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Tag: application development

Meet the Citizen Developer

Much has been written on the rise of citizen developers, but little about who they are and why they choose to do what they do

The enterprise is always thirsty for new applications. More than ever, this thirst seems unquenchable. Consider a recent market analysis from Global Market Insights, which expects the enterprise application market to grow at a rate of 7.6 percent annually from 2016 through 2024. That’s a clip swift enough to more than double its 2015 $150 billion market size by 2024.

The demand for enterprise applications—and especially for mobile apps—is so high that most enterprise IT departments can’t meet it and often have backlogs of months to more than a year.

We’ve written extensively about how the citizen developer is now stepping up to fill this gap. Citizen developers are helping enterprises to not only close the application demand gap but also innovate more rapidly. However, we haven’t seen much regarding the nature of these citizen developers—who they are and what makes them decide to tackle app development independent of IT.

Recently, Apple subsidiary FileMaker Inc. surveyed hundreds of citizen developers within organizations ranging from five employees to more than 1,000 employees. Those surveyed either created or were involved in the creation of custom apps, didn’t classify themselves as IT professionals and were not full-time custom app developers.

As we’ve written before, we consider the rise of the citizen developer to be an extension of the consumerization of the IT trend, which began with endpoint devices, evolved to include many cloud services and now encompasses citizen development. Just as users began choosing which tablets and smartphones they would use for work, many staff members now are choosing, independently, to shun old-fashioned spreadsheets and endpoint databases for higher-level, cloud-based platforms that make it possible to build applications with little to no coding.

Why do citizen developers choose to develop work apps on their own? According to the FileMaker survey, it’s because a sizable majority—83 percent—wanted to create a better way to work, while 63 percent wanted to be more productive and 42 percent wanted to help others in their organization. Only 12 percent of citizen developers had been asked by their boss to start building apps. Currently, the citizen developer movement is self-directed and self-motivated—41 percent started developing business apps to improve their skill sets.

So who are these citizen developers? Not surprisingly, the majority are savvy computer users with no formal background in computer science or software engineering, and 34 percent play a management or supervisory role in their organization. When respondents were asked what three words colleagues would choose to describe them, about half chose “problem solver.” Other descriptors such as “creative,” “hard-working,” “organized” and “leader” also ranked high.

The citizen developers also reported that citizen development had a significantly positive impact on their career. Nearly half, at 48 percent, cited increased satisfaction at work, while 42 percent found that the practice increased their confidence, 29 percent received more recognition within the organization and had more time to work on efforts they enjoyed, and 26 percent felt increased motivation at work.

Finally, because citizen developers can spot a business need and fill it quickly with an app, they are helping to fill the application demand gap in many enterprises. Eighty-two percent of citizen developers said they witnessed a reduction in inefficient tasks, 71 percent reported an increase in team productivity, and 60 percent said their apps helped to reduce data entry.

They’re building these apps quickly, too—often building their first app in less than three months, according to 71 percent of respondents. Only 12 percent reported it taking three to six months to do so. That type of accelerated app delivery—when the idea is conceived, designed, and delivered by the users who needs the functionality—will not only help to clear app backlogs but also could become a cauldron of internal innovation.

— George V. Hulme

February 3, 2017
Q&A: CNCF on Instilling a DevOps Culture, Part 1

The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is a non-profit comprised of some 49 industry participants that have come together to drive development and adoption of cloud-native applications and services. The CNCF is uniting such giants as Google, IBM, Intel and Cisco Systems to distill a collection of container technologies that end-user companies deem praiseworthy to reach its goal.

The CNCF intends its membership to represent end users (the CNCF website lists one end user, Goldman Sachs), cloud and container technologies, online and IT services, and academic institutions.

On behalf of the CNCF, Craig McLuckie, its Governing Board chair, and Brian Grant, its Technical Oversight Committee representative, weigh in on leading the DevOps transformation and instilling a DevOps culture in this two-part Q&A.

staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How is the CNCF specifically involved in leading the DevOps transformation by instilling the DevOps culture, in the industry or in member companies, for example?

McLuckie: We believe that at the heart of the DevOps culture is the need to reduce the friction and, indeed, the barriers between teams that build an application and the teams that run an application. Developers learn to think about an application as a living service that evolves continuously and rapidly to meet the evolving business needs. Operations is there to deliver the tools and environment needed for them to successfully drive their application.

staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud: Why do developers need an environment that is safe to change? What kind of change? Safe how?

