DevOps Chat

DOES London 2018 speaker, Ann Marie of IBM gives us a preview of her session on whether audit and compliance is a DevOps Killer. Have a listen to get a preview of her talk and be sure to register for DevOps Enterprise Summit London 2018: https://events.itrevolution.com/eur/

In this DevOps Chat our guest is Andrea Martinez Crawford, distinguished engineer and CTO for DevOps at IBM's Hybrid Cloud division. Andrea and Alan Shimel, editor-in-chief of DevOps.com talk about what is a "modern application" versus a legacy app. With special emphasis on what this means for DevOps. Great discussion!

Mirco Hering is a DevOps expert with Accenture. He is also an accomplished blogger and now a DevOps author. His book DevOps for the Modern Enterprise from IT Revolution is available on Amazon and other sites that sell books. Mirco in his role with Accenture is also very tuned into the Asia-Pacific region's DevOps scene, as well as Europe.

We discuss a little bit about both AP and Europe as well as a preview of DOES London 2018. Great conversation with a real DevOps practitioner.

Chris O'Malley is bullish on mainframes. As you would expect someone who is the CEO of Compuware. But it is more than just bullish. Today's mainframes can run as fast as you need them too. Want to run Java or JS node? No problem. There is no reason to treat the mainframe as if it is not a native of today's computing environments. In fact for many tasks the mainframes is the best tool for the job. Chris is a great advocate and I think you will find this chat very interesting.

Appian World is just a few weeks away. Featuring a hackathon, keynote by The Woz and more, it promises to be a great time down on Miami Beach. DevOps.com will be there shooting video, reporting on the conference and talking to real, live practitioners.

We spoke with Malcom Ross, VP of product marketing for Appian and a keynote speaker at Appian World himself. He gave us some great insight into conference, but more important into what is going on in the world of Low-Code.

You can get more info at https://appianworld.appian.com/

Tim Hockin is Principle Software Engineer at Google. He is also one of the founders of the Kubernetes project and works on Google Cloud Platform. When he talks about containers and microservices, pay attention. :-)

We caught up with Tim and spoke with him about microservices and how to refactor your applications if it makes sense. Enjoy1

Interop China has been growing steadily since its inception in 2013. It is part of the Cloud Connect conference. This year they are featuring both DevOps and DevSecOps tracks and talks. Jayne Groll of the DevOps Institute is the DevOps track chair and Alan Shimel of DevOps.com and Security Boulevard is speaking at DevSecOps.com.

We sat down with Molly Huang and Kelly Yao of UBM China to discuss this years event. It sounds like it will be a great one!

When two legends in the InfoSec world start a new company, people take notice. Jeremiah Grossman and Robert "RSnake" Hansen recently announced their new venture BitDiscovery (http://www.bitdiscovery.com) was coming out of stealth, fresh off a venture raise and the acquisition Robert's company, Outside Intel.

BitDiscovery offers a radically different way of doing asset inventory and website discovery. Rather than scanning when you want to discover your assets, with BitDiscovery, you just query the master database that the company has assembled and it tells you what it has already found there.

This is possible because BitDiscovery keeps a snapshot updated constantly of just about the entire Internet. That is one Big Data based solution right there.

Robert and Jeremiah are just the kind of guys to make something like this work. Also after speaking to them, I believe that with that kind of data, there will be a lot more uses for this technology that will present themselves to the BitDiscovery team.

With the track record of these two pioneers, look for big things!

In this DevOps Chat we speak with Scott Wilson of CA Automic about the modern software factory, software pipelines, CD/ARA and more. That is a lot packed into just about 15 minutes!

Scott is always an interesting guest with good things to say and learn from. Enjoy!

In this chat we spoke with Prem Chandraskearan, VP of Software engineering at Barclaycard. Prem has led the DevOps transformation there. He sums up his learning with this:

The best way for an organization to approach DevOps is from a collaborative angle. When development and operations experts actively work together in a cohesive effort, solutions are well designed, efficient and smart from both a development and maintenance perspective. When operations is viewed as a software problem, Dev and Ops can work in tandem to implement a tool that is holistically a part of the process from start to finish.

DevOps is always a work in progress, but the initiative can only improve with quality resources that implement a variety of backgrounds and perspectives on both Dev and Ops working together. Barclaycard has had some interesting challenges with DevOps due to being in the credit card/banking industry, so for example, the “you build it, you run it” mantra doesn’t work as well for us as it would for other enterprises implementing DevOps. It is definitely a learning curve, and our goals and best practices are still coming to fruition, but we are continuing to find ways to automate.

The best way to get teams to work together is to simply ensure that they are not in silos, meaning that if there are distinct dev and ops teams, they must spend time in each other’s sectors to understand the pains, how the functions work, what makes it tick, etc. When the development and maintenance perspective are strategized in tandem, it automatically makes for a better, more streamlined workflow.

The best way to ensure a DevOps initiative’s long-term success is to ensure that the foundation of the program is collaborative and understanding of how each function works. With this, automation testing for failure is imperative to discover problems that are typically only otherwise found in production. If all the bases are covered and the process is streamlined and collaborative, the overall quality of your DevOps function will be much higher.