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  • Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    Five Great DevOps Job Opportunities

    DevOps.com is now providing a weekly DevOps jobs report through which opportunities for DevOps professionals will be highlighted to better serve our audience.

    Our goal in these challenging economic times is to make it easier for DevOps professionals to advance their careers.

    Of course, the pool of available DevOps talent is still relatively constrained, so when one DevOps professional takes on a new role it tends to create an opportunity for others.

    The five job postings shared this week are selected based on the company looking to hire, the vertical industry segment and, naturally, the pay scale being offered.

    We’re also committed to providing additional insights into the state of the DevOps job market. In the meantime, for your consideration:

    Indeed.com

    Sony Electronics
    New York, New York
    DevOps Engineer
    $125,000 to $135,000

    SimplyHired.com

    Fiddler AI
    Palo Alto, California
    DevOps Engineer
    $120,000 to $152,000

    CareerBuilder.com

    Leidos
    DevOps Engineer
    Olivette, Missouri
    $120,000 to $125,000

    LinkedIn

    Capital Group
    Irvine, California
    DevOps Engineer
    $92,423 to $147,877

    Dice.com

    CA-One Tech Cloud
    Austin, Texas
    DevOps Engineer
    $80,000 to $100,000

  • Hitting the Accelerator for Change: How Open Source Drives Software-Defined Cars

    Hitting the Accelerator for Change: How Open Source Drives Software-Defined Cars

    Every new car on the road today contains hundreds of millions of lines of code, and that’s a good thing because the technological functions they enable add greatly to the car’s ultimate value. For over 100 years, automotive consumers coveted cars because of their paintwork, their leather interiors and the speeds they can travel. But now, their real and perceived value is influenced by technology features. Technologies such as electric vehicles, self-driving and other software-defined services are what drive the value of the car—and it’s no longer too nerdy to describe cars as ‘software-defined.’

    Navigating the Road to the Future

    For car manufacturers and their suppliers, the challenges of the software-defined car are already very much in focus. Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) have been hiring new workers and re-training existing ones to navigate these challenges, such as cybersecurity and connected technologies. Ten years ago, OEMs such as Renault and Volkswagen had few in-house software engineers. Fast forward to today, and both companies have numerous resources focusing on software.

    Software will soon become ever more central to the vehicles we drive, and that will soon drive us, as vehicles become more connected, autonomous, shared and electric (CASE). In the next few years, autonomous vehicles will soon be handling tens of terabytes of data per day, gathered by sensors such as LIDAR and cameras. Customers are increasingly expecting smartphone-esque features, which involves keeping pace with the very latest apps and technologies.

    Combined with features such as passenger entertainment systems and remote diagnostics, the requirement for software and processing power in vehicles is going to grow at an ever-increasing pace. Open-source software can provide automakers with the power to keep up.

    You Must Shift Gears

    Inevitably, these processing power requirements will require a seismic shift in the way OEMs work. Currently, OEMs are struggling to maintain existing systems‒while at the same time attempting to develop new platforms. It’s a hangover from years in which vehicles were not connected or had extremely basic connected services. This has led to a situation where it’s difficult to upgrade the software at pace due to the requirements and constraints of the hardware.

    There are lessons for car-makers in the smartphone world. Think about how a software update can be applied across multiple different smartphones. An iOS update works just as well across a new device or a device from four years ago. One iPhone will see multiple updates, adding new features and boosting security.

    For car manufacturers, this won’t be an easy shift: The industry needs more defined standards to allow an easier interface between hardware and software. The industry also needs to reconsider how it develops hardware and how this relates to software. These challenges will require a new way of thinking for car manufacturers as they transition to a world where time cycles are critical. I believe that cross-industry collaboration is needed to accelerate the development of autonomous vehicles.

    Keep an Eye on Moving Parts

    Complexity is building at an increasingly rapid pace in the car industry, and this shows no sign of slowing down. In a report on the industry, McKinsey noted that the average complexity of individual software projects in the automotive sector has grown by 300% over the last decade. By 2025, the number of lines of code in the average luxury car will have doubled from today’s figure of 100 million lines of code, according to a prediction by Volkswagen‒which is already more than a military aircraft like the F-35. In full-self-driving cars, the figure could potentially reach a billion lines of code, analysts believe.

