Devops lowres-final

CIOReviewDevOpsSpecial The Navigator for Enterprise Solutions SEPTEMBER 09, 2016 CIOREVIEW.COM IN MY OPINION Pauly Comtois, VP DevOps, Hearst Business Media CIO INSIGHTS Ryan King, CIO, Power Solutions International Quali DevOps IN A BOXLior Koriat,CEO| 1 |CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

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COVER CONTENTSSTORY 10 Quali DevOps in a Box Lior Koriat, CEOCIO Insights CXO Insights 20 17 When the “Obvious” You Cannot Improve What You Slaps You in the Face! Do not Measure Ryan King, Lee Eason, CIO, Director of DevOps, Power Solutions International Ipreo 30 24 Cloud Services Supporting IT Goals Agile Isn’t Just for Dev Anymore: Five Steps to Achieve IT Ops Agility Derrick A Butts, Bill Talbot, CIO, VP, Solution & Product Marketing, Truth Initiative CA Technologies 42 27|4 |CIOReview Innovating Intelligently When Do-IT-Yourself is Not Joe Iannello, Good Enough? VP & CIO, Scott Cleland, Capital Metrologies Sr. Director of Product Marketing, HGST, a Western Digital Corporation brand SEPTEMBER 2016

*All Insights are based on the interviews with respective CIOs and CXOs to our editorial staffCXO Insights 16 Audeo 19 Cake Solutions 33 22 Chef 26 Intigua Getting to DevOps Nirvana—Putting 29 REAN Cloud DevOps Management Front and Center 32 SaltStack Eric Hoffman, VP & 38 Sysdig Oleg Chunikhin, Chief Software Architect, 41 VersionOne Technical Partner, 46 XebiaLabs EastBanc Technologies IN MY 36 OPINION The Devops Culture Change Goes Way Beyond IT Diving into the Depths of Raman Sapra, VP & Global Leader, DevOps Dell Digital Business Services 08 Pauly Comtois, 39 VP DevOps, Hearst Business Media Ask Your Managers What They Really Need AshLea Allberry, VP, Operations, Nanonation, Inc. 44 Operational Visibility in the SDDC Dirk Wallerstorfe, Technology Lead for SDN & OpenStack, Dynatrace 48 What is a Low-Code/No-Code Platform? Thierry Ciot, Software Architect & Product Owner, Progress 50 The New Normal: Achievable But Not Simple Michael Nygard, VP, Cognitect | 5 |CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

CIOReview Editorial SEPTEMBER - 09 - 2016 The Nuances to DevOps SPECIAL Triumphing DevOps Managing Editor Be it buying Christmas gifts on Etsy or sending humans to Mars, DevOps is playing a vital role in catalyzing innovation by bridging Jeevan George the gap between development and operations teams. Nonetheless, while embarking on the journey to heightened productivity by Editorial Staff adopting a continuous approach to software delivery and development, CIOs need to carefully revamp their company’s processes by examining the frequencyAaron Pierce Alex D'Souza and scale of tests running throughout the development cycle. This will not only Ava Garcia Chithra Vijayakumar help speed up the process, but also streamline troubleshooting and ensure the Sarah Fernandes bugs are patched considerably quickly.Joshua Parker Fortunately, there is no dearth of tools that can assist enterprises—big or Visualizers small—hop on the DevOps train. Software and services aimed at automationJohn Goutham Stephen Thomas and analytics are fueling the DevOps revolution. From Chef, Puppet, and Docker to Ansible, Ruxit, and Jenkins, today’s innovative tools provide seamless Sales orchestration, superior control, robust security, and most of all—extensive Kevin Morris automation. [email protected] The rise of DevOps can partly be attributed to the rapid growth of cloud T: 510-565-7560 computing. Like the continuous development and deployment approach of DevOps, cloud fosters continuous updates to applications and infrastructure. Mailing Address While cloud will certainly help DevOps, it is not a necessity. Despite the synergy CIOReview between the two, they can function independent of each other depending on an enterprise’s specific needs. What worked for Etsy and NASA might not be the 44790 S. Grimmer Blvd best approach for an SMB, but the benefits of transitioning to DevOps are as Suite 202, clear as day. All that matters is making a surefooted shift from yesteryear’s success stories to what will drive enterprises toward glory tomorrow. Fremont, CA 94538 T:510.402.1463, F:510-894-8405 At this juncture, where nearly every forward-looking company is either adopting DevOps or is planning to make the jump soon, CIOReview is CIOReview presenting to you a special edition on DevOps, featuring insights from industry thought leaders. We hope the technology solutions presented in this 2nd AnnualSEPTEMBER - 9 - 2016, Vol 05 SE 74 Published by ValleyMedia, Inc. DevOps Edition will help you become a DevOps trailblazer. To subscribe to CIOReview Visit www.cioreview.com Let us know your thoughts.Copyright © 2016 ValleyMedia, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction Jeevan Georgein whole or part of any text, photography or illustrations without Managing Editorwritten permission from the publisher is prohibited. The publisher [email protected] no responsibility for unsolicited manuscripts, photographsor illustrations. Views and opinions expressed in this publication arenot necessarily those of the magazine and accordingly, no liability isassumed by the publisher thereof.|6 |CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

