and culture that enables them to implement new AI solutions throughout their businesses as opportunities and problems arise.

    With persistence, AI-aware leaders, cross-functional teams and the right budget and resources, you, too, can begin leading with AI, ensuring a future competitive advantage.

    Co-author Wilson Pang is CTO at Appen.

  • Meet the Winners of the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards

    Meet the Winners of the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards

    This is the moment you have all been waiting for. It is time to announce the honorees for the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards, and we couldn’t be more excited to share the names of the most outstanding leaders and tools in the DevOps community. Although, I must say, all the finalists have done an amazing job at making the DevOps community better through their mentorship, service and innovative ideas, and every single one is deserving of special recognition.

    The DevOps Dozen Awards recognize the best of the best in the maturing DevOps space and this year’s winners have demonstrated exceptional leadership and support to the community through 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic. Last year was a tough year for all of us for sure, but it was also a year of agility, innovation and rapid digital transformation. The 2020 honorees have displayed resilience, determination, commitment and willingness to embrace change in a year of unprecedented challenges to drive their business—and the industry—forward. Congratulations to each and every one of the honorees.

    Winners have been chosen from among the finalists with general public voting being weighted for 40% of the final total and our judges selections for 60% of the weighted total. Our team has gone through thousands of votes to pick out the winners in each category—it was not an easy task. Many thanks to our panel of judges for making the hard calls and to everyone who voted and nominated candidates.

    Ladies and gentlemen, I am proud to present to you the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards honorees:

    DevOps Dozen Community Awards

    Best DevOps Industry Implementation

    Lloyds Banking Group, the largest financial services organization in the UK, is the winner of the Best DevOps Industry Implementation award. Lloyds Banking Group has invested heavily in driving the adoption of Agile development and DevOps practices across its business to strategically modernize its digital service capabilities and align with customer expectations.

     

    Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research

    The Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research award goes to Puppet’s 2020 State of DevOps Report. The report focuses on two areas that can help organizations scale their DevOps initiative: a platform approach to software delivery and applying DevOps principles to change management. It is the ninth year in a row that Puppet produces a State of DevOps Report. It is the longest-running and most widely referenced DevOps research in the industry.

    Best DevOps Related Video Series (Video)

    The Best DevOps Related Video Series is DevOps Unbound, a bi-weekly video series that focuses on DevOps, automation, CI/CD and testing. Top industry leaders join the series to explore the challenges and issues that software delivery and IT teams face on a daily basis.

     

    Best DevOps Related Podcast Series (Audio Only)

    The Modern Mainframe: Building a Better Software Delivery Platform is the Best DevOps Related Podcast Series. The Modern Mainframe is a podcast by Compuware that explores mainframe modernization and how to transform mainframe culture, processes and tools with DevOps to help your business compete in a digital age. Building a Better Software Delivery Platform is episode 9 of the podcast, featuring Compuware DevOps Architect Rick Slade.

    Best DevOps Books / eBook of the Year

    Standing On Shoulders: A Leader’s Guide to Digital Transformation by Jack Maher and Carmen DeArdo is the Best DevOps Books / eBook of the Year. This must-read provides leaders with practical, actionable information about the breadth of Agile, Lean and DevOps topics that are generally dealt with individually; and explains how each of these are necessary but alone are not sufficient to avoid market disruption of your business. The authors focus on how to build an employee and customer-obsessed culture with an organizational structure that drives speed and efficiency, while leveraging technology to enable speed to value that is faster, safer, better and cheaper.

    Top DevOps Evangelist

    The Top DevOps Evangelist award goes to Helen Beal, chief ambassador at DevOps Institute. Helen is a well-known DevOps evangelist leading the DevOps Institute Ambassador program’s efforts to provide broad-based thought leadership and localization. She is an analyst at Accelerated Strategies Group and an editor at InfoQ. Recently, Helen has been working with a group of ambassadors to develop a new, online DevOps Capability Assessment (DOCA), launching in 2021. Taking on strategic advisor roles with Plutora and Moogsoft has given her the opportunity to dive deep into value stream thinking and observability. She is the host of Day-to-Day DevOps, a BrightTalk series that focuses on topics ranging from neuroscience, to ChatOps, to AIOps and everything DevOps related.

    Best DevOps Transformation (Non-Vendor)

    The winner of the Best DevOps Transformation award is Fidelity Investments, a financial services company that supports financial institutions with innovative investment and technology solutions to grow their businesses. Fidelity’s embrace of cloud-based platforms has yielded tangible improvements, such as better operational resiliency.


