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Tag: scale

  • The Path to App Modernization: Benefits, Pitfalls and the Route to Success

    The Path to App Modernization: Benefits, Pitfalls and the Route to Success

    There are many reasons an organization may find itself on the path to considering the risky journey of application modernization. It could be to gain an edge or to build a more competitive positioning, or a business could have a legacy system running on infrastructure that is no longer viable, leaving them no other choice. But the conundrum for organizations still resurfaces when considering app modernization; they must select one of these two routes: Either “the failure rate is high, and failure is simply not an option” or “Everyone is still doing it, so let’s forge ahead.”

    The Benefits of Choosing Application Modernization

    Whether an organization chooses this path out of necessity or ambition, modernizing an old IT environment can deliver several benefits, ranging from reducing outdated hardware and software to creating new value through innovation. Specifically, the key benefits are:

    ● Reducing technical debt and improving the underlying infrastructure: Improved security, operations, reliability and scalability.
    ● Decreasing expenses: Lowering the cost spent on expensive hardware and software improves the utilization of resources, thereby decreasing the total cost of ownership of technology operations.
    ● Accelerated time to market: Modernized IT and product development gain value from technological improvements that decrease the time it takes to develop and deploy new products and services.
    ● Agility in the market: Modernization enables an organization to react to changes at an accelerated rate, providing a competitive edge in the market.

    Choosing the Best Path to Application Modernization

    There are different paths to modernization, each with its own focus. On the one hand, there’s the infrastructure aspect of building your platform engineering practice versus adopting a service approach with a platform-as-a-service (PaaS). On the other hand, there is the actual process of modernization with options like refactoring, re-platforming or rewriting your systems, either in-house or through outsourced services. It ultimately starts with modernizing the relationship of the application with its infrastructure and changing some assumptions.

    Once you have a baseline, running everything else should come from a cost-benefit analysis. A scalable, well-managed monolith is valuable despite its age. Ensuring horizontal scalability and a robust backup strategy are key to effectively managing mutable data.

    First, understand the blockers in your current implementation that would complicate a shift to the cloud. Or identify where the result may not deliver any value.

    There are very common anti-patterns that remain anti-patterns, whether on the cloud, running on managed hosting or on-premises. Identifying them allows you to start absorbing technical debt regardless of whether a move to the cloud happens as intended.

    Anti-patterns to look out for are:
    ● Weak separation of code and configuration: You want to be able to run many parallel instances of each application as separate environments. Telltale signs are hard-coded URLs and service credentials. The dependency is the capability of running ephemeral preview environments that are quick to launch and quick to destroy, such that you know that you are “cloud ready.”
    ● Weak separation of the read/write domain from the read-only domain: In a cloud deployment, you want a build step that creates immutable artifacts that are not modifiable in production, and you need to know where all the actual data resides. Older applications tend to “believe” they own the whole disk.
    ● Manual configuration of services: You should be able to run “stock” services without any manual configuration in case the need for a specific database configuration arises and signals the likelihood of an application issue that requires debugging.

    Simply packaging a Docker container or a VM image and deploying to an IaaS won’t create any benefit and only increases costs. The first step to success is a thorough clean-up and update of the documentation to start the process.

    The one basic rule to follow is the ability to run an arbitrary number of instances of every element. Achieving this will allow everything else to flow. There is no need to rush to transform all Crons into “separate workers” and break the monolith into microservices. But the proof that it is possible now exists.

    The Best Approach to Application Modernization: In-House or Outsourced

    A mixed approach between in-house and outsourced is often optimal. There are many elements to consider. If you have a minimal in-house understanding of what the cloud imposes as constraints, you may be tempted to go for the simplistic lift-and-shift approach. Outsourcing everything can lead to huge amounts of lock-in.

    There are ways to cut corners that could simplify and accelerate the initial project, but this could increase the costs down the line. There needs to be a level of abstraction where using a PaaS is a winning proposition and can provide quite a bit of abstraction at no cost.

    Without control, the project may end up as something that “runs on the cloud” without the actual benefits. But there are many ways to do that.

    The Right Mindset Will Help Avoid Pitfalls Along the Way

    By neglecting constraints and skipping the necessary preparation, the costs may escalate. Running big chunks of hardware continuously versus using small ephemeral resources as needed typically leads to significantly increased costs over time. Full rewrites often go wrong when trying to obtain all the benefits immediately.

    A simple four-step approach for success is:

    ● Start with modernizing the relationship of the application with its infrastructure and changing assumptions.
    ● Identify and address the blockers in the current implementation–this makes a shift to the cloud less complicated and enables a smoother transition.
    ● Set a baseline that allows everything else to run from a cost-benefit analysis. Ensure horizontal scalability and implement a robust backup strategy to effectively manage mutable data.

    Accepting that app modernization will be a journey and that the initial implementation is a slightly more scalable and resilient version of the original. This is often a better mindset that leads to a more effective process.