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[ [In My OpinonDiving into theDepths of DevOpsBy Pauly Comtois, VP DevOps, Hearst Business Media et’s assume you have completed not afraid to take the road less travelled. ► A clear sense of ownership and a Culture Session and the team Present a complex problem (one with accountability is aligned behind the culture you multiple solutions) to solve and observe With the culture of asking people to make want. Now you need which path is taken by the candidate and more responsible decisions, there is theto hire new engineers to help why. Are they considering long term need for ownership and accountability.grow this DevOps culture. A implications (a solution) or short term You make the choice, you set the directionquestion that often comes up, gains only (a temporary fix). and you are accountable for your actions.and while there is no single This does not mean that you punishanswer for everyone, is, “What should ► Self-managed someone for taking a risk and that risk notI be looking for?” This article will share DevOps seeks to push decision making paying off. It means that the individualone proven approach for Hiring DevOps toward where the work is being that leads that decision sticks with theirtalent. performed. This new level of autonomy choice and sees it through. They receive I have been building teams for requires engineers that can manage their backing and support from leadership evenover 15 years. In that tasks, workflow and communication. in the face of disaster.time, those teams have Micromanaging has no place in thealways been DevOps workforce and this is especially true in ► Salesmanshipteams, even before they DevOps. This does not, however, mean In the interview I ask the person to tellwere called DevOps. In reality the focus that you work alone. You need engineers me about something they are passionatewas on building teams that communicated that manage their own work, while being about. Anything. Now try to convince mewell, supported each other and allowed part of the team. to be as passionate about it as you are.room for mistakes. These have alwaysbeen good habits of a high performingteam. Now that we are hiring Developersand Operations engineers to grow aDevOps culture, we find ourselves lookingfor the same traits.► Solve complex problems without aclear answerDevOps is new and still figuring outits way in the world. It's the gangly13-year-old whose body grew faster thanit's maturity. Many of the issues that weare leveraging DevOps to fix don't haveclearly defined answers. These teamsrequire explorers (and leaders) that are|8 |CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Pauly Comtois Micromanaging do not necessarily mean you don't hire has no place in the but you must understand the runway forPart of innovation is lively debate and workforce and this value add for that person is much longer.convincing others (up, down and sideways is especially true in Consider the position need and timing andin the reporting structure) to support your DevOps. This does decide accordingly. Someone with a highidea or approach. Look for someone that not, however, mean level of aptitude can make up for a lack ofis open to different opinions, conveys their that you work alone skills up front and still quickly add value.ideas succinctly and can professionallyhold to their convictions. DevOps is and frustration. During the interview ■ Skills are the lowest ranking forabout effective communication and process, take the person outside the office DevOps. This doesn't mean you shouldcollaboration first. for lunch or coffee. Look to see if they hire someone for a senior engineer can take differing opinions in stride with position with no relevant skills. It does► Given the rise in remote workers, the good humor or if they display a high mean that skills can be easily taughtmajority of technical communication is degree of ontological arrogance. You can and adopted by an individual with highwritten (email and chat) also take this opportunity to observe how aptitude. Even though this is the lowestGive the candidate a problem set and they interact with different people in a level of requirement, it is the one thatask them to write out one email to their potentially uncomfortable situation. gets the most attention when developingmanager and another for their colleagues, the position description and job posting.posing a solution. ► Culture, Aptitude and Skill Given that fact I will expand on this to ■ In order to compare many candidates list the skills that I look for in the resume.► A sense of humor Don’t get too hung up on a specific tool;DevOps is, at its core, about bringing (often 10-20 at a time) it helps to boil remember that if they fit culturally andgroups of people together. Sometimes down the previous characteristics into have aptitude you want someone that canyou are bringing these groups goals into three categories, and give the applicant quickly learn new tools and approaches!closer alignment. With so many different a score. They are listed in the order ofpersonalities, conflicting priorities and importance; Culture, Aptitude and Skill. Look for core skills in the followingdeadlines, things can get tense. Having key areas:a smart and graceful sense of humor can ■ Cultural fit is paramount. I havedefuse conflicts rather than escalate them. discovered, to my own peril, just how ■ Automation: Automating the Value important it is that the person fit the Stream is an important part of deriving► Care must be taken to look for culture of your teams. I once hired a value from DevOps. Look for skills insubtle sarcasm, negativity and passive- brilliant network engineer that, at the time automating system configuration, testing,aggressive humor of hire, I knew would not fit into the team. code builds.This type of humor can increase stress I was filling \"my\" need as a manager, but not filling the \"teams\" need. It is difficult, ■ Measurement: Understanding if not impossible, to change a person’s current state is critical to planning where core personality. For this reason, cultural you wish to go. Look for skills in tools fit gets the veto power for DevOps hiring. and process that identify key metrics, recording and measuring those metrics ■ Aptitude is not always easy to judge and reporting on those metrics publically. but if you put some reasonable tests in front of the candidate you can discern ■ Coding/Scripting: The level and their aptitude. Low levels of aptitude depth of experience in this field will vary, however understanding code supports all the other technical functions of DevOps. If you are new to this approach, I recommend researching CAMS, an acronym describing the core values of DevOps. It was coined by Damon Edwards and John Willis at DevOps Days Mountain View 2010. C – Culture; A – Automation; M – Measurement; S – Sharing |9 |CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

COVER STORY Lior Koriat, CEO|10|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

