Embedded video in connected devices will take security threats to another level

As IoT continues to grow, Malcolm Murphy, Technical Director, EMEA at Infoblox, believes that the place that it will have the most impact will be in video cameras.

“I strongly suspect that video cameras in IoT connected devices, such as video doorbells and embedded cameras in smart speakers, will be the next big threat to the network due to the richer information sets they hold. Since these devices are collecting more and more data, they are becoming increasingly interesting targets for hackers, so that data is at a higher risk of being compromised. Despite this risk, security is still not being prioritised by manufacturers in the design of smart products, so until this is addressed, we’ll continue to see breach levels rise.”

IT will find ways to keep citizen developers in line

Low-code is most certainly on the rise. Jennifer Gill, Senior Director, Product Marketing at Pegasystems predicts that it will soon be used to keep citizens in order.

“Low-code platforms have been touted for their ease of use so business professionals can develop their own applications. But without ITs involvement, applications can go rogue and cause governance, maintenance, and usability issues. To ensure citizen developers don’t go too far astray, IT departments will utilize low-code platforms with templates to keep business users within the guardrails of corporate governance. This way business users still have the power to create software but with best practices in mind.”

Automotive OEMs will pair with tech that will help with integration

John Phillips, MD of EMEA Zuora says that as MaaS becomes more popular, customers will need to become the focus.

“In 2020, we will see automotive OEMs use this knowledge and pair it with technology that will help them integrate their services with other suppliers both inside and outside of the auto supply chain in order to realise the full potential of Mobility-as-a-Service (MaaS).”

“The true winners in MaaS will place customer relationships at the centre of their businesses. By analysing rich customer data, providers have the opportunity to iterate their offerings and tailor their services to meet unique subscriber needs and ultimately build long-lasting relationships. At the end of the day, putting subscriber preferences and interests first will enable long-term scale.”

DevOps teams can establish a smarter, more agile culture through open standards

The Open Group predicts that IT and DevOps teams will play a fuller role in most types of business. They say:

 “Looking ahead, DevOps teams should strive to be as agile as possible across changing scenarios related to the management of product delivery. Open standards, including information models such as the IT4IT Reference Architecture, can provide a framework for agile development, helping to enable the standardisation of components and interfaces, and allowing teams to seamlessly interchange information on product delivery and use without disrupting the entire value chain. This also ensures that teams are able to establish traceability and accountability, making sure that all artefacts and information consistently flow through the IT pipeline.”

“With the rapid re-orientation of many businesses to digital delivery of products and services, legacy IT management techniques are struggling to keep up. So this is why relying on open standards will be key for ensuring consistency and flexibility in DevOps – leading to improved business outcomes overall.”

A growing DevOps community

Mark Levy, director of strategy, software delivery, Micro Focus, looks at why DevOps collaboration between the business and IT will take centre -stage starting in 2020.

“In 2020, there will be a greater focus on connecting portfolio/product management with the other practices of DevOps. The business needs “fast feedback” as well. Fast feedback should not only be in the boundaries of Dev and Ops but encompass the entire value chain. With the backdrop of a cloudy economic climate, delivering something fast is only effective if it’s something of value. In 2020, DevOps starts to move up the value stream to provide better alignment with the business.”

DevOps will settle down

Contradicting the previous point, Edge Testing suggests that despite this year’s hype, DevOps will become the norm.

“The hysteria of stating that testers are no longer required due to the introduction of the DevOps methodology has been more or less put to bed. DevOps will go the same way as agile in that it will become a ‘so what’ topic. Agile is now a fully matured methodology with the majority of testers having some exposure which they can put on their CVs. DevOps will follow this route.”

“Although we will continue to see one new tool or another being launched weekly to bolt onto the DevOps tool suite, the main set of tools are maturing nicely and the skill sets to support these in the industry are growing.”

CISO will play a bigger role in DevOps

Malcolm Isaacs, head of ADM solutions marketing, Micro Focus, explores how the CISO will be part of the DevOps team, influencing a holistic approach to security within DevOps pipelines.

 “Just as DevOps strives to deliver value quickly to the customer, it has the potential to unintentionally introduce security vulnerabilities quickly as well. This has spurred DevOps teams to embed security testing in the DevOps pipeline, increasing the sense of shared responsibility for security. Over the course of 2020, any remaining barriers between CISO staff and DevOps teams will be broken down, with CISO staff becoming full-fledged members of the DevOps team. Security will no longer be a bolt-on activity, and will become a standard component of any DevOps pipeline.”