  • Why Monitoring-as-Code Will be a Must for DevOps Teams

    Why Monitoring-as-Code Will be a Must for DevOps Teams

    Over the last decade, we’ve seen an increasing number of operations teams and development teams using an infrastructure-as-code (IaC) process for provisioning cloud-based infrastructure. In that model, IaC tools like CDK, Pulumi or Terraform are employed to allow developers to code, deploy and manage cloud-based infrastructure. The advent of cloud services and IaC tools has freed engineering teams from error-prone (and slow) manual infrastructure provisioning processes. The ability to codify your infrastructure next to your version-controlled application code has been a game-changer for many organizations.

    An Introduction to Monitoring-as-Code

    With IaC becoming an increasingly valuable tool for managing infrastructure, it’s only natural that other parts of the ecosystem follow that shift left philosophy, including how testing and monitoring are done.

    Similar to IaC, the monitoring-as-code (MaC) concept allows us to describe a monitoring infrastructure as code. Today, many DevOps teams are employing MaC by using some of the aforementioned IaC tools like Terraform or Pulumi—in conjunction with monitoring platforms like Checkly—to create, run and manage their browser and API monitoring regimens. In these examples, monitoring checks can be defined in JavaScript, TypeScript or HCL, and then those can be committed together with application code. Modern MaC matures fast; it does not even require traditional IaC tools but enables MaC without extra tools. Modern platforms enable this by shipping CLIs to achieve this. Making monitoring an integral and companion part of your codebase comes with many benefits and advantages.

    Just as IaC has become an integral part of the new paradigm for managing cloud-based infrastructure, here are a few reasons why I believe MaC will also become a must for modern DevOps teams.

    The Benefits That Make MaC a Must for DevOps Teams

    Flexibility and Programmability
    By adopting MaC, your automated testing infrastructure is defined as code and lives next to your application code in your code repository, giving you all the benefits that entails. Testing and monitoring are no longer treated as separate from your application code.

    Update Monitoring With Your Code Changes
    As mentioned in the previous bullet, MaC places your testing and monitoring next to your application code. So when your application code is updated, your testing and monitoring ships right alongside it, streamlining the process. That makes your testing and monitoring solutions deployable, with MaC giving you the ability to schedule tests on a continuous, around-the-clock basis from distributed locations across the globe.

    Monitor and Test on Staging
    In the past, synthetic monitoring was primarily meant to run on production: Once your apps were deployed, monitoring kicked in and alerted you when things failed. With MaC, that monitoring can now run locally alongside your application code in a CI/CD flow, allowing that app code to be tested and even monitored continuously on staging before getting deployed on production.

    Speed and Automation Efficiency
    With monitoring now embracing the “as code” paradigm, new checks can be spun up quickly and in far less time than a non-MaC monitoring approach. All of that increased speed and efficiency will have a real-world impact on dev, ops and QA teams, saving engineers hours now automating once-siloed manual and inflexible work.

    Scale as Needed
    Finally, given that your tests live right next to your application code, it’s much easier to observe, manage and understand what is being monitored. That insight and visibility also make it much easier to scale your testing and monitoring efforts across teams, organizations and even across the globe. All of that enhanced efficiency frees dev and QA teams to focus on other tasks while simultaneously providing better testing and monitoring support across the organization.

    MaC Benefits in Action
    As an example, all of the aforementioned benefits are being employed by a large health care provider that recently adopted a MaC workflow. That organization relies on a MaC testing and monitoring workflow—based on tests written in Playwright—to automate its synthetic monitoring efforts. In particular, a MaC approach has enabled the QA and dev teams there to quickly build, validate and deploy an entire suite of checks from their local development environment.

    The Future of Testing and Monitoring

    With MaC now moving in the same leftward direction as IaC, I believe that the future of monitoring will become increasingly accessible, flexible and frictionless for any modern developer. MaC will also be increasingly based on open source testing and automation frameworks like Playwright, Puppeteer and others, which have been used and adopted for automation and testing for years.

  • DevOps and Automation Abstraction?

    DevOps and Automation Abstraction?

    Similarity breeds consistency, giving way to predictability and, thereby, dropping costs of operations and quality from a lower number of incidents and a shorter duration to resolve them. But at the heart of this chain of events is the recognition that we tend to do certain tasks the same way, over and over again, for a given type of technology. Variability then becomes our enemy.  Consistency becomes our ally.  So the question: How do we as DevOps service providers instill a level of consistency in what we do that is not engineer-specific (i.e. only one guy knows how it is supposed to work) and will still scale at the enterprise level?

    From a people perspective, we use teams, whether co-located in person or virtually using the same backbone of tooling over wide geographical separation. From a process perspective, we use governance and education to ensure the same processes and approaches are taken at a fundamental level across different types of technologies. And finally, from a tooling perspective, we use templates or frameworks (or pick your synonym) that allows us to construct a shell that guides the automation construction to be consistent from parent to child. The combination of these three fundamental elements leads to consistency that scales. But is that all?

    What Are We Missing?

