devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: survey

  • REP SPOTLIGHT: TaUB Solutions

    REP SPOTLIGHT: TaUB Solutions

    DevOps Institute: Tell us about your organization.

    TaUB Solutions: TaUB Solutions is a consulting-cum-training organization based in Bangalore India. Our vision is to take the customers beyond the existing state of maturity to envisioned business outcomes.

    We serve a lot of customers in southeast Asian region by delivering consulting assignments on ITSM, IT governance, project and program management and business relationship management. This also includes delivering business simulations on the respective domains and make our customers gain benefit from learning by doing.

    DOI: What other topics do you teach or consult?

    TaUB Solutions: ITSM, IT governance, agile, DevOps, business relationship management, cybersecurity, project and program management and ISO standards (20000,27001, 22301)

    DOI: What type of interest in DevOps are you seeing in your region?

    TaUB Solutions: At the moment, we have successfully delivered around 11 batches of DevOps Foundation and Certified Agile Service Manager courses. We appeal to our customers because of the practitioner focus that we bring to the table and take them through case studies to understand the end-to-end value chain. Our current run rate indicates a strong pipeline of interest in southeast Asian countries who want to apply the DevOps principles and philosophy in their workplace. We also see great traction from Indian corporates to plunge in to the DevOps journey to serve their respective customers better.

    DOI: How do you think DevOps contributes to the business’ value stream?

    TaUB Solutions: One of the things that appeal most to me is the ability to articulate the end-to-end value chain. Business today does not care about which framework or methodology you adopt for the customers. All that matters is to deliver an end-to-end value chain and get a common understanding among different functions and leverage the best across the enterprise. I see tremendous value of leveraging agile, ITSM and lean principles with culture and tool chain to demonstrate key business value.

    DOI: What topic area in DevOps excites you the most?

    TaUB Solutions: There are three things:

    • Culture change
    • Power of automation using tool chain
    • Business KPIs and Common Metrics across the organization

    DOI: Why should enterprises and individuals consider formal DevOps Training?

    TaUB Solutions: Today, DevOps is still at its infant stage and has not yet been codified. So people have their own perspectives, thoughts and misconceptions. So in order to be certain with the path they traverse, it is increasingly important to step in the right direction. This is where a formal DevOps training from DOI can help people to understand fundamentals and DevOps trends from practitioners.

  • Development Tools Sprawl and the Impact of Open Source: The Herding Kittens Survey

    Development Tools Sprawl and the Impact of Open Source: The Herding Kittens Survey

    devopsy.kinsta.cloud and Automic partnered up to conduct a survey back in February and March of several hundred respondents regarding their use of development tools, their use of Open Source and their rate of change. The survey report entitled: Managing Your DevOps Tool Chest, The Complexity of Herding Kittens is available from Automic here (fyi, registration is required to download the report).

    Scott Wilson of Automic and I already conducted a webinar where we took a deep dive on the findings of the survey. You can access the slides and recording of that webinar here (FYI, this is also behind a registration wall).

    If you take a moment to study the analysis you will see what I think are some interesting things in this survey. One is that we had two basic groups who answered. One was made up of our devopsy.kinsta.cloud readers who tend to be DevOps adopters. The other was a more General IT group. There was some stark differences between the two groups. None was bigger than frequency of release and how often you would like to release code. Talk about polar opposites!

    Another interesting filter we applied was by size of organization. The biggest differences when comparing startup smaller organizations to large enterprises was the amount of tools and coding languages they used. Of course larger organizations used more than smaller ones. But the starker difference was in open source usage. Smaller organizations used a much greater percentage of open source tools than larger enterprises.

    Finally we also looked at geographical region and industry vertical to draw distinctions. You can read the report and listen to the webinar to to get all of the details on this and more. I highly recommend you download the report and take a look. Also if you can spare some time to listen to the webinar I think you will pick up some great insights.

