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Tag: devops

Jenkins World Preview: Q&A with Jez Humble
As we approach Jenkins World, scheduled for later this month in San Francisco, we sat down with Jez Humble, author of “Continuous Delivery” and one of the best-known names in DevOps. Jez will be keynoting this year’s event, along with CloudBees CEO and founder Sacha Labourey. Here’s what he had to say.

Alan Shimel: What are you most excited for at Jenkins World?

Humble: This is my first Jenkins World! I’m most excited to meet the community and find out what people care about, what problems they’re solving, what obstacles they’re facing, and what’s making them excited or sad. I’ve spent over a decade doing and teaching continuous integration and working on tools, so I’m always looking to validate and challenge my views.

Shimel: What do you plan to cover in your keynote?

Humble: I’ll be talking about DevOps, and how it’s transforming the world of software and the businesses it powers. I’ve been working on a research project into DevOps for the last few years so there will be some hard data. I’ll also be covering the principles and practices, as well as the obstacles that teams commonly face implementing them, and how to overcome them.

Shimel: What do you hope attendees take away from your talk?

Humble: First, I want folks to understand that this transformation is real, not just hype. High performers achieve higher levels of throughput, stability, and quality, and lower costs. Second, it’s hard. We’ve been talking about continuous integration for nearly twenty years now—it’s one of the basic agile engineering practices—and still the majority of people who think they’re doing it actually aren’t. But my other message is that whatever kind of organization you’re in, whatever your technology stack, you can apply these principles today. The essence of high performance is to work on getting better every day as part of your daily work, and that’s something all of us can—and should—commit to.

Shimel: What are the major DevOps trends you’ve seen this year?

Humble: I’ve not seen anything brand new jump on the scene this year. I think that’s a good thing. We’ve had so many transformational new technologies in the last few years from containers and serverless to new tools that I think we were in danger of drowning under shiny objects and hype. I think what I’ve seen in the last year is a better understanding of the contexts in which these tools and technologies can be effectively applied.

Overall, the last few years has been pretty exciting as we’ve seen devops and continuous delivery be applied in every domain from government (I spent most of last year working at 18F in the U.S. Federal Government helping to implement a DevOps, cloud-first approach to software delivery there) to mainframes in financial services to firmware. One of the common objections to devops is the “won’t work here” attitude, and we’ve comprehensively demolished that.

Shimel: How do you expect DevOps to change in the next five years?

Humble: I’m hopeful that many of the core practices such as infrastructure-as-code, continuous delivery, disposable/immutable infrastructure and blameless post-mortems will become business-as-usual in organizations of all types and sizes. However the field is still moving pretty fast, so I think we’ll continue to see plenty of innovation both in terms of the practices, their implementation, and the tools.

Shimel: What are the three most important things DevOps professionals need to focus on to achieve DevOps success?

Humble:
1. Know what success looks like in measurable terms. What are the organization-level goals we’re all working towards, and when do we want to have achieved them? Leaders should be setting clear, prioritized, measurable goals—for example, “Release every two weeks without anybody working outside normal business hours”—and then giving teams the resources and support they need to achieve them.
2. Most of your problems are going to be cultural. People like to focus on tools, and tools are definitely important, but that’s not normally where the failure modes are. I recently said my #1 devops advice was to buy lunch for and actively listen to someone in the role you complain about most in your org, whether that’s the auditors, the testers, or the DBAs. Find them and work out something you can do to make their life a bit better and then do it.
3. You’re never done: keep going! As I said, high performers are always working to get better. Devops and continuous delivery are implemented through working to get a little bit better every day. Most of the big lessons I learned in my career I learned not by working on exciting new technologies but by doing unglamorous grunt work using tools like CVS and bash. Find out what your team’s biggest obstacle is right now and do something to improve. Then find the next obstacle! Rinse and repeat.
— Alan Shimel
August 9, 2017
Loom Systems Extends Reach of AI into DevOps Realm

One of the things that tends to hold back adoption of DevOps are all the low-level events that need to be correlated by an engineer to generate anything that approaches actionable intelligence (AI). To eliminate that requirement, Loom Systems created a Loom AIops platform to automate many of the tasks that normally would need to be performed by a DevOps engineer.

Loom Systems has upgraded the Loom AIops platform by adding Distributed Entity Tracing, which makes it easier to analyze events across a range of interdependent applications and associated middleware. In addition, Loom has created Correlations View, which simplifies identifying how alerts being generated are related to one another.