    Could there be another fundamental element we have overlooked—namely, abstraction? Case in point: Consider the effect of a drag-and-drop interface versus a typed one to accomplish a given task. Both look to accomplish the same outcome. One could argue the typed text approach offers more flexibility and customization to get the task done. But the drag-and-drop method offers a consistent, simplistic way of doing a similar task, the same way, over and over again. Examining both methods objectively, the drag-and-drop method offers a level of consistency the typed method never could. For the typed one, you would always have to check to ensure punctuation and lack of changes (additions or deletions) to “know” it was the same script as last time. The drag-and-drop method on the other hand, is “canned” or largely unalterable; it may limit customization (by design), but it excels at consistency.

    The drag-and-drop method achieves this consistency by effectively abstracting the typed or scripted code within it from the user who employs it. The user only makes the choice to use it, when desired (or needed); the rest of the mechanics are abstracted from the user. The reason drag-and-drop methods exist is beyond just consistency, however; it is for simplicity. Apple computers would appear to be founded on this idea. For those of you old enough to remember DOS on PC computers, the parallel here immediately becomes clear. DOS was a typed-based command-line operating system (OS) fully capable of operating a PC many years ago. But Apple’s graphical interface made the same functions “intuitive” and forced the PC industry into Windows to stay competitive. Nobody chooses a command line OS like DOS when something as elegant as iOS exists, or Windows (or pick your graphical poison here).

    A graphical OS abstracts core functions from the user, and makes every attempt to make an elegant intuitive packaging of the same functions. Users “get” an iPhone, which accounts for its sales. You don’t need formal education classes or an eidetic memory to use an iPhone. Users effectively have been abstracted from all the typed code it takes to create an OS like this, millions of lines of such code packaged up into swipes, beeps and elegant graphical displays. Keep in mind, at its core this OS abstracts users from variability that might exist if hundreds of companies created their own versions of iOS. The simplicity is paired with consistency, and the quality of Apple is a result (for better or worse). But whatever the quality of Apple is, it is far better than if a wide degree of variability were permitted in the vendors of iOS or the construction of it.

    Extending Abstraction in DevOps

    Now enter DevOps. Containers are a level of abstraction widely popular in our discipline for keeping hardware particulars away from what are typically software engineers. The value of this abstraction is well-understood. My challenge is simply to extend this thinking into the next tier of DevOps tooling. What if the ability to include database DevOps automation was simply a product of drag-and-drop methods that every build tool understood perfectly? Granted, you may have to limit the expression of this idea to say Oracle or SQL Server at first to capture the nuances and particular capabilities of products and technologies in this space. But if someone built a “container” for Oracle, I would wager the choice to use Oracle would rise substantially over its competitors, at least until those containers or abstraction layers were just as effective with other database products.

    The abstraction phenomenon need not be limited to hardware, or as I have proposed to database platforms. It also could apply to .NET or Java development efforts at the top of the stack. The steps needed to take an idea, code it and put it through the build process are going to be largely similar when working in a .NET shop or a java shop (or pick your particular development tool of choice here). Even the top of the stack—that is to say, the development of applications itself—could be a viable candidate for abstraction from the mundane details as it relates to a build construction or a deployment to a given class of environment.

    Creating effective containers for the application layer in effect limits variability, and increases predictability. I realize it has to be technology-type sensitive. The .NET shops have their own container. The java shops have theirs, and so on. The only question is whether we are able to include enough of the common core steps we take to produce a build with a given technology type to form an abstraction construct of value. Over time, this would include every type of technology widely in use today.

    The effort to simplify through abstractions ultimately would result in our ability to include technologies such as WebSphere at our pleasure. It would also allow us to switch out WebSphere for a new competitor using the same abstraction constructs, universally, just by rebuilding all our apps one time. This kind of power is alluring to development teams. It drives application developers and operations engineers to begin to work together to look for the most cost effective technology that can perform a given spec. Being the best at something is no longer a cage from which there is no escape later.

    Technology components would be selected based on performance and cost of ownership (i.e. operations) later. Switching is ultrasimplistic if all we ever used to include it in our build routine was a drag-and-drop style method with universal, well-defined parameters. A customer’s ability to switch products to the best of breed through easy or simplistic means keeps pressure on vendors to actually be the best of breed. If the performance suffers or a new release is full of bugs, developers just switch it out through abstraction (not long, complicated scripts where everything has to go right, including a full moon on the third Tuesday of the month with a Gregorian chant in the background).

    Impacts to the Bottom Line

    The selection of DevOps tooling often is a cantankerous one in large organizations. Debates ensue about flexibility, extensibility and whether a given tool can be customized to accommodate the unique little snowflake of my development teams. Perhaps these debates are headed in the wrong direction. Perhaps instead of prizing and valuing the extensibility or customization a given tool affords, we should be looking closer at how that extensibility is achieved.

