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Tag: devops implementation

  • How to Secure C-Suite Buy-In for Your DevOps Efforts

    How to Secure C-Suite Buy-In for Your DevOps Efforts

    You could be forgiven for assuming DevOps is the modus operandi only for big modern enterprises like Tesla and Uber, but this is not the case. DevOps builds on earlier approaches, such as Agile development and Lean methodology, by emphasizing the importance of collaboration between development and operations teams and the use of automation to streamline the software development process.

    So, while the term “DevOps” is relatively new, the principles and practices that it encompasses have been in use for many years.

    In a traditional waterfall model, the software development process is split into distinct stages, with each stage being completed before moving on to the next one. The development and operations teams work in separate silos, with little interaction between them until the end of the development process when the finished product is handed over to the operations team for deployment and maintenance.

    Benefits of DevOps

    In contrast, a DevOps model emphasizes collaboration and communication between the development and operations teams throughout the entire software development life cycle. The goal is to create a culture of shared responsibility for the success of the project, with both teams working together to ensure that the software is developed, tested and deployed quickly and efficiently.

    DevOps also emphasizes automation, with the use of tools and processes to streamline the aforementioned project tasks. This automation helps to reduce the likelihood of errors and allows the teams to focus on higher-level tasks.

    Overall, the key differences between DevOps and a traditional waterfall model are the emphasis on collaboration and communication, the use of automation and the focus on shared responsibility for the success of the project.

    In short: Speed, time to market, agility and cost savings.

    What’s Driving DevOps Transformation?

    Any company, regardless of size, can release faster with DevOps. Look at the agile FinTech success stories; look at the generative AI success stories. In terms of cost savings too, it’s not ‘How much am I paying for 10 people, 20 people, 100 people…?’ From a DevOps standpoint, cost means penalties avoided from failing to release on time, project delays and project poor quality.

    Overall, development practices are evolving. Some clients call DevOps ‘zero rework’ development, others refer to it as ‘shift-left development.’ Whichever term you prefer, the context is the same: They want faster release and to reduce duplication of work. The way to achieve ‘shift-left’ or ‘zero rework’ would be through DevOps transformation. All of the individual pillars of DevOps concern shifting left, causing them to release faster and achieve their cost optimization.

    However you refer to it, DevOps is mainstream because of its scalability benefits, as well as the agility to react to unforeseen situations during development, QA or operations. This equates to competitive advantages and future-proofing.

    Challenges of Implementing DevOps

    Every business is different, but many of the challenges are the same. One of the main challenges is understanding your company’s specific blend of pain points on its road to DevOps transformation. Common challenges include:

    Vision – DevOps is not a top-down initiative. The role of executives in DevOps is to define a vision; if the vision is not clear, you won’t have buy-in. You can have the best tools and technology but if you don’t have buy-in, then it won’t work.

    Investment – DevOps is a change in every aspect of people, processes, technology and culture. You can’t just bring in this change with zero investment. It’s not unusual for costs to go up for the first couple of years after moving to DevOps because you’re transitioning from manual testers and normal developers to fungible team members that come at a premium. The cost advantage shows up after at least a year as rework goes down and the quality of release incrementally increases, leading to a better customer experience. So, it’s self-funded from the efficiencies it will bring in … but only if you persevere.

    Celebrating Success – Too many people try to boil the ocean with DevOps transformation. This leads to frustration, misaligned teams and, eventually, poor results. If you start small with DevOps transformation, it soon shows its superiority as a business model. This inspires your leadership and your executive teams to see the benefit of DevOps and buy into it by osmosis rather than taking the word of that executive with a big idea and a big purchase order.

    Culture and People – This is more than just a technology play. In fact, technology is the easy part. People, processes and culture all need to transform to implement DevOps. You need to move from a project to a product-based methodology. From a people perspective, you can’t bring in manual testers or manual validators to do DevOps. Any successful DevOps implementation has to get this right.

    How to Implement DevOps: The Hub and the Spoke

    Again, start small. You could start with only continuous integration and then move on to add continuous deployment. If you start over aspirationally, you are more likely to fail and go back to the old ways. As you expand DevOps gradually, you can follow the hub and spoke model.

    In the hub and spoke model, the hub is a lean team responsible for setting up the tools, automation and best practices. The hub is responsible for defining what is to be executed. The spoke, on the other hand, is responsible for execution. The spoke is the extended team and their individual projects which they are responsible for executing.

    The hub is also responsible for enablement by defining what processes, best practices, tools and pipelines should be used. Teams in the spoke will use the pipeline to promote their goal from development to QA, from QA to staging and from staging to production.

    Next-Gen DevOps

    The evolution of DevOps continues even for early adopters, especially with the introduction of AI and generative AI. How do you use AI to validate your requirements? How do you use AI to decide what infrastructure is needed and when? How can you use AI to optimize your test sets? Next-gen DevOps is about smarter DevOps and intelligent DevOps.

  • Best of 2021 – How to Combine DevOps and Agile

    Best of 2021 – How to Combine DevOps and Agile

    As we close out 2021, we at staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud wanted to highlight the most popular articles of the year. Following is the thirteenth in our series of the Best of 2021.

    In recent years, application development and deployment have become an increasingly critical part of business operations. Because of this, various entities have sought to optimize their product development process.

    This has led to a rise in the popularity of DevOps, which is designed for that purpose. In simple words, the DevOps application during the software development process reduces the number of steps necessary to bring software to market. These faster releases and streamlined processes mean swift user feedback.

    DevOps implementation focuses also on the software scalability, how well it could be deployed and also its monitoring and maintenance after the future releases However, there is also a downside to traditional DevOps benefits. The system does not include the kind of continuous testing and improvement that Agile offers. 

