Tag: all day devops

  • Why You Can’t Afford to Miss All Day DevOps on October 10th

    Why You Can’t Afford to Miss All Day DevOps on October 10th

    In a tech world full of events and conferences, one stands out, not just for its longevity, but for its global influence and accessibility—All Day DevOps (ADDO). Since its inception, ADDO has become more than just another virtual conference; it’s a cultural touchstone for the DevOps community. On October 10th, ADDO returns with its signature 24-hour “follow the sun” format, proving once again that DevOps is more than a buzzword—it’s a movement that never sleeps.

    A Global Stage for DevOps Excellence

    For those unfamiliar, All Day DevOps was one of the first large-scale virtual DevOps conferences, launched when most people thought virtual meant second-rate. Today, it’s the grandaddy of DevOps events, boasting a platform that connects people across every time zone, allowing them to tune in whenever they can, from wherever they are. It’s about democratizing access to cutting-edge insights that were once limited to those who could travel to physical events.

    This year, the lineup is stacked with must-see sessions that reflect the urgency and evolution of DevOps in the current landscape. More organizations than ever are grappling with software supply chain security, AI’s rapid integration, and the balancing act between innovation and risk in open source. If you’re in DevOps, security, or software development—or simply interested in how these forces shape the future—you’ll want to mark your calendar for ADDO 2024.

    A Few Sessions You Can’t Afford to Miss

    While there’s plenty to take in over the 24 hours, some sessions will set the tone for the year ahead in DevOps. Here’s a taste:

    • 3:00 – 4:00am ET: The Invisible Threat: Open Source Malware is Silently Sabotaging Your Software

    Open source has always been a double-edged sword—rich in innovation but fraught with vulnerabilities. This session digs into how malware in open-source projects is becoming an invisible threat to your software supply chain. If you’re sleeping on open-source security, this is your wake-up call.

    • 8:00 – 9:00am ET: Revolutionizing Software Development: The Critical Balance Between AI and Human Insight

    In an era when every tech headline seems to scream “AI,” this session tackles the reality of AI’s role in software development—not as a replacement for developers, but as a tool that needs to be wielded with human insight. Striking this balance could be the key to staying ahead.

    • 11:00am – 12:00pm ET: A Decade of Transformation – Unveiling the 10th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain Report

    One of the most anticipated moments of ADDO 2024: the unveiling of Sonatype’s 10th Annual Software Supply Chain Report. This isn’t just another report—it’s the pulse check on how supply chain security has evolved over the past decade, and where it’s headed next.

    • 1:00 – 1:30pm ET: Open Source in Financial Services: Balancing Innovation and Security in a Highly Regulated Industry

    Financial services are often seen as late adopters of open source, but this session shows how they’re balancing innovation with security in an industry that simply can’t afford to take risks. It’s a compelling look at how even the most regulated sectors are embracing open source.

    • 4:00 – 4:30pm ET: Achieving Quality at Scale: Revolutionizing QA with GenAI

    Quality assurance at scale is hard enough without the looming pressure of accelerating release cycles. This session promises to demonstrate how Generative AI (GenAI) can become a game-changer for QA, achieving high quality without compromising speed.

    Why ADDO Still Matters

    In a tech landscape cluttered with conferences, All Day DevOps holds a special place for one simple reason: it consistently delivers on its promise of community-driven, relevant, and actionable content. Year after year, industry veterans and newcomers alike find value in ADDO’s free, global, and virtual format—proving that physical distance or cost should never be a barrier to learning and growth in DevOps.

    This year’s focus on AI, software supply chain security, and open-source innovation reflects the real-time challenges practitioners are facing in an environment that is rapidly changing. More than just theory, ADDO offers concrete solutions and case studies that you can apply in your organization today.

    For many, All Day DevOps has become an annual touchstone, a way to measure how far the DevOps movement has come and to gain insight into where it’s going. Whether you’re new to the field or have been part of the DevOps revolution since the beginning, ADDO is the place to connect, learn, and get ahead of the curve.

    Join the Global DevOps Movement

    So why not tune in? ADDO 2024 kicks off at midnight ET on October 10th and runs for 24 hours straight. With the world waking up to new challenges every day, DevOps is more important than ever—and so is this event. You can register for free at https://alldaystaging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud and be part of a global movement shaping the future of technology.