    For an enterprise to make an unwitting choice to get into the script business, is effectively stating: “I will be maintaining the scripts I use to construct a build with as much rigor as I maintain the code these scripts are designed to create builds out of.” So, we just doubled our programming staff without realizing it—one half working on the application code and the other half working on the scripting code that “automates” the delivery of a build during construction. While overall speed may be increased, it comes at the cost of doubling already expensive headcount.

    As an alternative, what if enterprise customers were asking tooling vendors how simplistic their tools are to use, and how standardized are their approaches. While we may not enjoy losing a degree of flexibility as we may be unable to customize a drag-and-drop method construct, the payoffs to the business are simplicity of use and scale at an enterprise level. Not only do I refrain from doubling headcount, I can actually free resources to focus on the disciplines and areas they enjoy most instead of performing script maintenance. Abstraction as a construct: From the hardware layer up through the application layer, it may be a driving fundamental that keeps DevOps scaling and lowering the cost of innovation for many years to come—but only if you begin to ask for it.

    To continue the conversation, feel free to contact me.

  • CircleCI Secures $18 Million in Series B Led by Scale Venture Partners

    Industry Shift Toward DevOps Propels CircleCI as It Scales to Meet Rising Demand for Unified Web and Mobile CI/CD Solution

    SAN FRANCISCO, CA –(Marketwired – May 16, 2016) – CircleCI, the leader in continuous integration and continuous delivery, today announced it raised $18 million in Series B funding led by Scale Venture Partners. Existing investors DFJ, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal also participated in the round, bringing total financing for the company to $28 million. Timed with the investment, Andy Vitus, Partner at Scale Venture Partners, has joined the CircleCI Board of Directors.

    Founded in 2011, CircleCI helps software teams rapidly release code they trust by automating the build, test, and deploy process. Built for developers, CircleCI offers a modern software delivery platform that lets teams ramp up quickly, scale easily, and build confidently every day. Thousands of technology-driven companies including Facebook, Sony, Kickstarter, and Spotify rely on CircleCI to accelerate delivery of their code, helping software developers focus on creating business value fast.

    The company plans to use the funds to drive product development, expand operations to support a growing global customer base, and to scale sales and infrastructure to support new and existing customers of both the SaaS and Enterprise solutions.

    CircleCI joins an impressive list of Scale Venture Partners portfolio companies, companies including Chef, Box and DocuSign. “We are in the midst of a transformation to the software delivery pipeline, mainly driven by the demands for speed as enterprises move toward releasing code daily and hourly. As complexity rises, enterprises large and small have new demands for speed, assurances of quality, and automation, making the software delivery phases a critical business driver,” said Andy Vitus, CircleCI Board Member and Partner at Scale Venture Partners. “CircleCI is at the core of helping modern organizations build software across languages in a single interface. We look forward to working with them as they continue their rapid growth.”

    CircleCI will use the investment to continue the tremendous momentum it experienced over the past year including:

    Key Product Launches

    • CircleCI Enterprise on-prem deployment further expands options for modern software teams who want powerful CI/CD behind their firewall. CircleCI Enterprise enables customers to maintain complete control over access to their secure source code, test databases, and other resources.
    • CircleCI for OS X enables mobile app developers to test and deploy iOS apps quickly and easily. After a successful public beta and limited release, the new hosted OS X testing platform is now available for companies of all sizes and across industries to purchase and use.

    Employee Accolades

    • CircleCI was recognized as a winner of the 2016 Bay Area Best Places To Work, an awards program presented by the San Francisco Business Times and the Silicon Valley Business Journal. CircleCI was among the top 30 small Bay Area companies whose employees rate them as the highest on such values as fun, collaborative culture, solid compensation and benefits offerings, and other amenities as well as management practices.

    “The market is shifting with a keen eye toward DevOps and developer-centric solutions for good reason,” said Jim Rose, Chief Executive Officer, CircleCI. “We provide the velocity developers need to turn the release cycle from days to minutes without sacrificing quality. We are experiencing incredible momentum and we are eager to continue to bring the best possible solution to market for our customers and partners.”

    About CircleCI

    CircleCI helps software teams rapidly build code they trust. Thousands of technology-driven companies rely on CircleCI’s modern continuous integration and delivery platform to automate the build, test, and deploy processes. CircleCI empowers developers to focus exclusively on creating business value fast.

    CircleCI is a Bay Area Best Places to Work 2016 award winner. Founded in 2011 and headquartered in San Francisco, CircleCI is venture backed by Scale Venture Partners, DFJ, Baseline Ventures, and Harrison Metal Capital.

    Follow CircleCI on Twitter. Visit circleci.com to get started.

    About Scale Venture Partners

    Scale Venture Partners invests in technology companies with a focus on SaaS and Cloud Infrastructure. We partner with entrepreneurs, from their first dollar in revenue and invest to accelerate growth and establish market leadership. ScaleVP has$1B in assets under management and is investing its fifth fund. Representative investments include: Box, Chef, Cloudhealth, DataStax, Demandbase, DocuSign, ExactTarget, HubSpot, PubNub, Omniture and WalkMe. ScaleVP is located in Silicon Valley and invests nationwide. For more information, visit www.scalevp.com or follow us on Twitter at @scalevp or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/company/scale-venture-partners.

