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Tag: remote working

  • Empowering DevOps With Cloud Desktops

    Empowering DevOps With Cloud Desktops

    Today’s organizations need to enable their IT teams to rapidly deploy, manage and maintain their applications and services. This is a primary driver behind the growth in adoption of DevOps. By uniting the IT operations and software development teams, organizations are helping to provide continuous delivery and accelerating the systems development life cycle.

    At the same time, the chronic cyberskills shortage makes it hard for organizations to find the talent they need to hire and collaborate with. The cloud, and specifically cloud desktops, can address many of these challenges and help organizations get the most bang for their buck when it comes to their DevOps teams. In fact, the two technologies have a symbiotic relationship.

    DevOps Hiring Challenges

    Due to the shortage of individuals with key skills, organizations are facing a significant challenge these days as they try to find the right developers. In fact, a recent report by the Linux Foundation and edX finds organizations are searching for more people with open source DevOps skills (65%) than developers (59%) for the first time.

    It is possible, in some instances, to hire remotely, but there are potential snags. For instance, hiring people in another country will likely entail a visa process that can take several months to complete. And collaboration with external project partners can create project bottlenecks that inhibit productivity.

    Once the people you need have been hired, the onboarding process begins. Getting new hires settled in a workflow and procuring and shipping the laptops or workstations they need takes at least a couple more weeks before they can even begin to become productive. But organizations want to be able to hire developers anywhere they can find the right people and they need them to be productive within hours, not weeks or months.

    Collaboration Woes

    DevOps teams cannot function without collaboration, but this, too, can be difficult – particularly if those teams are geographically dispersed. Developer teams have attempted to solve this problem by adopting a variety of technologies, such as legacy VDI solutions, VPNs for remote work, physical workstations connected over a WAN and more. These technologies have helped solve some of the problems, but they’ve also introduced a host of other issues that negatively affect productivity and increase cost and complexity. That includes lack of performance, unreliable user experience, IP security concerns and data management problems.

    Cloud Desktops: A New Approach

    In light of all that isn’t working, it’s clear that a new approach is needed. Cloud desktops offer many advantages when it comes to addressing some of the key challenges DevOps teams face. For one thing, they make onboarding much easier. By using cloud desktops and workstations, all that the new, talented software developer needs is a device and an internet connection, and they instantly become a part of the development team. This resolves another headache that consumes unnecessary IT resources.

    Shipping and hardware preferences are no longer an issue with the cloud desktop model. There is no more shipping, no more maintenance overhead, no more Windows-versus-Mac debates. Now, developers can pick the device they want, depending on their role requirements. They can even use smartphones and tablets in docking stations instead of laptops to connect and work in the fully configured and secure cloud desktops.

    Benefits for Developers and Testers

    Because cloud desktops support multiple desktop images, they are ideal for DevOps teams. For developers, this means that they can have multiple desktops, all with differing versions, all kept separate. This is great news if you don’t want to have to keep reimaging a physical device.

    Giving a developer a persistent desktop is one option that cloud desktops enable. Another option is the ability to give the developer a brand-new, “clean” cloud desktop every day (non-persistent). For enterprises, this means they can control the developers’ IDE so code leaks don’t happen from one release to the next, intellectual property is better protected and they can enforce stronger overall data security.

    Testers benefit as well, as they know they’ll have a totally clean, brand-new cloud desktop every day. This allows them to test and test again in isolation, knowing nothing was left behind from a previous test. In addition, the right cloud desktop enables anytime, anyplace collaboration; geographic limits become a thing of the past.

    Empowering DevOps

    The speed and agility of DevOps have made it a mainstay of software development, but certain criteria must be met for it to succeed. Its premise is faster delivery times, but companies cannot provide continuous delivery if they don’t have the skilled DevOps talent they need. Once they’re recruited and hired, provisioning often takes up more valuable time.

    With the clock ticking, organizations need to select skilled individuals, regardless of their location, and get them working and collaborating as quickly as possible. Cloud desktops address both of these challenges. In addition, they improve the user experience compared to typical VDI solutions – even for compute-heavy users. Cloud desktops increase time-to-productivity, too. As you equip and add to your DevOps team, consider the benefits of adding cloud desktops to the mix.

  • DevOps Deeper Dive: Teams Adjust to New WFH Normal

    DevOps Deeper Dive: Teams Adjust to New WFH Normal

    In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic the level of software development activity has remained relatively constant, but developers—who, like everyone else—are now largely working from home, are putting in more hours. Organizations are now grappling with whether working remotely on software development projects now represents the “new normal.”

    A report published this week by GitHub shows that while there was a slight dip in activity in various regions of the world as the pandemic spread, activity on the public GitHub repository quickly recovered. Whether developers are spending more time working on projects is difficult to conclude given all the potential distractions at home, but according to the GitHub report, the amount of time spent on the platform per developer has increased. This could be due to various factors including the fact that developers are not commuting to work or are managing multiple tasks—some of which are directly related to work—across an extended working day. Others simply may be taking more breaks between activities.

    Despite working in isolation, it would appear developers are remaining productive, said Kelly Stirman, vice president of product strategy and marketing for GitHub. “More time to code increases productivity.”

    Providers of other DevOps platforms have observed similar increases in activity during the pandemic. Moritz Plassnig, senior vice president and general manager for software delivery management and software delivery automation cloud at CloudBees, said many organizations have been launching custom application development projects to drive digital business transformation initiatives. Now those projects are becoming core to the organization’s business continuity strategy.

    “The current situation has only accelerated that trend,” said Plassnig.

    The biggest challenge in managing a highly distributed workforce is ensuring the right code is being worked on at the right time, said Fred Simon, chief data scientist of JFrog. “Everyone needs feedback.”

    To provide that feedback, managers have employed collaboration tools such as Zoom and, when necessary, shifted work to DevOps platforms made available as a cloud service, added Simon.

    At the same time, the level of communications tooling baked into a DevOps platform matters more than ever, said Emrah Samdan, vice president of product at Thundra, a provider of a platform for securing and observing cloud-native microservices. Developers can collaborate with each other much more effectively using asynchronous communications tools to, for example, share code.

    “A lot of productivity is being lost setting up Zoom calls,” said Samdan.

    The issue now is whether working on software development projects remotely represents the new normal. A recent survey of chief financial officers published by PwC finds that nearly half of the respondents (49%) plan to make remote work a permanent option for roles within their organizations that allow for it.

    How employees will respond to that change will vary. According to results from a recent survey of workers conducted by GitLab, 52% of employees say they are more productive working remotely, while 48% are more efficient. Of course, those results also suggest half of employees don’t share that same level of appreciation for working from home.

    It’s worth noting that many software development teams were already heading in the direction of working remotely more often prior to the pandemic, said Brendan O’Leary, senior developer evangelist at GitLab. In fact, he noted, resources such as the GitLab Remote Playbook have been downloaded more frequently over the last few months.

    “I think it is a time that will see a real separation of bosses and leaders,” O’Leary said, noting leaders will go beyond simply tracking metrics to enable organizations to continue to launch innovative software development projects.

    Obviously, DevOps teams that were working in a distributed fashion prior to the pandemic have a distinct advantage over those that have worked primarily in the same central location. However, given all the current uncertainties organizations now face, it’s probable every member of a DevOps team going forward is going to be working from home a lot more often.