DevOps Blog
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IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 9.14.2020
Gartner releases its annual Magic Quadrant look at the Cloud market. While the review has been updated to cover both cloud infrastructure and platform services, the result should be familiar to many as Gartner places AWS as a Leader within the report, giving it the highest score for both its ability to execute and completeness of vision. Remaining true to past reports, Gartner places Microsoft and Google as the only other market leaders while IBM, Oracle, Alibaba and Tencent Cloud are all relegated as Niche Players. Looking to further its vision, Google Cloud announces a new category that it is calling a Business Application Platform. Google describes it as, “encompassing API management, no-code application development, automation and data insights capabilities.” The goal is to provide a “consistent way of consuming services, data, and functionality, via APIs, despite complex backends and empower non-technical employees to quickly build data-driven applications without coding.” The Business Application Platform leverages Google Cloud’s Apigee API management and AppSheet investments.
Seven Cloud Cost Optimization Resources
In uncertain times, it’s a natural reaction to focus on funds. Yet, there is a clear difference between tripping over dollars to pick up pennies and being a good steward of one’s budget, ensuring systems are optimized for cost efficiency. Fortunately, cloud cost optimization is a pillar in both AWS’s Well Architected Framework and Microsoft Azure’s Architecture Framework. Indeed, with the help of several tools offered by the cloud providers themselves and some analysis, cloud cost optimization can be achieved.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 9.8.2020
In this week’s DevOps news, Progress announces its plan to acquire Chef for $220 million in cash. The combined entity will provide, according to a news release, “industry-leading compliance and application automation products for multi-cloud and on-prem infrastructure.” The transaction is expected to close in October 2020. We can expect additional acquisitions from Progress as it pursues its plan to double the company in the next five years. Chef, a mile marker in that journey, is seen by Progress as growing its offerings, providing continuous application delivery, dependable compliance, and remediation automation.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 8.31.2020
In this week’s DevOps news, Microsoft shares how the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation of cybersecurity. According to a new survey, the majority of interviewed firms (58%) have increased their security budgets, with 82% planning to use a portion of the expanded budget to add staff. The top goal identified by security teams is to provide secure remote access, with multi-factor authentication identified as the top security investment made during the pandemic. Compliance has not been neglected during the pandemic with 65% reporting an increased budget for it. Longer-term, respondents identified cloud security (40%) as a top area for investment along with Zero Trust with 51% of companies speeding up their deployments.
Announcing SNowForm, a ServiceNow and Terraform Integration
We are excited to introduce SNowForm, a new solution that integrates ServiceNow Service Catalog and Terraform Enterprise to quickly and easily build infrastructure on public cloud platforms, including AWS and Azure. The new solution shrinks the time consuming process of requesting, approving, and provisioning cloud infrastructure from weeks to minutes, greatly expediting developer productivity and efficiency.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 8.24.2020
In this week’s DevOps news, Cloud Native Computing Foundation and SlashData release findings from their bi-annual State of Cloud Native Development Report. Perhaps not surprising, researchers found that the population of cloud native developers is growing, with 1.8 million more than in Q2 2019. Among the 6.5 million developers, 2.7 million use Kubernetes, and 4 million use serverless architectures and cloud functions. CNCF also reports that 60% of backend developers use containers in their work, a 10% year-over-year increase. As you’d expect in light of this, the use of container orchestration tools has also grown — by 7%.
Manufacturers Get Closer to the Customer
Not too long ago, retailers owned the customer relationship. Customers would visit the store, interact with store staff, and leave with recommended goods. Manufacturers set up distribution centers to get their products to retail to be sold to the customer and vied heavily for shelf space. Indeed, it was a major coup for a new product to be picked up by a retailer like Wal-Mart as it could mean the difference between remaining small or becoming a household brand.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 8.17.2020
In this week’s DevOps news, we learn that developers spend an increasing amount of time cleaning up data, rather than working on solutions that deliver value to the company. This, according to a survey by SD Times and Melissa. Surveyed developers said they spend approximately one full day per week wrangling with data issues, which they attribute to duplicate data, inconsistent data, and incomplete data as well as old or incorrect data and misfielded data. More than half of the respondents revealed that they are involved in data quality input, data quality management, choosing validation APIs or API data quality solutions, and data integration.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 8.10.2020
In this week’s DevOps news, VMware Carbon Black issues its semiannual Global Incident Response Threat Report. In it, the firm warns readers that COVID-19 has brought a surge in cyberattacks that security teams are struggling to keep up with — 53% of survey respondents reported increases in cyberattacks related to COVID-19. Top endpoint security issues to be addressed include remote access inefficiencies, VPN vulnerabilities, and staff shortages. Looking forward, cloud jacking was identified by 42% of respondents as “very likely” to become more common in the next 12 months.
Smart or Stupid Agility: Which are you?
In his book, Good to Great, Jim Collins describes an important business cycle called the doom loop, a negative cycle created by reaction without understanding. In a recent Knowledge Project podcast, he shared this about companies in the doom loop, “Here’s what’s really scary. You are going through the first three of five phases where looking in from the outside you still look healthy, but you are already sick… And you are not visibly sick where nobody can deny it anymore until stage four out of five stages. And the fifth stage is a stage you never come back from which is capitulation to irrelevance or death.” The doom loop illustrates the importance of the OODA (observe-orient-decide-act) loop as a model for responding to shifting market situations with intelligent agility.
IT Modernization and DevOps News Week in Review 8.3.2020
According to new research by VMware Carbon Black, attacks continue to accelerate. In this first USA threat report, researchers learn 92% of security professionals said the volume of attacks they faced has increased. And, 97% of organizations had suffered a breach in the prior 12 months; 84% report that attacks have become increasingly sophisticated.
Lessons from the DevOps Front Lines
While it may be difficult to imagine yourself as working on the DevOps front lines when you work from home, I’ve learned as a DevOps engineer at Flux7 that indeed that is the case. Here, I have had the opportunity to work on incredibly rewarding projects, the most recent of which is no exception. Recently I have been fortunate enough to be a part of the team that developed and deployed a proxy cluster setup for one of our customers. I learned several things over the course of the project that in the spirit of continuous learning (and improvement in the greater DevOps community) I share with you today. I’ll start with my takeaways about the project and working as part of an Agile team and conclude with my thoughts on specific technologies.