    This has led to Agile practices being overwhelmingly focused on what you might define as the development aspects of software delivery. Though, there is less focus on operational aspects.

    Hence, both practices are quite critical to be implemented in the SDLC of any product. 

    Separating Agile and DevOps approaches to software development leads to the building of the product but its deployment, work automation, as well as infrastructure management fail as it’s “somebody else’s problem” when the Agile team is looking at it. Moreover, “operability” disappears into the background.

    The solution is combining Agile sprints with the integrated teamwork offered by DevOps. By doing so, you can optimize incrementally the development lifecycle and maintenance of your product both. It helps to correct an imbalance but has little influence over the practices that happen during the continuous development phase.

    What is Accomplished by DevOps and Agile Integration?

    The integration of DevOps and Agile helps in the following areas:

    • Streamlines the release process and improves product offerings.
    • Allows for better collaboration.
    • More value and fewer risks in each release. 
    • Fewer bugs and faster fixes.
    • Increased visibility.
    • Higher user satisfaction rates as the products are more qualitative.

    What to Pay Attention to When Integrating DevOps and Agile

    To simplify the process of implementing DevOps into Agile product development we have gathered the most common pitfalls that might happen during this process and how to avoid them making your process working smoothly.

    Improve Teamwork Flow

    Using the DevOps framework and Agile approach together makes it crucial that team members have a broader understanding of all development aspects. You get DevOps business value and the practicality of Agile together. 

    Team members such as the Product Owner, Scrum Master and the PM, along with operations, infrastructure and sysadmin roles need to consider not only the software development process but also delivery and maintenance. Your teams should be equipped with the knowledge of release, service and change management, environment provisioning, automation and tools, and application deployment. Build-and-run product-centric teams solve the problem of the Agile development-to-operations hand-off.

    Defining the Lifecycle

    Successfully attempting a DevOps implementation plan with an Agile framework means defining the product lifecycle. This increases consistency, reduces cost by minimizing waste and speeds up a time to market. Teams now inherit more of the operational concern within the entire lifecycle. Therefore, it’s ideal if you start to implement some of the DevOps principles right at the beginning of your development process. 

    DevOps Adoption in Sprints

    Agile workflow assumes the software development process divided into sprints, therefore it’s strategic to integrate DevOps management while handling sprints.

    Follow these instructions as you start working the DevOps approach into your Sprints.

    • Invite ops/infrastructure/support personnel to planning sessions.
    • Discuss product functionality and operability features.
    • Include them in the upcoming sprint.
    • Involve the DevOps team in sprint backlog planning and daily meeting, as well as sprint review and scrum and plan alignment.

    The engagement and collaboration of your development team and operations team also keeps the ops team abreast of functionality release timelines. The ops team can then help the dev team in planning the release schedule with greater accuracy and can assist the dev team in shipping the product faster.

    Including QA in Each Phase

    Making the QA part of the entire development lifecycle is another essential factor when integrating DevOps and Agile. Testing assumes a vital position when combining the two. Besides functional testing applied in Agile, DevOps approach requires performance and load testing of the software. Hence, constant testing is equally as important as continuous development.

    Implement Service Backlog Under DevOps

    When implementing DevOps and Agile together, you need to rebuild your service backlogging process. As under DevOps framework, it should include: 

    • Scalability of the software.
    • Deployment capability.
    • Service monitoring.
    • Logging.
    • Setting alerting. 
    • Software testing. 
    • Security and compliance aspects.
    • Operational performance.

    Leveraging the Right Tools

    Using the right tools is the key to successful Agile and DevOps adoption into your software development. Keep in mind that applies to your software development process configuration management tools to create and replicate infrastructure using the Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC) concept needed for DevOps. This helps developers to deploy the application on different types of platforms without any reworking efforts.

    Automation

    Automation of workflow is another part of Agile combining with DevOps. Try to automate all the code scanning processes and avoid any potential vulnerabilities. Build artifacts in a repository, or automate the release out the door. Automate these elements entirely so your end-to-end goalposts are the one possible places where someone has to manually check for issues.

    Documentation 

    While in the Agile approach, teams don’t document their meeting minutes or other communications. Instead, they prefer lo-fi methods such as pen and paper. DevOps, on the other hand, requires entire design documentation and specs to understand a software release.

    Measurement and Analysis

    Well, after building DevOps into Agile project management to keep track of its progress, you need to care about establishing the metrics to measure its effectiveness. This allows for the successful enablement of multiple releases to production faster. As under the Scrum Alliance Organization recommendations, some of these could be:

    • Percentage of release date adherences.
    • Percentage increase in release numbers.
    • Time taken for release to production.
    • Defects attributable to platform/support requirements.
    • Percentage of NFRs met.

    Though you can define other metrics during DevOps implementation to measure that have higher business value.

    Why DevOps and Agile both matter should be obvious now. Though these practices serve to streamline and simplify the product creation and deployment processes, combining Agile and DevOps requires a shift in the organizations. But putting efforts in combining Agile and DevOps management in the right way, you will see how it can improve your development process and deliver results in reliable, scalable and maintainable applications.

    — Slava Vaniukov

  • DevSecOps Implementation: Dynamic Scans

    DevSecOps Implementation: Dynamic Scans

    This is the third installment in this series on DevSecOps. Read the first installment, on static analysis, here and the second installment, on source composition analysis, here.

    One weakness of static analysis is its failure to account for environment and use. Running static analysis on a code base as the only check before production deployment is akin to looking at the engine of a VW Golf before assembly and pronouncing the vehicle fit to use. The way a vehicle runs after assembly, and the way it is—or, more precisely for dynamic scans, could be—used, matter to any product. That is where dynamic scans come in.