  • Container Usage and Adoption, Here is Your Chance to Tell Us What You Think

    Container Usage and Adoption, Here is Your Chance to Tell Us What You Think

    We are teaming up once again with ClusterHQ for an update on Container usage and adoption. Our new survey is available and shouldn’t take more than 5-7 minutes of your time. We are looking to see if the container adoption and usage has changed since our last survey last summer. Please take a moment to fill out the survey. If you fill out contact info at the end, you are eligible to win a $50 dollar Amazon gift card. One in 50 wins a card. If you don’t want to give any contact information, you don’t have to but we can’t contact you if you were to win a gift card. Either way we would love your input!

    While containers are capturing lots of buzz and attention, many still doubt their impact in real world procurements. However, we are hearing enough subjective feedback to think that this is not the case. We think containers are catching on quickly, perhaps even quicker than cloud adoption did at similar time frames. But that is subjective. We are looking for numbers that prove or disprove it. So even if you are not using containers now, we want to know that too.

    The standard line is that containers are being tested in dev and test environments, but are not ready for prime time. Yet Docker, CoreOS, Kubernetes and the entire container ecosystem point to more and more customer references. Can everyone be just playing with containers in their labs? We don’t think so.

    On the other hand, there are questions about security, scalability, networking. Should you lock in to one vendors complete stack? How open should the ecosystem be? What about data, databases, OS, etc. Lots of questions and we really don’t have a lot of objective data points. Help us change this by giving us your own thoughts, experiences and ideas.

    We will share the full report with analysis with our readers when complete. But don’t miss this chance to be heard and make a difference.

  • State of DevOps Survey – The Ultimate Feedback Loop

    State of DevOps Survey – The Ultimate Feedback Loop

    If there’s any consistent criticism of the larger DevOps movement, it’s that the talking heads and industry gadflies are driving the conversation, not the people in the trenches.

    All the thought leadership panels and “how-to” content (including the written and AV materials on this very site) make for great watercooler discussion, but lack the input of those dev, ops and IT management pros who are actually living the DevOps experience, some critics have said.

    Well, fair enough. Talking heads are paid to talk. Thought leaders are chosen to lead the debate at conferences and on webcasts. Bloggers blog. Reporters report. This is simply the way of the world. Certain voices are heard via the channels they frequent. It is, as so many people are fond of saying these days, what it is.

    So what about everyone else? What of the people reading this stunning prose and listening to these talks while rolling their eyes based on the connectivity of it all to their real-world experience? How can their voices be heard?

    Independent of jumping into the blogsphere or applying to speak at said industry events – which you should, btw – there’s one significant opportunity available to anyone who cares to take the time – participating in industry research.

    Over the next few business days, citizens of the DevOps world will have their last chance to contribute to the industry’s most widely read and respected research project, the State of DevOps Report.

    If you haven’t done so already, take the time to fill out this year’s survey, and make sure that your voice is heard when the subsequent report is published in June. Sure, it takes a little time, about 15-20 minutes; but that’s because it goes to the trouble of exploring the real-world issues that weigh most heavily on today’s practitioners.

    Why is this particular project so important, or even credible? Consider that the minds behind the survey and analysis resulting in the 2016 State of DevOps Report are those authors and talking heads that actually get the most respect.

    Backed by DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA), the independent think tank operated by a partnership of Jez Humble, Gene Kim, and Nicole Forsgren – perhaps the most respected voices on the landscape, along with Nigel Kersten, the project is categorically aimed at surfacing the truth about DevOps adoption today – not merely promoting the interests of vendor sponsors.

    Like previous iterations of the report, the 2016 edition will focus on topics including IT performance, technical practices, culture, lean management, and organizational performance. This year’s survey also examines several new areas, including the ROI of IT performance, security and compliance, and containers.

    To further entice participation, project leaders are also offering free tickets to the DevOps Enterprise Summit, along with forthcoming books from some of the industry’s leading advocates to a lucky few who take the time to get involved.

    DevOps success is fundamentally based on the notion of increased collaboration and continuous feedback among the people scattered across the SDLC. Likewise, the legitimacy of this research project is utterly dependent on the input of as many real-world practitioners as possible.

    If you’re one of those individuals, and you really care whether or not everyone else involved in the advancement of DevOps understands what this all means to you, do yourself a favor and participate.

    Much like an application being built using DevOps practices, this quality of this project will be directly determined by the degree to which anyone with insight is willing to get involved and build toward optimal results.