    CONTACT INFORMATION

  • ELECTRIC CLOUD HELPS ORGANIZATIONS SCALE THEIR DEVOPS EFFORTS WITH NEW RELEASE OF ELECTRICFLOW

    New features give enterprises an easier way to scale DevOps initiatives across projects and teams with end-to-end automation, cross-functional visibility and consistent processes

    SAN JOSE, Calif., May 10, 2016 – Electric Cloud (http://electric-cloud.com), the leader in DevOps Release Automation, today announced the latest release of its industry-leading ElectricFlow DevOps Release Automation platform. The new release supports the company’s mission to advance DevOps in the enterprise by helping customers scale software delivery pipelines and DevOps best practices throughout the organization.

    “The industry discussion has evolved from ‘how do I get started with DevOps?’ to ‘how do we scale our DevOps initiatives while addressing security, compliance and governance?’” said Steve Brodie, Electric Cloud’s CEO. “We are laser-focused on helping enterprises turn their software pathway to production from a laborious, slow and painful process into a competitive advantage. ElectricFlow offers new features designed specifically for the needs of the largest and most complex organizations on the planet – with some of our customers releasing updates from 40,000+ developers across 20,000+ applications on a single platform.”

    In order to succeed with DevOps, large organizations need an end-to-end solution that allows them to standardize and automate their software deployment tools and processes as much as possible. This provides enterprises with consistent build, test and deployment procedures to speed up cycle times, eliminate configuration drift and bottlenecks in the pipeline, while also reducing IT capital expenditure and operating costs.

    ElectricFlow provides even greater enhancements to further improve the orchestration and automation of an organization’s ‘Pathway to Production.’ New features include new artifact staging, automated rollbacks and simplified manual steps creation capabilities. Click here to learn more about ElectricFlow (http://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow).

    The platform’s proven scalability and extensibility, which allows organizations to automate any workflow and plug-in any tool or technology stack, has led many customers to set up ElectricFlow as a shared internal service that powers their software delivery across all teams and releases worldwide.  This is consistent with observations from leading industry experts and research analysts who recommend a centralized DevOps Release Automation platform. “Automation adoption in any form is good,” noted Robert Naegle and Ronni J. Colville in a May 2015 Gartner Research report*, “but, ultimately, to deliver significant business value automation initiatives must be centralized, with common governance, leadership and management constructs.”

    The industry is taking note. Recently, Ovum Research recognized Electric Cloud as a market leader for DevOps Release Management. Forrester Research also recognized Electric Cloud in its 2015 ARA Wave Report as a Strong Performer, with clear leadership in strategy as defined by vision, planned enhancements, scalability, extensibility, controllability and out-of-the-box, third-party plug-ins. The company recently announced record sales for its DevOps Release Automation solutions, and also has closed multiple large contracts over the last two quarters with several leading Financial Services firms, including a Fortune 10 bank, two leading electronic stock trading companies and one of the industry’s largest mortgage originators. It also secured a multi-year, multi-million dollar enterprise agreement with one of the largest networking companies in the world.

    To learn more about Electric Cloud, please visit: (http://electric-cloud.com).

    Share This: .@electriccloud hits stride with ElectricFlow, the leading #DevOps Release Automation platform for scaling DevOps http://electric-cloud.com/products/electricflow

    *Gartner, Survey Analysis: The Realities, Opportunities and Challenges of I&O Automation, May 27, 2015.

    About Electric Cloud, Inc.

    Electric Cloud is the leader in DevOps Release Automation. We help organizations developing enterprise web/IT, mobile, and embedded systems deliver better software faster by automating and accelerating build, deployment, and release processes at scale. Leading organizations like Cisco, E*TRADE, Gap, GE, HP, Intel, Lockheed Martin, Sony and Qualcomm use Electric Cloud solutions and services to boost DevOps productivity and Agile throughput, while providing a scalable, auditable, predictable, and high-performance pathway to production.

    # # #

    Contact:

    Jeremy Douglas

    Catapult PR-IR

    303-581-7760

    jdouglas@catapultpr-ir.com

  • cPrime and AgileCraft Partner to Scale Agile with Atlassian’s Jira Suite

    Partnership enables organizations committed to Atlassian suite to scale agile across all levels of the enterprise – including team, program, portfolio and enterprise levels.

    Foster City, CA (PRWEB) March 31, 2016

    cPrime, the industry leader focused on solutions to help companies adopt, transform and scale their business with Agile Development methodologies and AgileCraft, the leading provider of enterprise agility platforms to simplify software at scale, have partnered to help companies drive business agility and transformation at scale.

    “Customers interested in scaling agile to the enterprise are rapidly adopting JIRA along with AgileCraft to align business and technology.” Said Zubin Irani, CEO of cPrime. “Our customers tell us that using AgileCraft with JIRA allows organizations to bridge the PPM / ALM gap in a modern and highly scalable way. The result for customers is better software – delivered on time and on budget – with clear visibility and trace-ability from start to finish.