Finally, the latest version of AIops adds support for the OpenStack cloud management framework, in addition to sporting a revamped set of dashboards that are easier to navigate.

Dror Mann, vice president of product for Loom Systems, says one of the reasons that DevOps is not widely implemented is that today it requires IT staffs to accumulate and correlate massive amounts of low-level event data to create anything approaching actionable intelligence. Loom AIops is designed to automate the low-level tasks relating to DevOps to enable the IT staff to focus more of their time and effort on fixing issues and reducing the time required to release and update applications.

Loom AIops, says Mann, accomplishes that goal by first streaming all the application log data into its platform, followed by all the log data generated by any dependencies that application might have. Loom AIops then applies machine learning algorithms in real time to identify the root cause of an issue. Armed with that information, it becomes a lot easier to reduce the mean time to resolution (MTR), which then provides the IT organization with the time needed to address more complex management challenges, he says.

Mann notes the single biggest challenge IT organizations encounter with DevOps is that it requires them to change their modus operandi. By automating many of the lower-level DevOps tasks, there’s more time available for IT organizations to think through the cultural changes required to successfully implemented integrated DevOps processes.

Most IT professionals will view the application of AI to IT operations with a combination of skepticism and trepidation. It will be difficult initially for many IT professionals to trust the analysis being generated by AI software. Once they do begin to trust that analysis, there naturally will be some concerns over to what degree an AI program can eliminate the need for a DevOps engineer altogether. But, Mann notes, there are many complex tasks that never get addressed because most DevOps engineers spend an inordinate amount of time and effort trying to correlate the right data.

At this juncture, usage of AI within the context of DevOps is now all but inevitable. The challenge now is not figuring out the line between where humans add higher orders of value compared to machines that are generally going to be limited to identifying patterns. The advantage a machine has it that once it learns something, it doesn’t forget it, take days off or switch jobs. However, being able to identify a pattern is not nearly the same as being able to apply reasoning to what the sum total of those patterns really means for the business.

— Mike Vizard

August 4, 2017
IBM: DevOps Challenges Require Managed Services
The DevOps complexity associated with determining which classes of application workloads are best-suited to run on certain platform types will push an increasing number of IT organizations to embrace managed services. That’s the premise put forth by IBM, which provides such a service.

Steve Robinson, general manager for IBM Cloud Platform Services, says it’s becoming less likely that internal IT operations teams will have the tools and expertise required to analyze and optimally deploy workloads. In fact, the number of platform choices have already exceeded the ability of most internal IT organizations to master. They include:
- Traditional virtual machines: The most widely deployed form a virtual machine software comes from VMware. But there’s already a lot of interest starting to emerge in so-called “micro VMs” that promise to reduce the memory footprint of VMs. However, rather than replacing traditional VMs, it’s probable micro VMs would be deployed alongside traditional VMs.
- Containers: Most containers today are deployed on top of virtual machines because of a lack of tools as well as security concerns. But as IT organizations become more adept at managing containers, many more of those containers will wind up running on bare-metal servers that will be able to attain much higher utilization rates by eliminating the need to deploy traditional virtual machines.
- Serverless Computing: Based on event-driven architecture, these platforms can be invoked natively as functions or simply be used to host containers. In either case, the need to provision servers, storage and networking resources is eliminated because IT infrastructure resources are made available on demand in real time.
- Graphical Processing Units (GPUs): As an alternative to Intel Xeon class processors, GPUs now are taking on many workloads involving machine-learning algorithms and big data because of their ability to process many of those workloads in parallel.
- Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs): Based on custom integrated circuits, FPGAs are being more widely employed within a variety of cloud services.
IT organizations today have the option to deploy any of these technologies on-premises or invoke them in the cloud. The issue most are contending with is a lack of advanced IT skills. In the absence of those skills, many IT organizations are in peril of falling behind their rivals. To overcome that issue, Robinson says it’s easier for many organizations to rely on third-party providers to manage their infrastructure while they concentrate their limited resources on application development.

Any increased reliance on managed services to gain the benefits of a more sophisticated approach to DevOps will vary widely by organization. Crafting DevOps process that span third-party organizations takes time and effort. There’s no way to analyze a workload and then automatically deploy it on the optimal platform without any human intervention. But as IT organizations continue to struggle with mastering DevOps processes, many may conclude it makes the most sense to rely on the expertise of a third-party service provider to manage a hybrid approach to DevOps. Regardless, the pressure to show results by increasing the amount of high-quality code being generated across the enterprise is mounting.

