However, the dire need for increased collaboration among teams is one major aspect that has been concerning firms all across. As a result, more technology and a collaborative environment became the need for firms. That’s where the concept of ‘DevOps’ emerged.

Addressing concerns regarding IT infrastructure, DevOps introduced a new culture between development and operations teams, which made it unique among technologies. That’s why the technical community calls DevOps a ‘culture’ rather than a technology.

Why DevOps?

A basic functionality gap between the development and operations teams across firms has been affecting firms’ efforts for faster product development and quicker market release, which are key to any company to stand ahead of the competition.

As a combination of software development, operations and services, DevOps ensured increased communication, collaboration and integration among the teams through the entire lifecycle from development to delivery.

While Dev focuses on bringing up innovative features in a continuous flow, the Ops team aims to ensure stability in the flow across the process chain and addition of new services.

Some of the key benefits offered by DevOps include:

• Technical benefits: With DevOps, one can witness a continuous software delivery with less-complex cases and faster recovery solutions.
• Business benefits: A faster rate of software product development opens avenues for faster product delivery, which leads to fast market entry adding to the business growth. DevOps also allows more operating environments.
• Effective communication: DevOps practices facilitate an effective communication mechanism that allows teams to perform well in collaboration and avoid delays and blockages during the process. This communication also helps teams in gaining a knowledge on every prospect related to the project.
• Avoiding gaps: In a fast-paced development cycle, there is a chance of missing code or having an imbalance in the quality of code. In such cases, the DevOps model withholds the incorrect code for corrections and releases only the good code to the next levels.
• Shorter development cycles: Frequent code releases, supported by continuous integration, make shorter development cycles possible through DevOps.
• Less failure rate and faster innovation: With both the key teams (Dev and Ops) working hand-in-hand, recovery time in case of any failures is also less in case of DevOps implementation. This lets teams quickly focus on further projects and allows a faster rate of innovation.
• Better productivity and reliable releases: A tightly-integrated DevOps model ensures reliable product releases ensuring end-consumer satisfaction.

A glance of the DevOps market

Increasing adoption of automation solutions among small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large firms, reduced spending on setting up of process automation and decreased maintenance service costs are among key factors driving the global DevOps market.

The global DevOps market that was worth US$2,885million in 2016 is expected to grow to a US$9,407million by 2023, at a CAGR of 18.7% during the 2017-23 period, with the demand for process automation driving the market during the forecast period.

Besides, operational effectiveness and the demand for automated business processes is increasing DevOps adoption across industry verticals. Manufacturing, government, healthcare, insurance, banking and financial sectors are expected to boost the global DevOps market over the forecast period.

Market segmentation: The global DevOps market is basically segmented by solution, end-user, deployment and geography.

DevOps as a career option

Apart from salient features as a technology, DevOps is also seen as a good career opportunity with an increasing workforce requirement across firms.

DevOps experts hold a special advantage in the today’s technical job market. A Forbes research found that the median wage for a DevOps specialist with a minimum high-school qualification stands at around USD 106,734.

Researchers found that DevOps is going to be one of the top hiring priorities for 46 percent of the IT firms in the future.

Overall, DevOps has changed the way firms operate across development lifecycles and has also opened ways for a new style of software functioning.

Written by Veritis

The post DevOps for better software productivity, faster market release appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

With over 16 years of experience, Ben has experienced a mixture of emotions in enterprise security and operating systems, whilst working on several products at Microsoft, including Windows 2008, Windows 2012 and Multiple “Forefront”, the old Microsoft enterprise security brand. Bernstein said: “I was in my third semester in Technion (the Israel Institute of Technology) when I was recruited into the kernel team for a security product Microsoft was developing that was called “ISA Server”. I had no kernel experience, and until today, I have no clue how I passed the tests to get there. Back in 2001, it was quite difficult to get into the Microsoft cult.”

“Since the first time I checked in code and tested it internally, it made our product crash, with the entire sites internet access going down as a result. But, I learnt quickly, and a few years later, became a decent member of the kernel team,” he added.

Understanding operating systems

According to Bernstein, programming in kernel makes you understand operating systems very well; although it helped that in his spare time he enjoyed exploring how malware interacts with the kernel, to help him learn and meet like-minded people from the cyber security eco-system. “My Co-founder Dima Stopel and I were enterprise security nerds who realised that although developers loved containers, IT security experts would not feel comfortable with them if they didn’t support some of the standard controls and checks that enterprise software requires. So we thought, let’s start digging into that, and see what happens,” revealed Bernstein.