QualiDevOps in a BoxBy Chithra Vijayakumar“In the digital economy, every to enable ‘fast IT’ without making it ‘reckless,’ ” states other company can be deemed Koriat, CEO. Grabbing the baton of responsibility a ‘software’ company in a in automating and unifying the software lifecycle way,” points out Lior Koriat, is Quali, a prodigy that has encamped on the solid CEO, Quali. From IBM's grounds of an interesting DevOps landscape. DeepQA software that powers IBM Watson to the “DevOps is very effective in breaking down navigation apps delivered on functional barriers in the software development smartphones, today the flooding tide of software tools lifecycle without disturbing the functionalities and across industries is virtually limitless. The ensuing allowing organizations to implement a single process competition for rolling out newer software across the across the siloed groups,” Koriat asserts. Quali focuses consumer as well as enterprise markets is driving on turning development and test environments into a software developers to streamline the siloed processes service. “We achieve that by creating the necessary to expedite software delivery and service. Gaining infrastructure and tools and rendering it in a fully mainstream attraction in this picture is DevOps, the automated service; this is what we call a ‘sandbox.’” At decade old ‘automation’ strategy, that has emerged its core, a sandbox is a personal replica of the production a clear winner and mainstay in the times to come. environment that each developer and engineer can “DevOps is all about speeding up the ‘time-to-market’ access and run on demand, without disrupting the overall flow of service. Sandbox allows development |11|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

and testing to be performed in an environment that resembles servers, virtual environments such as vCenter, and a numberthe actual environment where the service or application will of public cloud environments like AWS and Azure,” Koriateventually be deployed. Putting its own slant on things, Quali elaborates. The models are also made available as open sourcehas onramped its sandbox solution to the cloud to cater to the software in a developer’s community with a growing list beingongoing shift of eliminating infrastructure ownership. added every now and then. By combining the replicas with the orchestrated DevOps workflow, Quali creates ‘blueprints’ Quali’s indigenous cloud sandbox, CloudShell, was developed and finally facilitates them to be deployed as portable, on-as a means to automate the creation of network configurations demand sandboxes.on-the-fly. In its relatively incipient age, CloudShell was used to Quali team brainstormingDevOps is all about speeding up the ‘time-to-market’ to enable ‘fast IT’ without making it ‘reckless’automate a single function, usually testing or development. The Post installation of the entire setup, Quali ensures itsrecently launched, CloudShell 7.0 version customers’ DevOps requirements are met through anprovides automation across the DevOpsvalue chain and in doing so, “we evaluation of key metrics, of which time-to-marketaccelerate application delivery plays a pivotal role. “At Quali, we translatewhile saving millions of this internally to ‘time to value’—the timedollars in infrastructure cost,” it takes for a new customer to start usingnotes Koriat. CloudShell as part of their DevOps processes,” notesThe Anatomy of Koriat. Optimally, anCloudShell accurate CloudShell implementationCloudShell is built accelerates time- to-market by upwith the ability to to 75 percent and allows for amodel a hybrid cloud scalable and replicable DevOps process.in a sandbox, enabling Backed by a Communityorganizations to In an effort to continue their prolonged supportquickly and safely deliver to customers, Quali’s sales and product teams work closely with them and a special delivery team eases downapplications to hybrid clouds. the complexities that arise with deployment. In the process, the teams serve as a feedback loop for enhancing efficiency,Enterprise data center infrastructures time-to-market, and ultimately, a better user experience. The recent launch of the Idea box platform and other interactiveare rapidly evolving from purely physical forums on the Quali community portal has made the task of sending and viewing feedbacks more easier for customers andto virtual, private cloud to ‘X-as-a-Service’ partner organizations.and the more recent hybrid-cloud infrastructure;and CloudShell preps up organizations in times of thesechanging horizons.Under the hood, Quali’s cloud sandboxes follow thepragmatic routine of ‘model, orchestrate, and deploy.’ Theapproach begins by studying a customer’s software developmentarchitecture and the myriad structural components surroundingit. Following which, “we provide or create, replicated modelsfor the entire production environment including switches and|12|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Quali’s clientele encompasses an elite At Quali, we translate this internally togroup that covers a good fraction of the ‘time to value’—the time it takes for aGlobal 100 companies across industries, new customer to start using CloudShellincluding healthcare providers, financialservices institutions, and retailers. Organizations are still adopting disparate sandbox blueprints called Topology andProminent public cloud providers and a DevOps tools for different stages of a Orchestration Specification for Cloudmajority of the top ten service providers software application’s lifecycle. “We talk Applications (TOSCA).from around the world use Quali to take about DevOps but the ‘Ops’ aspect istheir DevOps strategies to the cloud. still missing. A good number of DevOps “There have always been talks aboutIllustrating the proficiency of Quali’s tools in use today remain exclusive to a ‘DevOps pipeline,’ where all the toolscloud sandboxes in helping enterprises developers while operations teams use can be connected in a serial fashion,”cope with the length and breadth of the a different set of tools and practices,” states Koriat. However, the practicaldevelopment workflow, Koriat recounts observes Koriat. “There is massive implications tell a different story. DevOpsCisco’s success story. Through the scope for a gamut of one-stop-shop at scale cannot be a serial pipeline; it hasDevNet initiative, Cisco has a sprawling solutions to replace the prevailing point to be a parallel one and there are stillcommunity of open source developers solution paradigm.” some key technologies lacking to filland an extensive free resource center that in the spectrum of DevOps tools. Withcollectively contributes to its innovative From a technical and product every passing day, the DevOps domainnetwork solutions. Underpinning the perspective, ‘standardization’ is is getting consolidated through mergersentire framework is the CloudShell becoming a concern of monumental and acquisitions, and Koriat predictscloud sandbox, fully-equipped with importance. Very often, time spent that in the next few years, there will bea slew of Cisco toolsets, forming the on tool integrations sidelines teams a condensed set of clear, differentiatednucleus of DevNet. CloudShell’s ‘model, from their core business proposition, leaders. “These are natural developmentsorchestrate, and deploy’ schema and negating the value reaped through agile that will happen in time,” he assures.the visual object-based automation has DevOps automation. To that end, Quali “When it comes to that, Quali will bebecome a success and the volume of has recently joined the Organization leading the procession by outplayingactivity in the developer community, for the Advancement of Structured its efficacy in developing unified cloudstands a testament to Quali’s proficiency. Information Standards (OASIS) group sandboxes for ‘A to Z’ needs across the that is developing a standard for development lifecycle.”Route to Coalesced AutomationAutomation is the buzzword du jouracross the board, yet in that regard,DevOps is still nascent because ofits fragmented delivery structure. |13|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