— Mike Vizard
August 4, 2017
Jenkins World: Q&A with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey

The Jenkins Community and DevOps professionals around the world are excited for Jenkins World, coming up in just a month, Aug. 28-31 in San Francisco. CloudBees, the hub of enterprise Jenkins and DevOps, is the lead organizer and premier sponsor of the event. We sat down with CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey to discuss everything Jenkins World.

NOTE: If you haven’t registered yet, there is still time! DevOps.com readers can register now with the code JWDEVOPSCUST and get 20 percent off.

Q: How has Jenkins World evolved since its inception?

A: It’s been quite the journey since the beginning of Jenkins World. The very first Jenkins World was back in 2011. We had 200 people attending and we were extremely proud of that. The Jenkins project was still new, as it had just changed its name in 2011, so we were excited to see the community already coming together. Fast forward to 2017 and we’re expecting about 2,000 attendees at this year’s event. We’ve grown 10x since the first show and even from last year to this year we’re expecting almost 50 percent more attendees. It’s been great watching the conference mature and grow over the years. 2017 will be our best show yet!

Q: What’s new at Jenkins World this year?

A: This year we’re expanding everything, covering a wide range of topics including DevOps culture, process design, automated testing, performance measurement, security, leadership and more. We’ve added a welcome reception and evening event in the expo hall so attendees have more opportunities to network and learn from each other.

Additionally, we’ll be kicking off the first-ever annual Jenkins World Awards. These awards recognize the achievements of CD innovators and Jenkins contributors from around the world. There are two award tracks: Jenkins Community Awards and CloudBees Innovation Awards. Winners in each track will be featured at Jenkins World.

Q: What can attendees expect from the keynotes?

A: We have a great lineup of keynotes this year, including myself! My keynote will be a state of the union that looks at what’s happened in the last year, what worked, what didn’t work and what we’ve learned from it. Stemming from that I’ll also offer a vision for the future. This will be actionable, and practical—something we can truly act on. I’m excited to say that there will be some significant announcements throughout the week as well.

Kohsuke Kawaguchi will also be keynoting. His keynote is always excellent. He’ll offer a state of the union from the Jenkins community angle. He’ll go over the evolution of the Jenkins project and run through the latest numbers. It’s such a pleasure to watch him on stage each year; his talks are always exciting.

We’re also thrilled that Jez Humble will be keynoting this year. He literally wrote the book on DevOps, so if you’re looking to learn about DevOps, he’s the man you want to hear. He’ll be discussing the DevOps market, challenges, opportunities, the evolving requirements and needs of DevOps professionals and more.

Q: What advice do you have for first-time attendees?

A: My advice is: Take advantage of the trainings, workshops and certification opportunities. Last year, workshops and training were a huge success, so we’re offering even more this year. It’s a great way to further your career. It’s very hands-on and provides an opportunity to show tangible results of how the conference helps you improve your skills and ultimately helps your career.

Also, make sure to network with fellow professionals. It’s the perfect time to find out how others are approaching their projects, what challenges they faced and how they’ve overcome them. It’s such a great community of professionals to learn from.

Q: Are there any sessions you recommend?

A: I’d certainly recommend checking out some of the specialized vertical sessions. For example, we’ll have a number of sessions that focus on the financial services industry with speakers from Capital One, PayPal and more.

We’ll also have some great DevSecOps presentations. It’s a very hot topic and is increasingly important in DevOps. I’d highly recommend attendees get to at least one of these sessions.

Finally, there will be several sessions focused on testing—which often adds the most friction to delivery pipelines. These sessions will prove really helpful for attendees looking to enhance their testing processes.

There you have it! This year’s show is bound to be bigger and better than ever before. Register now with your 20 percent off code: JWDEVOPSCUST.

— Alan Shimel

August 4, 2017
Yahoo7 Uses DevOps to Speed Website Redevelopment

Yahoo7 is a joint venture between Yahoo and Australian entertainment and TV company Seven West Media. Seven is one of Australia’s three major TV networks.

The company has completely replaced its technology stack and is in the process of revamping its seven consumer sites to take advantage of the new platform. The first cab off the rank is the Be entertainment and lifestyle site, but “the rest will come pretty quickly,” according to CTO Paul Russell.