    Exercising the product as it runs is a big deal, and that is what dynamic scanning attempts to do. Automating the testing of applications by exercising inputs and watching the results, dynamic scans can detect a variety of issues that static analysis simply cannot. These tools are the source of a lot of the noise in DevSecOps because they’re testing a variety of scenarios with each run, and things that a dynamic scan sees as vulnerabilities might very well be known to not be a risk at all by the dev team. As with static analysis, this has been improving over time, and they’re well worth a look at this point.

    The best use for these tools is as gateways—before going to test, in test and before going to production, set a policy for promotion requirements and then run dynamic scans to determine if the application meets that policy, needs remediation or needs approval to go live with possible issues known.

    With all of that said, here is a starter list of things to look for when considering using dynamic scans:

    • Production Safe: These tools run tests that try a documented vulnerability to see how the application responds. The thing is, if you’re not very careful, this can cause serious problems in production. Since long-term the trend is to eliminate a pure test environment for all but the most stability-conscious organizations, knowing that the product you choose can run in prod without causing outages is an important step.
    • Vulnerabilities Tested: Most vendors offer a list of what they look for. Compare these lists to your organization’s needs and other vendor’s lists. Since choosing a product is unique to each org, I don’t have much in the way of buying advice, but here I will say if the product does not support at least the OWASP top 10, look elsewhere, simply because OWASP is both a recipe for you to prevent attacks and a handy list of easy vulnerabilities for attackers to look for. All of the vendors we looked at for our ASG work do support OWASP, so this might be non-advice.
    • Integration: Dynamic scans need to be run after the product is fully assembled. This is not to say complete, but the various pieces need to be together—the scans generally look at an application, not pieces thereof. This means they can be spawned at any point after build—or, more specifically, after post-build deployment to dev/test/prod. Make certain there is a place in the toolchain to call the scanner from and proper gateways to suit your organization’s needs. Part of that evaluation is how the application is kicked off: Can your build tool call it directly? Is it deeply integrated into your chosen environment, or will you have to do work?
    • Reporting and Gating: What level of reporting is available: Can dynamic reports and static reports be integrated to show that a potential problem reported by static scan is found to actually be a problem by the dynamic scan? Can an overall status report be found (à la C-level dashboards) to show the security posture of a given application? Can alerts be configured for apps that fail certain tests (so you can make informed decisions before going to production, for example)?
    • RBAC: This is applicable to all scanning, but I’ve chosen to include it here because for dynamic (and interactive), it’s a bit more important. Can you limit what an individual can see/do? In the end, dynamic scans are reporting on actual vulnerabilities in your codebase—only those who need to know to fix the issue should be able to see it; others should just see pass/fail overall for the app, not a list of known vulnerabilities in the app. The ability to run these scans should likewise be limited. Who/when is a corporate decision that is as much policy and process as it is the chosen tool, but if the scanner doesn’t support that policy, enforcement becomes more difficult.

    When you get to interactive scanning, it is time to consider how security issues traditionally have been handled versus how they should be moving forward. Most organizations hold security issues separate from other application development issues. It is time for that to end—and indeed, some organizations ended this process long ago, but too many are hanging on to the past. Security vulnerabilities that can result in a risk to the organization need to be run through the system as high-priority bugs. Because they are. We used to think that something making the UI look bad for 5% of customers was more important than a security issue impacting no one. A truly global internet and the rise of automation even among attackers make this a silly stance to take. No one is impacted by security issues at this second, but sometime in the next minute, everyone might be impacted. It’s like saying you don’t need scalability for Black Friday because the servers are handling traffic well right now (written in early November). The issues that dynamic scanners alert on are generally real (removal of false positives has come a long way in the dynamic space) and generally dangerous. If your scan tool can find it, assume attackers’ scan tools can, too.

    As with the other installments, I’ll thank you all for keeping the lights on in a really topsy-turvy IT environment—you are doing us all a service—and mention that all of your hard work is at risk if security at your organization isn’t taken seriously. We quickly identified the threat from the sudden opening of millions of RDP ports on the public internet, and most of you took steps to secure your own. Keep it going. Make certain the apps you are developing and deploying are as safe as you can make them. And keep kicking rear—you are the rock that’s keeping the suddenly dispersed company clipping along.

  • Bootstrapping DevOps for the Internet Computer

    Bootstrapping DevOps for the Internet Computer

    All startups face unique sets of challenges and issues at each stage of their existence. The DFINITY Foundation, a Swiss-based not-for-profit with the remit to extend the functionality of the internet, is no exception. Like any new organization, we have had to evolve and adapt our DevOps and other practices in response to different obstacles.

    After learning to clearly communicate our vision for an open development platform where software runs directly on the internet, we created a road map to translate this vision into a decentralized architecture with distinct features that could be built and shipped on a periodic cadence. Consisting of five milestones, the road map culminates in a public launch in Q4 of 2020—and we haven’t missed a single deadline despite the disruptions of a global pandemic.

    Incorporating a focus on operational responsibility on top of our focus to ship features without losing speed was a major challenge this year ahead of the release of our developer network, called Tungsten. Sustainably bootstrapping operational responsibility for this release, as well as future releases, was imperative.

    We’ve all heard horror stories about operational teams that run through a checklist in a perfunctory fashion without identifying the root cause of a problem. Even worse, they are quick to give up and are resistant to launching changes, increasing the complexity of their workload.

    Pushing Forward With DevOps

    We were determined that this wasn’t going to happen to DevOps at DFINITY, so we embedded these core cultural touchstones into the organization.

    1: Create SLOs and SLIs for cross-functional clarity

    At the end of 2019, well before there was a service to operate, we started thinking about service level objectives (SLOs) and service level indicators (SLIs). These are critical for providing a common, quantifiable vernacular for R&D and Operations teams to measure how a service should be performing.