The DevOps landscape continues to mature with successfully drive the DevOps approach. Previously, firms more enterprises continuing to adopt the agile were focused on deploying containers over virtual machines. practices into their existing infrastructure. DevOps However, they are now gradually deploying these containers has turned out to be the most promising approach over bare metal servers.for consistently giving businesses an edge in the market. Thearena has also witnessed a paradigm shift in the use of Docker Few concerns still plague the adoption of a comprehensiveas it drives the adoption of agile and lean practices. According DevOps strategy. Security and lack of experience is whatto the ‘State of the Cloud Report’ by RightScale, Docker usage perturbs organizations the most. Enterprises are slowlyhas more than doubled, from 13 percent to 27 percent. realizing the need for expanding their know-how about DevOps, besides focusing on activates which assist in The adoption of DevOps has been more evident in large enhancing the experience. To help navigate the DevOpsenterprises, compared to Small and Medium Businesses landscape, our distinguished selection panel, comprising(SMBs). Reports indicate that technologies supporting CEOs, CIOs, VCs, industry analysts and the editorial boardDevOps toolchain have been expected to grow by 21 percent of CIOReview narrowed the final 20 providers that exhibitglobally. Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Salt are some noteworthy competence in delivering DevOps solutions.configuration tools that companies leverage. The toolchainsenable continuous integration, deployment, and delivery to We present to you CIOReview’s 20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers 2016.Company Management DescriptionAudeo Justin Baugh, Using DevOps methodologies to manage internal processes andBoston, MA President integrate with internal IT teams, enabling continuous integrationaudeo.com and development. Robert Beauchamp,BMC Software Chairman, President & CEO Helps IT transform traditional businesses into digital enterprisesHouston, TX for the ultimate competitive advantage.bmc.com Guy Remond, Managing Director Provides DevOps as a Service that enables teams to concentrateCake Solutions on their core strengths by delivering a \"as a service\" environmentNew York City, NY Barry Crist, tailor-made for a team's DevOps needs.cakesolutions.net CEO Enabling IT departments to automate configuration andChef deployment processes using innovative software.Seattle, WAchef.io Sacha Labourey, Provides Jenkins powered solutions that enable IT organizations Founder & CEO to respond rapidly to the software delivery needs of the business.CloudBeesSan Jose, CACloudBees.comElyxor Mark Carleo, Delivers DevOps solutions that are reliable and scalable byRowley, MA Founder & Managing Partner reusing their library of existing components and services.elyxor.com Shai Toren, Intigua keeps DevOps streamlined and agile by abstractingIntigua GM the complexities of tool management away from the DevOpsNewton, MA toolchain, and accelerating run-time processes.intigua.com|14|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

20 Most Promising DevOps Solution Providers 2016Company Management DescriptionObjectFrontier Software Rich Napoli, Automates the provisioning, configuration, build, test,Alpharetta, GA CEO deployment, and monitoring of software systems using the bestobjectfrontier.com DevOps tools available. Jennifer Tejada,PagerDuty CEO An enterprise incident management provider that integrates withSan Francisco, CA ITOps and DevOps monitoring stacks to improve operationalpagerduty.com Lior Koriat, reliability and agility. CEOQuali Provides cloud sandboxes for all stages of the DevOps lifecycle.Santa Clara, CAquali.com Darshan Puttanaiah, A software design and development firm specializing in Agile/ Founder & CEO Lean, design thinking, DevOps, and Continuous Delivery.Qwinix TechnologiesCentennial, CO Ben Butler, A one-stop-shop for Managed Cloud Solutions (MCS) that helpqwinix.io VP, Partners, Marketing, & organizations become agile and productive in their DevOps and Business Development cloud endeavor.REAN CloudHerndon, VA Marc Chenn, Provides configuration management software for thereancloud.com Co-Founder & CEO orchestration and automation of CloudOps, ITOps, and DevOps.SaltStackLehi, UTsaltstack.comSmartBear Software Doug McNary, Creates software tools that development, testing, andSomerville, MA CEO operations teams use to deliver the highest quality andsmartbear.com best performing software possible.Sysdig Loris Degioanni, A container visibility company dedicated to making containersSan Francisco, CA Founder & CEO viable and mainstream by offering production-qualitysysdig.com monitoring for containerized applications and microservices.Tricentis Sandeep Johri, Specializes in agile market leading software testing toolsLos Altos, CA CEO for enterprises.tricentis.com Robert Holler, Helps organizations achieve the benefits of DevOps byVersionOne Director, CEO & Co-founder automating, orchestrating, and visualizing the flow of changeAlpharetta, GA throughout the software delivery cycle.versionone.com Todd Vernon, Offers real-time incident management platform that combines theVictorOps Founder & CEO power of people and data to embolden DevOps teams so they canBoulder, CO handle incidents proactively.victorops.com Ryan Pelerin, A solutions integrator specializing in cloud and server migration,WSM International Founding Partner & CEO transformation, and DevOps services.St. Clair Shores, MIwsmintl.com Derek Langone, Develops enterprise-scale DevOps software, providing companies CEO with the visibility, automation, and control to deliver softwareXebiaLabs faster and with less risk.Boston, MAxebialabs.com |15|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