McLuckie: Safe change has many potential meanings: The first kind of “safe” is about creating deterministic behavior in operations. Does the system handle a change correctly every time? If I make a change to two systems, will they have the same state? How about to 1,000 systems? It’s important to focus on creating strong determinism by removing the moving parts in a production deployment.

The second kind of “safe” is about being able to validate that a change is good—not just in pre-production environments, but in the actual production environment—with a simple and deterministic rollback. It is important to make it trivial to replicate environments, and offer a way to run a simple experiment in production (e.g. route 1 percent of my traffic to this new version) with the option to deterministically roll forward or backward without effort.

A third kind of “safe” is about being able to ensure that every change is deliberate. One of the problems we often see in production systems is “configuration drift” that isn’t driven through any kind of formal process. This should be addressed by creating a strongly declarative toolset that makes every change deliberate and trackable.

staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How do you recommend providing these things that developers need? How do you help provide them?

McLuckie: There are multiple issues like data, security governance and applications that need to be addressed. Additionally, companies want to deliver apps with high velocity. How do you solve all of this? A vendor-neutral organization that can harmonize emerging technologies is important for facilitating cloud-native. Given the large number of players in the marketplace with competing approaches, having an open source way to solve this is also important.

Grant: Cloud-native infrastructure enables self-service and “hands-off” operation, including provisioning, deployment, scaling, healing, discovery, monitoring and more, with relatively little marginal effort for specific applications. By supporting open source projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus that provide such functionality, the CNCF hopes to democratize high-velocity application delivery, which was previously achievable mainly by web-scale companies.

staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud: How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?

Grant: In a DevOps culture, operators are both partners and customers of the developers. Developers take responsibility for meeting operational requirements: security, reliability, availability, scalability, efficiency, actionable monitoring and logging output, necessary configurability, compatibility with the production environment, etc. Cloud-native infrastructure provides mechanisms developers and operators need to facilitate and capitalize on those capabilities.

Stay tuned for part two of the CNCF interview.

June 14, 2016
Walmart OneOps Won’t Be One-Upped
One of the biggest names in retail also is kind of a big deal in DevOps. Walmart has developed its own platform, OneOps, designed to streamline operations and keep its application development schedule in check.

“OneOps is an open source cloud and application lifecycle management technology platform with benefits including cloud portability so developers can seamlessly move applications, databases or entire cloud environments from one cloud provider to another,” says Brian Johnson, VP of Engineering, Platform, Walmart Labs. The latter feature allows developers to leverage the broad selection of cloud environments and pricing schemes to their advantage.

The OneOps platform deploys Walmart website adds/changes, launches new mobile features such as Walmart Pay, and creates APIs so third parties such as Hiku can tap into Walmart’s online grocery offerings, at speed and with a lower investment in the cloud, says Johnson. The OneOps platform once only managed the Walmart.com e-commerce site, but now it also serves individual Walmart stores and supports other initiatives.

According to Johnson, OneOps undergirds and empowers the work of developers as follows:
- OneOps continuous lifecycle management continuously auto-pilots the process of automating application scaling and repair whenever any unforeseen changes take place.
- OneOps promotes accelerated innovation so software engineers can spin up new environments for app hosting in minutes, since the DevOps platform skirts the need to specify the intricate details of any one cloud environment by modeling that for the developer.
- This abstraction of the cloud environment gives developers control over the tools and technologies they select regardless of the cloud provider they use.
Life Before OneOps

“Before OneOps, the process of updating Walmart’s website was so tedious that we rolled out updates only every two months. The process used hundreds of manual steps and required significant resources,” Johnson says. “This was time-consuming and created room for manual errors.”

Before OneOps, A/B testing was expensive and time-consuming, taking months to set up multiple cloud environments and conduct tests. By the time testing was done, the rationale for the new feature had waned and whatever opportunity it was created to take advantage of had passed, he says.

At that time, creating enough virtual machines (VMs) in time to handle peak shopping events and traffic would have taken teams of people months to complete, at the risk of exorbitant operating costs, Johnson adds.

The OneOps Afterlife

OneOps now fully manages the Walmart e-commerce platform such that in a typical day the site sees more than 1,000 new software deployments, which developers execute on demand in a span of minutes on average, says Johnson.

OneOps serves a variety of customers such as consumers of Walmart.com, who on black Friday found their shopping experience supported by the tens of thousands of VMs OneOps was able to spin up across multiple clouds to cradle the peak traffic, Johnson says. OneOps is the DevOps and cloud platform for SamsClub.com as well.