    It’s not just the software that is becoming more complex, the hardware is too. Modern vehicles already have up to 150 Electronic Control Units (ECUs), often scattered through the vehicle, close to sensors. Increasingly, manufacturers are moving towards a model where these ECUs are combined and consolidated, connected by an ethernet network. As the amount of data vehicles deal with increases, it’s unlikely that all of this will be directly uploaded to cloud servers; instead, much of it will be processed inside the vehicle before ‘edited highlights’ are uploaded to the cloud for processing.

    This has important implications for vehicle maintenance and also poses cost issues. Car manufacturers face challenges when it comes to managing the ever-growing complexity of their systems while trying to keep annual recurring costs down.

    Watch the Hacker Threat

    The need for cybersecure vehicles is also growing, particularly as we see self-driving vehicles enter the fray. In 2015, two security experts showed off a hack where they were able to ‘switch off’ a Jeep driving at 70mph down an American highway. It marked the dawn of the ‘hackable’ car—although the seeds of this were sown decades earlier when the first ‘connected’ components were unveiled in the 80s and were not built to be resilient to hackers. A 2021 report on global automotive security was damning, saying, “There have been 110 Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs) that year related to the automotive industry, 33 in 2020 alone compared to 24 in 2019.”

    Ultimately, the automotive industry faces increasing regulation in the face of these threats. As governments begin to regulate software within the automotive industry, those designing the products and software will become more accountable.

    Open Source and Safety … Always

    For car manufacturers, there are also important issues related to functional safety—unsurprising when you are dealing with a device that weighs a ton or more. This directly impacts software development, with additional costs for any system that has an impact on driver or passenger safety.

    Car manufacturers need to learn from the aviation industry, where systems related to safety are rigidly separated from those that are not, reducing costs due to compliance.

    It’s often difficult to reuse existing software in cars today, as it can require porting to a different configuration. Costs can rise, not in a linear fashion, but exponentially. How much money will it cost to write, implement and test 100 million lines of code ‒ or a billion? This is the challenge manufacturers are facing. When it comes to managing these costs, open source will become ever more important and not only will allow the reuse of existing software, but will enable other manufacturers to contribute to said software.

    Software-Defined Cars

    The future is rushing towards us at speed—and in it, cars are increasingly software-defined. In this future, open source offers OEMs a highly attractive solution to the considerable hurdles ahead, from safety issues to cybersecurity. Open source will unleash the power of the ambitions of the car industry—not just to compete with the tireless innovation of other industries, such as mobile, but to exceed it. For consumers, cars are already the most complex devices they own: and they could be the most innovative. The flexibility and scalability of open source will allow car-makers to free their imagination and create the innovative, software-driven car of the future.

  • Navigating the World of Distributed Workforces

    Navigating the World of Distributed Workforces

    The ever-changing software development landscape continues to bring new opportunities and challenges to developers and businesses that hire developers in equal measure. Whether it’s breakthroughs in quantum computing, extended reality development fueling growth in the gaming industry or the deepening complexities engulfing the regulatory landscape, there’s a lot in store for the DevOps community in the coming year. Developers will become increasingly crucial for businesses aiming to future-proof their bottom lines. Tech companies, especially, must grasp the significance of accommodating a distributed workforce to address the diverse needs of a rapidly evolving market.

    Distinct from the conventional understanding of ‘remote’ work, a distributed workforce refers to a deliberately formed team structure that operates from various geographical locations. This model, propelled by technological advancements, is set to evolve significantly, transforming communication and collaboration across distances into a seamless process integral to the developer’s journey.

    What’s Driving the Distributed Workforce Trend?

    There are many reasons behind the popularity of distributed workforces, but some of the main drivers behind 2024’s expected growth include:

    ● Global expansion: As businesses grow globally, having a distributed development team allows organizations to tap into a deep understanding of the essence of a particular language, country or market. This local expertise and cultural awareness contribute to better market penetration and customer satisfaction.
    ● Legal and security considerations: Some industries may have stringent regulations requiring staff and all sorts of contractors and vendors to be of a particular nationality or have a physical presence in specific regions. Compliance with these regulations is easier to achieve by strategically distributing team members across relevant locations and ensuring adherence to legal and security requirements, all while maintaining operational efficiency.
    ● The need for 24×7 operations: By placing team members across different time zones, organizations can ensure continuous coverage throughout the day and round-the-clock productivity.
    ● Cost optimization: By mixing teams from higher and lower-cost regions, businesses can create a cost-effective structure.
    ● Talent availability: The distribution of the workforce is highly influenced by the talent shortage; for example, in the UK. As some geographical locations are known for their expertise in certain industries and technologies, organizations look to these areas for access to a wider pool of skilled professionals.