    “Our business model is to embrace partners to drive the implementation and customization of our platform” said Steve Elliott, CEO of AgileCraft. “cPrime already deeply understands the needs of organizations scaling agile, and was looking for a tool to help solve the problem of true enterprise agility. cPrime has repeatedly worked with our team to deliver innovative solutions that accelerate the path to operational agility.”

    Built from the top-down to support agile at scale, the AgileCraft platform helps align entire organizations around common goals and objectives while providing actionable views and metrics to everyone touching the technology product lifecycle.

    To learn more about scaling agile to the with cPrime and AgileCraft on platforms like Jira register for a one-hour complimentary webcast featuring a product overview and technical deep dive to be held on May 10, 2016.

    About cPrime Inc.

    cPrime enhances the full lifecycle of product development with comprehensive solutions for adopting and scaling Agile methodologies and software. Hardware, DevOps, JIRA, cPrime covers it all. The alignment of  people, processes and technology solutions build and optimize a lasting framework for client growth. cPrime works with the most notable enterprises; providing training, consulting, and team augmentations to help organizations adopt and scale Agile methodologies. Additionally, cPrime deploys and optimizes the software used to support client’s unique processes. The cPrime solution sets span the full application lifecycle management pipeline to ensure quick and quality product delivery.

    About AgileCraft

    AgileCraft® delivers the most comprehensive software solution available for scaling agile to the enterprise. AgileCraft transforms the way organizations enable and manage agile productivity across their enterprise, portfolios, programs and teams by aligning business strategy with technical execution. The AgileCraft platform combines sophisticated planning, analysis, forecasting and visualization with robust, multi-level collaboration and management. Designed to be open, the AgileCraft platform compliments and extends existing agile tools, methods and processes and can be deployed through the cloud or on premise. AgileCraft customers get the best agile solution on the market and benefit from a platform that is specifically designed to scale enterprise wide. For more information, please visit http://www.agilecraft.com.

  • 3 Skills Developers Should Master in 2016

    3 Skills Developers Should Master in 2016

    The era of mobile and web is upon us, which has caused nearly every business decision-maker to ask the question, Is now the time to hire a developer to build our app or website? In 2016, businesses are going to be looking for the best developers to join their team and help scale their business. We’ve already started to see this trend, as a recent Harvey Nash Technology Survey 2016 found that developers are the most sought-after of all technology personnel.

    To stand out from the pack, developers must master the critical skills businesses are looking for. The most valuable developers will be those who can adapt to the changing technology landscape and further hone their craft to help companies scale and solve specific business challenges.

    To stay competitive in today’s market, developers need to invest in these three skills to be relevant in 2016 and beyond.

    Master the Skills to Scale a Product or Service

    Startups increasingly are evolving from early stage concepts to building a growth model to take their business to the next level. To be an asset today, developers need to master and specialize in scaling technologies that are key for businesses looking to expand their customer base and focus on technological innovation.

    There is a demand for developers that have not only a breadth of experience in bringing an organization up to scale but also depth in their technical skill set. Having the ability to work on major systems, support large amounts of traffic and customers and maintain the system for several years are critical competencies that companies will be looking for.

    Also, having a data model or database experience is very important—NoSQL solutions such as Cassandra, CouchDB or Riak, as well as traditional data sources such as MySQL, are in high demand. Middleware languages such as Java and Golang also are an important part of a developer skill set when building services and APIs.

    Understand the Customer Perspective

    When building a technology solution, an engineer must be able to look at the product from a customer’s perspective to understand what problem the product is fixing. While technical skills in developing a product and user experience (UX) are very important, the ability for a developer to understand and create a product that solves a customer challenge far outweighs the focus on building the most elegant software.

    Engineers who are able to demonstrate project management skills and have experience around scaling infrastructure and ensuring the platform is robust will be in high demand. Businesses increasingly are seeing a need to support growing customer bases and traffic with utmost end-user reliability.

    Become a Subject Matter Expert

    There is a gradual shift in the developer community, in which engineers are focusing on specializations and becoming subject matter experts. There is an opportunity for developers to create career highlights by merging their talent and passion with opportunities.

    Developers are encouraged to identify an area they are passionate about and focus on refining those skills. By being able to find these opportunities that build on their passion, these developers can demonstrate they are able to solve a challenging problem for a large number of users—a competitive skill in high demand across the industry.

    The overarching strategy of a successful developer career is to invest in learning how to scale a product or service, understanding the customer perspective and becoming a subject matter expert. Investing in your skills as a developer in 2016 can lead to a longer, more fulfilling career.

    About the Author/Sha Ma

    Sha Ma_SendGridSha Ma is the senior director, Software Engineering at SendGrid. She led development teams at both startups and Fortune 500 companies prior to joining SendGrid. In her current role, she drives strategic planning, development and management of large scale projects. Ma is a graduate of MIT where she earned both her bachelor’s and master’s degrees.