Open Source will once again be in peril – from a new source

Andrew C. Oliver, Product Director,  Couchbase believes that Open Source will have to adapt to stay in the game.

“In 2020, vendors will have to realise that the Open Source game has changed. If they still want to meet their Open Source goals, clever licensing approaches will not be enough. They must instead see themselves as service providers, from management to support and other value-adds, in order to ensure that they can offer something that others cannot. The business model is to innovate — where cloud providers won’t — and to provide better and more differentiated service not just differentiated software.”

 No-Ops will die

New Relic’s prediction is that firms need to shed No-Ops if they want to progress.

“Next year, more organisations will start to ditch the notion of “No-Ops” and recognise value in their Ops team members. Companies will always need Ops people, but as technology and automation processes mature, Ops professionals will be able to work on higher-quality problems. At New Relic, we have DevOps with SREs embedded in the product teams AND also have Site Reliability Champions who focus on removing friction for developers, long term scalability, and meeting with software architects to discuss reliability from the beginning of building a service or feature.”

Disruptors will take the driving seat

Those who take the initiative and think two steps ahead will be taking the lead, believes David Parry-Jones, VP EMEA, Twilio.

“With the advent of APIs and cloud-based communications platforms, customers can now be easily reached across a multitude of different channels according to their preference, and call-time vastly reduced through the application of AI, so in 2020 more organisations should begin to ask – why can’t we do this too? And can we really afford not to?”

“Customers are at the heart of business success, and in 2020 it’ll be vital that businesses apply the lessons we’ve learnt from disruptors more widely.”

Money will be made from trading info

Selling information to third-parties using the Data-as-a-Service approach will become a growing source of revenue for firms says Alberto Pan, Chief Technical Officer, Denodo .

“In the new year, since many big companies will now own high-value, unique data and services, the next logical step is reusing this infrastructure in order to offer them to third-parties. For instance, we are already seeing telecommunications companies selling customers geolocation data for a variety of purposes. This trend will be significantly accentuated during 2020 in all major industries.”

“From the investment standpoint, this will involve higher demand for the technologies involved in creating and exposing data as a service, like GraphQL, Data Virtualization and/or API management tools.”

IT will be the “cool kids” again

CEO Brian Kelly at CloudBolt suggests that DevOps will be at the top of its game.

“The IT community (not the obvious powerplayers) will determine the winners of the go-to tools for managing hybrid cloud infrastructures, as they seek extensible, easy-to-deploy, cloud-native solutions.”

“There will be a rebalancing of the relationship between Dev and Ops, as the drive toward more intelligent automation will demand IT to become more adept.”

The post The experts make their predictions on 2020’s DevOps trends appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

From small teams to large corporations, DevOps is becoming more and more popular as engineers, developers and those in various IT operations realise the benefits of collaborating across the board.

However, as work becomes more complex, teams can sometimes be bombarded with options, ideas and the latest in tech, which can become overwhelming, to say the least. Implementing changes to IT infrastructures can become challenging when firms are being pushed and communications starts to fade.

This can become very frustrating when ultimately, the point of DevOps is to come together as a team to work towards the same goal and improve an organisation through increased deployment speed and frequency, as well as higher quality product output and lower failure rates.

The buyer’s forum

The DevOps Industry Forum, held at the iconic British Museum, is a complimentary one-day event aimed at IT professionals who are looking to understand the latest in technology trends, as well have an opportunity to learn and investigate the products and services available in the coming year.

Happening on 31^st March 2020, the event will give experts the chance to learn about and explore the latest in cutting edge technology, services and solutions through:

• People and processes
• Tools and technology
• Strategy and management

People will then have the opportunity to decide if they would like to progress with any purchasing decisions which may benefit their organisations in moving forward.

A chance to relax

Attendees will be able to relax at the forum as they sit in on conferences and visit exhibitions, whilst considering case studies, opinions and user experiences presented to them. This allows people to make informed decisions regarding the products that may work best for them and their companies.

This format allows those attending to:

• Remove the hustle and bustle of an exhibition and reduce distractions
• Increase 1-on-1 time with people, enabling a more detailed understanding of products and services
• Make a more focused and informed decision in buying products

By attending the complimentary DevOps industry Forum delegates are able to make faster, more informed decisions as to which products & services will help them to move their businesses forward, saving time and increasing ROI.

Use the form below to register

The post Why attend the DevOps Industry Buying Forum 2020? appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

Daniel Berman is the Product Marketing Manager at Logz.io, an Israeli and US-based organisation that focuses on combining cloud services with machine learning to provide visualisation of data for platforms and apps. The firm relies heavily on working in a DevOps environment and so, Berman has provided his insight into next year’s DevOps predictions because as he says, “it’s important, as [DevOps] changes almost every single day!”