    Take the 2016 State of DevOps Survey… today!

  • Herding Kittens: Developer Tools Trends From Our Survey

    Herding Kittens: Developer Tools Trends From Our Survey

    Back in late February we launched our latest survey in partnership with Automic. The survey sought to understand how developer tools are selected and used within organizations. We wanted to have some insight into how prevalent Shadow IT was. Well thanks to the hundreds of you who responded, we have been busy working with Automic analyzing the results. Frankly in some areas the responses bore out our original hypothesis, but in other ones the results were pretty surprising.

    Not to be a tease, I should tell you we are not releasing the full report and results until our webinar on this on May 4th. You can register for that one here. But let me give you some insight into some of the results:

    1. A big difference between DevOps empowered organizations versus traditional IT shops. We actually ran the survey to both our devopsy.kinsta.cloud audience and then to a general IT control group and had a look at the differences. DevOps empowered groups had far greater insight into what tools were being used, generally used more tools, more open source tools and generally had greater diversity (that they knew about anyway).
    2. The large majority of respondents reported that their organization use tools besides those on the “approved list”. This is a form of Shadow IT and shows how new software tools are sneaked in under the radar of the official IT.
    3. Many times these tools that snuck in the back door were eventually adopted as official tools, showing that this is a viable method of introducing new tools into the organization.
    4. Another insight was whether entire dev teams were using the same toolset. This answer as you might imagine was different when you compared organization sizes. However, overall the message is that developers like to use their chosen tools.

    These are just some of the insights we will be discussing at the webinar. Also all attendees will receive a full copy of the report with analysis. So mark your calendars now and register for the webinar where we will discuss these results and more.

    BTW, the webinar will feature myself and Kerry Lebel, senior director of community for Automic.

    Scott_Willson_Headshot_Round

    Scott Willson

     

    Scott Willson is Product Marketing Director, Release Automation at Automic Software. He has over 20 years of technology experience that spans software development, pre-sales, post sales, and marketing. Scott is passionate about technology and helping business achieve value through technology and was leading DevOps at organizations before it was coined DevOps.

  • Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey

    Puppet Labs Launches Annual State of DevOps Survey

    Puppet Labs has announced its 5th annual State of DevOps Survey. In the past five years, we’ve surveyed more than 20,000 technical professionals around the world, spanning all industries and companies of all sizes. We’ve captured a tremendous amount of data about how IT performance, culture, technical practices and organizational performance intersect.

    What sets our survey apart from the many other surveys out there is that it’s science-based. Yes, there is a science to creating surveys and analyzing data, and there’s also an art to translating all of that amazing data into something that’s useful to the industry at large.

    This year, we’ve partnered with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by our friends Gene Kim, Jez Humble and Nicole Forsgren. If you’ve been following the DevOps conversation for a while, their names should be familiar. Together, our goal is to help advance the DevOps community and help technology organizations improve their practices through rigorous scientific research.

    Through our analysis, we’ve been able to quantify IT performance. We know that high-performing IT teams deploy code 30 times more frequently, with 60 times fewer failures, and they recover 168 times faster. We also know the factors that predict IT performance—technical practices such as continuous delivery, cultural norms and lean management—which in turn predict organizational performance.

    This year’s survey seeks to dive deeper into each of these areas, while also shedding light on new areas of research, including:

    • ROI of IT performance. What can you expect from your investment in DevOps? Our goal is to understand how throughput, stability and quality affect the bottom line.

    • Security and compliance. What role do security and compliance play in a DevOps environment? Some people see security as a roadblock to DevOps, but we want to investigate if it has to be that way.

    • Quality. So you’re deploying code faster than ever. What’s the quality of that code?

    • Containers. How do containers affect IT performance? Are they making IT’s job easier?

    • Lean management. Last year we found that lean management practices such as limiting work in process and creating and maintaining visual displays showing key quality and productivity metrics predict IT performance. This year’s survey looks at additional lean management practices to help us better understand what it really means for a technology organization to go lean.