    An SLI is a clearly defined indicator for one aspect of a service’s performance, ideally focusing on user-visible service behaviors. The SLO sets the target for the indicator, as well as a window of time over which it is measured.

    To communicate the SLIs and SLOs, training materials were presented across the organization, including speaking with various engineering teams, discussing best practices at management meetings and giving an overview at an organizationwide meeting. In addition, the leadership of R&D teams signed off on the approach.

    To provide clear operational expectations as well as a forcing function, we established an early version of the SLOs as a high-priority OKR.

    As an additional consideration, it is crucial that your SLOs reflect aspects of your service that are visible to the user. As Charity Majors, CTO of Honeycomb.io, noted, “Nines don’t matter if your users aren’t happy.” SLOs are not a one-and-done deal; they need to be updated as the service evolves and as your ability to capture the UX improves.

    Having SLOs in place gave staffers with operational responsibility clear expectations to fulfill. If the service is performing within the SLOs (and if the SLOs are representative of user happiness), then things are running smoothly.

    #2: Engineers developing the software should also help run the software in production

    To bootstrap the team with operational and support capabilities, we needed to ensure that we didn’t create a siloed team lacking engineering skills. Operations in this context is a software engineering problem, which meant we needed to involve developers.

    The same engineers developing the software should have skin in the game in terms of how the software is running in production. If there are problems, these engineers are in the best position to diagnose them and propose and implement the necessary fixes. Getting organizational buy-in for this took some time.

    We emphasized the need for senior engineers to be able to operate the software being built. We didn’t want to fall into the trap of throwing a handful of junior engineers into the deep end without proper supervision or training, so we also established an expectation that all engineers should be able to operate the software irrespective of seniority.

    We built two teams of between five and 10 developers in each of our office locations in Palo Alto, California; San Francisco; and Zurich, which were initially staffed with volunteers across the organization. Each week, one team member at each site managed primary operational responsibility for the service instead of their regular project work, and they knew that the entire staff would help if there were any problems. We plan to rotate new people into these ad hoc teams every six to nine months.

    #3: Create optimally sized, communicative teams

    Operational team size is also important. If the team is too small, people are on-call too frequently. If the team is too large, they will be on-call so infrequently that they will either forget how to operate the production stack or their knowledge will become outdated.

    We share status updates through a daily log and informal shared communication channels such as Slack. There is also a weekly meeting to relay responsibility from one person to another.

    This has helped us identify capability gaps. With team members based across the world, we’ve come to acknowledge that if a problem requires a team’s expertise outside of its working hours, then rolling back first and investigating later is absolutely fine.

    The DevOps team decided early on that we weren’t going to start with 24/7 support, instead providing support during business hours in Europe and the U.S., where the majority of our early-access customers are located.

    We’ve been transparent to the wider organization throughout this process, calling out what is and what is not working well, and how we’re working to improve our processes.

    Conclusion

    We were fortunate that unprecedented global events like COVID-19 didn’t significantly affect our operations. That said, shaping our processes in-person and being physically present for people when they first go on-call would have been valuable, and we definitely felt the impact of losing that. But we’ve successfully bootstrapped our DevOps teams nevertheless, and we look forward to continuing to evolve as a team.

  • Six Tips for a Successful DevOps Implementation

    Six Tips for a Successful DevOps Implementation

    As we expand our digital world, there is an ever more urgent need to look after businesses that need to operate faster and with more agility. Because of this, DevOps has grown quickly and become central to a lot of organizations as they pursue a competitive advantage. However, some organizations struggle to implement DevOps as they are unsure how to approach them.

    Here are our top six tips on how your team can integrate DevOps successfully.

    Discipline and Process

    It isn’t just a case of installing DevOps and then getting started with the tools. Your whole company needs to have real clarity about what DevOps is and what exact business needs it can solve. Most importantly, all your team needs to be prepared to change the way things have been done in the past.

    Start this process by working out your current application value streams. This is the process needed to move your products from development to production. Being clear on what your constraints, bottlenecks and wait queues are will help you to identify activities to concentrate on.

    By identifying areas of inefficiency in your current delivery process, you have an opportunity to make changes in your organization. Encourage your team to ask questions: “Why do we do this? What’s its business value? How can we make it more efficient?”

    Release Rates

    Any initiative within DevOps should focus on your business’ requirements and be specific to you, not just about getting improved tools. Try not to launch a DevOps initiative before getting clear on the business reason for doing so.

    Instead of just focusing on release rates and how to do things faster, look at the business value that will enable. So, for example, an improved release rate could help your team to innovate more quickly. 

    Collaboration

    Many people associate DevOps with automation processes, but it is primarily about collaboration and communication. If you do not have strong collaborative practices that are embraced by everyone in the team, and across all stages of development, simply automating the processes will not give you the benefits that your business is looking for.

    By using collaboration, you can get the input of the whole team into which areas need the DevOps implementation first and what impact it can have to each stage of the development process.

    Communication and Culture

    Here we need to look at your company’s manual processes, which tend to be the most frequent cause of mistakes and delays. Look at your pipeline and keep an eye out for the word “manual.” This could be manual testing or deployment. Anywhere that involves your team communicating through a ticket process. These are classic problem areas for waste and may be where DevOps automation could lead to big rewards.

    To achieve this, you need to get your teams onboard with the changes, especially operations, as they are often overlooked when achieving buy-in. The whole organization needs to be excited about the changes and the same process needs to be implemented across the pipeline.

    Get Clear on Data

    Select metrics that are closely linked to your business goal. How long does it currently take for your product to get from idea to market? 

    There are three pieces of data to measure to determine this. The lead time, deployment frequency and mean time to recover. All three of these are key to understanding which parts of the process can have the biggest impact when you implement DevOps.