    Ongoing and Future Challenges

    While more and more organizations recognize the benefits of a distributed workforce, it’s not without its challenges—both for the businesses employing the model and the in-house developers adjusting to it.

    For businesses: These may include having the HR capacity to effectively manage talent recruitment, retention and relationships in the context of near-/offshoring, shortly followed by legal and security concerns. Hiring remote workers while navigating legal frameworks across different locations and ensuring the security of intellectual property and collaboration terms are challenging.

    Additionally, businesses must grapple with extending corporate social responsibility, equality and representativeness initiatives to destinations where local traditions and business environments may not align with standards set in the location of the organization’s headquarters. The traditional ‘offshore’ model—where time zones don’t align—coupled with project fragmentation across various sites, makes asynchronous collaboration, is also a key challenge.

    Retaining talent within distributed teams is another significant hurdle, as methods effective locally may not suffice, requiring new retention strategies. Then, even with these in place, the time required for onboarding becomes crucial for quickly integrating effective replacements or extensions to existing teams. All of this underscores the importance of vendors who possess expertise in managing these aspects within remote teams and are poised to apply and develop these essential skills on a broader scale.

    For in-house developers: When transitioning to a distributed workforce, there may be difficulties in conveying ideas leading to misunderstandings or delays, struggles in adapting to new collaboration tools and technologies such as virtual collaboration platforms or challenges in working collaboratively due to the lack of spontaneous in-person interactions.

    Without effective communication strategies and time given to developers to adapt to new norms, practices and expectations, maintaining team cohesion and engagement can be more demanding in a distributed setup.

    Security concerns also sit with in-house developers as well as business leaders, as they must ensure the security of ideas, code, setup and sensitive information, all while adapting to what may be new security protocols and practices established for the distributed work environment.

    Meeting the Evolving Demands of Distributed Workforces

    Addressing these challenges requires a proactive approach that establishes good communication, collaboration and a supportive remote work culture.

    Alongside using the skills of recruitment vendors, who play a pivotal role in meeting the evolving demands of distributed workforces, employee training and up-skilling is crucial, especially when transitioning from a local to a distributed team within an organization.

    Training programs should focus on clarifying the reasons and goals behind the shift, defining roles and responsibilities post-transition, establishing effective communication protocols and channels and offering recommendations for practices that enhance the overall effectiveness of the new distributed setup. A training approach such as this will ensure that employees not only understand the strategic objectives but also acquire the necessary skills to thrive in a distributed work environment.

    Preparations should also focus on introducing new tools and methodologies for remote work, of which there are already plenty available, with more advanced tech expected in the upcoming year. Examples include:

    ● Employer of Record platforms: Platforms that facilitate compliance with legal requirements are experiencing substantial growth. The future is likely to see these platforms evolving to address not only legal aspects but also HR-related needs, offering more comprehensive solutions for managing distributed workforces.

    ● Remote collaboration tools: While high-speed internet and standard video conferencing tools have become commonplace, the emphasis will shift towards more advanced tools. Virtual windows and other innovative collaboration technologies will play a crucial role in enhancing the remote work experience and fostering better communication and collaboration among distributed teams.

    ● Team performance and delivery measurement practices and tools: As businesses strive for efficiency and effectiveness in managing distributed teams, tools that measure team performance and project delivery will become increasingly important. These tools, integrated into existing project management systems, will provide automated metrics and insights. Some forward-thinking vendors are already leveraging such methodologies to enhance remote team management.

    ● Advanced project and time management tools: Beyond basic project and time management tools, businesses will adopt more sophisticated solutions to streamline workflow, enhance productivity and track progress effectively. Automation in these tools will become essential for managing distributed teams and ensuring seamless collaboration.

    With a host of challenges, tech and demands—all of which are continually evolving—the key takeaway here is preparation. Only well-prepared development teams will be able to navigate the complexities of a distributed work environment successfully and see businesses ready to reap the benefits.