“We had an aging website based on a proprietary framework,” he said, which has been replaced with a platform based on node.js and other open-source frameworks, including the Yahoo-backed Screwdriver continuous delivery platform.

There is also a focus on adopting reusable components across all the sites. It is more efficient to select, for example, an image gallery that gives the best user experience and deploy it across all the sites. That doesn’t mean all the new sites will have the same look; it is still possible to have distinctive layouts for each of them, Russell said.

A move to cross-functional teams and Scrum “was a pretty big change for us” that took approximately two years, he said. There are three teams, each with four or five developers, a product owner, a tech lead, a Scrum master and a tester. A user experience specialist is added when required.

The reorganization required “a mindset change,” but having people doing different types of work side by side did help. But the adoption of common KPIs “really has made a big difference,” as it keeps people focused on the things that really matter.

“We’ve got a fairly mature DevOps model” and the current project is the company’s latest step, said Russell.

Augmenting Screwdriver with automated performance testing on a range of metrics including latency and the number of requests per second that can be handled captures any problems at the early stages. This was “a really big step for us,” he said, especially as Yahoo7’s news content leads to significant spikes in demand, and also because the entire stack was being replaced.

The scope of the project meant it was important to have experienced staff (top engineers were needed to pull everything together under Screwdriver, he noted), although some PHP developers were cross-trained for the technical skills required for the new platform. Russell said he is prepared to train people who come with the right attitude, but even though Yahoo7 is regarded as an attractive employer, “it’s definitely a challenge” to get the right people.

Functional testing is being automated for some of the more complicated parts of the site, such as the video player, to improve confidence in each release.

Russell believes organizations need to be clear about what they expect to accomplish by adopting DevOps practices, and warns that it requires a change of mindset which is unlikely to be achieved unless the people involved buy into the concept and are all on the same page.

In particular, the idea of allowing the development team to run releases can be challenging to those used to traditional operations practices, but “it’s absolutely worth it,” he said. For example, the increased release pace means the company can respond more quickly when opportunities arise; Yahoo7 now can deploy two releases per day when necessary.

There are also benefits from the way the teams take greater day-to-day ownership of the systems they build and run. This—combined, we suspect, with the shared KPIs—brings about a situation where rules imposed from above are largely replaced by good working practices created within the teams.

A final tip from Russell to anyone considering the adoption of DevOps: You need the right tools and practices in place if it is to be successful.

— Stephen Withers

August 3, 2017
NetOps vs. DevOps: New Data is Enlightening

Traditionally, we have seen development—and, by extension, DevOps—as having a less-than-cordial relationship with network operations (NetOps). Since the goals of the two groups are sometimes at cross purposes—DevOps wants access to make everything run automated, and NetOps wants to control a production environment so that it is stable—we’ve naturally talked in those terms.

I’m a developer who learned other skills, including operations, along the way. I can manage to get things done on F5 Networks or Cisco Systems gear, but I’ve sat with true experts while they worked their magic and have a lot of respect for the NetOps crowd. So this topic has always been of interest to me.

Now, according to a recent survey conducted by F5 Networks, we can see that the animosity we have all been lead to believe is there really isn’t. There is also a press release here, and surprisingly, it offers more information from the survey than the blog does.

There is a ton of interesting data about rate of automation, views of other teams and deployments in the survey results, making it well worth a read-through.

While DevOps and NetOps remain at odds regarding how much pipeline access should be available via self-service and automation, for the most part both groups view the other as on the right track. Eighty-two percent of DevOps and 76 percent of NetOps agree that each other prioritizes “the right things.” Clearly, there is common ground across the digital divide in at least goals and focus, if not always in the organizational chart.

This, to me, says that DevOps is having the proper impact on the organization. That what’s important is getting prioritized on both sides of the pipeline. Or it says that this was always the case, and DevOps has had little impact. Historical surveys, however, seem to indicate that there was not always this level of belief between the two groups.

Interestingly enough, there has been a lot written about whether your DevOps methodology should be operations- or development-driven, but networking has always been a bit off to the side. Not the type of operations that historically is discussed in DevOps; it sat with teams such as Security and QA working with DevOps but not generally a part of the DevOps teams.

The results here would indicate that network automation is occurring at a healthy clip (makes a guy want to look at vendor APIs again, and see what’s changed to enable this fact), and if the majority of DevOps people are saying the NetOps team is focused on what’s important, likely the integration into DevOps is further along than pundits have portrayed.