    The survey seeks answers to questions we get all the time and we believe they reflect the broader concerns of the DevOps community. Your experience matters and we hope you’ll share it by taking the 2016 DevOps Survey. It should only take about 20 minutes, and when you complete the survey, you’ll be entered to win some great prizes (see the official rules), including :

    Please take the survey and share it with your friends and peers. Together, we can make IT better for everyone.

    About the Author/Alanna Brown

    unnamedAlanna Brown heads up DevOps research and go-to-marketing strategies at Puppet Labs. She also works closely with Puppet Labs product owners and engineers to develop a roadmap and support for Puppet on Windows.

  • Puppet Labs Launches Fifth Annual State of DevOps Survey

    PORTLAND, OR–(Marketwired – Mar 22, 2016) –  Puppet Labs, the leading provider of IT automation software, today announced that it has opened the survey for the fifth annual State of DevOps Survey and Report (http://bit.ly/2016DevOpsSurvey). This one-of-kind, comprehensive industry study provides enterprises with insights into how DevOps, automation, IT and organizational performance impact the world’s leading organizations. The 2015 report revealed the critical role that IT leaders play in a company’s DevOps transformation, affirmed that through the power of DevOps and automation, high-performing organizations have 60 percent fewer failures and recover 168 times faster, and demonstrated that DevOps provides a powerful competitive advantage.

    This year’s report is being conducted in partnership with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA), founded by IT and development experts Gene Kim, Jez Humble, and Nicole Forsgren. The survey will examine a number of new research areas, including:

    • ROI of IT performance. Exploring the ROI of IT performance and technical practices to better understand how throughput, stability and quality measures affect the bottom line.
    • Security and compliance. Security and compliance are top of mind in the DevOps space. This year’s survey investigates the role security plays in a DevOps environment.
    • Quality. Past reports have revealed the impact of DevOps practices on key IT performance metrics for throughput and stability. This year’s survey will help to better understand how quality is affected by DevOps practices.
    • Containers. Containers are no doubt changing the IT landscape. The survey will make clear how much containers are truly affecting IT performance.
    • Lean. Last year’s report found that lean management practices such as limiting work in process and creating and maintaining visual displays showing key quality and productivity metrics predict IT performance. This year’s survey will continue diving into lean practices to boost productivity and performance.

    “As DevOps practices have been increasingly adopted in all industries, we hope to have even more people in IT share their experiences through this year’s DevOps survey,” said Nigel Kersten, CIO of Puppet Labs. “We’re looking to get more information on how well DevOps practices actually pay off for organizations that make this investment, and which practices lead to more effective IT and more successful organizations.”

    “DORA is honored to participate in this year’s survey,” said Gene Kim, one of the co-founders of DORA and co-author of The Phoenix Project. “Organizations in all industries increasingly adopt DevOps because the business value is so high. More than ever, this research helps us understand what organizational and technical practices are required to make DevOps work, as well as how to measure its value.”

    In addition, for the first time in the survey’s history, Puppet Labs and DORA have opened sponsorship to a consortium of companies that are both leaders and innovators within the DevOps space. Current sponsors of the report include Atlassian, Automic, CA Technologies, Hewlett-Packard Enterprise, IT Revolution, Splunk, and ThoughtWorks.

    To participate in the 2016 DevOps Survey and Report, visit (http://bit.ly/2016DevOpsSurvey)

    Additional Resources

    About Puppet Labs
    Puppet Labs, Inc. is the leader in IT automation. Puppet Labs software provides system administrators the operational agility, efficiency and insight they need to proactively manage dynamic infrastructure, scaling from tens of servers to thousands, both on premise and in the cloud. Thousands of the world’s leading organizations use Puppet Labs software to configure and manage their IT infrastructure, including Bank of America, Cisco, NYSE, Salesforce.com and WebEx. Based in Portland, Oregon, Puppet Labs employs more than 360 people. The company is backed by investors Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Google Ventures, VMware, Cisco, True Ventures, Radar Partners, and Emerson Street Partners. To learn more, please visit PuppetLabs.com.

    About DevOps Research and Assessment, LLC
    DevOps Research and Assessments (DORA) brings together the leading DevOps experts and researchers to help technology and business leaders create world-class technology organizations, leveraging insights from Gene Kim and Jez Humble, renowned experts in the space of IT operations and development, and Nicole Forsgren, PhD, an expert in metrics and psychometrics in software delivery and IT impact.

