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The future of DevOps T
he idea of DevOps was born from a need for organizations to deliver software more quickly, to remain competitive in a world gone digital. It called for developers and operation engineers to work together so developers could have the infrastructure resources they needed to deploy multiple times per day. But according to a report published last month by analysis firm Gartner, organizations need to reach the next level in their Agile and DevOps practices to solidify their ability to continuously deliver value to their customers. And, in the 'Predicts 2021' report, the next level, the future, is value streams. Daniel Betts, one of the authors of the report, told SD Times, "You've got traditional DevOps, which is bringing the likes of operations and development to be collaborating and working on delivering value, but you've also got Agile, which is the business and the development teams working closely together. We look at DevOps as that complete piece, as the business
being enabled by IT to deliver value to the customer." Value streams give organizations visibility into their processes, so that when limitations to the flow of work occur, Betts said, "you're using Agile practices, collaboration, technology and tools to help you. So it's very much about delivering business value, where we are thinking very much around the value stream being this way of measuring and mapping out all of the different tasks that you have in delivery, or in the actual business planning, or things like return on investment." But, he noted, DevOps is not to be thought of as a development standalone effort. Disciplines such as infrastructure, security and compliance are also involved . Value stream management brings all of these together to enable businesses to quickly deliver new products and features that meet customer needs. IT is the business. This showcase turns the spotlight on several software providers that help organizations through the various aspects of DevOps. Have a look. t
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Break down DevOps silos by centralizing on a single platform
Release management
Deployment automation
Operations runbooks
Automating your builds and deployments is great, but it’s not the end of automation. Operations teams need to automate all kinds
If we’re going to embrace DevOps and break
of routine and emergency operations tasks to
down silos, the ideal solution should put all
keep your software running. Most CI/CD tools
DevOps automation tasks in a single place.
end once the software is built or deployed,
That’s what we’re doing with Octopus Deploy.
and ops teams are left to use different tools. Octopus Deploy is the first platform to bring Effort is duplicated, multiple systems have
deployment automation side by side with
access to production, and there’s no source
IT/runbook automation, bringing your
of truth.
operations team together in a single place.
octopus.com Creating happy deployments at more than 25,000 companies.
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Improve DevOps with Octopus Deploy
M
any organizations have adopted DevOps, but their results vary because some teams have been unable to optimize production-related processes and collaboration. For example, in some companies, developers build applications and deploy them into production. At other businesses, operations professionals have had to learn how to code. Even when teams have a healthy balance of development and operations skills, each function is using its own set of tools. Using Octopus Deploy, DevOps teams can ensure better application reliability in production, facilitate common understanding and deploy code consistently across disparate target environments on premises and in the cloud. “It used to be if you were an ops person, you’d click through wizards and you knew some scripting. If your company’s on-premises infrastructure failed, you knew what would happen,” said Paul Stovell, founder and CEO of Octopus Deploy. “Now if you work in ops you’ve got to know Python, Ruby and YAML because at least part of your infrastructure is in a public or private cloud.” DevOps requires developers and operations professionals to work closer together than they ever have before, which is difficult to achieve when development uses a CI server as its source of truth and operations uses production monitoring tools. “Our view is that we need to bring those things together,” said Stovell. “We think DevOps won’t really become a reality at companies until they share the same tooling and content.” Octopus Deploy provides a single place- to manage releases, automate deployments and automate the runbooks so their applications can stay up and running anywhere.
