Weekly Top 10: DevOps, Data and Feedback Loops

Data is driving DevOps. From adoption, transformation to fruition, DevOps and its related practices are producing stats and data that stream-in continuously, and commands attention. The potential and ROI of DevOps and Continuous Delivery are by now well recognized. The question is no longer “Should your organization adopt?” but, as Dion Hinchcliffe wrote, “speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive.” The data behind the relationship between DevOps and Continuous Delivery adoption is just the tip of the iceberg. Nowadays, not only is the customer always right, they’re constantly telling you (and everyone else in the world) how you’re doing at your job. Once your team has torn down its silos, ‘automated all its things,’ and is using a continuous delivery pipeline, your release lifecycles should be much shorter and your builds smaller, which is a good thing. As Disha Garg Mittal wrote on DevOps.com this week, it's important because “it enables you to get feedback very quickly, and it is significantly easier to verify because the change is not mixed in with other changes.” In our top article this week, Dana Gardner explained that DevOps, Big Data, and feedback loops, “…are transforming slow, batch assessments of essential data into live streaming of reaction and prediction services.” Companies that are incapable of continuously delivering improvements and value to their end users will lose them. “Business and competitive pressures…really focus on improving employee productivity, cost avoidance, increased innovation, and delivering "speed" as a competitive differentiation, ” these - among others - are some of the reasons why Fortune 1000 CIOs and CEOs must make DevOps a priority , per Stephen Elliot, Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Cloud Practice at IDC. Read on for more top news shared this week on @electriccloud and @DOESsummit :

1 Feedback loops: The confluence of DevOps and big data

By @Dana_Gardner | Published on @TechBeaconCom http://techbeacon.com/feedback-loops-confluence-devops-big-data#sthash.THhr4UCh.dpuf Now, as costs and complexity have dropped dramatically, a broad democratization of digital information has arrived. For businesses, the information received from transactions and interactions provides a variety of new opportunities to learn about customer needs and habits and make educated guesses about what will delight them next. A DevOps approach to software development is one example: software development organizations use these techniques to quickly release apps and gather feedback on new features in the latest version.

Feedback loops: The Confluence of #DevOps & #BigData https://t.co/laZqIOep7Q via @Dana_Gardner on @TechBeaconCom pic.twitter.com/CTeeTISIYF

— CloudBees (@electriccloud) June 5, 2015

2 Optimize Team Output, Not Individual Output

By @flomotlik | Published on @DZone http://java.dzone.com/articles/optimize-team-output-not?mz=38541-devops As teams and products grow, workflows and development processes get ingrained into the team. It starts with the early employees; processes are formed around them and the way they work. When engineering teams go from small to medium and then from medium to large, old workflows can become a large issue. Those workflows are often still optimized for the small to medium-sized team, not to mention optimized specifically for those first employees. Not everyone who joined later is properly up to speed, nor do they necessarily have the means to tackle problems that are coming up.

3 How Should Organizations Actually Go About Digital Transformation?

By @dhinchcliffe | Published on @Irregulars This is now the question that is top of mind in a large number of enterprises today, as speeding up adaptation to rapidly evolving digital markets is now not just a requirement to grow today, but increasingly to survive . This is not incautious language and I’ve been pointing to the relatively urgent data for several years: One major slip as organizations fully digitize their workforces, supply chains, and externally facing products and services is easily enough to put an organization into significant and potentially permanent decline.

How Should Organizations Actually Go About Digital Transformation? https://t.co/N8vfyYek1I #devops #infographic pic.twitter.com/vD3lNlh4nd — CloudBees (@electriccloud) June 11, 2015

4 Follow the Unicorn: Transform your Enterprise Applications

By Mike Fulton | Published on @devopsdotcom http://devops.com/2015/06/10/follow-the-unicorn-transform-your-enterprise-applications/ For those of us that work on Enterprise Systems such as the mainframe, the claims that the Unicorns (1) make, can be pretty astounding. Dozens and sometimes hundreds of releases a day from big companies like Netflix (2) and Etsy (3) are hard to comprehend. But look a little closer and you can see that the key difference is in the way changes are released to customers, not so much the total volume of changes … Small batch releases to customers has significant value. It enables you to get feedback very quickly, and it is significantly easier to verify because the change is not mixed in with other changes.

