devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: DevOps talent

  • Bridging the Multi-Cloud, DevOps Skills Gap

    Bridging the Multi-Cloud, DevOps Skills Gap

    The cloud is driving a digital transformation revolution throughout the world, as traditional “brick and mortar” companies morph into software companies. This is easy to see with retailers and publishers, but it’s also happening at companies such as ZipCar, Boeing and Liberty Mutual (more about them later). This transformation, while driving radical performance and cost improvements, has caused the skills gap to widen substantially as businesses struggle to find top developer talent—competing with the likes of traditional software companies such as Google and Microsoft. I attend the Cloud Foundry Summit in Boston to verify my assumptions.

    The diversity of offerings of cloud products has opened up a variety of possibilities, and one specific usage is on the rise: the multi-cloud strategy. This means that a company is using multiple cloud providers to host its services. There are numbers of reasons to do this: to take advantage of price differences, distribute the traffic to serve different geographical regions or as part of a disaster recovery plan, to name a few.

    Having a multi-cloud infrastructure brings a lot of complexity and challenges. Fortunately, solutions such as Cloud Foundry are designed to help companies embrace what the cloud industry has to offer, including the multi-cloud aspect. Cloud Foundry has actually seen a 12 percent increase in adoption from 2017 to 2018, and 42 percent of its users consider themselves developers or DevOps engineers.

    The 2018 GitHub developer survey confirms the trend: “DevOps and machine learning are important trends in the software industry today. Languages and frameworks associated with these kinds of works are on the rise, and developers working in these areas command the highest salaries.” DevOps engineers are not only the second most well-paid developers, but they are also among the ones with the most experience.

    DevOps engineers or site reliability engineers (SREs) are a rare type of talent, because these professionals need a wide range of knowledge within the software scope—more specifically, development skills and infrastructure/system administration skills. The fact that DevOps engineers are generally more experienced is because most people start as developers and then end up learning about infrastructure on the job, and this takes time. And our education system is to blame.

    Most computer science degree programs do not focus on practical computer science and software development. System administration skills are often not covered at all, so there are hardly any graduates taking on this type of position. As a result, many engineers learn on the job rather than during their degree programs.

    I heard time and again from attendees at Cloud Foundry Summit how difficult it is to find talent. When I asked about students graduating from colleges (even top colleges), they universally responded that new graduates were far “too green,” required months of training and were not familiar with or attracted to the DevOps/SRE career path.

    Taos, a prominent Silicon Valley IT consulting and services provider, is among some that are getting creative when it comes to attracting and developing quality DevOps talent. “Our customers are increasingly investing in projects that require engineers trained in cloud technologies and DevOps,” said Trish Palumbo, vice president of Talent at Taos. “To meet the demand, we look for knowledge-seekers with a baseline of CS fundamentals to join the Taos DevOps Bootcamp.” The training is free and students get paid to attend.

    As more businesses digitally transform, more developer talent will be needed. The Cloud Foundry Foundation has been aware of this skills gap for some time, having published a full report on the topic in 2016. The foundation continues to work hard to close this gap by hosting summits where developers can take training sessions, participate in a hack-athon and learn about a career in DevOps, while networking with experienced developers and organizations seeking talent. Cloud Foundry Summit is a crucial event for organizations in need of digital transformation, as this is one of the best industry conferences to meet top-tier talent.

    — Sylvain Kalache

  • Why Offshoring Software Does Not Work in the Agile Age

    Why Offshoring Software Does Not Work in the Agile Age

    These days, even refrigerators can be programmed to tell you when you’re running low on a certain food or when something has expired. Washing machines, coffee makers and toasters all use software to bring a more connected experience to their users.

    And a lot of the technology being developed today is targeting large-scale problems, too. Artificial intelligence can help with health care, driving and learning; blockchain can help with human trafficking and tracking blood diamonds; and data analytics can shed insight anywhere from credit-worthiness to cardiac risk.

    As demand for such technologies has grown, however, the brainpower behind them has been spread thin. Canada, for example, is predicted to have 218,000 tech jobs open by 2020—but not enough people to fill them, and the United States is certainly not better off. This pushes companies to offshore to places such as India to meet their development needs. But while software offshoring can offer these companies much-needed affordable technical expertise, there is one glaring problem: Traditional software offshoring does not work great for Agile development.

    Here’s why, and what you can do instead.

    Challenges with Traditional Offshoring

    In the Age of Agility, the digital transformation of industries is generating unanticipated software opportunities that rely more on creativity and reaction time, and less on technical grunt work.

    Under Agile development, software developers must work in close collaboration with a cross-functional team to constantly learn from client feedback and deliver new code that can be tested with real clients every one or two weeks. This approach serves to speed the velocity at which a company can test hypotheses about what the client wants without wasted time and effort.

    During this process, iteration is key. Engineers will deliver a minimum viable product (MVP) and quickly test to see if it works. They’ll gain valuable feedback from real clients and gradually iron out the kinks until the product is market-ready. But with the traditional software offshoring model, a high level of flexibility and iteration velocity is very hard to achieve.

    Under this model, a company in Silicon Valley and its software outsourcing partner in Asia or Eastern Europe may have at most two or three hours of overlap to coordinate their work. Conversations between team members thus become limited, occurring either very early in the morning or late at night.

    In an effort to communicate more frequently, the U.S. team begins to generate documents with instructions and recommendations that the foreign development team can read when they begin their workday. However, this generates complexity, diminishes real-time conversations and the insights they produce, and makes iteration a paper-heavy process. This is not the fault of engineers in the United States or abroad; it is simply a natural restriction imposed by geography.

    But it can be avoided.

    Opportunities with Nearshoring

    U.S. companies at the forefront of the digital age are realizing that to make software outsourcing work, they have to ensure it doesn’t sacrifice their agility and capacity to iterate. For this reason, companies have begun engaging in nearshoring—that is, they’re outsourcing to places in which the time-zones more closely coincide.

    Under nearshore software outsourcing, engineers in the United States and their foreign development teams are both awake at the same time. This provides the opportunity for significantly more real-time communication rather than enduring the disjointed paper-heavy communication in offshoring. As a result, project ideation and the creative cycle of market feedback and iteration are potentialized, and the software engineering process can run in tandem between the on-site client and the nearshore partner.

    For companies in the United States and Canada, the benefits of nearshoring can be realized by looking to Latin America, which offers a rich supply of talent. In particular, Colombia, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil offer sophisticated services, cultural compatibility and strong communications infrastructures.

    Not only do most Latin American engineers understand English—the majority of software engineering texts and materials are written in English—but  they also often rank ahead of India in terms of quality. According to Stack Overflow, Peru, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Mexico and Brazil each score higher than India in terms of “Average Reputation of Top Users.” And this is no surprise, considering that Latin America is home to various unicorns, including Argentina’s software development company Globant, as well as MercadoLibre and Despegar.

    Far-shore software outsourcing services will not go away, and will still be used for certain types of projects that involve application rewrites or application maintenance. However, when push comes to shove, the companies tracing the new frontiers of technology would be wise to look at Latin America for nearshoring opportunities. India may be marginally cheaper than Latin America, but the additional flexibility and speed-to-market gained by nearshoring versus offshoring has no price tag. In the age of agility, only leaders and effective innovators will thrive.

    — Alejandro Vasquez