The first Git-centric operations management platform fixes the challenges of DevOps scaling by cataloguing an organisation’s entire development stack, automating Git Operations tasks and preventing dangerous changes to applications and infrastructure.

Agile and DevOps broke down software companies into small autonomous teams using different programming languages, multiple repositories and microservices. This helps make software development faster, more efficient and more creative.

However, autonomy comes with a price. Software teams often have no idea what code components other teams are using or who’s working on what; company standards become optional because there’s no way to enforce them without excessive control; and CIOs, Software Architects and DevOps Managers have lost visibility into the company’s stack because it’s so distributed.

Security compromises

Over time, these issues snowball, leading to inconsistent quality, security compromises, and even outages. For many companies, Git has become the single source of truth for applications and infrastructure code. With ‘infrastructure as code’, even servers are software and are defined in Git repositories. Every developer can make code commits or pull requests that affect both applications and infrastructure stability and quality in production.

Companies can have hundreds or even thousands of Git repositories, linked by a complicated network of dependencies, with automated processes building and deploying them into applications in ways that nobody fully understands.

Datree solves this problem. First, it scans and monitors all of a company’s public and private code repositories to build a 360-degree catalogue of the entire company’s ecosystem: all the code components (open source and internal packages, infrastructure as code, cloud services and more), as well as people and repositories.

Best-practice guidelines

Datree’s real-time catalogue knows which people and teams work on which code components, and who are the in-house experts on particular tools and packages. All of this is accessed via interactive dashboards.

Next, datree’s smart policy engine helps developers work within an organisation’s best-practice guidelines. Developers get real-time information and insights pushed to their existing work environment (eg the command line and Slack) to help them make informed decisions. Datree checks every pull request against user-defined policies and standards and blocks risky code components, unstable versions, and unauthorised changes to ‘infrastructure as code’ and Git configurations.

“Even among the software giants, a typo in a configuration file can cause huge infrastructure outages. One company told us that a minor change to a template file on Git removed their whole application’s security systems by mistake due to automated deployment,” says datree, CEO, Arthur Schmunk.

“Datree would prevent a change like that from being merged in the first place”.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post Datree receives US$3million to build DevOps engine in GitHub appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The findings show that EMEA cloud adoption continues to “outpace the rest of the world”, with 84% of EMEA organisations migrating to apps like Office 365, AWS, G Suite and Slack to leverage the productivity and cost benefits of the public cloud.

The results found that EMEA cloud adoption rates have increased by 27% since the initial study in 2016.

Furthermore, Office 365 is the most widely adopted cloud application across EMEA; 65% of organisations now use this application – an increase of 51% compared to Bitglass’ 2016 study. Usage of AWS far exceeds the rate of AWS deployments globally. Worldwide only 8% use AWS while in EMEA that figure rises to 21.8%.

“The results of this survey reinforce what we found in our 2016 study – organisations in EMEA are embracing cloud productivity apps but still lack the security tools necessary to protect data,” comments Rich Campagna, CMO at Bitglass.

“In cloud-first environments, security must evolve to protect data on many more endpoints and in many more applications.”

The report found also that more than three times as many firms use Office 365 when compared to Bitglass’ 2016 study; G suite remains popular in France with 30% adoption and Spain 40%; 21.8% of EMEA organisations now use AWS, compared to just 8% worldwide, and less only 47% of organisations have an SSO tool in use.

Written from press release by Leah Alger

The post EMEA cloud adoption continues to ‘outpace the world’ appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

The San Francisco-based company, which offers tools for companies seeking to speed up the process of developing their own software, will be investing its money in “prediction and intelligent automation”.

The firm lets customers choose whether to keep the process on proprietary machines or to operate a collaborative app-building process in a web-based environment, according to Xconomy.

Catching bugs ‘quickly and securely’

CircleCI CEO Jim Rose wrote in an e-mail to Xconomy: “Our philosophy is to provide full API endpoints to every part of the CI system such that customers can use any tools they desire.

“We also integrate with GitHub, Bitbucket, Slack, Jira, AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Heroku, etc.”

The platform also catches bugs “quickly and securely”, testing the elements of an application as they’re produced, instead of combining elements at a later stage.

Written by Leah Alger

The post CircleCI raises US$31million in Series C fundraising round appeared first on DevOps Online North America.

ITV’s technology background

In the past five years, ITV has switched from waterfall into agile development.

“It was all manual before, and it wasn’t keeping up with the pace of change that we needed,” Clark said.

The decision was made to introduce automation into the stack from end to end. There was a transition from a more traditional functional silo approach into a product team approach.

“We now have development teams headed by product owners. The smaller teams encompass everyone from developers, to testers, scrum masters and platform engineers. The team takes ownership – you build it, you run it.”

As traditional media companies have evolved to embrace new multi-channel commercial opportunities – ITV was one of the first with its online player and user-friendly online hub – Clark explains that a transition to DevOps came out of a more collaborative strategy.

“ITV is set up with different independent divisions, from studios to commercial, broadcast and online,” Clark said. “They all run and operate very independently. We began working in a DevOps manner in Online around three years ago, and once the company as a whole began to adopt the Common Platform, it was natural to use the DevOps practices that were working so well.”

In March 2015, ITV began implementing DevOps across the rest of the company in earnest.

Cultural changes following a DevOps transition

The transition into smaller product teams across ITV has had a positive effect. And by allowing teams to take ownership of everything they build, it has changed the psychology of team members, who benefit from instant feedback and increased collaboration.

“Our developers are really happy that they get to see their code in production. Even if it fails, they’re happy they get to fix it quickly,” Clark said. “From a dev perspective it’s been hugely positive. And also from a business perspective. It can seem like shifting to a DevOps model would be more expensive, but in actual fact we’ve been able to achieve a lot more with less, thanks to increased automation and standardisation in tools used. We can do more work in parallel than before.”

Challenges

The road to full DevOps implementation was not always smooth. Convincing people was the biggest challenge.

“It was hard to convince everyone to give it a try,” Clark explains. “Also, it’s still a tricky concept, whereby people still don’t fully understand what DevOps means.”

The team at ITV were aided by the fact that colocation was possible for the small product teams, and indeed, collaboration and communication is working so well that many team members can be spread out and/or work from home without disrupting workflow.

“We have engineers in different cities, and people can work from home. We use a lot of communication tools such as Slack, Trello, Github and Google Hangouts. We make sure that the flow of information is always there,” Clark said.

The future

The future looks bright at ITV as it continues to evolve and invest in DevOps.

“We’re investing a lot in building the right teams, recruitment is a challenge – I joke that I went into management at the wrong time, as DevOps skills have never been in more demand,” Clark said.

To help train and support its staff, ITV encourages team members to go to conferences and attend meet-ups, as well as holding internal workshops to promote self-learning.

In terms of the future, Clark is excited about new technologies and increased awareness of DevOps in general.

“Personally, I’m interested in containerisation, and where this technology will take us. Also, I think security is an area where we need to devote a lot of energy –we’re working closely with our security team to make sure they’re working at the same speed as the rest of us,” Clark said.

“ITV is a FTSE100 company and people make a lot of assumptions about what goes on behind closed doors – and it’s exciting to tell people about our DevOps journey and help promote this IT philosophy.”

Tom Clark will be speaking on DevOps at ITV at the DevOps Enterprise Summit

Written by Cecilia Rehn

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