tools and operations’ tools. It integrates with the popular tools both groups use while providing a common mechanism to improve production-related outcomes. “Rather than starting in the build space and seeing deployment as the last step of the build process, we’re seeing it as the first step towards your application being in production, the lifecycle of your application in production, and all the automation that takes place when it’s in production,” said Stovell. Once an application reaches production, many things need to be automated such as backing up the production environment database and restoring it to the test environ-
Bridge the Gap in the DevOps Toolchain
Enable Better Outcomes
The DevOps toolchain is an end-to-end concept but not an end-to end reality. Developers use IDEs, unit testing frameworks and release automation tools to compile code, unit test it and deploy it, but then the code breaks in production. Meanwhile, operations uses Power Shell, Puppet or Ansible. Because each role uses different tools the classic “it runs on my machine” problem arises which frustrates developers and operations, delays release cycles and creates more work for everyone. “There isn’t a lot of knowledge sharing between dev and ops because there’s a tool chasm that’s preventing it. I think that’s the reason a lot of companies struggle with DevOps and fail to meet their goals,” said Stovell. “They think the way around it is teaching ops people how to code. Then, the ops people start thinking like developers and forget about why the software fails.” Octopus Deploy is the missing piece between developers’
With Octopus Deploy, DevOps teams can achieve higher levels of communication and collaboration using the same source of truth while ensuring that the applications they deploy run more predictably in production. In fact, large companies and businesses in regulated industries trust Octopus Deploy to help them meet auditing and compliance requirements. Octopus Deploy is also capable of automating complicated software deployments and ensuring consistent deployment automation across all target environments. It includes other advanced deployment capabilities and patterns as well as more than 300 deployment steps out of the box. Finally, Octopus Deploy’s runbook automation capabilities help teams automate recovery processes and execute them against infrastructure so applications run with minimal disruption. Learn more at www.octopus.com. t
“There isn’t a lot of knowledge sharing between dev and ops because there’s a tool chasm that’s preventing it.” —Paul Stovell
ment, taking an application offline for maintenance and bringing it online again, and ensuring failover in a disaster recovery scenario — none of which are part of a CI process or enabled by a CI tool. When DevOps teams use wiki pages as runbooks and those runbooks are used to create PowerShell scripts, there’s no good place to store those assets because they’re neither a deployment nor a CI process, they are simply an automation task that needs to be run. A more effective approach is to store all production-related artifacts in the environment where the deployments take place, which is a public or private cloud.
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Debug Anything, Anytime, Anywhere
T
he best way to deliver great app experiences consistently is to have visibility and control over what’s happening in production. In today’s real-time world, organizations can’t afford gaps between software development and IT ops. While a DevOps process helps bridge the gap, developers need to understand what’s happening in production and be able to intervene in real-time. With Rookout, developers can interact with app code in real time from wherever they are regardless of whether the app is a legacy, desktop, web, mobile or IoT app. “Development teams are being held increasingly responsible for how their software performs in real world production environments. They need to understand what’s happening and be able to take appropriate action instantly,” Liran Haimovitch, co-founder and CEO of Rookout. Today’s IT ops professionals need real-time observability and application performance monitoring (APM) capabilities. Meanwhile, developers want to know whether the app is functioning properly and driving intended user behaviors. However, neither IT ops nor security want developers meddling with production systems. Simulators and emulators provide safe production-like environments, but they don’t provide complete visibility into actual code in production nor do they allow a developer to interact with the code. “Developers need more granular data than ops people,” said Haimovitch. “The problem is that ops tools weren’t designed for developers, so they don’t show developers the data they need.” With Rookout, developers get actual production-level insight that’s safeguarded by the organization’s governance and security policies. “Developers are constantly asking questions such as who’s calling that function? What arguments are being used to call that function?” said Haimovitch. “They could dig into the logs, but if the logs aren’t there, then data collection code needs to be added manually.” If the redeployment cycle of the code takes a few hours, a week or a quarter to deliver the data the developer needs, the developer has already moved onto many other issues and their contexts. Problem-solving momentum is lost because the developer needs to “come up to speed,” again. “Keep in mind that for every developer this is happening constantly throughout the day and organizations have thousands of developers, so the impact is enormous,” said Haimovitch. “Everything should be as data driven as possible to save time and achieve higher quality. At the same time, you want instant feedback you can act upon right away.” With Rookout, developers can achieve five to 10 iterations in just a couple of minutes while the situation and its context
are still top of mind. What’s more, the software changes do not introduce security, compliance or other risks because the risk mitigation policies have already been defined by security and IT ops so they can be enforced by Rookout.