    In the last three years, DORA has compiled tens of thousands of respondents from technology organizations around the world. By doing this, DORA can benchmark organizations against their industry peers, and provide guidance to leaders on how they can address any gaps to achieve their technology and organizational goals.

    Media Contact
    Justin Dorff
    PR Manager
    (510) 875-9608
    justin.dorff@puppetlabs.com
  • Developers Cite Startling Lack of Digital Leadership

    Developers Cite Startling Lack of Digital Leadership

    Despite app backlogs, developers say their efforts are underfunded and undertrained, and lack a priority for security

    We’ve long written about the challenges enterprises face when developing the apps they need, digging out of app backlogs and technical debt, and the overall importance of running a productive development pipeline. And, how to keep up, enterprise’s are seeing more and more citizen developers rising to fill in try to close the lag between what software apps they need built.

    Which is why it was disheartening to read in a recently published report, “Investment in Enterprise Developers is the Best Risk Management System,” based on a survey of more than 100 developers by the Application Developers Alliance, that 40 percent of respondents have experienced failed development efforts from lack of funding, and a third are concerned that current projects could be pulled for budgetary reasons. Also, despite survey after survey of executives citing security as a “top priority,” only 45 percent of enterprise developers surveyed believe that their organization sets a “high” priority for security.

    Not surprisingly, according to the survey, four out of five enterprise developers surveyed work on Windows and/or OS X, and 24 percent work on Linux. Yet only 20 percent work on mobile platforms exclusively. And, interestingly, two-thirds of enterprise developers develop their apps exclusively HTML5, hybrid or native, with native being the most common. And, not surprisingly today, cloud is the most common way to deploy apps during development, test or production.

    Unfortunately, many developers report underfunding in technology, processes and training. A third report outdated technology and processes in their organizations—more than half (51 percent) of those in organizations with more than 100 employees.

    Leadership Falling Short in Many Areas

    When it comes to cultivating processes and technology guidance, many enterprises also fall short. Only 37 percent of those surveyed said their organization has a Center of Excellence. Not surprisingly, the larger enterprises were more likely to have a Center of Excellence; however the lack of such centers is more common in North America and Europe, Middle East and Africa. Most every organization surveyed in Asia, however, has a dedicated Center of Excellence. Additionally, a surprisingly low 29 percent of of developers surveyed reported that they are required to attend training, certification programs or other continuing education.

    That’s stunning, considering that increasingly businesses are driven by their digital efforts. There’s no shortage of surveys citing this. In a recent study commissioned by CA Technologies, “The Battle for Competitive Advantage in the App Economy,” 43 percent of survey respondents said that becoming software-driven is central to being competitive today, and nearly 80 percent said that would be true in three years. Broadly, to be competitive in the years ahead, enterprises are going to have to be exceptional software companies in addition to their core current products and services. Yet survey after survey finds that enterprises are falling behind in their app development goals and are having a challenging time finding the talent they need.

    Additionally, the Application Developers Alliance survey found that only 50 percent of enterprises discuss the capabilities and skills they need to succeed, while only 26 percent integrate such competencies in their evaluation process. And, just as when it came to establishing Centers of Excellence, Asian companies stood out, with 78 percent of Asian developers saying necessary skill development is discussed.

    Centers of Excellence, the Application Developers Alliance survey found, also are excellent indicators of whether an enterprise is committed to building secure software. While 64 percent of developers believe they’re “adequately” trained to build secure software, more than 70 percent at organizations with a Center of Excellence contend that security is a high priority where they work. If they work in an organization without a Center of Excellence, that number drops to 28 percent, and 17 percent rank security as a low priority in such enterprises.

    Clearly, if enterprises expect to compete globally in the years ahead they’re going to need to step up their priorities when it comes to budgeting app development, cultivating the skills they need and building the internal organization necessary to succeed as a digital enterprise.