AudeoEmphasizing Collaboration and CommunicationDevOps has been breaking\" continuously improved methodologies and seamless threat analysis in down silos in organizations to encourage greater innovation while deployment pipelines. By linking DevOps and facilitating novel ways of reducing cost, boosting performance, methodologies to critical KPIs, thesolving IT problems. The “2016 State of and adhering to regulatory requirements. company can demonstrate the true impactDevOps Report” by Puppet reveals that “We assist clients in evaluating their of DevOps on operations. They also offerfirms incorporating DevOps practices current DevOps frameworks and creating real-time access to metrics that measureexperience 24x faster recovery times a detailed roadmap, leading DevOps best performance assessment of current teamand considerably lower change failure practices,” asserts Baugh. “Our process structures and skills—allowing Audeorates. “Going beyond a set of tools and optimizes a firm’s cloud architecture for to suggest the need for further trainingcollaboration, DevOps has culminated rapid scalability, instant failover, and or additional staffing necessary forinto an approach emphasizing high- automated security protocols.” Continuous Integration and Continuousquality products and customer experience Deployment (CI/CD).over complex procedures,” begins Highlighting an example, BaughJustin Baugh, President of Audeo. “We explains, Epix—an entertainment Justin Baughuse DevOps methodologies to manage network—relied on legacy, custominternal IT teams and processes to enable technology and solutions for their Baugh states that customers shouldcontinuous integration and innovation.” developmental operations management. not implement technologies owing toSpecializing in ecommerce clients, Audeo The company needed an up-to-date their popularity, but rather their utility operational structure in order to launch a and how it will lead the firm towardOur process new API service for delivering content to efficiency. Audeo makes it a point tooptimizes a firm’s any device. Audeo provided key DevOps be involved with clients from start tocloud architecture consultation and the technical expertise to finish—recommending architecturalfor rapid scalability, help scale and develop Epix’s applications improvements that enhance productivityinstant failover, in the cloud. Today, Epix’s customers when scaling becomes far more importantand automated are receiving products and services than delivering initial results. Audeosecurity protocols as per their needs without hindrance differentiates itself by its expertise across in operations. all areas of DevOps—infrastructure,delivers an end-to-end infrastructure architecture, and platforms—alongsidesolution—not just managed hosting, Audeo, as part of their services, its ability to provide end-to-end solutions.but a solid platform on which to build. provides a unique solution ‘Merlin’—a “Our consulting services help customers“Customers no longer need to worry web-based self-service tool for developers scale effectively and deliver moreabout scaling issues and delivering an and end-users to quickly provision new agile solutions through implementinginternet-based infrastructure, instead can instances in an infrastructure without continuous integration of DevOps—focus on offering unique, engaging digital requiring interaction or support from making operations faster, efficient, andcontent and the best user experience,” DevOps. Companies use Merlin to reliable,” concludes Baugh.adds Baugh. empower developers to maintain their own environments, reduce support The company’s vast DevOps costs, and increase developer and ITproficiency enables clients to deploy staff productivity. Audeo invests greatlynew services quickly while applying on innovative technologies to enhance DevOps measures, and has partnered with HP, IBM, and Amazon, to provide private and hybrid cloud solutions for a variety of needs. Audeo modernizes security management systems with automated security protocols, central logging,|16|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

[ [CXO InsightsYou Cannot Improve What YouDo not MeasureBy Lee Eason, Director of DevOps, Ipreo How long does it take to get a file off the file-store? Do we have enough job processing servers to handle our queue during the day? These are all questions that APM can help you answer. So many tool options This article is about why you should be embracing this type of monitoring and less about which specific tools to use. There are a few tools that are worth considering. I’d strongly encourage you to evaluate DataDog, Microsoft’s Application Insights tool, or bigger tool suites like New Relic or AppDynamics. You could also roll your own like Etsy did in this well-known post. APM takes the guesswork out of resolving performance problems that your customers are experiencing, even if they don’t report them Lee Eason There is no “improve” without “prove” et’s get one thing straight: Your software has APM takes the guesswork out of resolving performance problems that performance problems. Whether that is at the your customers are experiencing, even if they don’t report them. It’s the top of your mind or not is probably driven by first way your team will leverage APM, and it’s how you’ll recoup your how often your customers report those problems. investment. Simply put, if your teams don’t have access to an APM tool,Regardless of whether you’re thinking about how to solve when they are called on to fix a performance problem, they’re doing itthem or not, building a culture that enables and embraces blindfolded. They will spend more time troubleshooting, reproducingApplication Performance Monitoring (APM) as a normal issues, and finding the root cause. Without metrics looking acrosspart of your Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) the application, they’ll rightly worry that their change may have hurtwill pay dividends. performance elsewhere in the application.Application Performance Monitoring With APM, your developers will be able to “peel back” the layers of code that drive those bad customer experiences. They will knowLet’s say you’ve got a SaaS application that has a web what’s wrong rather than having to guess. Without an APM tool, they’reapplication, a services layer, a database, and a file-store. probably dumping metrics to the log and trying to piece together theHow does your concurrent user count change throughout cause and effect chains by hand. That can take hours, even days of work;the day? How many queries are being executed per worse still, it’s a manual, error prone process. Without APM, when asecond? Is there a correlation between a particularly slow system is performing poorly, engineers make changes that may not evenloading page and a specific part of the application stack? be related to the issue. They can end up fixing problems that don’t exist. Do this enough times, and you’ve created additional technical debt (known problems in your source code) that they will have to clean up later. Your development team is plenty busy – there’s no need to make |17|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