  • SaltStack Data-Driven Orchestration on Display at SCALE 14x

    SaltStack sponsors the Southern California Linux Expo with talks and demonstrations highlighting event-driven infrastructure automation.

    Pasadena, CA (PRWEB) January 21, 2016

    SaltStack®, the creators of data-driven orchestration software for the management of any infrastructure or application stack at scale, today announced it is a sponsor of the Southern California Linux Expo for the fifth year in a row. SaltStack will demonstrate the power of data-driven orchestration for event-driven infrastructure through talks and demonstrations delivered by speakers from Adobe and SaltStack. Also, SaltStack can be found in the expo hall in booth #117. SCALE 14xwill be held this year in Pasadena, Calif., Jan. 21-24, 2016.

    Don’t miss these Salty talks from Christer Edwards, Adobe senior systems administrator, and David Boucha, SaltStack software engineer, highlighting SaltStack for data-driven orchestration:

    Christer’s talk titled, “Ops Tools for Infrastructure Hardening,” will highlight how Adobe Systems is leveraging SaltStack for full system auditing, reporting and compliance. His presentation outlines how Adobe automates infrastructure hardening for FedRamp compliance and highlights the custom tools and modules we’ve created for SOC-2 and beyond. The initiative also includes components for HIDS, FIM and CIS compliance auditing with extensions that include osquery integration for SQL-like querying capabilities across the entire Adobe data center.

    Dave’s talk titled, “Beyond Configuration Management with SaltStack for Event-Driven Infrastructure,” will show how SaltStack is so much more than just a configuration management tool. Specifically, Dave will outline and demonstrate SaltStack intelligent, data-driven orchestration for event-driven infrastructure automation. SaltStack is built to help optimize the entire infrastructure and application stack via dynamic adjustment of resources based on monitored data, changes and events. Dave will provide an overview and demonstration of SaltStack Beacons combined with the SaltStack Reactor for proactive and autonomic system monitoring and management.

    Read the SCALE 14x speaker interview with Dave to learn that Dave expects presentation attendees to bring and use cell phones during his talk and encourages group participation during his demonstration of SaltStack data-driven orchestration.

    Register for SCALE 14x now using promo code “SALT” to receive 40% off the registration price.

    SaltConf16

    The 3rd annual SaltStack user conference is coming back to Salt Lake City, April 19-21, 2016. Attend to hear how organizations like Adobe, Aetna, Dun & Bradstreet, Dutch Government Data Centers, Lyft, Pure Storage, National Instruments, TD Bank, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and many more are using SaltStack to orchestrate and automate any infrastructure or application stack at scale. SaltConf16 is the most effective and economical way to get Salted but the best discounts are available for a limited time only. Register now.

    SaltStack recently announced new SaltStack Support offerings to provide Salt Open users and SaltStack Enterprise customers with dedicated, prioritized access to the Salt brain trust for any Salt implementation. Customers that subscribe to a SaltStack Support package by Friday, Jan. 29, 2016 receive complimentary SaltConf16 passes.

    About SaltStack

    SaltStack is a complete systems management software platform for scalable orchestration and automation of any infrastructure or application stack. SaltStack is used by IT operators, system administrators and DevOps engineers to automate configuration management, private cloud building, public cloud orchestration and event-driven infrastructure. The Salt open source project was launched in February of 2011 and is now one of the fastest growing, most-active communities in the world. SaltStack was founded in August 2012 to support the Salt project and to deliver SaltStack Enterprise packaged for the world’s most dynamic large and small businesses, web-scale applications and clouds. SaltStack won the Best of VMworld Gold Award for virtualization management, won an InfoWorld 2014 Technology of the Year Award, won the 2013 GigaOm Structure LaunchPad competition, was named a Linux Journal Reader’s Choice product in five categories, was named a Gartner 2013 Cool Vendor in DevOps, and was included on the GitHub Octoverse list for 2012 and 2013 as one of the largest, most-active open source projects in the world. For more information, please visit http://www.saltstack.com

    For the original version on PRWeb visit:http://www.prweb.com/releases/SaltStack/SCALE14x/prweb13176718.htm

  • Rugged DevOps: Good, Bad & Ugly

    Rugged DevOps: Good, Bad & Ugly

    The Good: DevOps has been a success for Dev.

    With higher expectations, better processes, more management focus and new tools like advanced PaaS and containers, developers are churning out more and more software faster than ever. Success! Or is it?

    The Bad: DevOps has been a success…for Dev.

    For Dev teams, this may result in pats on the back and high fives. But for Ops, this can look like one thankless tidal wave of work after another. The same software velocity that is praised in Dev is currently overwhelming their counterparts in Operations. And frankly, many DevOps tools released in recent years happen to benefit Dev much more than their counterparts in Ops. (My pet theory is that developers at IT automation firms are acting and thinking like…developers – focusing their creative energies on solving Dev problems.) A similar problem holds true for IT Security teams who want to build quality in by “shifting left” – see  https://staging-devopsy.kinsta.cloud/2015/12/10/getting-rugged-devops-right/ . From the vantage point of IT Operations and Security teams, they are doing more work than ever but without any more human or IT automation resources. To add insult to injury amid their increased workloads, many IT Ops teams have to invest countless hours (away from family and personal time) in training courses and migrations to reorient their processes to fit into shiny, new Dev-centric “DevOps” tools and paradigms. 