  • Managing Your DevOps Tool Chest: The Complexity of Herding Kittens

    Managing Your DevOps Tool Chest: The Complexity of Herding Kittens

    We are running another survey here at devopsy.kinsta.cloud, this one co-sponsored by Automic. The survey seeks to understand how tools are selected and used within organizations. Do developers pick their own tools or are tools mandated by the company? Maybe a little of both?

    For many organizations trying to keep track of all the tools that developers and IT ops are using is a lot like herding kittens. But what about your organization? We are trying to find out how often you change tools, what the change process looks like, how big an effect does shadow IT have in this equation?

    The survey is short and shouldn’t take you more than 5 or 6 minutes. As usual we will be giving out $50 Amazon gift cards to 1 out of every 50 people who respond. While email address or your name is not necessary to take the survey, we do need a way to contact you if you want to win the Amazon card. That is the only thing that will be done with the info if you do fill it out and try to win the gift cards.

    We will publish a full analysis of the results in a few weeks. So stay tuned.

    Also for this survey we have versions in French and German in addition to the English version. So please help us, you and the industry better understand how and what DevOps tools we use.

    The English version of the survey: https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/3VWHPKV

    The French version of the survey: https://fr.surveymonkey.com/r/529GKW5

    The German version of the survey: https://de.surveymonkey.com/r/5FWYYKR

    If you have any questions about the survey, please leave a comment. Thanks!

  • Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment

    Carving through the hype – take the DevOps maturity assessment

    As anyone who spends time with their family over the holidays can attest, the notion of maturity is a highly subjective concept.

    Whether it’s sizing up the next generation’s advancement or defaulting to time-honored inter-sibling behaviors, annual get-togethers offer tangible proof of what’s new and those things that likely won’t ever change.

    In the domain of DevOps – an umbrella concept that encompasses a massive array of processes and supporting capabilities – gauging the maturity of your organization’s standing is also a highly interpretive task.

    Given that “DevOps” means something different to nearly every organization, based on its unique makeup, methodologies, tools, and most importantly, business goals, attempting to measure progress against any outside model may seem an effort of limited value.

    That said, as an increasing number of organizations seek to embrace DevOps, and growing recognition that well-worn stories of leading-edge “unicorns” don’t relate closely to most people’s real-world expectations, many teams are left wondering where their own efforts stand, especially in comparison to their peers.

    To help acquit this pursuit, and allow organizations to scope their progress, CA recently launched the second iteration of its online DevOps Assessment.

    Split into three short surveys covering core limbs of the DevOps tree – “Develop and Test”, “Release and Deploy”, and “Manage and Monitor” – this free tool offers detailed insight into how your organization’s maturity stacks up to that of other practitioners.

    For instance, in the domain of development, how well do your teams fare in defining and managing requirements, and then presenting them to others in a structured manner? Related to release cycles, are your teams truly meeting business-driven expectations for more frequent application deployments, shorter lead times, and higher success rates? Or, when it comes to applications monitoring, are you able to distinguish the most critical and recurrent problems and how they truly impact business services?

    These are perhaps some of the most fundamental questions that one could apply to measurement of DevOps adoption in general, but further investigation attempts to take a closer look at more finite, underlying issues.

    Are your development teams accurately replicating realistic conditions from production systems to create virtual services and testing scenarios? Are your application release deployments fully automated across development, test and production environments? Can your teams monitor complete business services that link user experience, transactions and applications to infrastructure to pinpoint any root cause issues?

    The best thing about the survey is that it immediately provides visibility into how your answers compare to those of previous respondents. There’s no fuzzy math or editorial interpretation (though we may highlight trends in a report at some point), merely instant validation, and the option to create a customized report card charting where your efforts stand in relation to those of your peers.

    If you’re wondering precisely just how to achieve your long-term DevOps goals comparative to where you stand today, it might even be worth leveraging some of the involved questions for the purpose of evolving process and methodology.

    The only remaining questions are: Do you think that you’re ahead of the curve? Are you afraid to find out just how far you’re behind the crowd? And most importantly, what do you have to lose?

    Take the survey today and get a real-world fix on your overall level of DevOps maturity. Guaranteed it’s a far more informative activity than debating family and friends over whose turn it is to carve the turkey, or wash the dishes.