more work for them, especially work that doesn’t move your More Insightful Load Teststeam, or your company, forward. Having a suite of automated load tests is a luxury that many APM metrics also help the team have confidence in the teams don’t have. They can be tricky to build and tend to bechanges they make. Instead of hoping their change fixed more brittle than other types of tests. However, the valuethe problem, APM gives them proof they can share with the of knowing the breaking point of your application makes itcustomer support team and other stakeholders so that everyone worth it.involved knows two critical things: the fix worked, and it didn’tbreak anything else. However, as valuable as all this is, these are When you add APM data to what you get from yourthe obvious things APM does for you. The real value is in the load tests, the whole exercise becomes much more valuable.ripple effects. Now your team can see which component is the bottleneck in performance and scale. The load test shows how manyThe Observer Effect concurrent users you need to break the app, and the APM data shows why the application broke. The key here is that you learnWe’ve all heard it before: people tend to focus on and improve this before your customer experiences a problem.things that are being measured. This has a tendency to workagainst most attempts at measuring creative processes, such as A Change in Perspectivesoftware development. If you attempt to measure the productivityof a developer based on how many lines of code they commit, for The last change to highlight is that your engineering groupsexample, you will likely see a change in behavior that favors will start to look at your application and their jobs differently.that metric, to the detriment of the codebase. This is called the The code becomes a way to influence metrics that directly tie toObserver Effect. customer experience. When a teammate refactors code in a way that improves the metrics, then the whole team has something This effect can also be really positive, and it’s one of the best they can celebrate. Ego gets set aside in favor of something muchreasons to embrace APM. more important. First, create a simple framework for your engineers to start Put another way: APM helps your team organically geltracking whatever they want. Don’t put up gates or roadblocks to around a common goal that naturally lines up with businessadding new metrics - it’s just a line of code. Create a fast-track priorities. It helps your engineering team remember why they’rerelease process for releasing changes that only affect monitoring. here. Writing code isn’t the WHAT, it’s the HOW. Their job is to create a great user experience for your customers, meeting their Developers will start adding metrics out of curiosity. At needs by creating the best software possible. APM creates a firmfirst they’ll be obvious things, like page render times. Suddenly connection to that mission.though, they’ll see something jump out at them. Why doesthat one page take so long to render all the time? That outlier Why don’t we have this already?represents a bad user experience for your customers that may nothave been reported. That errant metric will annoy your teams, If APM is so valuable and so great, then why hasn’t myand in the process of diagnosing the root cause they’ll end up engineering team already done this, you ask? First, people don’tadding metrics to track all kinds of things. Soon, they’ll have know what they don’t know. This layer of monitoring is easy todata points for database queries, file transfer times, and other miss, and not many shops do this well in my experience. Second,points of interest. Now, when a problem occurs, they can quickly it’s possible your team wants to put this in place and just can’tcorrelate those metrics with other data points, enabling them to find the time to do it. They’re too busy putting features out inrapidly find and fix problems as they become visible. production or fighting fires. Make sure your team has enough innovation time in their schedule to make these kinds of targeted The end result is beautiful. Your engineers start to understand improvements. There are a lot of seasoned engineers out therethe application, not just architecturally, but in the context of who know in the back of their minds that something like thishow it is used by your customers – perhaps the most important would be nice, but finding the time to do it can seem impossible.thing that an engineer can know about an application. I’ve seensituations where the developer who wrote most of the code was That said, I can tell you from experience that implementingshocked by what the metrics showed in production. Why is that? this layer of metrics is not complicated. It usually doesn't getBecause customers are resourceful and they will use your system done because people don't understand the value it can bring.in ways no one could predict, especially if your system has been Starting an APM initiative can be done in just a few days—adeployed for a long time. Without APM, your engineers will small investment compared to the benefits it will bring to yourhave no way to know how their system is used by customers, company. The first time your engineering team proactivelyand they’ll be trying to fix an application that doesn’t behave the heads off a major systems outage or performance slowdown,way they think it behaves. APM can help highlight areas of your APM will pay for itself and then some. Make the decision tocode that haven’t kept up with how customers use it, illuminating start an APM initiative, and you’ll be glad you did.problems and enabling engineers to find the right solution.|18|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Cake SolutionsCost and Risk Mitigation through DevOpsas a ServiceThe age of siloed software for any change. Beginning with Minimum\" and Travis CI. Error detection and development has now slipped Viable Product (MVP), the company elimination become agile processes due into oblivion and responding helps clients in value assessment of the to increased frequency of integration andto business requirements immediately in-built software features. consequently the software is deliveredis the new norm. Agile methodology is in lesser time. Cake helps to zero ina modern touchstone for incorporating Guy Remond on the best CI strategy, build complexchanges in accordance to client demands systems, and handle the nuances as welland the development process necessitates We are growing as complexities of various softwareco-ordination between developers and rapidly and components built on different platforms.other IT professionals in an enterprise. successfully, providingCompanies acknowledge the significance innovative and Cake entails CI and CD throughof DevOps in ironing out complexities disruptive solutions its DevOps as a Service and in one ofin software development; however, using the very latest instances, the holistic approach sowed thetheir development teams have to race technologies to solve seeds of success for a client in the securityagainst time while concentrating on the business problems for solution arena. Paycasso, which providesoperational side of the software. Brooklyn, our clients cybersecurity solutions for enterprisesNY based Cake Solutions offers a silver as well as users, sought a MVP, productbullet to the present scenario with its To measure the performance of the enhancements, and traffic handling. TeamDevOps as a Service (DaaS) that helps product, Cake empowers developers with Cake crafted an MVP that was based onclients in mitigating the associated risks, measurement tools to determine various new technical stack comprising Scala,pitfalls, and costs. parameters like response time, number of iOS, C++ with AMQP messaging and active users, and performance under load. utilized avant-garde DevOps approach Cake provides DevOps as a Service Developers are able to release software to expedite the process of releasingfor strategic planning and process at any instance due to Continuous new system instances. Consequently,consulting and helps clients establish a Integration (CI) servers such as Jenkins the client had a product with advancedDevOps framework around core value image processing, computer vision, andproposition. By virtue of the service, safeguarding capabilities.Cake assists in crafting DevOps toolchainfor application lifecycle management and Guy Remond, Managing Director ofsupports infrastructure automation and Cake Solutins, shares the journey of hismanagement. The service allows agile company that has witnessed success storiesdevelopment teams to concentrate on akin to Paycasso, “We are growing rapidlycore competencies and its customized and successfully, providing innovativeenvironment fulfills the DevOps needs of and disruptive solutions using the veryspecific teams. Cake ensures collaboration latest technologies to solve businessbetween software developers and problems for our clients.” The companyoperation professionals and allows sharing looks forward to create innovativeof ideas while enhancing understanding products as well as empower clientsamong the development teams. The with its cutting-edge service in creatingcompany leverages Continuous Delivery business value through quick to market(CD) methodology in its offering to help solutions. As DevOps becomes a newdevelopers with instantaneous software imperative in the software developmentrelease and maintain production readiness arena, Cake is well positioned to explore new opportunities. |19|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