    Autonomy

    The important thing is to use the same automated system whenever a product goes to any stage of the pipeline, whether that’s development, quality assurance or production. You do not want team members having to manually click configuration steps, or copying software. Each deployment should have the same automation so that the process can operate smoothly.

    Starting first with the slowest part of your pipeline, introduce automation one stage at a time. Once the slowest has been automated, look at the next slowest. This way you are always improving processes but getting the biggest shifts each time.

    Provided that you have all team members in alignment with the purpose for DevOps, every new step of progress is a win. Then win more support for the bigger steps that the company may need to make.

    — Regina Raap

  • Implementing DevOps Goes Beyond Technology

    Implementing DevOps Goes Beyond Technology

    The implementation of DevOps is primarily toward a change of process. All you need is to break down the feed store and bring in the competing individual inducements to acquire the actual benefits from DevOps. Regarding the change of process, it will either be embraced by those who are making the change and succeed, or it will get rejected and eventually fail.

    The hardest part of successful DevOps is not the implementation of technology but much beyond it. It is understood that without technology, you can hardly enforce the DevOps culture. The technology side is all about automation, focusing on the infrastructure in the form of codes and establishing the pipeline process.

    A survey found that among more than 2,000 of the IT industry executives, 54% of the respondents believed they had no access to self-service infrastructure; instead, they take some ticket-based approach toward infrastructure delivery. This also impacts productivity and increases time to market. The survey noted that only 23% of the experts said that infrastructures could be delivered in less than 24 hours. However, some 33% said it takes up to a month to give, while 26% responded it takes one month or more to do so. 

    Speaking in terms of technological perspective, we’re well aware of the fact that DevOps targets to achieve complete automation and integration, but practical implementation is not entirely possible. Establishing new aspects has been a great struggle, even if it is related to replace specific traditional methods with some new ones.

    Mentioned below are the best answer to why implementing DevOps goes beyond technology. Let’s discuss them one by one. 

    Lack of Proper Vision

    Without having a proper definition of the issue or solution, it becomes challenging to form a vision. Therefore, when experts become familiar with the process, they begin to follow a specific path to manage things in the correct order. Even though at some point they become stuck in the circle, too.

    With time, it becomes difficult to get out of this vague circle, be more responsive to current situations and discover new methods for betterment all at the same time.

    Without having a proper plan, it becomes not tricky but merely impossible to achieve some productive output. The lack of vision makes it challenging for the project owners to design a clear-cut plan when it comes to deciding milestones and deliverables.

    The industry experts find it a bit risky because there are honestly few people who possess skills and expertise in this domain when compared to the number of tools present in the market. This also gives rise to confusion, which ultimately leads to an increase in the risk factor.

    Cultural Defies

    Another significant challenge is the removal of traditional methods and to adopt new ones. Undoubtedly, people are more comfortable when they follow conventional techniques as long as the outcome is useful toward the end of the day.

    However, if the outcome is not what you’ve desired, or if you start realizing that your job requires various manual interventions, then it would be good to understand that this can hinder your overall productivity and leads to adverse effects in the long term.

    Absence of Tool Knowledge

    Previously, DevOps has introduced the principles of continuous deployment, testing and collaborative reporting. But, since most of the people prefer to continue working with traditional tools, adapting to the functionalities of the latest tools becomes a difficult job. This happens more when it comes to getting a hold on the changes made to the architecture based on cloud and on-premises during the entire process.

    Lack of tool knowledge leads to organizations making poor choices of tools.

    Risk Analysis

    It is challenging to alter old methods and techniques and get them replaced by the latest ones. While implementing DevOps, when it comes to risk analysis, business experts design their dashboards by scaling hundreds of different reports. It is based on calculations and most of the time, it is quite easy to start but hard to climb. It happens when things are being put into action. The workers face troubles in keeping up with the pace. Therefore, adopting the latest methodology involves risks to a significant extent.

    Ways to Minimize These Challenges

    After doing research, I have come up with six best ways to minimize these issues and increase your chances of DevOps success. Let’s discuss them.

    Boost Up Productivity

    As mentioned above, no proper vision is a severe issue, and it also leads to poor and low levels of productivity. With new IT services coming in the market, people will understand the need for shaping their vision. It is crucial because only then they’ll be able to compete in the marketplace. DevOps comes with specific tools ranging from automation to monitoring. These tools can boost up the functions of an organization. An organization can unlock benefits from these automated tools so their developers can have a lighter load. This reduces time on deployment and by default, errors and mistakes are reduced too, which results in more productivity.

    Encourage Diversity

    DevOps successfully brings people together from different backgrounds and with different skillsets, and it delivers the results when this diversity is embraced. Having diversity in a DevOps team leads to higher productivity. This is extremely important with the rise of full-stack developers and the need for every individual to possess a variety of skills.

    Learn From Mistakes

    In the slow-moving model of working, people get afraid to accept they’ve made a mistake or even share any lessons they’ve learned while committing an error because it’ll directly affect their career. In the DevOps world, it is believed that by sharing those experiences, you are encouraging innovation. DevOps often calls for identifying mistakes and ask everyone to consider it as a learning opportunity, instead of an issue to be blamed. The perfect approach is to embrace mistakes and make improvements.

    Review Security Practices

    Security is essential in DevOps implementation. If the developers fail to enforce proper security practices, then they’re solely responsible for the effects afterward. By implementing automated tools or software security services early in the development cycle, teams can test the code throughout their software development process. Also, developers must ensure the presence of security elements while they deliver software timely.

    Focus On the Usage of New Tools 

    The introduction of new tools has speed up the adoption rate of DevOps, and now it has become vital to ensure that these tools are correctly integrated within the existing infrastructure and meet all the security levels. But, much focus should be on the team rather than on devices because workers are the essential faction in the shift of DevOps.