    The Ugly.  

    Work. Overwork. Glitch. Search. Find. Rework. Repeat.

    A quick glance at IsItDownRightNow.com will show you which IT Operations teams are in a living hell at the moment. The other thing you will notice is that these IT Ops teams are from some of the most reputable companies on the planet. They are talented teams but stuck in rework cycles of web performance problems, security vulnerabilities and outages.

    These problems get the attention of everyone. Operations…and Dev…and Security…and customers…and Finance…and auditors and the press.

    No one likes rework. And no one likes the panicked fire drills that cause panicked rework. So what causes those rework cycles?

    Drama-free IT. Visibility Cures Chaos.  

    Much of this chaos can be tied to miscommunication. Boring? Maybe. Simple? No. Part of miscommunication is cultural. (Hint: OrcaConfig’s “How to Screw Up DevOps” white paper covers the cultural aspects of miscommunication). But miscommunication is also cured by automation solutions that promote transparency and visibility.

    If we want drama-free IT we need IT automation solutions that eliminate miscommunication and missed assumptions between Dev, Ops and Security.

    What better way to do this than with full transparency and visibility?

    Bird’s Eye Views:

    Many IT automation tools cater to SysAdmins who are interested in managing configurations of individual servers. That’s great if your focus is on individual severs. But IT Operations, eCommerce teams, Application Owners, Compliance & Security teams and IT Managers often care more about the health and performance of their application ecosystem (including related applications, middleware, databases and configurations that tie them together). So there is often a mismatch between the tools that SysAdmins and Developers have versus what IT Ops needs.

    Operating at Enterprise Scale Requires at-a-glance Visibility:

    IT Ops teams need bird’s-eye views of applications, databases, middleware and ecosystems to promote ease of ongoing operation. They need to be able to see, at a glance that a configuration compliance problem exists and they need to know right away the location and nature of the error. Large scale IT Ops teams do not have the luxury of toggling back and forth between multiple reports and multiple screens searching for that non-compliant, broken needle in an ecosystem haystack. If they are faced with a glitch or an outage, they need to find and fix it right away. One size does not fit all. Dev, Ops and Security each have their own interests and their own need to view their application through a lens that is most meaningful for them. Multiple ecosystem views eliminate guesswork between Dev, Ops and Security and save precious time in the find-fix cycle.

    Forrester Research spells it out well in their 7 Habits of Rugged DevOps white paper, Habit 1: Increase Trust And Transparency Between Dev, Sec, And Ops:

    “I&O pros pride themselves on understanding the interconnectedness of the hardware and software environment, and they are unnerved by complexities that poorly governed delivery practices create because the firm rates I&O pros on their ability to improve the performance and stability of the production environment. To maintain the environment, they must reduce the chances of an outage or interruption of service, and they must reduce the MTTR when an issue does occur.“

    Understanding that interconnectedness depends greatly on how much intuitive ecosystem visibility we provide to our colleagues in IT Operations. But it’s not just IT Ops that benefits from visibility, Dev and Security do too.

    Developers are able to write more secure code when they get early, in-context feedback. As David Mortman, distinguished engineer and Dell chief security architect, said, “Security issues are product quality issues, and no one wants to write buggy code.”

    Even better than efficiently finding and fixing errors is of course to prevent them in the first place and to proactively eliminate the damage they cause. Here too, the answer is better visibility. With true application ecosystem visibility, Dev and Ops teams would be able to model relationships between applications, middleware and their configurations so users will know that “changing this, affects that”.

    My teenage son has better visibility via his smartphone as to his driving route and weather conditions than I have for my multibillion dollar IT operation.

    Visibility into the Future:

    Ecosystem visibility is a key to communicating between Dev, Ops and Security and running complex application environments in the present. But what about the future?

    Release automation tools and custom scripts are excellent at deploying changes across large environments. Unfortunately they can be just as efficient at deploying typos and other mistakes across large environments, causing the chaos that we discussed earlier. Here again Operations teams would benefit from improved visibility – the ability to preview and pre-validate proposed changes across the entire ecosystem well before those changes are deployed. This is the real promise and savings of ecosystem visibility. Better visibility, with more use-case lenses cuts out the miscommunication that causes too many performance glitches, security vulnerabilities and outages. This chaos takes a toll on our IT Operations teams, our employers and our customers.

    What Next?

    We are soon entering a new season with new budgets. The temptation to “buy something” will be great. In the spirit of Rugged DevOps my recommendation is to take a full, bird’s eye view of your SDLC and to shift Ops and Security leftwards, building their critical considerations into your processes and into your IT automation tool selection.