Flux7 Blog

Gartner has released its annual Top 10 technology trends for the year ahead and has structured this year’s trends around the notion of people-centric smart spaces. According to David Cearley, vice president and Gartner Fellow, in a press release, “Putting people at the center of your technology strategy highlights one of the most important aspects of technology — how it impacts customers, employees, business partners, society or other key constituencies. Arguably all actions of the organization can be attributed to how it impacts these individuals and groups either directly or indirectly. This is a people-centric approach.”

2020 strategic technology trends, those with substantial disruptive potential, include: 

• Hyperautomation, the combination of ML, packaged software and automation tools to deliver work.
• Multisensory and multimodal experiences
• The democratization of data and analytics, development, design, and knowledge with greater access to tools and expert systems that empower more employees to exploit and apply specialized skills
• Human Augmentation, the delivery of cognitive and physical improvements as an integral part of the human experience
• Greater transparency and traceability of consumer data
• The empowered edge, which focuses on exploiting edge capabilities and enabling greater autonomy at the edge
• Distributed cloud
• Autonomous things like robots, drones, autonomous vehicles/ships and appliances
• Practical blockchain, and rounding out the top 10 is 
• AI security.

DevOps News

• HashiCorp brought treats on Halloween as they announced Clustering for Terraform Enterprise reached GA. According to a blog announcement, the new Clustering functionality enables users to easily install and manage a scalable cluster that can meet their performance and availability requirements; Clustering supports installations of Terraform Enterprise in AWS, Azure, and GCP.
• GitLab released versions 12.4.1, 12.3.6, and 12.2.9 for both its Community and Enterprise Editions. The versions are notable as they contain fixes to important security issues. GitLab strongly recommends that all GitLab installations be upgraded to one of these versions immediately.
• Google introduced TensorFlow Enterprise to help accelerate development of AI apps. The new service features enterprise-grade support; enhanced cloud scalability with Deep Learning VMs (GA) and Deep Learning Containers (Beta), and; an optimized experience and enterprise-grade features across Google Cloud managed services, like Kubernetes Engine and AI Platform.
• Trello celebrated 50 million registered users last week with new team board templates, access to community-created templates, card templates, additional automation, and suggested actions that, using AI and ML, will learn your most common actions on a board and suggest them at the right moments to help you work faster.
• Helping you benchmark against the industry is new research by OpsRamp, Adapt or Perish: The OpsRamp Report on Modern IT Operations in the Digital Age, in which they found that 64% of respondents believe that DevOps is the most sought-after skill, exceeding cloud certifications, machine learning, and industry knowledge. In addition, more than half of mission-critical workloads run in the public cloud for almost 60% of organizations.
   

AWS News 

• Amazon brought to market last week the ability to create CodeStar projects using the publicly available CodeCommit and GitHub CloudFormation resources. You can also create the initial commit for your repository through CloudFormation. While it was difficult to replicate CodeStar’s resource provisioning before, users can now easily provision toolchain resources by using the CloudFormation template CodeStar configures for them. Moreover, according to Amazon, operators can customize CodeStar templates to setup a more complex continuous integration and deployment process, so they no longer need to start from scratch.
• You can now AWS announced Image Scanning for Amazon ECR, where developers can store, manage and deploy container images. Now in GA, Image Scanning for Amazon Elastic Container Registry automates the vulnerability assessment feature in ECR that helps improve the security of application container images by scanning them for a broad range of operating system vulnerabilities.
• Operators can now connect multiple data sources in Amazon QuickSight, creating data sets and building dashboards. For example, transactional data and various customer dimensional data such as segment, geographic, or demographic can be married without first pulling the data to a single source outside Amazon QuickSight.
• With Amazon ElastiCache for Redis, operators can now modify authentication tokens by setting and rotating new tokens. According to the announcement, users can now modify active tokens while in use, or add brand-new tokens to existing encryption-in-transit enabled clusters that were previously set-up without authentication tokens. 
• AWS announced GA of the AWS for WordPress plugin, which provides a workflow to configure an Amazon CloudFront distribution that is highly optimized for WordPress websites.

Flux7 News

• Not every business needs to be Netflix or Amazon. Knowing the best path forward for your business and how a DevOps model can help you get there is the subject of a new Webinar with GigaOm research analyst, Jon Collins and Dr. Aater Suleman, CEO, and co-founder of DevOps Consulting firm, Flux7. Listen as they discuss strategies for applying DevOps in a VUCA world.
• Read our latest AWS Case Study: Vision Graphics Grows Business, ROI with Technology Transformation. This is the story of a digital transformation brought about by a desire to grow competitiveness through application modernization and technology transformation. The result: new customers, greater customer satisfaction, and a net positive ROI.

Written by Flux7 Labs

Flux7 is the only Sherpa on the DevOps journey that assesses, designs, and teaches while implementing a holistic solution for its enterprise customers, thus giving its clients the skills needed to manage and expand on the technology moving forward. Not a reseller or an MSP, Flux7 recommendations are 100% focused on customer requirements and creating the most efficient infrastructure possible that automates operations, streamlines and enhances development, and supports specific business goals.