    Educating and Training the Staff

    This area needs serious attention. It is crucial to conduct weekly seminars and training sessions to educate the employers on new methods and tools they might be using in the development process and prepare them for new challenges. This will not just boost up worker’s knowledge but will also foster DevOps success.

    Final Thoughts

    Successful DevOps implementation is not an overnight project. The entire process requires advocacy, time, effort and strong leadership in a way that is compatible with your organization’s goals and objectives. Prepare yourself for achieving DevOps success by overcoming the challenges and hurdles that were made by the people that came before you.

    — Farwa Sajjad

  • Why Is Security Missing in Many DevOps Implementations?

    Why Is Security Missing in Many DevOps Implementations?

    The exceptional and ground-breaking, technology-driven opportunities in today’s digitized age come with significant competitive pressures to transform promptly. Specific demands increase due to continuous repeating in response to customer preferences becomes the more deep-seated expectation. To overcome this issue, organizations are shifting toward DevOps as a medium to deliver innovations quickly.

    DevOps also promotes innovation and agile software development but, for optimal results, proper security implementation is required. When business security teams are more cohesive in the development culture it is easier to secure new developments from the start. 

    DevOps is all related to automation and speed. At times this can make the apps in development get exposed to malicious attacks, which results in various scams. However, the end customer is seriously concerned about the security feature. The tools you’re going to choose might be vulnerable to different security issues. Hence, it is essential to select those tools that comply with security concerns, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

    DevOps culture is driven by moving fast yet in small pieces. It offers organizations with a wide range of benefits, which includes cooperation among stakeholders, development processes, improvements in code quality, as well as enhanced business velocity. 

    DevOps is responsible for solving different challenges in the software development process, but at the same time, it also familiarizes new challenges. It is found that less than 46% of IT experts are neglecting security in DevOps design and planning. Such environments end up with an inactive and uncoordinated approach to incident management and mitigation.

    There are several reasons for security being missed during DevOps implementation. Some of them are discussed below.

    Cultural Resistance to Security

    It is a standard view in many organizations that introducing security will lead to a slower development process. However, the overall effort and time cost of catching some security flaws early in the design or development process is much lower than to fix the problematic code and weaknesses later during the development cycle. 

    More Focus on Speed Than Security Teams

    DevOps teams are often associated with InfoSec teams. DevOps induces and modifies code batches over a short period, which might far outpace the speed at which the security teams can keep up with code review. If security—code analysis, configuration checks and vulnerability scanning—is not adequately automated, the DevOps output will eventually be slowed down or result in a lack of security hygiene. 

    Practically, this fallout consists of insecure codes, inadvertent vulnerabilities, hard-coded passwords, misconfigurations and other weakness in-app security that can contribute to operational dysfunction or get exploited by attackers.

    DevOps and Cloud Environment

    A typical DevOps environment is dependent upon cloud deployments, which often shares many cloud security considerations. DevOps teams influence the latest, open-source and even immature tools to manage various security groups and server instances. In this digital age that function at large scale, a slight misconfiguration error or security malpractice can be widely propagated, resulting in extensive operational dysfunction or other exploitable compliance and security issues.

    Poorly Managed Access Controls

    Most of the aspects of DevOps are interconnected, changing rapidly and utilizing secrets. DevOps secrets might include private account credentials, APIs token, SSH Keys, etc. that might be used by both humans and non-humans, for example, apps, containers, cloud instances and microservices. Ineffective secrets management is a common flaw in DevOps environments. It provides a provoking possibility for attackers to interfere with the security and other controls, disrupts functions, steals information and exploit an organization’s IT infrastructure. 

    Moreover, to further advance the workflows, DevOps teams might also allow unrestricted access to some private accounts by multiple individuals, who might share their credentials. This is a practice that eliminates the chances of a clear audit trail. Several methods, configuration management, as well as other DevOps tools, might be granted immense privileges. With access to private accounts, an attacker or even a piece of malware can get full control of the data and systems.

    Security should be a top priority of an organization while implementing DevOps, but due to the practices mentioned above it is often neglected.

    How to Ensure Security in DevOps?

    Sticking to security helps the team to come up with quality code. This practice makes developers write error-free codes. When this culture turns into a norm, it fosters the DevOps efforts as a whole. Below are some of the ways to ensure security in DevOps:

    • Set a priority list and put things according to it. Shift the security focus to the left in the development lifecycle.
    • Ensure that developers are well aware of the security consequences and principles and follow the same path as of yours.
    • Educate and train your developers to use particular tools to build secure systems, as well as also keep your DevOps system safe.
    • Set up an alerting and monitoring system to avoid any damage in the end. 
    • Do have proper metrics and submit reports daily to ensure that everything is under control.
    • Various compliance tools and the best business security systems should be introduced into the toolchains. If the codes fail to pass security tests, the build breaks and does not gets deployed so, sent it back to the developer for further refining.
    • Adopt different configuration managements. It means do scans to identify and remediate possible errors. Stabilize all configurations by using the industry’s best practices. Also, allow continuous configuration and hardening baseline scanning across various servers and codes which are built for cloud assets.
    • Do prioritize the deployment of automated tools to detect possible threats, problematic or vulnerable codes and other issues with process and infrastructure. More strictly, you will match the speed of security to the DevOps process; the less you’re going to come across culture resistance, which is embedded in the security practices.
    • Shift toward the rising trend of DevSecOps. It is a practice of injecting security in the lifecycle of app development. It reduces vulnerabilities and brings security much closer to business goals.

    Final Thoughts

    Security is a crucial element in DevOps implementation because it influences the bottom line of any organization. At times, security is missed out, but if this continues it will eventually lead to exploitation by hackers and loss in customer trust. Remember, everything can be recovered, but once a customer’s trust is lost, it can never be gained again. Thus, it is imperative to ensure security while implementing DevOps and achieve success by leaps and bounds.