Solving the Single Cloud Provider Dilemma

Walmart targeted OneOps to use multiple cloud providers easily, because of the pitfalls of being locked in to a single provider. “The fear of vendor lock-in is the major challenge to cloud service adoption. Cloud vendors like AWS don’t make it easy for customers to move from one cloud to another. The complexities of cloud service migration mean that many customers stay with a provider that doesn’t meet their needs simply to avoid the cumbersome and expensive process of migration,” says Johnson.

Further vendor lock-in concerns, he notes, include:
- Contracts of lengthy duration geared toward ensuring higher server utilization, maximum ROI and profitability for the cloud provider but providing little benefit for the cloud customer.
- Lack of freedom of choice where storage space, processing power, bandwidth and tools and technologies are concerned.
- Because it is typically difficult to find any two cloud providers that use the same tools, compatibility is an issue. “You can’t simply port your site to a new provider without rebuilding it using the new provider’s toolsets,” says Johnson.
- “While you build and test your site on the new cloud platform, you are still paying to maintain it on the old provider, doubling your costs,” says Johnson.
This is why OneOps abstracts the use of differing cloud providers, making porting easy.

The Big Question Is …

OneOps solves a unique set of DevOps challenges related to the cloud. Can you name another platform that does something similar?
May 4, 2016
DevOps and Continuous Delivery: Not the Same

DevOps and continuous delivery are the same thing, right? Far from it. We peer through the fog to understand the difference between the two related but distinct methodologies.

We live in an era of apps. More and more of our personal, social and work life is governed by apps—communicating with one another through social apps, booking cinema tickets through your mobile device or scheduling a business trip through the airline app. This digitization of services has arrived. Organizations that understand this sea change have a unique opportunity to jump ahead of their competitors, acquire customers more quickly and grow revenues.

The battleground for this service development is DevOps. It’s not a product, but rather a methodology for helping organizations build teams and build software. DevOps is a culture, movement or practice that emphasizes the collaboration and communication of both software developers and other IT professionals while automating the process of software delivery and infrastructure changes. It creates a culture and environment where building, testing and releasing software can happen rapidly, frequently and more reliably.

Organizations are marching with their feet. According to a recent study, market demand for DevOps skills is growing, and DevOps engineers are among the highest paid IT practitioners today. And it looks set to stay that way. Research in the U.K. shows that 30 percent of 300 organizations surveyed in the run up to the 2015 DevOps Summit had either started to implement a DevOps strategy or had already merged Dev and Ops, with another 13 percent planning to go down this route.

Two Related Children: DevOps and Continuous Delivery

So now we arrive at continuous delivery. If DevOps is about accelerating the delivery of new, high-quality services, surely continuous delivery is the same thing, isn’t it? In other words, ensuring a steady stream of new services? You might look at it as a manufacturing production line: DevOps is the machine that builds the service, while continuous delivery is the conveyer belt that rolls the services off the production line—one big unified service development cycle.

That’s not the case. Although the distinction between DevOps and continuous delivery can be a little grey and cause confusion, there is in reality clear water between the two. Continuous delivery has become an essential ingredient for teams doing iterative and incremental software delivery. It is an approach whereby teams ensure that every change to the system can be released, and that any version can be released at the push of a button. Think of it this way: Continuous delivery aims to make releases dull and reliable, so organizations can deliver frequently, at less risk, and get feedback faster from the end users until deployment becomes an integral part of the business process and competitiveness of the enterprise.

Gartner summed up the distinction between DevOps and continuous delivery very neatly with a report that stated, “DevOps is not a market, but a tool-centric philosophy that supports a Continuous Delivery value chain.” The analyst argues that bimodal and digital business strategies stimulate demand for improved speed and effectiveness of software delivery.

Continuous delivery and DevOps do share common traits, though. Both methodologies are aimed at agile and lean thinking: each delivers small and quick changes; each relies on tight business an IT collaboration; and each share the common goal of faster time to market for new services.

However, the goal of DevOps is merge dev and ops roles together—and the processes they manage—to achieve business goals. It’s all about a common, shared culture and enhanced collaboration. About clearly defined business processes.

Automation has an essential role to play in both DevOps and continuous delivery. Automating DevOps helps your organization manage and secure continuous delivery to the business and IT users. The result is a faster, low-risk migration to a new world of composite applications, faster business innovation and better support for rapidly changing business process needs.

April 8, 2016