Follow the Unicorn: Transform your Enterprise Applications http://t.co/HQFBz8y6Ff @devopsdotcom @mikesfulton #devops pic.twitter.com/xKB0rpf3pk

— DOES Summit (@DOESsummit) June 10, 2015

5 AT&T’s Shift to DevOps and New Tech Requires a Massive Training Effort

By @sfwriter | Published on @CIOJournal http://blogs.wsj.com/cio/2015/06/05/atts-shift-to-devops-and-new-tech-requires-a-massive-training-effort/?mod=WSJBlog By 2020, AT&T has said 75 of its network will be controlled by software. To make this happen, the company has reorganized about 130,000 employees to tear down the walls between IT and network operations to move faster to release software. The company is shifting to a DevOps mode, a software development method that emphasizes collaboration between developers and other IT professionals… “We’re trying to make sure we can evolve our capabilities and processes in a DevOps model to scale,” said Scott Mair, senior vice president of technology planning and engineering for AT&T.

6 Why Fortune 1000 CIOs and CEOs should make DevOps investments a priority now

By @SElliot5 | Published on @CIOonline http://www.cio.com/article/2926724/cloud-computing/why-fortune-1000-cios-and-ceos-should-make-devops-investments-a-priority-now.html Many of the CIOs (and their teams) I advise are under tremendous pressure to reinvent themselves, their roles, and drive transformation across their IT organizations. Business and competitive pressures, which now assume lower costs, really focus on improving employee productivity, cost avoidance, increased innovation, and delivering "speed" as a competitive differentiation. Companies like Amazon, Etsy, Facebook and Google use speed, delivered from their DevOps investments across people, process and technologies, as a way to drive their business results. These are now dominant C-level, and board-level conversations, and are increasingly not only as expected business outcomes, but CIO compensation goals.

7 May Top 50 #CloudInfluence Individuals

Published on @comparethecloud http://www.comparethecloud.net/cloudinfluence/may-top-50-cloudinfluence-individuals/ This month’s top 10 has a few familiar faces, but also several new entrants, demonstrating the volatility of the ranking for individuals from and high turnover from one month to the next. After a brief flirtation with top spot following the excitement around the first ever disclosure of financials for AWS Jeff Bezos dropped back to fifth this month. This allowed Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEP, to regain top spot for May.

Our CEO @stbrodie was named #13 of the Top 50 #CloudInfluence Individuals! http://t.co/XRcIAzSoin #devops pic.twitter.com/ne8FM3RO8p — CloudBees (@electriccloud) June 9, 2015

8 Top 3 DevOps Practices for Operational Stability

By @SvenMalvik | Published on @devopsdotcom http://devops.com/2015/06/04/top-3-devops-practices-operational-stability/ Operational Stability is one of the main concerns in organizations. Especially some larger organization struggle to get a more stable IT landscape. Too often it’s political discussions that are preventing them from doing something about it. Organizations that have DevOps teams in place can just smile because they are enabled to be in control of their entire delivery chain from development to production. Read about what DevOps teams do in order to be real DevOps and why they’re smiling all day long.

9 Sleep easy: release automation reduces DevOps security threats

By @CHBoorman | Published on @devopsdotcom http://devops.com/2015/05/29/sleep-easy-release-automation-reduces-devops-security-threats/ While DevOps appears the controller and commander of faster feature releases, it also has the potential to expose software vulnerabilities and security threats in your production environments. We all know that assembling existing code is more efficient than rewriting it from scratch, for example. And when assembling applications from libraries, developers typically use the latest version of that code, assuming it is likely to have less bugs. However, new releases can open up new security vulnerabilities. Take the Spring Framework, for instance, a Java platform that provides comprehensive infrastructure support for developing Java applications. According to Joshua Corman, CTO of Sonatype, 81 of the 85 versions of the Spring Framework have known vulnerabilities.

10 What is the relationship between DevOps and Continuous Delivery

By Yaniv Yehuda | Published on @ITProPortal http://www.itproportal.com/2015/06/09/whats-relationship-between-devops-and-continuous-delivery/ Continuous Delivery (CD) and DevOps possess a shared background in agile methods and Lean Thinking: small and quick changes with focused value to the end customer. They are well communicated and collaborated internally, thus helping achieve quick time to market, with reduced risk. (Sounds great, doesn’t it? ) The combination of ‘softer’ or flexible philosophical conceptsthat go hand in hand with a very practical set of continuous delivery best practices, means that we are talking about similar, but not identical things.