    — Farwa Sajjad

  • DevOps Needs Collaboration and a Safe Place for Success

    DevOps Needs Collaboration and a Safe Place for Success

    When it comes to DevOps adoption, “[many organizations] tell a similar story,” said Scott Van Kalken, systems engineer at F5 Networks. It takes more time and effort to develop the right culture than you probably expect.

    Van Kalken has a long history in tech, including development and operations roles, and has spent several years practicing DevOps. He is part of the open source and meetup communities, and organizes some of the largest DevOps events in Australia.

    “DevOps typically starts in a corner of the organization, where people want to deliver high-quality software really quickly,” said Van Kalken.

    When that team gets good results, the organization decides to scale up its DevOps efforts, but tradition and silos get in the way.

    “At least two things are needed to overcome those obstacles and achieve DevOps success,” suggested Van Kalken.

    Collaboration and Safe Places

    The first thing you need to achieve DevOps success is a collaborative team environment. One of the central ideas of DevOps is you don’t throw software over the wall between functions, such as development and testing, so there needs to be an understanding and acceptance that everyone in the team is on the same side.

    Second is the provision of a safe place to fail and the realization that failure is just an iterative step on the path to implementing the best ideas.

    A financial services company that Van Kalken works with was adopting GitOps but needed to convince the service management team this was the right move.

    “Initially, it was quite challenging because service management thought it [GitOps] was uncontrolled chaos, even though that isn’t the case,” he said.

    Its support was gained after running a series of workshops that showed the underlying processes were actually the same, even though the tools used to implement them were changing.

    Service management is still the final gatekeeper, but it now approves releases in the repository rather than on paper.

    Maturity

    “There is a maturity in accepting change does involve risk,” said Van Kalken.

    Things such as GitOps provide a quick and easy way of reverting to a previous release if something goes wrong. So the “safe place to fail” idea can be implemented in a way that protects the organization in a practical sense as well as staff members in a psychological (and career protecting) sense.

    Another way DevOps can protect the organization is that frequent releases generally involve relatively minor changes, which in turn have a smaller blast radius in the event something goes wrong. Again, this is about having the maturity to recognize risk and dealing with it, rather than trying to avoid it in the first place.

    A sometimes overlooked aspect of increasing the release cadence is the effect on users, who are being asked to cope with frequent changes.

    Van Kalken pointed out that increasing the frequency does not necessarily mean multiple releases a day–it could be from two releases a year to three or four, if that’s what suits the organization.

    Not all changes have a direct impact on users. Some are under the hood, improving performance or addressing rarely-encountered bugs. But when users’ interaction with the system is changed, he suggested canary deployments as a way of checking the acceptability of the new approach among a larger pool of users than those brought into the development process, before it is released to the entire user population.

    “This approach also has a place in DevSecOps as another way of limiting the blast radius,” he said.

    Accepting Failure

    Perhaps the biggest challenge to an organization’s culture is the adoption of chaos engineering because if you’re going to kill a container or flood a network with data in order to check that the wider system can cope, you absolutely need to be in a safe place to fail.

    You also need to realize everyone involved–including developers, security people and those involved in the business side–wants to achieve high availability, and that means designing systems that can handle (partial) failures.

    It isn’t enough to do this in pre-deployment testing. Ongoing testing provides confidence that production systems will continue to cope with such failures.

    “It’s pretty cool when you get it right,” said Van Kalken. However, “your culture has to be OK with this iterative approach.”

    “DevOps is really just a methodology to achieve a better outcome,” stated Van Kalken. That involves collaboration, iteration and embedding security and other considerations up front. But the wider organization needs to understand and tolerate this, and the risk that goes with it.

    “Education, awareness and experience can all contribute to dispelling the traditional view that risk and failure are inherently bad,” he suggested.

    Are the Metrics Appropriate?

    A related point is that whether one outcome is better than another, depends on the metrics adopted. “[Metrics are] probably the biggest things organizations need to change,” said Van Kalken.

    For example, a customer who ordered a pizza doesn’t care whether a particular system involved in taking the order, cooking the pizza and then delivering it, achieved a certain uptime target. They just want the pizza to arrive promptly.

    When that doesn’t happen, he believes a collaborative approach is needed to determine why the delivery was late, exactly what caused the problem and how to quickly roll out a fix to stop it recurring.

    When it comes to practical advice, Van Kalken emphasized the need to get people together early in a project, otherwise there is a risk that sub-groups will demonize each other. In addition, you get more buy-in and everyone accepts they have to help with the pedaling, not just sit back and be passengers.

    “If people aren’t talking, you have a bad culture,” he said. But he acknowledged it can be difficult to get past existing adversarial relationships. Breaking the ice between teams that haven’t previously engaged with each other can also be tricky.

    Returning to an earlier theme, he stressed the importance of adopting an analytical, rather than punitive, approach when failure occurs. Everyone involved must know the organization accepts risk and understands the consequences.

    — Stephen Withers

  • How to Overcome Resistance to DevOps Implementation

    How to Overcome Resistance to DevOps Implementation

    The number of businesses adopting DevOps to make software releases happen faster without compromising on software quality continues to grow. Within the next five years, the DevOps market is expected to reach almost $13 billion. If you are among those who’ve decided to make a shift to DevOps, you are likely to experience resistance coming from the departments involved in a software development life cycle (SDLC), and even from end users, at the start of your DevOps journey.

    In this article, we will outline the reasons why your employees may resist the DevOps approach and show how to overcome their resistance.

    About DevOps Approach Implementation

    Among the benefits DevOps brings are the fast provision of new infrastructure, quick and reliable delivery of software updates, fewer post-release errors due to the implementation of continuous testing and the alignment of testing and production environments, etc. DevOps implementation requires efforts in establishing tight collaboration between the development, QA and operations teams, as well as adopting new tools and methodologies, such as containerization, IT infrastructure automation, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools.