  • Three Strategies for Reducing MTTD and MTTR as Outage Costs Spiral

    Three Strategies for Reducing MTTD and MTTR as Outage Costs Spiral

    According to a New Relic survey of IT professionals, the median annual cost of IT outages has reached an astronomical $7.75 million. Over one-third of the 1,700 respondents said critical business application outages now cost more than $500,000 per hour. In a business environment where most interactions with customers, suppliers and business partners are conducted digitally, downtime has become a problem and an existential threat.

    Most IT organizations carefully monitor two key metrics — mean time to detection (MTTD) and mean time to resolution (MTTR) — to track their success in identifying and remediating critical systems issues. The figures represent, respectively, the average time it takes administrators to identify that a problem has occurred and to remediate the underlying issues. They serve as a benchmark for understanding the organization’s level of awareness of the status of its systems and the speed with which problems can be diagnosed and acted upon.

    There are many ways to improve performance against these metrics, but three stand out as the most effective, as evidenced by New Relic and the survey results.

    Monitor Everything

    The less you know about a problem, the longer it takes to diagnose and fix. The New Relic survey measured 17 different observability categories, such as network monitoring, alerts, log management, browser monitoring and distributed tracing. Across the board, about two-thirds of the companies that used even one of those monitoring tools reported reduced MTTR, with many saying resolution times had fallen by more than 25%.

    One-third of respondents whose organizations implemented full-stack observability—which is the ability to see everything in the tech stack that could affect the customer experience—reported the fewest outages, fastest MTTD and MTTR, lowest outage costs and highest median annual return on investment compared to all respondents. For example, those who have full-stack observability experience a median outage cost that is 37% less than those without.

    As the complexity of enterprise technology stacks increases, so does the difficulty of pinpointing the root cause of an outage. Any monitoring is better than no monitoring at all, and the more visibility you have into applications and infrastructure the faster you can identify and resolve incidents. Strive for full-stack observability around integrated observability data and a comprehensive dashboard.

    Have an Incident Management Action Plan

    The worst time to figure out how to resolve a problem is when you’re in the midst of a crisis. Organizations with mature observability practices also have extensive and documented response plans.

    Your incident plan will be unique to your organization. Small companies and startups tend to have ad hoc response strategies based on the skills within the organization. Large enterprises may use a more formal methodology like IT service management that defines strict procedures and protocols. Companies that have embraced modern DevOps and Lean principles often use a hybrid approach that depends heavily on teamwork and collaborative problem-solving. All of these approaches can work if the team fully understands the chosen strategy.

    Document your IT architecture, identifying known vulnerabilities and outlining procedures for responding to the most common types of incidents. Plans should cover obvious disruptions like fires and power outages, but you should also think about “unicorn” scenarios such as a rogue query that ties up a database server or a communication outage at a key supplier. Mature observability teams devote a portion of their resources to constantly testing new and unpredictable scenarios and use chaos engineering to randomly inject problems in a controlled manner to see if systems respond as expected.

    As you develop incident response procedures, document the processes in runbooks, which tell responders exactly what to do when a specific problem occurs. This not only creates a database of organizational knowledge about response strategies but also helps with onboarding new employees and covers for skills gaps that occur when team members are unavailable or leave the company.

    Fix for the Future

    Technical debt is a long-term obligation that is created when a short-term – and incomplete – solution is applied. You should aim to minimize it in your observability operation.

    When a problem occurs, the temptation is to fix it as quickly as possible. Human nature is to move on to the next task without taking the time to go back and understand why a problem occurred. “Quick and dirty” fixes are an invitation to larger problems in the future. Your observability plan should include a forensics stage that documents root causes and the fixes that were applied. Even if it isn’t convenient to implement a long-term solution immediately, the documentation serves as a guide for implementing a permanent fix down the road.

    Building a resilient IT architecture is a marathon, not a sprint. The more rigor you apply to identifying and resolving problems when they happen, the better prepared you will be to prevent their reoccurrence and the more informed your team will be about the resources they manage. Reducing your MTTD and MTTR will not only improve the bottom line of your business, it will ensure that your customers have an amazing digital experience.