Together, they noticed three big blind spots in the container space:

• Maintaining hygiene of delivery of software to the cloud (for example, whether container images are vulnerable)
• Supporting compliance for both delivery and execution of software in the cloud (for example, running containers for customers who work with/store credit card data in accordance to the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI-DSS))
• Active threat protection (for example, does the admin get any indication when his containerised applications are being hacked)

“We realised that as more enterprises started using containers for mission-critical applications, this gap would become more pronounced. With the ever growing pain-point in mind, we set out to make containers more secure so that developers could focus on what they do best without worrying about security,” noted Bernstein.

Security capabilities

He now has his first end-to-solution for container security field, which was launched and released in May 2015. “While we were the only cloud native ‘pure play’ company at the time, other folks like International Business Machine Corporation (IBM), Redhat and others were working with docker on platform security too; they just weren’t ‘pure play’. Venture Capital Firms (VCs) used to ask: ‘How come you are the only company in this space?’ quite a bit back then,” he added.

Twistlock has contributed many security capabilities to docker and OpenShift in the open source community, as well as to the Centre for Internet Security’s Kubernetes Benchmark guide. Bernstein said: “Twistlock has been actively contributing to the body of knowledge around best practices for container security. The company is developing a companion guide for National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Special Publication on Container Security Best Practices (SP-800-190), and has similar companion guides for Payment Card Industry (PCI) and Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), both of which support technical and compliance teams who work with containers.”

‘DevOps presents several opportunities’

From Bernstein’s perspective, DevOps presents several opportunities, as well as challenges. “The benefits of DevOps include shorter cycle times, faster testing times, more automation and ideally, better code. Done right, it can catch security flaws earlier in the delivery cycle and enable organisations to respond faster to incidents,” said Bernstein.

According to Bernstein, DevOps can leave some leaders nervous about quality and consistent security measures. While DevOps teams want to rapidly develop and deploy software, cyber security personnel strive to mitigate and manage risk by thoroughly checking for any potential breachable point in the software.

He concluded that Twistlock has leapt to the leadership of container security by delivering rapid innovation and customer growth and is spearheading new ways to secure applications, which address persistent flaws in old security solutions that have haunted customers for years.

Written by Leah Alger

The post Twistlock exposes container security developments appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

I attended a dinner recently, where the topic of discussion turned to digital transformation. Very convivial it was too. However, something gave me indigestion. In fact, it was a conversation I had with one of my fellow guests about how organisations are adapting to the digital transformation.

The need for digital transformation

“Digital transformation is nothing new,” he said. “We’ve been digitising our assets for the past 30 years. Digital transformation is not a revolution, it is simply an evolution of what went before.”

I beg to differ. In fact, I 100% completely and utterly disagree. Digital transformation is a revolution – a wholehearted, profound change in the way organisations approach product and service development, and how they deliver new business capability.

Why? Because in today’s disruptive business climate, it’s all about speed and agility. Digital transformation is revolutionary because it offers the opportunity to radically change the way organisations, markets and customers interact and do business with one another. To do that you need to be the hare—not the tortoise. You need to be the most adaptive, not the largest.

It’s happening right in front of our eyes. Tesla is frightening the wits out of Detroit. Traditional banks are scrambling to develop new business models to face up to the threat from challenger banks. Hotels everywhere are running scared of Airbnb. And it’s a brave person who asks a taxi driver what they think of Uber.

How can organisations adapt?

A senior banking executive recently admitted, “Financial services will be disrupted by digital transformation”. And the reality of not taking action is clear: witness the recent demise of the retail giant British Home Stores, which failed to adapt with agility and speed.

So how do you achieve speed and agility, be part of the revolution and win?

It’s about blending technology, with people and processes. Let’s talk technology first: that’s the bedrock of being able to adapt swiftly. The old world of structured toolsets is quickly being superseded by open source development tools, to bring new services more quickly from code to production.

That move to open source tooling is being driven by the people that use them: the millennials. The millennial generation is a technology savvy and aware group. When it comes to open source, it’s observable – a major part of open source application users are under 30 years old, and many entering the workforce are either unaware of their companies’ IT policies or are not inclined to follow them.

The processes are changing too. Organisations everywhere are shifting their focus from ITIL and waterfall development methods to DevOps. Organisations using DevOps practices are overwhelmingly high functioning: They deploy code much more frequently than their competitors, and fewer of their deployments fail.

The Holy Trinity of technology, people and processes are driving speed and agility. And I you fail to understand that, you’ll be like my dinner colleague, “digitising our assets for the next 30 years” – but not staying competitive.

Edited for web by Jordan Platt

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