    A new approach calls for project managers, developers, infrastructure management, QA and operations teams to leave their comfort zones and get used to new working conditions. However, each stakeholder has reasons to resist DevOps implementation and requires a tailored approach to overcome them.

    The Resistance of Project Managers

    Why They May Resist

    Project managers (PMs) are the first to face the changes when the DevOps approach comes into force. Their resistance originates from a range of new duties, new responsibility and knowledge they need to add to their playbook, such as:

    • Persuading development, QA and operations teams involved in SDLC in the DevOps necessity.
    • Establishing constant collaboration between developers, the QA team and the operations team.
    • Getting familiar with DevOps-specific tools and techniques (CI/CD, continuous monitoring, version control tools, etc.) as well as cloud computing technologies like AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Provider (GCP).

    How to Overcome Resistance

    PMs should become DevOps evangelists as they will be the ones who will contribute the most to overcome the resistance of other parties involved. A CIO should provide a PM with sufficient training on all DevOps-related aspects. Such training should include the management of the development, the QA team and the operations team in the context of close collaboration between them. It should also provide the PM with the understanding of DevOps methodologies and tools–containerization, infrastructure as code (IaC), continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), cloud technologies, etc.

    The Resistance of Developers

    Why They May Resist

    Developers may resist DevOps adoption due to the following reasons:

    • They are not excited by the necessity to work with infrastructure engineers closer and deal with operational issues if the operations team is not competent enough to address them on their own.
    • They are comfortable with the technology stack they’ve chosen for a particular project and not accustomed to caring about how familiar the other project team members are with these tools and technologies.

    How to Overcome Resistance

    PMs should embrace their soft skills to establish a mutual understanding between developers and infrastructure engineers. They should also make sure infrastructure engineers can work with the tools and technologies developers may use within the DevOps approach, e.g., Docker, Jenkins, by providing them with relevant training.

    The Resistance of a QA Team

    Why They May Resist

    A QA team may feel concerned about a faster SDLC DevOps implementation, since it entails less time for testing. Test engineers now need to acquire new skills prescribed by automation across the entire SDLC. In particular, they face the need to learn new tools for automated testing (Selenium, Appium, fMBT) and API testing (JMeter, Postman).

    How to Overcome Resistance

    To make QA engineers less risk-averse, QA managers in cooperation with PMs, should provide them with appropriate training (tools for automated testing and API testing) and show the advantages DevOps may bring. An opportunity to increase test engineers’ qualification level, less effort on testing activities than required with manual testing are among such benefits.

    The Resistance of an Infrastructure Department Manager

    Why They May Resist

    In the pre-DevOps times, an infrastructure department manager was responsible for controlling the design, configuration and delivery of infrastructure for development, testing and production. With DevOps on board and the IaC approach implemented, the infrastructure manager may feel as if they lose control over the IT infrastructure provisioning and management. What’s more, the scope of the infrastructure manager’s responsibilities extends greatly since they’ll need to run the infrastructure department as a competency center.

    How to Overcome Resistance

    A company’s CIO should explain the infrastructure manager their new responsibilities upfront. The infrastructure manager should stay assured that they change the area of control, not lose it. Within DevOps, the infrastructure department manager has to transform their approach to work. They must be able to help a PM correctly arrange the development, QA and operations team for each particular project taking into account project complexity and size. The infrastructure manager must be able to proactively deal with the cases when the team members involved in software development lack qualification for a project, and not wait until the lack in teams’ competencies results in the project prolongation, for example.

    The Resistance of Operations Engineers

    Why They May Resist

    With DevOps in place, the operations team will have to coordinate their efforts with developers and the QA team from the very beginning of the project, as well as regularly report to the PM on the tasks completed, which is not the usual work approach. To be able to work in the DevOps environment, operations engineers will also have to get familiar with a range of IT automation, version control and other tools. What’s more, the operations staff’s responsibilities will now include the provision of the information on the IT infrastructure functioning to business and technical stakeholders.

    How to Overcome Resistance

    To help an operations team adapt to the DevOps culture, the infrastructure department manager should deliver training to make operations engineers familiar with new tools and technologies they will need to use, e.g., version control systems (Git, Team Foundation Server), software deployment automation tools (Chef, Puppet), etc. A PM, in their turn, will need their soft skills to increase the operations team’s willingness to work in close alignment with development and QA teams.

    The Resistance of End Users

    Why They May Resist

    It may sound surprising, but even the primary beneficiaries of the DevOps approach implementation may resist the changes DevOps brings. There are two reasons for it:

    • The time available for software acceptance testing gets reduced due to a faster SDLC.
    • Acceptance testing becomes automated, and end users hardly trust automated tests.

    How to Overcome Resistance

    To dispel end users’ DevOps-related doubts, PMs must do their best to earn their trust by establishing strong communication with end users. If, for example, end users know software testing covers critical software functionality and the probability of post-release errors is minimized, their confidence in software reliability and the overall trust in the DevOps approach rises.

    In a Nutshell

    Each party involved in software development has its reasons to be suspicious when the DevOps approach is coming on board. New duties, close collaboration, the necessity to apply new tools and other DevOps-related changes may make project managers, developers, QA engineers, IT infrastructure managers, an operations team and even end users resist the new approach.

    To overcome the resistance, a company’s CIO should maintain open communication with each party involved in SDLC, explain their new duties and listen to their concerns. It’s essential to make sure each team member realizes what changes and advantages DevOps brings into SDLC. To ensure they have the necessary knowledge and skills, appropriate training should be provided to project managers, developers, QA team, IT infrastructure manager and the operations team.

    — Andrei Lipnitski