Pipeline Automation

The tendency to automate tasks where possible and practical is a consistent trend throughout DevOps. The concept of automated pipelines for software has become ubiquitous. For example, one can see the number of continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) tools continue to grow since GitHub introduced GitHub Actions.

Hand-in-hand with the popularity of automation comes the continuing rise of “infrastructure as code” tooling. Tools such as Terraform, AWS Cloud Formation, Azure Resource Manager, and GCP’s Deployment Manager allow environments to be spun up and down at will as part of the development process, in CI pipelines, or even in delivery and production. These tools are continuing to mature.

Kubernetes

It feels like Kubernetes was everywhere in 2019. From its inception in 2015, this immensely popular container orchestrator has had the most mindshare in the DevOps community, despite competition from products like Mesos and Docker’s Swarm. Major software vendors like RedHat and VMWare are fully committed to supporting Kubernetes. An increasing number of software vendors are also delivering their applications by default on Kubernetes.

Kubernetes adoption is still growing. While the platform has yet to prove itself for all classes of workloads, the momentum behind it seems to be strong enough to carry it through for a good while.

Service Meshes

Conversations about implementing Kubernetes increasingly go hand-in-hand with conversations about service meshes. “Service mesh” is a loose term that covers any software that handles service-to-service communication within a platform.

Service meshes can take care of a number of standard application tasks that application teams have traditionally had to solve in their own code and setups such as load balancing, encryption, authentication, authorisation, and proxying. Making these features configurable and part of the application platform frees up development teams to work on improvements to their code rather than standard patterns of service management in a distributed application environment.

Observability

Another trend in DevOps is to talk about observability in applications. Observability is often confused with monitoring, but they are two distinct concepts. A good way to understand the difference is to think of monitoring as an activity and observability as an attribute of a system. Observability is a concept that comes from real-world engineering and control theory. A system is said to possess observability when its internal state can be easily inferred from its outputs. What this means in practice is that it should be easy to infer from an application’s representation of its internal state what is going on at any given time. As applications get more distributed in nature, determining why parts of it are failing (and therefore affecting the system as a whole) becomes more difficult.

This is where the associated concept of cardinality, which refers to the number of discrete items of time-series data a system stores, comes in. As a rule, the higher the cardinality, the more likely a system is to be observable, since you have more pieces of data to look over when trying to troubleshoot it. Of course, the data gathered still needs to be pertinent to the system’s potential points of failure, and a mental map is also still required to effectively troubleshoot.

DevSecOps

While the DevOps portmanteau has been a standard part of IT discussions for some time, other neologisms are coming to the fore. DevSecOps is one of these. This concept is gaining traction as teams aim to get security “baked in” to their pipelines from the outset rather than trying to bolt it on after development is complete. Thus security increasingly becomes a responsibility of DevOps, SRE, and development teams; consequently tools are springing up to help them with that.

“Compliance as code” tools like InSpec have gotten popular as automated continuous security becomes a priority for organisations buckling under the weight of the numerous applications, servers, and environments they track simultaneously.

Automated scanning of container images and other artefacts is also becoming the norm as applications proliferate. Products like Aqua and SysDig are fighting for market share in the continuous security space.

You may also hear DevSecNetQAGovOps mentioned as more and more pieces of the application lifecycle seek to make themselves part of automated pipelines. However, DevSecOps is still the most common reiteration to the by-now somewhat-classic DevOps pairing.

The Rise of SRE

Site Reliability Engineering is an engineering discipline that originated in 2003 at Google (before the word DevOps was even coined!), described at length in their eponymously book Site Reliability Engineering. Eschewing traditional approaches to the support and maintenance of running applications, Google elevated operations staff to a level considered equivalent to their engineering function. Within this paradigm, SRE engineers are tasked with ensuring that live issues are monitored and fixed, sometimes by writing fresh software to aid reliability. In addition, their feedback on architecture and rework pertaining to reliability and stability is taken on by the development team.

SRE works at the scale of Google’s operations, where a division between development and operations (normally an anti-pattern for DevOps) is arguably required because of the infrastructure’s size. Having a team responsible for an entire application from development to production (a more traditional DevOps approach) is difficult to achieve when the platform is large and standardized across hundreds of data centres.

DevOps companies more frequently advertised for “SRE Engineers” than “DevOps Engineers” in 2019. This may be in recognition of SRE’s specific engineering focus, as opposed to DevOps’ company-wide one.