  • Observability: The Central Watchtower Your All-Seeing IT Needs

    Observability: The Central Watchtower Your All-Seeing IT Needs

    If there’s something you need to keep secure, it’s natural to want to keep it sealed away under lock and key. However, even keeping something in a vault, far from prying eyes and ill intent, may not be enough to offer peace of mind. After all, how can you have the peace of mind of knowing it’s safe if you don’t regularly check to ensure it hasn’t bolted, been burgled or broken down?

    Now, multiply the volume and value of things being monitored tenfold — and you get a sense of the daily inefficiencies and anxieties IT professionals battle.

    Instead of jewels, these teams safeguard, manage and maintain something far more valuable: The data that underpins everything from business transactions to system performance to threat detection to service delivery and beyond. To make matters more complicated, today’s digital ecosystems are more complicated, distributed and disparate than ever before.

    Databases are critical to managing a successful IT department — and it’s time to discard the widespread industry’s perception of them as an unknowable black box. To be sure, databases represent the most difficult component of the IT ecosystems to observe, tune, manage and scale. But the database isn’t a Magic 8 ball in terms of its internal processes; We no longer have to shake the mystery toy and accept one of the six answers it’s designed to spit out.

    The fact of the matter is that database specialists and IT teams need a clear view of database performance telemetry if they want any hope of maintaining the health, stability and scalability of their services.

    Observability Tools

    This is where observability tools can play a transformative role. Taking its cues from the all-seeing panopticon watchtower, observability eliminates the dark corners of the database dungeon by providing a comprehensive view across the full cloud-native, on-premises and hybrid technology stacks.

    The word panopticon derives from the Greek word panoptes, or “all-seeing.” The panopticon model features a central, lighted guard tower at the center of a circular room — allowing 360-degree lines of sight that allow the guards to observe every surrounding cell from a single, centralized vantage point.

    English philosopher Jeremy Bentham had no way of foreseeing the challenges of today’s database professionals when he first conceived of the panopticon in the 1700s. The concept would lay the blueprint for a prison system designed around one core concept: Enabling the minimum number of guards to effectively monitor the maximum number of inmates. Bentham’s system also works as a strategy for ensuring the health and performance of your organization’s critical databases.

    The panopticon was designed so that every cell could be monitored from one central point — ensuring not only better and more straightforward security but preserving resources in saved time, manpower and effort expended. Think of your ITOps, database, DataOps and DevOps teams as the wardens of your IT performance. Traditional monitoring can be likened to patrolling a traditional prison: Rows of cells facing out into a hallway that is patrolled on a schedule or used to spot and address misbehavior as it’s noticed.

    How can they be sure they’re focusing their efforts in the right place? Or trust that Cell Block A won’t stage a breakout while they’re breaking up an argument in Cell Block B?

    In short: They can’t. Odds are, the team is either running from outage to outage in an everlasting firefighting mode or relying on random spot checks for something as vital as the health of our IT systems.

    Observability, as opposed to monitoring, puts teams into that central panopticon watchtower, allowing them to not just see everything, but to see it within the context of the bigger picture. This comprehensive visibility and always-on observation enable IT teams to identify critical issues as they occur, even those caused by complex dependencies between the database, operating system, storage subsystem and network.

    Database Performance Issues

    Furthermore, database performance issues are a starting gun for costly bottlenecks or serious outages that can handcuff your company’s ability to compete or grow. Without complete and precise database monitoring and observability, IT operations struggle to accurately determine an application’s root cause of performance issues. This increases the risk of downtime, data loss and poor customer experiences.

    Discovering the root cause of performance issues is quite literally a system-critical undertaking, whether you’re simply running your enterprise, scaling your operations or deploying new code. Observability also offers teams the rare opportunity to get ahead of performance issues since you can see performance anomalies in advance of a service disruption rather than relying on real-time remediation.

    With traditional methods, DevOps and IT teams must manually analyze the data presented to them, correlate it to the problem, and locate the error before they can finally begin addressing it. In contrast, observability collects data to provide information on what’s not performing as expected and why. This allows teams to take a proactive approach to solving downtime and bottlenecks and proactively preventing them.

    In the software world, that translates directly to more time spent where it matters: Developing new business value within your applications and infrastructures, fueling innovation and exceeding customer expectations.

    Given how complicated the modern database has — and continues to — become, arming your enterprise with the right observability solutions can provide a boost to efficiency and performance and pardon your teams from a sentence to time-consuming, mundane and error-prone work.