DevOps Chat

Data Privacy is the new front in the compliance wars. For many organizations Data Privacy is a dreaded subject with a maze of governance and compliance issues.

Osano wants to make it easy. Led by serial entrepreneur Arlo Gilbert, it is catching fire as enterprises learn that complying with Data Privacy laws is possible and even affordable.

Have a listen as Arlo and Alan Shimel discuss this important topic.

Ci/CD has changed the way we do software. From architecting it, to coding it, storing it, testing it, deploying it. GitLab has been a leader in this revolution.

I spoke with Darby Frey of GitLab's CI/CD team about this and what the future has in store.

Have a listen and hope you enjoy!

While at times it seemed the adoption of DevSecOps was like pushing rope uphill, the market has embraced the premise that DevSecOps is real and is much needed in bringing a higher level of quality to software.

StackHawk is a new company out of Boulder, Co that is seeking to allow developers to better secure their code and increase quality. I spoke to two of the co-founders of the company, Ryan Severns and Scott Gerlach while I was out in Boulder recently.

Have a listen to what they see as the game changing solutions they want to bring to market.

In this episode of DevOps Chats we talk with Donald Lutz, Principal Software Architect, specializing in systems integration and creating large, scalable cloud applications. Occasionally DevOps Chats is fortunate to spotlight DevOps and cloud native developers doing trailblazing work in contemporary software architectures. Donald fits that bill to a "t.", as an entrepreneur and employee at startups like Faction, BoldTech Systems, and his own company Technetronic Solutions, and established companies including Via West.

Our discussion focuses on creating cloud native applications in startups and large enterprise IT. Donald's currently working with one of the world's largest financial institutions to move from legacy applications directly to cloud native apps, bypassing any interim lift-n-shift moves. His work spans many Microsoft technologies, including .NET Core, runtime framework Dapper for RDBMS mapping, Service Fabric, and Azure, and opensource Kubernetes, Terraform, and Puppet (and Enterprise).

During our discussion, we cover the challenges of architecting and scaling very large cloud native applications, implementing DevOps in less mature software organizations, how established software patterns benefit DevOps and cloud app developers, and the importance of giving back by hosting meetups to share knowledge and mentor others. Donald also gives back as an active leader and mentor of the FIRST Robotics Team 1410 since 2005. Join in on our conversation as we explore the complex and sophisticated inter-workings of a cloud native software architect.

Application performance company AppDynamics recently released its 2019 edition of the App Attention Index Report. The 2019 report is subtitled The Era of Digital Reflex. Whoa, that sounds heavy!! Joining me on this episode of DevOps Chats is Steve Long, AppDynamics Regional CTO, and Technology Strategy. Cisco acquired AppDynamics in 2017.

Digital connections are a near-constant. Interacting with our world through digital apps and transactions are omnipresent: making a restaurant reservation using OpenTable, making payments using an app or our smartphone digital wallet, and checking our smartphones to plan and move through our day. Thus the name of the report "The Era of Digital Reflex."

In addition to insights from the report, Steve and I talk about measuring the customer's experience, tieing performance back to the desired business outcoming, strategies for finding problems, and reducing the time it takes to fix problems. Join us on this compelling discussion about application performance, customer experience, and business outcomes.

Test automation and CI/CD are evolving very rapidly to achieve great speed and impactful results by DevOps teams and Agile organizations. Our DevOps Chat guest, Tricentis Chief Product Officer Wolfgang Platz, contributes his experiences to the state of the art with his newly released book Enterprise Continuous Testing.

Automating software testing just for the sake of automation, is "doing the mess for less." What is the business value of each software element you are testing, and what is the right strategy for testing these software implemented functions? Automation certainly brings with it speed, but are we ultimately making incremental improvements to testing which doesn't tap into the full power and benefits of automated software testing.

Our discussion with Wolfgang focuses on the need for expanding dev-testing with higher-level integration, system, and end-to-end user experience testing, which are often performed well by shared testing and operations teams. Now, think Shift Right. While Agile and dev teams often focus on the progression of creating new and exciting capabilities for the business and our customers, we still require that regression mindset that consistently validates unit tests, valuable business functionality, system integrity, performance, and operational needs.

Pulumi is bringing a new open source tool and approach for modern infrastructure as code. We spoke to Pulumi CEO, co-founder Joe Duffy about it and the SaaS version that they are bringing to market.

Pulumi is an up and coming player in this market and you should watch what they are doing going forward.

RSA Conference (#RSAC) besides being the worlds largest cybersecurity conference has also become the place to see the latest innovation in the world of cyber. The woman who drives the innovation programs at RSAC is Cecilia Marinier.

We spoke with Cecilia last year for RSA 2019. The program was great last year. 2020 promises to be even better. Listen to Cecilia give us the scoop on on what is in store for 2020.

You can find out more about RSAC https://www.rsaconference.com/rsac-programs/innovation-sandbox

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: As you use an opensource tool like Spinnaker, the more you develop best practices and learnings. These are useful to share with others internal to the enterprise and other opensource users.

Jing Vergara, Principal Software Engineer at Salesforce, joins DevOps Chats to share a preview of her upcoming talk "Demystifying Spinnaker VM Image Baking and Deployment". Jing shares with us what to include and not to include (like secrets), when baking a VM image, how to avoid configuration drift, and how to deploy to multiple cloud providers using cloud init files. Jing also shares how to use opensource Packer templates with Ansible, Chef, and Docker, and how to build your own packer templates.

Jing Vergara's talk is on Sunday, Nov 17th at 10:45 AM PT. Spinnaker Summit 2019 is San Diego on November 15-17.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has garnered a great deal of attention as organizations pursue automation routine tasks through automation software. RPA automates tasks integrated into digital business process automation.

Wayne Ariola, Tricentis General Manager of RPA, joins DevOps Chats to discuss how Tricentis brings its strengths and heritage in software testing automation into the world of RPA. The expansion into RPA makes a lot of sense when you consider testing technologies that operate on UX domain and data models, avoiding the pitfalls of brittle screen scraping approaches.

Together, Wayne and I explore how business process automation using RPA intersects with DevOps tools, processes, and teams, and how RPA benefits from the experiences gained in the DevOps community. Join us on this episode of DevOps Chats as we explore Robotic Process Automation and DevOps.