Access Code Throughout the SDLC Rookout can be used from the earliest stages of the SDLC to produce higher quality code. For example, if an app needs to be updated and the task is being planned, Rookout empowers developers go beyond reading the statis code and to actually observe it in action to understand how it behaves. “Developers need more granular data than ops people. The problem is that ops tools weren’t designed for developers, so they don’t show developers the data they need.” —Liran Haimovithch
Meanwhile, enterprises are trying to enforce software engineering standards which is difficult to do when the different types of apps require different tooling. Rookout works across all applications and environments. “Software infrastructure is becoming more production first, whether it’s serverless, Kubernetes or cloud environments, but developers can’t use their traditional tools so you need cloud and production monitoring tools for your development environments but they don’t provide debugging capabilities,” said Haimovitch. “Rookout gives you almost the same debugging experience you would get from within your IDE.” Rookout also works in test environments. Without Rookout, deploying to a pre-production environment may take a few hours to a few days because, despite the availability of APM and exception management tools, test environments are not as stable as production environments. Rookout goes deeper than traditional APM and exception tracking, enabling developers to see and interact with what’s happening live. Wherever in the SDLC, whatever the app, Rookout enables faster iterations whether it’s fixing a bug or rolling out a new feature. And, if the app is running on a remote physical device or a virtual machine at a customer’s site, developers can connect to it and collect data securely without asking the customer to upgrade just so the developers can access the data. Rookout Also provides every developer on the team with the data they need to troubleshoot, so senior resources can spend more time writing important features and making infrastructure changes. Learn more at rookout.com. t
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Be the catalyst with the Digital.ai Value Stream Platform Transforming your organization, disrupting your industry, and delighting customers with digital products they love and trust is not easy. Automating processes and increasing velocity can help, but it’s not going to turn your organization into a high-functioning, digitalfirst company capable of continuous innovation. Agile Planning DevOps Application Security Continuous Testing AI-Powered Analytics
Fortunately, Digital.ai is here. Our intelligent Value Stream Platform helps you plan, build, test, secure, and deliver software at scale. And it’s all backed by AI-driven insights that align development efforts with measurable business goals, like increasing user satisfaction, acquisition, retention, and revenue. Be the catalyst for change in your organization. Learn more at https://digital.ai
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Value Stream Matters to DevOps, Business
T
raditional DevOps initiatives have enabled businesses to become more Agile, automate more of their processes, get better at making smaller changes faster, and get releases out quicker… but that’s not enough to compete in today’s modern development world. According to Mike O’Rourke, chief research and development officer at Digital.ai, there is a missing link between DevOps and the business. “There is no link between the way the development organization is defining success and the way the business is defining success,” he explained. Success tends to differ depending on whose measuring it. For instance, success for the development team might be how fast they respond to changes, get a release out or how many bugs they can detect and fix before a release goes out. For the business, success might be getting a fivestar app rating or improving revenue or customer satisfaction. Both matter, but in most organizations, there is no connection between the two. What business and development teams really need is a way to align their definitions of success and understand whether or not what the development team is doing is driving the outcomes the business is looking for. This is where the notion of value streams is becoming extremely important to extend the scope of DevOps and achieve business success. “As you are developing something, wouldn’t it be great to know what the business expects to get out of it?” O’Rourke said. “In most companies there is a big gap between development and business outcomes. At Digital.ai, our goal is to dramatically reduce that gap to the point that when the business has an outcome they are looking for, everyone in the development organization understands what it is they are looking for, why they are looking for it, and how they can contribute to driving that outcome.” The first step in getting there is creating a value stream map, according to O’Rourke, where business requirements are mapped to development artifacts and everyone knows at every juncture what they are trying to achieve. “The goal is to be able to flow information throughout the development life cycle,” said O’Rourke. “Historically, DevOps has been good at looking at things like burndown charts, how many releases you did, where your build failed, etc. etc. But actually visualizing the value flow throughout the development life cycle is something DevOps is missing. At Digital.ai, we bake this capability into Agile planning so that information flows end-to-end regardless of what tools you are using.”