Though the results indicate that many DevOps teams want more access and control of network operations than they have, this is likely the natural outgrowth of the different views these teams have always had. Network operations’ goal is rock-solid infrastructure. DevOps’ goal is speedy delivery. These two things can be at odds relatively easily.

I’m hoping that F5 offers us more access to data than a blog and a press release, but honestly what is in those two is enough to get you pondering about the state of NetDevOps (or whatever we’re calling it this week) versus the perception.

Disclaimer: I am a former F5 employee, and have a positive view of the company and its products. My wife is also F5’s Principal Technical Evangelist, and had a hand in this survey. While this doesn’t impact writing about survey results, you’ve been informed.

— Don Macvittie

August 3, 2017
Survey: Inviting Security into DevOps Promotes Effective Agility

Two of the biggest trends in business technology are seemingly at loggerheads with one another. Many companies are under severe pressure to digitally enable their businesses. At the same time, the need for hardened application security has never been more critical than it is now. You can deliver apps quickly and you can deliver apps securely but, generally speaking, the two things don’t happen at the same pace. The DevOps mission is aligned more with development efficiency and agility, but it’s also in keeping with the thinking behind DevSecOps. How are enterprises handling the conundrum?

According to a new survey from identity and encryption enterprise vendor DigiCert, they are handling it quite well. The recently released “Inviting Security into DevOps” survey found that 98 percent of respondents said their companies are integrating their security teams into their existing DevOps methodologies. The survey found that 49 percent of the respondents are in the process of doing so; the other 49 percent have already done so. Those who report having already integrated security with DevOps are 21 percent more likely to report what might seem counterintuitive: They are doing well at meeting app delivery deadlines.

“Successful security for DevOps requires a combination of culture building and the right technology,” said DigiCert CSO Jason Sabin. “Companies that can do this and bring in security at the start of a project avoid costly delays, because they deliver their project just once rather than discovering security issues late in the process.”

The methodology for the survey, which was conducted in May, involved 100 DevOps professionals, 100 IT professionals and 100 security professionals with executive management to management titles skewing 3:1.

The large enterprises polled for this survey agree it’s worth striving for. Some 88 percent of the respondents called security working directly with DevOps somewhat or extremely important. More than 70 percent of the respondents are concerned that if their companies don’t make this change, one or more of these negative repercussions are likely: increased costs, slower app delivery and increased risks.

Although nearly all the respondents have integrated or are integrating security within DevOps, they’re not saying it is an easy process. Their top challenges include a lack of a champion for the transition, the security team resists the change, lack of relationship skills required to bring the teams together and it takes much more time than expected—an average of one to two years.

How should you approach this in your company? First, recognize that it’s no panacea. It’s a logical first step, but don’t spend a year planning it, just do it. Start by appointing or identifying a leader for the project. Someone who understands both sides, ideally, and who knows how to get things done. And install a security lead at the DevOps table for all DevOps business. Integrate, standardize and invest in automating baseline security practices within DevOps workflow. Thinking that way will get you the agility you need.

Then address what comes next. Have the team identify choke points in the application security process and develop ways to work around them or eliminate them. In other words, attack the problem head on with all your best minds. Don’t forget to look for best practices developed by others. It’s a problem a lot of companies are trying to solve, so networking with people from other companies at industry events may give you your best ideas.

— Scot Finnie

August 2, 2017
Why Your Manager Will Want to Send You to Jenkins World 2017

Jenkins World 2017 is right around the corner. The conference will be held in San Francisco Aug. 28-31 and will be the biggest event of the year for Jenkins users, with approximately 2,000 people expected to be in attendance! You will not want to miss out on this event, full of learning and networking opportunities.

Need some help convincing your manager why you should attend? No problem—we have laid out all the reasons why attending would be beneficial to you and your company. Once you have convinced your manager to attend, don’t forget to register today! (As a media sponsor for Jenkins World, we are providing a special offer for our readers. Register with this promotional code and get 20 percent off your registration: JWDEVOPSCUST.

Educational Value

Jenkins World will be offering more than 60 educational sessions given by real Jenkins experts—a chance to learn from the most experienced users. Did we mention that you can also receive a free Jenkins exam with the purchase of a full conference registration? Imagine the benefits for both your résumé and team.