    Best DevOps Virtual Event of the Year

    The DevOps Dozen award for the Best DevOps Virtual Event of the Year goes to DevOps World 2020. The virtual event, featuring more than 100 business and technical breakout sessions, focused on how DevOps is transforming the world of software delivery and how businesses are adapting their ways of thinking during the COVID-19 pandemic. Top industry leaders discussed where DevOps is headed and how the audience can best leverage advanced practices to succeed in the future.

    Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project

    Grafana Loki was chosen as the Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project. Loki is a horizontally-scalable, highly-available, multi-tenant log aggregation system inspired by Prometheus.

     

     

    DevOps Executive of the Year

    The DevOps Executive of the Year is GitLab CEO and Co-Founder Sid Sijbrandij. Sid’s career path has been anything but traditional. He saw the first Ruby code in 2007 and loved it so much

    that he taught himself how to program. It was during his time as a Ruby programmer that he first encountered GitLab, and quickly discovered his passion for open source.

    In 2012, he helped commercialize GitLab, and by 2015, he led the company through Y-Combinator’s Winter 2015 batch. Under his leadership, the company has experienced 50x growth in the last five years, expanded from nine to more than 1,300 remote team members across 65+ countries and regions and is now valued at $2.75 billion. A champion of the open source community and a pioneer in scaling remote organizations, Sid is altering conventional wisdom on DevOps practice.

    Best DevOps Presentation of the Year

    On Ramp to Open DevOps for Mainframe by George DeCandio, chief technology officer of the Mainframe Software Division at Broadcom, is the winner of the Best DevOps Presentation of the Year award. In this keynote presentation, George DeCandio explained what you need to adopt an open strategy and how you can integrate with existing DevOps tools such as Git and Jenkins, or into existing cross-platform CI/CD pipelines. George discussed how Zowe, OMP’s first project devoted to the mainframe, is opening mainframe system commands, data sets and source libraries so you can integrate with tools that know nothing about mainframe.

    Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

    How to Reduce Engineer Burnout During COVID-19 by Henry Jewkes, staff software engineer at Split, is the Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year. Henry explains how to cope with burnout effectively as it becomes increasingly common during the COVID-19 pandemic.

     

    DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards

    Best End to End DevOps Tool/Service

    The winner of the Best End to End DevOps Tool/Service in 2020 is GitLab. GitLab has demonstrated to be the most efficient solution for DevOps teams to collaborate and build software. 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.

    Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service

    The DevOps Dozen award for the Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service goes to GitHub, the most popular open-source version control code repository. GitHub is great to manage and maintain code in the cloud and contribute to projects quickly with automatic environment setup.

     

    Best CI/CD Tool

    CircleCI was chosen, by the public and the judges, as the Best CI/CD Tool. CircleCI is the leading CI/CD solution for software innovation at scale. The CircleCI platform allows teams to build and deliver software in the cloud or on their own infrastructure. CircleCI manages more than 35 million builds per month on Linux, macOS and Windows.


    Best Value Stream Management Tool

    The 2020 DevOps Dozen winner of the Best Value Stream Management Tool is Digital.ai Value Stream Platform. Digital.ai enables the world’s largest enterprises to accelerate their digital transformation initiatives by combining industry-leading enterprise Agile planning, application security, continuous testing, software delivery and AI-powered analytics in the first intelligent value stream platform. Digital.ai Value Stream Platform provides a unique view of the software delivery lifecycle through the customer experience lens to better align with business objectives and scale Agile and DevOps processes.

    The Digital.ai Value Stream Platform features end-to-end connectivity, visibility with AI-powered analytics, continuous testing and quality, release management and flow optimization, and measurable outcomes through quantified metrics. The platform allows organizations to set business goals based upon market needs, deliver products and technologies to achieve those goals, measure and analyze results, and make adjustments to continuously improve.

    Best Observability Solution

    The award for Best Observability Solution goes to Splunk Observability Suite, a comprehensive combination of solutions designed to help IT and DevOps teams tackle new monitoring challenges that other tools haven’t been able to effectively address. The Observability Suite helps users maintain the highest levels of business performance and adaptability, improve release quality and velocity, improve developer efficiency, minimize downtime, and deliver world-class digital experiences.

    Best DevSecOps Solution

    JFrog Xray was voted the Best DevSecOps Solution of 2020. JFrog Xray is a universal impact analysis product enhancing artifact security, container security and OSS license compliance across your DevSecOps pipeline. JFrog Xray scans your artifacts, builds and Release Bundles for OSS components being used, and detects security vulnerabilities and licenses in your software components.