CIO InsightsWhen the “Obvious”Slaps You in the Face!By Ryan King, CIO, Power Solutions International Ryan King t is like a horror movie we have all seen where for some strange reason they are dumb and they go to the basement or they check that closet. Or someone gets robbed at their home and the police are reviewing the crime scene and the homeownerhad an alarm system and they never activated it because they say“I just thought it would never happen to me!” Or here is theclassic, “you lock the front door and the back door is wide openand you wonder to yourself how could that happen!?!” It is like that in companies and securing your environment.We overlook the obvious! Or we do the dumbest things in ourquest to secure our companies valuable intellectual property.From my role as a CIO of a manufacturing company in Chicagoand my 20+ years of experience in the IT field, I have seen it alland still nothing surprises me even to this day. I have to alwaysstand back from the controlled chaos of every day work life andreview the obvious and make sure I am not overlooking anythingthat can bite me later. It is not about spending the most money, itis about good old fashion review and double check your work. Icall it looking for the “Free Stuff” A little good old fashion hands on review never hurt anyone -Here are some basic items to review for that “obvious” “aha moment”or the “Free Stuff” that I feel if always reviewed is your first lineof defense.• Are my servers/workstations patched for all critical patches? In a conversation I had with “Special Agent Aaron VanHoff” on system patching who works “cyber matters” in the FBIChicago field office and has 12 years with the FBI on investigatingincidents where a company or persons are compromised by atechnology hack, with his permission and I quote: “Keeping systems up-to-date with the latest patches andhotfixes is a baseline principle of IT security, but unfortunatelyat times, it is a glaring oversight that we see in some victimcompanies that have been hacked. In post incident review, it isoften discovered that critical systems were left unpatched eithersince installation or over an extended period of time. With thewindow increasingly shrinking between when vulnerabilities|20|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

are discovered and when maliciousactors develop exploits for those knownvulnerabilities, it is crucial for IT securityprofessionals to work quickly within thatwindow in order to safeguard their systemsfrom known threats.” “Although staying current with system patches andupdates is only one of many facets to a healthy defense in-depthposture for system security, the practice of ‘set it and forgetit’ is more than likely exposing your company or organizationto risk that is unnecessary. An idea to keep in mind is thatthe longer you go without patching your systems, the morevulnerability you have on your networks. This is a needless riskthat can be mitigated by a well planned and executed patchmanagement process.” In post incident review, it is when they go on vacation or quit “you are stuck” and have to try often discovered that critical under stress to get a hold of them and they magically get it fixed systems were left unpatched in five minutes! Document and then document some more. Then either since installation or over after you have documented – test that documentation on someone an extended period of time who has never seen or tried the software or process and have them truly test how good the documentation is. This is an ongoing• Is my anti-virus up to date and working? Have I reviewed the process, in the end it will pay for itself in multiples of 100s.logs? Am I getting any automated emails that most vendors give ► Example I just had a network engineer leave for an opportunityfor free? Take advantage of the “FREE STUFF” closer to his home and because we documented all of his• Am I reviewing my server logs looking for log entries that pose responsibilities and tested them, his departure had a very minimalan alarm and further investigate them thoroughly? Sometimes the impact on our department because we knew and understood whatautomated programs like Solar Winds miss items like a cookie he did.crumble or morsel, which will lead to a larger event. They say • Here is a BIG ONE – PAY ATTENTION FOR THIS ONE:you are hacked six to nine months prior to the “Big Event” that “Educate your employees of their role in security of the companiestakes place. data infrastructure”• Do I have a good backup of my critical data – in the case you ► I had an experience not too long ago where a user came toare attacked are your backups working? Review the logs daily or the IT department and said he went to a supplier website fromat least weekly? Japan and when he clicked on a link from the website, his whole• The software is saying I have a good backup, “but” have you machine started to do strange things. It was changing the items ontested it? Test your backups with a restore at least monthly or his desktop to different extensions. What he had contracted wasquarterly. Like I tell my staff all the time - the one thing that ransomware and it was encrypting his entire machine and wouldwill get you fired is not having backups and making sure they have spread to the entire network, however; his quick thinkingwork! OBVIOUS!!! said “remove it from the network” he unplugged his network• Document critical software and hardware and understand cable. He was somewhat computer savvy and knew that heit thoroughly and in the case of a disaster your downtime will needed to do something and fast. We were able to redo his laptopbe minimal. Nothing I hate more in IT environment is “tribal and get him back running rather quickly. Damage very minimal.knowledge” of one person who seems to have the answers and I love this quote and it applies to my discussion in my article: “By small and simple things are great things brought to pass” – Alma Paying attention to the little things makes all the difference! Do not let “Obvious” slap you in the face, because it just may cost you your job! |21|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