At the conference, you’ll be able to take advantage of great training sessions to better enhance your Jenkins capabilities. The training sessions include Jenkins Certification Training, Introduction to Jenkins, DevOps Leader Certification Training and DevOps Test Engineering Certification Training. We recommend highlighting to your manager what sessions you will want to attend in advance. Check out the full agenda here.

Jenkins World is offering keynotes from many industry leaders. Be sure to emphasize to your manager the importance of hearing from the very best in the Jenkins community, live on stage and in the breakout sessions. From Jenkins founder Kohsuke Kawaguchi to CloudBees CEO Sacha Labourey and featured speaker Jez Humble, your manager will greatly appreciate the knowledge you bring back to the office from listening to such experienced industry experts.

Networking Opportunities

The Jenkins World conference will provide numerous networking opportunities. Learn what similar problems and challenges other organizations are facing in the industry. Make it known to your manager that you will be exposed to people like you, with like business needs and challenges, that you will be able to connect with.

Prove ROI

When convincing your manager to let you attend, it is first important to make them aware of the potential ROI of this opportunity. Detail exactly your expenses including airfare, hotels and meals. This will better help your manager understand the exact cost to send you to Jenkins World. Make sure you also present how this knowledge will help push you and your team forward, ultimately propelling your entire organization forward. The ROI will be evident – make that clear! (And the ROI just got better, because DevOps.com readers can use this discount code and get 20 percent off: JWDEVOPSCUST.)

We hope this provides enough information to help you convince your manager to let you attend! We have also created an email template to use when sending all this over to your manager for review. Once you have successfully convinced your boss, go register!

— Alan Shimel

August 1, 2017
4 Ways to Give DevOps Teams the Support They Need

If it weren’t hard enough for IT infrastructure teams to innovate and keep the lights on, a host of technologies designed to drive efficiencies are introducing new levels of complexity across the data center. Virtualization, cloud computing, software-defined storage and digital are making it much more difficult for the infrastructure team to control, manage and administer an organization’s IT.

Just when IT professionals think they’ve figured out the support model, DevOps steps in. As the number of apps continues to explode, more organizations are adopting a DevOps model to accelerate development efforts. A recent Coleman Parkes Research survey of 1,770 senior business and IT executives revealed 87 percent have adopted DevOps.

Unsurprisingly, the growing emphasis on DevOps is placing an added burden on infrastructure teams already struggling to cope with the digital transformation of their organizations. Traditional storage systems are often unable to match DevOps’ requirements for an enterprise infrastructure that is simple, flexible and automated. Some DevOps teams also work in silos, which produces an additional level of complexity and opportunities for failure.

Also, occasional tensions between development and IT operations can flare up over different approaches to infrastructure and competition for resources.

IT operations teams with traditional storage hardware backgrounds are normally focused on accelerated release cycles, availability, reliability and streamlined data management. Developers, on the other hand, spend little time thinking about what technology they need versus keeping test data up to date with production and having easy access to capacity when needed.

A Support Structure That Works

Set against this backdrop, choosing the right platform to underpin these growing changes within the enterprise cloud can play a big part in ensuring a DevOps model that works and makes life easier for the IT infrastructure team. Here are four ways to help make the enterprise cloud infrastructure fit a DevOps model:

Copy Data Management

Copy data management provides up-to-date, “virtual” copies of production data to the DevOps team, eliminating the need for physical data duplication. Copy data management helps remove the load on production storage and protects the performance of applications. With snapshots, cloning and replication, modern enterprise cloud systems can enable data copies. The same technologies make it possible to protect and manage the development side of the environment in case of failure or data corruption.

QoS and Performance Guarantees

Quality of service (QoS) and guaranteed performance is a significant concern when adopting DevOps. QoS enables IT to allocate different storage workloads to control performance. QoS can set levels of maximum and minimum input/output operations per second (IOPS) or bandwidth. IT can also configure QoS at the virtual machine (VM) or virtual disk (vDisk) level. With the power of all-flash, DevOps can be consolidated on the same platform as production. This makes it easier to access production data sets and reduce the storage footprint.

Monitoring and Troubleshooting

The ability to monitor the infrastructure and correct problems and misconfigurations rapidly is valuable when moving to a DevOps environment with continuous integration and continuous deployment. Ideally, the foundations of an enterprise cloud platform should provide basic and advanced monitoring capabilities, predictive analytics, integration with other monitoring tools and VM-level monitoring.