At the same time, the pipeline needs to get smarter. It has to understand all the changes that occurred, where they were made, and what impact they had. When done properly, this information provides an audit trail or software chain of custody that spans the organization. The next step is to take DevOps beyond delivery. Traditionally, the DevOps process has stopped when an item is delivered. Value stream takes it further and enables teams to gather information on the back-end about how customers are using an application, which features they are using, why, how it is performing under load, how secure it is, etc. This rich “As you are developing something, wouldn’t it be great to know what the business expects to get out of it?” —Mike O’Rourke
set of insights flows back into the development lifecycle and enables development teams to implement improvements based on real-world results. “For example, not only can developers do a better job at testing and a securing an app, they can do it context of what the business is looking for. What’s more, because development knows why they were asked to do this work, they can present the business with information about what is really happening with their app in ways that are interesting them,” said O’Rourke. Digital.ai’s value stream delivery solutions help DevOps teams expand their reach and deliver business value to their organizations by building context management right into their platform so information flows end-to-end and everyone has visibility into the software development process. The company’s value stream management solutions leverage an AI-powered analytics engine to flow that information back into the higher-level business. The company also integrates with popular application performance monitoring, AIOps and ITSM tools so it can gather information regardless of the environment the app is running in. When an app gets deployed, it can collect everything from the operating system to the memory size and bring all that information about what is happening inside the application back to the developer and business. “We believe everyone is going to want to go to value stream management over time, but most organizations are still struggling just trying to get information back to their own teams. We get it. And we’re here to help.” said O’Rourke. Learn more at www.digital.ai. t
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Featured Companies n Digital.ai: Digital.ai’s DevOps intelligence provides the metrics and insight that
enterprises need to deliver software more efficiently, with less risk and with better results. DevOps intelligence helps you better understand your software delivery process while measuring and proving the ROI of your digital transformation initiatives. Analyze the complete DevOps value stream from ideation and planning, through building and testing, to deployment to production. Get clear context for your measurements to understand the meaning behind the numbers, so you can best direct efforts to continuously improve. n Octopus: Octopus Deploy is the first platform to enable developers, release
managers, and operations engineers to bring all automation into a single place. By reusing configuration variables, environment definition, API keys, connection strings, permissions, service principals, and automation logic, teams work together from a single platform. Silos break down, collaboration begins, and your team can ship – and operate – software with greater confidence. n Rookout: Rookout is pioneering the category of software “understandability” by giving developers tooling to insert code-level, non-breaking breakpoints that eliminate unproductive work and unnecessary wait times associated with traditional debugging. With the shift-left DevOps movement, developers are becoming more and more responsible for how their code behaves in production — and that responsibility requires information. By enabling developers to retrieve necessary data from live systems, without affecting the performance of the application or requiring redeployment, developers achieve a more comprehensive understanding of their applications.
n Appvance: The Appvance IQ solution is an AIdriven, unified test automation system designed to provide test creation and text execution capabilities. It plugs directly into popular DevOps tools such as Chef, CircleCI, Jenkins, and Bamboo. n Atlassian: Atlassian offers cloud and on-
premises versions of continuous delivery tools. Bamboo is Atlassian’s on-premises option with first-class support for the “delivery” aspect of continuous delivery, tying automated builds, tests and releases together in a single workflow. For cloud customers, Bitbucket Pipelines offers a modern continuous delivery service that’s built right into Atlassian’s version control system, Bitbucket Cloud. n Broadcom: With an integrated portfolio span-
ning the complete DevOps toolchain from planning to performance, Broadcom delivers the tools and expertise to help companies achieve DevOps success on platforms from mobile to mainframe. We are driving innovation with BlazeMeter Continuous Testing Platform, Intelligent Pipeline from Automic, Mainframe DevOps with Zowe, and more.
n Chef, from Progress: Chef Automate, the
leader in Continuous Automation, provides a platform that enables you to build, deploy and manage your infrastructure and applications collaboratively. Chef Automate works with Chef’s three open source projects; Chef for infrastructure automation, Habitat for application automation, and InSpec for compliance automation, as well as associated tools.
