Latest DevOps Opinions
For Dave Whyte, operations lead at UK automotive marketplace Auto Trader, a combination of Google Kubernetes Engine and an Istio service mesh has made the company’s DevOps dish taste even sweeter. At this year’s DevOps Live in London, Dave will explain why the centralised platform the company has built using the two tools is “the DevOps dream.”
The combination is a powerful weapon. But what are Kubernetes and Istio’s respective roles in the new environment?
The world of enterprise software development came of age with the emergence of ‘single purpose’ software applications aligned to a specific business function. It started with accounting programmes in finance, but with time, many areas such as manufacturing, supply chain and inventory management also benefited from the emergence of purpose-built applications.
Monolithic structures like ERPs, for instance, were designed to increase efficiency by transmitting information across business functions. Problems started creeping in, however, when businesses customised these applications to cater to their own unique requirements.
More often than not, increased customisation rendered these applications slow and clunky since they were too rigid to scale, making frequent iterations difficult. The IT department that was supposed to incite productivity became the reason for falling behind.
Just about every business today relies on people who write code. The problem is that hiring good developers is difficult. It may even be the most difficult thing a business will do.
The reason developer hiring is such an important topic (and something many businesses find challenging) is that unlike many other professions, good developers can be many times more productive than their peers.
While disconnected, siloed working doesn’t always lead to explosive Martian mishaps, it is certainly increasingly incompatible with our hyper-connected, digitally transformed realities. Innovation and progress have the best chance to succeed when inter-team alignment is constant, and everyone is relentlessly, continually engaged in collaborative dialogue. This is exactly why DevOps methodologies are having such an influential impact on software development right now, bringing development and operations teams together to produce the best possible outcomes. Much has been written about the technical aspects of DevOps but, regrettably, less attention has been spent on championing the fundamental soft skills that make it so powerful.
In a world where one data breach is all it takes to destroy a business, only the prepared and vigilant ones that embrace security in their operations will survive.
Yet, for many organisations, successfully integrating security into the software delivery lifecycle is still a huge obstacle. As illustrated in this year’s Puppet’s State of DevOps Report, which revealed that only 22 percent of companies at the highest level of security integration have reached an advanced stage of DevOps maturity. Delivering innovation shouldn’t result in the need to compete head-to-head with safeguarding customer data.
While there is a myriad of security practices and solutions in the market, why is it so hard to integrate security into software development?
Fintech apps are changing users’ relationships with money. Whether your users are freelancers, amateur investors or just trying to gain more control over their finances, fintech apps offer new and innovative ways to move, save, and invest funds.
If you’re a fintech app developer, chances are your users are looking to you to help them make their financial lives easier. Popular apps like Twine help users automatically move money into a savings account to achieve financial goals or build emergency funds, and apps like Steady help string together payments from multiple sources to help paint a detailed picture of a freelancer’s income.
The shift towards cloud native architectures and micro services has accelerated the need to integrate security into DevOps environments.
I’ve seen first-hand how modern architectures have given agile DevOps teams a new and unparalleled velocity to create, release and deploy. But with that boost in speed comes the need to bolster processes and secure application estates.
The traditional handovers for software development are now obsolete. DevOps teams can do them autonomously and are encouraged to do so. Whilst that’s all well and good, as technical leaders we’re obliged to inspect our operations and introduce new methods to ensure pipelines remain secure. Modern checks and balances should automatically detect and reject forbidden changes before they are even applied.
Across the board, the bottleneck-reducing philosophy of DevOps has become the central approach for cloud-native enterprise software development and deployment, ushering in a cultural shift in how processes, code and technology are delivered.
According to 2019 Accelerate: State of DevOps report, companies who get DevOps right deploy 208 times more code, deploy it 106 times as fast and are able to recover 2,604 faster from incidents. This has not stopped DevOps attracting critics, criticisms that I put to Bill Kleyman, EVP of Digital Solutions at Switch.
“DevOps is not about what you do, but what your outcomes are,” said the wise Gene Kim, and we would do well to heed his direction. What he’s urging us to remember is that while DevOps is about enabling a faster speed of working throughout the development process, fundamentally it needs to help in achieving results. Unfortunately, this often gets forgotten in modern-day DevOps practices.
Here are five common mistakes that can occur in DevOps if the end result is not constantly top of mind and how you can avoid falling into these dangerous traps.
On a near daily basis, new articles are published claiming “This is NOT DevOps” and “You don’t get it, DevOps is not about this!” or “This is not how you do continuous delivery,” and so forth.
While well-intentioned and often with a precise mental model in mind, the reality is that these articles are not really helping, but just creating more confusion.