    Don’t just take our word for it—log in, learn, and see how ADDO continues to drive the conversation in DevOps forward. I will be on line for sure.

    Also, shameless Techstrong plug, we are featuring our newest video series called “From the Source,” featuring Sonatype CTOs Brian Fox and Ilkka Turenen talking about DevSecOps, software supply chain security and SBOMs around many of these topics. You can watch on techstrong.tv, or it’s coming soon to the podcast platform of your choice.

  • Scaling DevOps at Pearson

    Scaling DevOps at Pearson

    Pearson might be one of the more influential companies you have never heard of. Its footprint in the educational publishing marketplace is expansive, and its scope was just one challenge when it made the move to DevOps.

    Sean D. Mack (@SeanDMackNYC) is formerly the VP of Operations and Application for Pearson. To give you an idea of the scale of the company’s operations when it began implementing DevOps, Sean oversaw 110 development teams and 3,000 different products across the globe. To further complicate things, Pearson is a mature company with both legacy and new products. This is a case study of how the company approached implementing DevOps with the goal of helping you learn how to do it. Sean presented it at the 2016 All Day DevOps conference.

    As they say, you often learn your biggest lessons with your failures. Sean noted that, ultimately, DevOps was a failure at Pearson due to organizational change. But, he presented the case study with the hope you will learn from what Pearson did and take it forward. He continues to be a passionate evangelist for DevOps.

    Pearson had its challenges. It was a siloed organization operating at a large scale, and had a toss-it-over-the-wall mentality in dealing with problems. Out of sight, out of mind.

    seanmack1.png

    In addition, all of Pearson’s teams were at different levels of maturity, from legacy teams running .Net on Windows 2000 servers while others doing CI/CD to AWS. Obviously, this creates challenges when implementing DevOps, but we will see later how the company tried to tackle that, specifically.

    At the high level, the solution involved several aspects:

    • A DevOps practice area
    • A DevOps steering committee
    • Measuring progress based on global KPIs focused on measuring business impact
    • Measuring teams based on a DevOps scorecard
    • Push from the bottom – plenty of developers and operations who embraced and were eager for the change
    • Push from the top – support from key executives

    Pearson’s DevOps Steering Committee set up several workstreams:

    • Tracking tools
    • Metrics
    • Deployments automation and monitoring practices
    • Test automation
    • App engineering resource contention
    • Operationalization
    • Communications

    While these are specific to Pearson, many may be applicable to your organization. In any case, it is important to step back, look at your organization, and decide what your organization needs.

    Pearson also looked at four core competencies to track and measure: automation; independence (how independent is the feature); operationalization (how easy it is to maintain); and continuous improvement. The below chart outlines each area in more detail.

    Automation

    Continuous Improvement

    Independence

    Operationalization

    • Unit tests
    • Critical Scenarios
    • Dependent Systems
    • Continuous Build
    • Continuous Deployment
    • Test Automation
    • KPI
    • SLA
    • Metric Tracking
    • Metric Reporting
    • Remediation
    • Isolated Configuration
    • Code Dependencies
    • Isolated Infrastructure
    • Monitoring and Alerting
    • Tier 1 Service Desk System Knowledge
    • Tier 2 Service Desk System Knowledge
    • Documentation

    To help each team measure their competencies and improvement, Pearson built a self-reporting tool to empower teams but encourage visibility, and developed business metrics and then a competency model to measure teams against to see how they were progressing. As Sean noted, “We were not trying to get everyone to a 5. Some teams, yes, but we also had legacy products that were running for years, successfully, with little or no maintenance. The investment to bring the teams up wasn’t worth the effort. There had to be a business reason.“

    seanmack2.png

    In the end, Pearson raised DevOps maturity for all of the teams. As noted earlier, though, this was eventually phased out, but Sean presented this case study with the hope you found something to drive DevOps in your company.

    In the end, if you have just a couple takeaways, they are this:

    1. Begin by determining what your desirable outcomes are.
    2. Don’t just do DevOps to be cool. Do it to drive business results.

    You can watch Sean’s entire talk online here. If you missed any of the other 30-minute long presentations from All Day DevOps, they are easy to find and available free-of-charge here.  Finally, be sure to register you and the rest of your team for the 2017 All Day DevOps conference here.  This year’s event will offer 96 practitioner-led sessions (no vendor pitches allowed). It’s all free and online on Oct. 24.

    — Derek E. Weeks