n CircleCI: The company offers a continuous integration and continuous delivery platform that helps software teams work smarter, faster. CircleCI helps teams shorten feedback loops, and gives them the confidence to iterate, automate, and ship often without breaking anything. CircleCI builds world-class CI/CD so teams can focus on what matters: building great products and services. n CloudBees: CloudBees is the hub of enter-
prise Jenkins and DevOps. CloudBees starts with Jenkins, the most trusted and widely adopted continuous delivery platform, and adds enterprisegrade security, scalability, manageability and expert-level support. The company also provides
CloudBees DevOptics for visibility and insights into the software delivery pipeline.
n Compuware, from BMC: Our products fit
into a unified DevOps toolchain enabling crossplatform teams to manage mainframe applications, data and operations with one process, one culture and with leading tools of choice. With a mainstreamed mainframe, any developer can build, analyze, test, deploy and manage COBOL applications. n Dynatrace: Dynatrace provides the industry’s only AI-powered application monitoring. We help companies mature existing enterprise processes from CI to CD to DevOps, and bridge the gap from DevOps to hybrid-to-native NoOps.
n GitLab: GitLab aims to tackle the entire
DevOps life cycle by enabling Concurrent DevOps. Concurrent DevOps is new vision for how the company thinks about creating and shipping software. It unlocks organizations from the constraints of the toolchain and allows for better visibility, opportunities to contribute earlier, and the freedom to work asynchronously.
n Instana: Agile continuous deployment practices create constant change. Instana automatically and continuously aligns to every change. Instana’s APM platform delivers actionable information in seconds, not minutes, allowing you to operate at the speed of CI/CD. AI-powered APM delivers the intelligent analysis and actionable information required to keep your applications healthy.
n JetBrains: TeamCity is a Continuous
Integration and Delivery server from JetBrains. It takes moments to set up, shows your build results on the fly, and works out of the box. TeamCity integrates with all major development frameworks, version-control systems, issue trackers, IDEs, and cloud services. n JFrog: JFrog Pipelines empowers software
teams to ship updates faster by automating DevOps processes in a continuously streamlined and secure way across all their teams and tools. Encompassing continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery (CD), infrastructure and more, it automates everything from code to production. Pipelines is natively integrated with the JFrog Platform. n Liquibase: Liquibase (formerly Datical) solu-
tions deliver the database release automation capabilities IT teams need to bring applications to
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market faster while eliminating the security vulnerabilities, costly errors and downtime often associated with today’s application release process.
n Mattermost: The open-source messaging
platform built for DevOps teams. Its on-premises and private cloud deployment provides the autonomy and control teams need to be more productive while meeting the requirements of IT and security. Organizations use Mattermost to automate workflows, streamline coordination, and increase organizational agility. It maximizes efficiency by making information easier to find and increases the value of existing software and data by integrating with other tools and systems.
n Micro Focus: Continuous delivery and deploy-
ment are essential elements of the company’s DevOps solutions, enabling Continuous Assessment of applications throughout the software delivery cycle to deliver rapid and frequent application feedback to teams. Moreover, the DevOps solution helps IT operations support rapid application delivery (without any downtime) by supporting a Continuous Operations model.
n Microsoft: Microsoft Azure DevOps is a suite
of DevOps tools that help teams collaborate to deliver high-quality solutions faster. The solution features Azure Pipelines for CI/CD initiatives, Azure Boards for planning and tracking, Azure Artifacts for creating, hosting and sharing packages, Azure Repos for collaboration and Azure Test Plans for testing and shipping.
n Neotys: Neotys is the leading innovator in
Continuous Performance Validation for Web and mobile applications. Neotys load testing (NeoLoad) and performance-monitoring (NeoSense) products enable teams to produce faster applications, deliver new features and enhancements in less time, and simplify interactions across Dev, QA, Ops and business stakeholders.
