The cause was not a dramatic mechanical failure but a simple communicatory lapse between project teams: developers of the onboard computer system chose metric measurements for distance calculations, whereas the ground crew opted for the imperial route. The mismatch sent the probe hundreds of miles off course to its fiery demise.

Communication breakdowns seem like an obvious, and even banal reason, for projects to go haywire but it is very real and extremely common – particularly when a multitude of stakeholders are involved.

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.

Stay soft

The key soft skills and behaviours essential for DevOps actualisation are not technical, though they are closely related to technology.

First, let’s look at community. DevOps tools are open source and maintained by a vibrant group of people, so it’s important to be in touch with peers. If you aren’t sharing ideas and contributing to the community, you’re probably doing it wrong. DevOps is an inherently social process where you must engage to stay relevant and up to date.

Then there’s collaboration. You cannot succeed in the DevOps world without it. A non-stop development pipeline without barriers won’t happen if any contributor is left behind. Details matter. Fortunately, DevOps automation tools are starting to diminish siloed thinking and/or departments operating as opaque fiefdoms.

To make everything work, a level of collaboration between the traditional development and operation teams needs to have real depth and should become culturally ingrained. It must reverberate throughout an organisation’s DNA.

These same principles apply whether you’re a Silicon Valley tech behemoth or a small-to-medium size independent developer that is taking a more gradual approach to DevOps.

Changing the way we work

In fact, the cultural challenges can often be greater for larger organisations, many of which are hamstrung by both legacy systems and business-as-usual mindsets. In this scenario, implementing DevOps means changing the way individuals and teams work on a day-to-day basis. Abandoning bad habits is never easy but it is a necessary transition.

If you’re at the start of your DevOps journey, it is vital to get relevant staff on board with the new methodology from the outset.

Undertake extensive education initiatives and get all stakeholders to agree on a viable approach. Identify bottlenecks upfront and, crucially, repeat the discussion over time. Before jumping full-blooded into the DevOps realm, it is always prudent to test processes. Pick a few projects that are not mission-critical before scaling the initiative far and wide.

From the top down

Ultimately, any worthwhile DevOps strategy needs to be owned from the top down with credibility and purpose. Otherwise, it won’t work. A process of constant self-evaluation is non-negotiable. Each project should have its own designated DevOps coach or “champion” to help drive the process of constant self-evaluation and improvement.

Whether your organisation is tentatively stepping into the DevOps space, or is already at an advanced stage firing on all cylinders, it will all end in tears with the wrong culture in place. No amount of technical skill will save a DevOps project if participatory behaviours are inappropriate or misaligned.

Written by Rodrigo Albuquerque, DevOps Solution Developer at F5 Networks

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Vincent Lavergne, RVP Systems Engineering, F5 Networks, said: “F5 is proud to work with organisations to realise their digital transformation ambitions and truly optimise their application capital.

“It is more important than ever for leaders to embrace infrastructures, cutting-edge application development methodologies and management tools, as well as processes and tools that balance effective controls with the freedom to innovate at pace. This is critical at a time where much of the user experience is digital in nature, delivered via the cloud, and increasingly built by developer teams outside of the traditional IT organisation.”

Some of F5’s further developments include:

Multi-cloud application services: According to F5’s recently published State of Application Services report, almost 9 in 10 businesses surveyed globally have multi-cloud architectures in place, largely driven by application-first methodologies. The biggest cited challenge is to enforce consistent security and ensure reliable performance.

Nearly half of all organisations (48%) undergoing a digital transformation initiative reported difficulties of this nature when applications are distributed across multiple cloud platforms. F5 will work with developers to be more productive and enable a consistent set of application services that can be applied to any app, anywhere.

Updated Kubernetes Ingress Controller from NGINX: F5 is currently the industry leader in application services, as well as application infrastructure for network and security teams. NGINX is the industry leader in application infrastructure for developer and DevOps teams, built on its open source core. Last month NGINX became the most used web server in the world, according to Netcraft’s Web Server Survey.

F5 and NGINX will serve NetOps and DevOps customers with enterprise-grade services for both traditional and modern applications – wherever built or deployed. Key to the acquisition’s success is F5’s ongoing commitment to open source, which is a core part of its overall multi-cloud strategy and a driver for the company’s next phase of development.

NGINX announces Kubernetes Ingress Controller v.1.5: This introduces new configuration to support features like traffic splitting and content-based routing, improved Prometheus support, wildcard certificate support, ExternalNames support, and Helm Chart availability via the Helm Chart repository. NGINX and F5 combine to provide 79% of deployments, according to a 2018 CNCF survey.

Cloud Services: F5 undertakes cloud-native application services portfolio expansion. Delivering optimised services for application developers and DevOps teams, F5 Cloud Services aims to provide high-availability, self-service, and fully managed SaaS solutions that are provisioned and configured within minutes.

F5 Cloud Services are designed to support deployment scenarios such as cloud-native applications, microservices, and container-based environments. Consumed as a utility through a pay-as-you-go model in the AWS Marketplace, F5 Cloud Services offers predictable pricing, flexibility, and the ability to auto-scale to meet application workload demands.

Aspen Mesh. A fully supported service mesh built on Istio. While container orchestration tools like Kubernetes have solved microservice build and deploy issues, many runtime challenges remain unsolved. Aspen Mesh addresses this challenge by making it easy to manage the complexity of microservice architectures.

Aspen Mesh is one of the first projects to come out of F5 Networks’ recently launched corporate incubation program aimed at developing enhanced solutions to better support modern application services, regardless of the underlying infrastructure.

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F5 Networks said the deal would “bridge NetOps and DevOps,” and “enable multi-cloud application services across all environments, providing the ease-of-use and flexibility developers require while also delivering the scale, security, reliability, and enterprise readiness network operations teams demand.”

The original open source product was originally created by Igor Sysoev back in 2002 and open-sourced in 2004.

Acquisition

Nginx CEO Gus Robertson said in an open letter that “our vision and mission don’t change” with the deal.

“We’re still helping companies on their journey to microservices. What does change is our trajectory. F5 shares our mission, vision, and values. But they bring to bear a tremendous amount of additional resources and complementary technologies.”

“F5 is committed to keeping the Nginx brand and open source technology alive,” he continued. “Without this commitment, the deal wouldn’t have happened for either side.”

In a statement, François Locoh-Donou, president and CEO of F5, said: “By bringing F5’s world-class application security and rich application services portfolio for improving performance, availability, and management together with Nginx’s leading software application delivery and API management solutions, unparalleled credibility and brand recognition in the DevOps community, and massive open source user base, we bridge the divide between NetOps and DevOps with consistent application services across an enterprise’s multi-cloud environment.”

F5 Networks said the deal would “enhance Nginx’s current offerings with F5 security solutions and will integrate F5 cloud-native innovations with Nginx’s software load balancing technology, accelerating F5’s time to market of application services for modern, containerised applications.”

Mission

The company plans to maintain the Nginx brand, and the unit will be managed by Nginx CEO Gus Robertson and founders Igor Sysoev and Maxim Konovalov.

“Nginx and F5 share the same mission and vision. We both believe applications are at the heart of driving digital transformation. And we both believe that an end-to-end application infrastructure—one that spans from code to customer—is needed to deliver apps across a multi-cloud environment,” said Robertson, in a statement.

“I’m excited to continue this journey by adding the power of Nginx’s open source innovation to F5’s ADC leadership and enterprise reach. F5 gains depth with solutions designed for DevOps, while Nginx gains breadth with access to tens of thousands of customers and partners.”

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