    Best Testing Service/Tool

    Tricentis Tosca, a continuous testing platform that accelerates testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps, is the winner of the Best Testing Service/Tool of 2020. With the industry’s most innovative functional testing technologies, Tricentis Tosca breaks through the barriers experienced with conventional testing tools. Simplifying end-to-end functional testing, Tricentis Tosca automates tests across all layers of modern enterprise architectures.

    Best Kubernetes Platform/Service

    The Best Kubernetes Platform/Service award goes to Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform. 

    Red Hat OpenShift is an open source enterprise Kubernetes platform offering a consistent hybrid cloud foundation for building and scaling containerized applications.

    Best Cloud Native Security Solution/Service

    Styra’s Declarative Authorization Service (DAS) is the winner of the Best Cloud Native Security Solution/Service award. Styra DAS was purpose-built to solve the authorization challenges of cloud-native, containerized application, and the infrastructure they run upon. Built on the open source project Open Policy Agent (OPA), Styra policy-as-code solutions have been proven in production, at scale, in many of the largest cloud-native deployments in production today.

    Styra DAS allows enterprises to define, enforce and validate authorization policy across services, teams, clusters and clouds. As businesses move their cloud-native applications from development through to production, Styra DAS provides the tooling to minimize the risk of human error, offload compliance overhead and ensure security and compliance best practices are enforced across your environment. Styra DAS simplifies policy creation with a built-in library of best practices and security policies, as well as a point and click interface for building custom policy from scratch.

    Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution

    It was very difficult to choose a winner in this category. There was a tie between two solutions, CA Endevor Bridge for Git by Broadcom and Compuware’s Topaz, and after a long discussion the judges decided that both should be honored as the Best DevOps for Mainframe Solutions of 2020.

    CA Endevor Bridge for Git is a component of the CA Endevor Integrations for Enterprise DevOps. It connects Git to Endevor via an Enterprise Git Server, such as GitHub, Bitbucket or GitLab. Git as well as traditional mainframe developers can easily collaborate on the same mainframe application managed in Endevor. Only code that is pushed from local Git repository to the Enterprise Git repository is recognized by the integration and gets propagated to Endevor.

    Topaz is a modern Agile platform of mainframe development and testing tools that integrates into the DevOps toolchain, empowering any developer, regardless of experience, to understand and work on any program, no matter how old or complex, so that their organizations can easily maintain and innovate from their base of mainframe investments.

    Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution

    The Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution is InfluxDB. Developed by InfluxData, InfluxDB is an open-source time series database that empowers developers to build IoT, analytics and monitoring software. It is purpose-built to handle the massive volumes and countless sources of time-stamped data produced by sensors, applications and infrastructure.


    Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider

    The winner of this category is Opsera, the first continuous orchestration platform for DevOps teams. The Opsera platform automates any CI/CD toolchain, enables declarative pipelines and provides unified insights across the entire software delivery process.

     

     

     

    Winners will receive both digital and physical trophies and badges celebrating their achievements.

    Thanks for supporting devopsy.kinsta.cloud and the DevOps community. For more information, visit the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards website and stay tuned for the 2021 DevOps Dozen Awards.

  • MediaOps Expands Executive Bench to Capitalize on Explosive Growth With Addition of Industry Luminaries Andre Pino and Mitchell Ashley

    MediaOps Expands Executive Bench to Capitalize on Explosive Growth With Addition of Industry Luminaries Andre Pino and Mitchell Ashley

    Andre Pino, DevOps industry leader, joins as COO/CMO and Mitchell Ashley, Accelerated Strategy Group Founder, joins as CTO to drive growth of award-winning MediaOps

    BOCA RATON, Fla., January 5, 2021 —  MediaOps, the place to tell your story in the most powerful way, today announced the appointment of two key executives to the team. Andre Pino and Mitchell Ashley join MediaOps as COO/CMO and CTO respectively. Both bring exceptional track records of success and experience in leading organizations through high growth and profitability.

    For more than two decades, Pino has driven significant growth in technology and services businesses ranging from Fortune 500 to startups. Most recently, he served as VP of Marketing at CloudBees, where he drove the organization’s growth from startup to one of the leading players in the DevOps/Digital Transformation market. He was responsible for CloudBees’ brand awareness, demand generation and partner marketing to deliver on strategic growth imperatives in software development and DevOps. While at CloudBees, Pino launched the widely regarded DevOps World annual conference, which today has a global audience of thousands.

    Prior to CloudBees, Pino was a principal analyst at Forrester Research and held senior leadership positions at Unisys, HP and several successful startups.