n New Relic: Its comprehensive SaaS-based
solution provides one powerful interface for web and native mobile applications, and it consolidates the performance-monitoring data for any chosen technology in your environment. It offers code-level visibility for applications in production that cross six languages (Java, .NET, Ruby, Python, PHP and Node.js), and more than 60 frameworks are supported.
n OpenMake: OpenMake builds scalable Agile DevOps solutions to help solve continuous delivery programs. DeployHub Pro takes traditional software deployment challenges with safe, agentless
software release automation to help users realize the full benefits of agile DevOps and CD. Meister build automation accelerates compilations of binaries to match the iterative and adaptive methods of Agile DevOps.
n Perfecto: A Perforce company, Perfecto enables exceptional digital experiences and helps you strengthen every interaction with a qualityfirst approach for web and native apps through a cloud-based test environment called the Smart Testing Lab. The lab is comprised of real devices and real end-user conditions, giving you the truest test environment available.
n Puppet: Puppet provides the leading IT
automation platform to deliver and operate modern software. With Puppet, organizations know exactly what’s happening across all of their software, and get the automation needed to drive changes with confidence. More than 75% of the Fortune 100 rely on Puppet to adopt DevOps practices, move to the cloud, ensure security and compliance, and deliver better software faster.
n Redgate: Its SQL Toolbelt integrates data-
base development into DevOps software delivery, plugging into and integrating with the infrastructure already in place for applications. It helps companies take a compliant DevOps approach by standardizing team-based development, automating database deployments, and monitoring performance and availability. With data privacy concerns entering the picture, its SQL Provision solution also helps to mask and provision database copies for use in development so that data is preserved and protected in every environment.
n Rogue Wave Software by Perforce:
Rogue Wave helps thousands of global enterprise customers tackle the hardest and most complex issues in building, connecting, and securing applications. Since 1989, our platforms, tools, components, and sup-port have been used across financial services, technology, healthcare, government, entertainment, and manufacturing to deliver value and reduce risk. n Sauce Labs: Sauce Labs provides the
world’s largest cloud-based platform for automated testing of web and mobile applications. Optimized for use in CI and CD environments, and built with an emphasis on security, reliability and scalability, users can run tests written in any language or framework using Selenium or Appium, both widely adopted
open-source standards for automating browser and mobile application functionality.
n Scaled Agile: To compete, every organization needs to deliver valuable technology solutions. This requires a shared DevOps mindset among everyone needed to define, build, test, deploy, and release software-driven systems. SAFe DevOps helps people across technical, non-technical, and leadership roles work together to optimize their end-to-end value stream. Map your current state value stream from concept to cash, identify major bottlenecks to flow, and build a plan that will accelerate the benefits of DevOps in your organization.
n Tasktop: Transforming the way software is built and delivered, Tasktop’s unique model-based integration paradigm unifies fragmented best-ofbreed tools and automates the flow of project-critical information across dozens of tools, hundreds of projects and thousands of practitioners. The ultimate collaboration solution for DevOps specialists and all other teams in the software lifecycle, Tasktop’s pioneering Value Stream Integration technology provides organizations with unprecedented visibility and traceability into their value stream. Specialists are empowered, unnecessary waste is eradicated, team effectiveness is enhanced, and DevOps and Agile initiatives can be seamlessly scaled across organizations to ensure quality software is in production and delivering customer value at all times. n TechExcel: DevSuite helps organizations
manage and standardize development and releases via agile development methods and complete traceability. We understand the importance of rapid deployment and are focused on helping companies make the transition over to DevOps. To do this, we have partnered with many automation tools for testing and continuous integration, such as Ranorex and Jenkins. Right out of the box, DevSuite will include these technologies.
n Tricentis: Tricentis Tosca is a continuous testing platform that accelerates software testing to keep pace with Agile and DevOps. With the industry’s most innovative functional testing technologies, Tricentis Tosca breaks through the barriers experienced with conventional software testing tools. Using Tricentis Tosca, enterprise teams achieve unprecedented test automation rates (90%+) — enabling them to deliver the fast feedback required for Agile and DevOps. z