Automation

From an infrastructure point of view, it is also critical to provide the capability to provision and manage IT infrastructure programmatically. Automation enables organizations to create and break down environments as needed, incorporate advanced features such as snapshots and cloning as daily workflows, and eliminate the potential for error from manual or interactive configuration.

As organizations move relentlessly to a mixture of virtual and physical, on-premises and cloud-based IT, infrastructure teams have to manage, control and administer all those resources while matching them to a diverse range of business, development and user requirements. By implementing an enterprise cloud platform that can work across physical and virtual environments, infrastructure teams can help DevOps teams achieve their goals without constraints around performance, scalability, manageability, resilience or flexibility.

IT organizations are achieving this level of support by replicating the agility of public cloud within the data center to make it easier to manage enterprise and cloud-native applications. This approach can help support the DevOps model and ensure it is implemented with as little friction and disruption to the infrastructure as possible.

About the Author / Chuck Dubuque

Chuck Dubuque is the VP, Product Marketing at Tintri. Prior to Tintri, he was at Red Hat where, as director of product marketing for the virtualization business unit, he was responsible for Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) and Red Hat Enterprise Linux OpenStack Platform (RHEL-OSP) market strategy. Before Red Hat, Chuck worked at a value-added reseller for VMware, NetApp and Cisco and also spent several years in biotechnology in marketing and business development. Follow him on Twitter.

July 31, 2017
Move the Needle in DevOps with Continuous Testing

Shift-left testing, risk based testing, early testing and technical debt reduction are all predicted to be some of the most sought-after trends in product development life cycle. All of these can be achieved with continuous testing through DevOps, as it emphasizes quicker transitioning of quality products to production environment at a reduced business risk.

Software Engineer in Test (SEiT) or Software Developer in Test (SDiT) was long-spoken earlier and now implemented as part of DevOps culture. As the software side of the organization moves to continuous testing practices, so, too must the product side of the organization. External market forces including competition, innovation quotient, faster time to market, scalability and lean process initiatives definitely play a role in driving the continuous testing trend.

From a technical standpoint, test environment creation, full test coverage, regression testing and integration testing of multiple endpoints are key parameters to ensure a faultless production environment when a new feature is added.

Adopting Testing Tools for DevOps Implementation

Continuous testing implementation not only includes adoption of right tools and test automation, but also a cultural change to incorporate testing at each stage of the agile development life cycle. It will involve changes right from test planning, test scenarios creation, automation feasibility analysis to test execution.

Teams need to be restructured in an agile setup to align testers closer to developers and operations teams, and have common goals for product/software delivery. This involves changing the culture and organization structure, which generally takes a longer gestation time. Test management tools such as JIRA and TestNG can help expedite this structuring, as both parties would be aware of the product features that need to be delivered and can view the progress at all times. There also are various open-source tools, including Selenium, Appium, Python robot framework/pytest and JMeter, that aptly meet the needs of agile testing.

Regression testing generally takes up the bulk of the time, as new features need to be tested every time they are added to avoid critical failures. Hence, automating regression tests have become an imperative as part of continuous testing. JUnit, which is a unit testing framework, promotes test-driven development and early code quality improvement. Bamboo can run tests in parallel batches and support hundreds of build agents providing an early feedback to developers. Automation scripts for test data cleanup, load and execution saves the testing effort of the operations team. Selenium test automation framework for web applications is one of the most famous tools for continuous testing, as it works with a host of programming languages including Java, C#, Groovy, Perl, PHP, Python and Ruby. Appium is another tool used frequently for cross platform mobile application testing.

Ensuring an Effective Product Release

Testing UI components and functionality of a product through API-based test automation is another important phase in continuous testing. API test scenario creation also generally needs involvement from the ops team. Considering virtualization of devices, along with applications or services, will accelerate test setup environments. Device virtualization using Raspberry pi helps in testing end–to-end use cases in IoT scenarios. Network virtualization for performance testing ultimately helps improve uptime and reduce outages.

The orientation of continuous testing with continuous integration and continuous delivery pipeline within an enterprise will determine the long-term success and standing of the final product in the market, from a quality perspective.

About the Author / Urvashi Babaria

Urvashi Babaria is a Product manager at eInfochips working in new age areas like IoT, DevOps and CloudOps. She is a techno commercial marketer with nine years of experience in product and project management, business analysis and transformation. She has keen interest in areas of data science including visualization, analytics and modeling. Connect with her on LinkedIn.

July 31, 2017