Artificial Intelligence

There is increasing speculation about the role artificial intelligence (and, specifically, machine learning) can play in aiding or augmenting DevOps practices. Products such as Science Logic’s S1 are starting to trickle into the market and gain traction, although they are still in the early stages of adoption. These products use machine learning to detect anomalous behaviours in applications based on previously observed or normative behaviours.

In addition to traditional monitoring activities, AI can be used to optimise test cases, determining which to run and not run on each build. This can reduce the length of time it takes to get an application into production without taking unnecessary risks with the stability of the system.

On the more theoretical side, Google has published information about their use of machine learning algorithms to predict hardware failures before they occur. As machine learning becomes more mainstream, expect more products like these to arrive in the DevOps space.

Serverless

Serverless has been a buzzword since AWS introduced AWS Lambda in 2014. Things have been heating up since then, as other providers and products have been getting in on the act.

The term “serverless computing” can be confusing—in part because servers still have to be involved at some level. Essentially, it describes a situation where the deployer of the application need not be concerned with where the code runs. It’s “serverless” in the sense that providing the servers is not something the developer needs to deal with. Typically, serverless applications are tightly coupled with their underlying computing platforms, so you need to be sure that you’re comfortable with that level of lock-in.

“Shifting Left and Right” in CI/CD

The concepts of “shifting left” and, to a lesser extent, “shifting right” in CI/CD gained visibility this year. As release cycles get smaller and smaller, “shifting left” means making efficiency improvements by failing builds earlier in the release cycle—not just with standard application testing, but also with code linting, QA/security checks, and any other checks that can alert the developer to issues with their code as early in the process as possible.

“Shift-right” testing takes place in production (or production-like) environments. It is intended to bring problems to the surface in production before monitoring or user issues are raised.

Summing Up

These are just some of the more noteworthy trends we’ve been watching amidst the maelstrom of activity in the world of DevOps in 2019. The acronym “CALMS” (Culture, Automation, Lean, Measurement, Sharing) is a helpful way to structure thinking about DevOps tools and techniques and, going from 2019 to 2020, the 10 DevOps trends in this article certainly exemplify these principles!

The post The top 10 DevOps trends of 2019- the professional’s prediction appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The IDC illustrates that ICT is dependent on new technology, with traditional business technology revenues in decline as cloud-based computing solutions rise.

The study shows that new technologies known as ‘Innovation Accelerators’ will provide up to US$7.4trillion in the aggregate industry revenue by 2020, with US$1.8trillion annual sales being added to the overall size of the industry by the end of its forecasted period.

The annual revenue of IoT is forecasted to reach US$1.3trillion by 2020, although security, virtual reality, cognitive systems and 3D printing will also add to the growth of the ICT market.

‘Big data is at the heart of the fastest-growing opportunities’

Vice President at IDC, Stephen Minton, said to Cloud Tech: “The traditional ICT market of data centre infrastructure, client devices, software, services, and telecommunications is now growing at a rate not much faster than real gross domestic products (GDP), and increasingly resembles a mature sector of the overall economy.

“Device sales are now dominated by mobile devices and cloud service providers represent a growing proportion of all infrastructure hardware and software sales, while big data and analytics are at the heart of the fastest growing opportunities. Meanwhile, growth in the telecom market is already entirely dependent on mobile.”

Asia-Pacific is forecasted to reach over US$600 billion by 2020, representing the largest market for Innovation Accelerators, followed by the United States, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Written by Leah Alger

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According to the British Computing Society, the number of children studying for a computing qualification could halve by 2020.

A new ICT course has taken over the old ICT course, with more rigorous computer science at GCSE level, which teaches ‘little more than how to use Microsoft Office’, according to critics.

Figures from Ofqual have fallen slightly, showing exam entries rising to 67,800 this year from 61,220 in 2016; with 58,600 students still taking the exam.

‘Disaster for the future nation’

“If we don’t act now by 2020 we are likely to see the number of students studying computing at GCSE halve, when it should be doubling. If that happens, it will be a disaster for our children, and the future of the nation,” says Bill Mitchell from BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT.

Professional IT bodies believe this could be a ‘disaster for the economy’, with the British Computing Society noting that when ICT disappears, the computer science exam will fail to fill the gap.

“The current GCSE in computer science has replaced the opportunities for creativity that existed in ICT with set programming tasks that have very few solutions,” added Drew Buddie, the Head of Computing at a London school.

Drew Buddie also noted that ICT has always been misrepresented, as it’s more creative than critics assume and girls in particular aren’t interested.

Written from source by Leah Alger

Source: BBC

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