    Ashley, founder and CEO of Accelerated Strategy Group (ASG), will assume additional responsibilities as CTO at MediaOps. As CTO, he is responsible for technology and cybersecurity strategy, innovation and execution for the company. Ashley brings a wealth of experience leading technical teams as a successful CTO, CIO, CEO and VP of Engineering at various startups, spinouts and large enterprises.

    “We are so lucky to have Andre and Mitchell join us at this critical stage of MediaOps’ growth,” said Alan Shimel, CEO of MediaOps. “After years of steady growth, the last few have seen us really accelerate. I knew that continuing and building on that growth required us to bring on experienced leadership to grow to the next level. Having worked with Mitchell for many years and knowing Andre for a long time now, I am so excited to have both joining us and bringing their talents to the team.”

    “Modern IT initiatives are transforming IT at a pace not seen before. All of this change is challenging the communities of IT professionals to try to keep up with the accelerating pace of change and technology adoption,” said Pino. “I am proud to be joining MediaOps at a time when the IT professional community needs us more than ever to help them stay on top of it all.”

    “Acceleration of digital transformation initiatives, cloud migration and modern software architecture adoption are occurring at a pace we’ve never experienced,” said Ashley. “Software is the new business and the MediaOps team brings crucial knowledge, insights and expertise on a suite of innovative platforms that meet the changing demands of how we consume information.”

    Both new executives start Jan. 4 to help MediaOps build on the momentum it has established.

    ABOUT MEDIAOPS

    MediaOps, the place to tell your story in the most powerful way, is an omniversal media company covering IT industries and practices that are reshaping the world of technology, including DevOps, Cloud-Native, Cybersecurity and Digital Transformation. Through a convergence of new media distribution platforms, MediaOps delivers the experiential stories IT professionals need to gain fresh insights and learn new skills. For marketing partners, MediaOps delivers unparalleled access to inform and engage with a highly involved IT community for thought leadership, demand generation and specialized campaigns. MediaOps is not only the most trusted name in technology media, but the most loved as well.

    ###

    Rebecca Auguste

    rebecca@devops.com

    (561) 430-3347

  • Announcing the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards Finalists

    Announcing the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards Finalists

    We are excited to announce the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards finalists. For six years in a row, we have been honoring the most outstanding leaders in the DevOps community. This year, we decided to expand our awards program to include two different sections: DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards and DevOps Dozen Community Awards.

    Those who made it to the finals have demonstrated exceptional performance and service to the community during the past year. Finalists were picked based on most nominations. Congratulations to each and every one of the finalists in the 24 categories. It is quite an accomplishment to make it this far.

    Without further ado, here are the finalists for the 2020 DevOps Dozen² Awards.

    DevOps Dozen Community Awards

    1. Best DevOps Industry Implementation
    1. Best DevOps Survey/Analysis/Research
    1. Best DevOps Related Video Series (Video)
    1. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Podcast of the Series (Audio Only) of the Year
    1. Best DevOps Books / eBook of the Year
    1. Top DevOps Evangelist
    1. Best DevOps Transformation (Non-Vendor)
    1. Best DevOps Virtual Event of the Year
    1. Most Innovative DevOps Open Source Project
    1. DevOps Executive of the Year
    1. Best DevOps Presentation of the Year
    1. Best devopsy.kinsta.cloud Article of the Year

    DevOps Dozen Tools and Services Awards

    1. Best End to End DevOps Tool/Service
    1. Best DevOps Repo/GitOps Tool/Service
    1. Best CI/CD Tool
    1. Best Value Stream Management Tool
    1. Best Observability Solution
    1. Best DevSecOps Solution
    1. Best Testing Service/Tool
    1. Best Kubernetes Platform/Service
    1. Best Cloud Native Security Solution/Service
    1. Best DevOps for Mainframe Solution
    1. Best DevOps for DataOps/Database Solution
    1. Best New DevOps Tool/Service Provider

    Finalists will receive a badge to display on their website and social media with a link to the voting/survey site.

    Voting for the winners in all 24 categories is now officially open to the public. Click here to vote for the leaders, tools and companies you think are truly deserving of an award for their exceptional service to the DevOps community. Winners will be chosen from among the finalists with general public voting being weighted for 40% of the final total and our judges selections for 60% of the weighted total. The deadline for public voting and judges submissions is Jan. 8, 2021.

    Winners will be announced at Predict 2021 Virtual Summit and will receive both digital and physical trophies and badges celebrating their achievements.

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