ChefAutomating Unified Delivery of ApplicationsBeing a media and marketing faster with minimal risks. The firm’s Chef enterprises that are trying to drive company with unparalleled Server—a highly scalable foundation for innovation velocity through application local-to-national reach, Gannett the firm’s IT automation platform—uses development and a streamlined set ofsuccessfully connects consumers, a Domain Specific Language (DSL) to practices. “Chef is part of that patterncommunities, and businesses. write system configuration or “recipes.” and we find ourselves at the center of theCharacterized by a traditional Grouped together as a “cookbook,” these DevOps universe,” explains Barry Crist,deployment workflow with multiple recipes describe a series of resources, CEO, Chef.handoffs and manual tests, Gannettfaced challenges in maintaining\" Chef’s DevOps workflow enablesaccurate, repeatable builds. users to quickly and safely deployMoreover, several build tests changes to applications andwere often run in the wrongenvironments. Experiencing a infrastructure. It is often a time“shadow IT” situation on the consuming process to implement thedevelopment side, the client was actual pipeline that moves the codesready for a change. This is where from development to production.Seattle, WA based IT automation Apart from supporting technical challenges, the pipeline should alsoTime and again, customers have told us stimulate practices that support athat the real magic is how we transformtheir business through our partnerships DevOps workflow. Adopting an unconventional approachprovider—Chef—came into picture. The including how packages should be of integrating DevOps practicescustomer needed to rebuild a Virtual installed or services should run. Chef can with automation, Chef’s addition to thePrivate Cloud on Amazon Web Services either run in client or server mode, or in a platform—Chef Delivery—can be used for(AWS) for a development environment standalone mode named “chef solo.” As it both infrastructure and application code,that would mimic production. Though runs, Chef client queries Chef Server for providing operations and developmentnone of the tools that the client used the latest set of recipes that apply to the teams a common platform for developing,earlier were appropriate, Chef worked current node. As the server determines testing, and deploying applications. Thewell with the cloud and both Linux and the applicable recipes based on the firm’s Chef Automate also offers a full-Windows environments. In addition node’s roles, the Chef client executes stack continuous deployment pipeline,to the advantages of automation itself, the recipes—simplifying how recipes and automated testing for compliance andChef broke down the barriers between are written and offering continuous, security, including complete visibilitydevelopment and operations and helped repeatable results. into operations.them work together. This ensured The company places as muchincreased visibility, effectiveness and The Chef environment comprises importance on the Chef team and culture,speed of the development cycle. three components—Chef Server, as their technology. “Time and again, workstation and nodes. With this, customers have told us that the real Built on an open source platform, Chef Chef bridges traditional, back-office magic is how we transform their businessautomates persistent, unified delivery of infrastructure-based IT and the new, front- through our partnerships,” adds Crist.applications and infrastructure, enabling facing cloud-based IT. “There is explosion With an opportunity to become oneenterprises to deliver software much of transformation inside mainstream of the top companies in the software industry, Chef is in a constant attempt to boost innovation, velocity, and quality. Though Crist believes that there would be several big changes in the IT in 2016, the company is geared to stay abreast with added vigor that will enhance growth.|22|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

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CXO InsightsAgile Isn’t Just for Dev Anymore:Five Steps to Achieve IT Ops AgilityBy Bill Talbot, VP, Solution & Product Marketing, CA Technologies s an IT Operations professional you know that IT Ops is at the center of your organization’s success. IT can either be a factor that enhances the business or a roadblock that the business will work around to getwhat it needs. The disruptors in the app economy, such as Uber, Netflix,and others, either already are or are quickly becoming softwarecompanies. And being successful as a software shop meansbecoming more agile. But it’s not enough for a developmentorganization to embrace agility. Agility is as important for Opsas it is for Dev.What’s in it for IT Ops? Bill TalbotIn many IT organizations Dev has adopted agile methodologies Agility is as important for Opsand practices, but what’s in it for IT Ops? as it is for Dev When IT Ops is agile, it can provide the feedback Dev needs moving app economy. Expensive, multi-year projects based onto enable continuous improvement of the organization’s apps and waterfall development practices often miss the mark becauseservices. Agile management enables shared visibility between technology and customers’ needs change significantly from whenDev and Ops, eliminating key areas of contention and potential projects were first scoped.delay. Agility helps legacy IT transition more quickly to deliverthe services and apps that customers value. You can still do big projects with Agile but you do them in small chunks. Keeping project work manageable allows you to But IT Ops face challenges on the road to becoming agile. The easily adjust as needed. Testing and validating your solution withIT infrastructure is rapidly becoming more dynamic, distributed your customers on a continual basis ensures you are providing theand complex, often leaving IT Ops teams with a mix of legacy solution they need.and newer IT systems to manage using disparate, non-integratedtools. Finding and fixing bottlenecks can seem like the proverbialneedle in a haystack. New digital services and apps are deliveredfaster than ever by agile development teams for IT Ops to deployand support. While increasing demands and expectations requireIT Ops to be agile, it may seem impossible to find the time andresources needed to make that transformation. Despite these challenges, it’s worth the effort. Andtransitioning to an agile IT Ops organization is not as dauntingas it may first appear. Following these five steps can help youtransition and increase your odds of success:Step 1: Convince Stakeholders that the Shift to AgileWill Be Worth It; Make a Compelling CaseIT is no longer a back office operation, nor is the legacy waterfallmethod of new service delivery still effective in today’s fast-|24|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Generate consensus by establishing initial projects with a and go their separate ways. Maintain shared visibility andbroad steering committee that includes customers. Then leave transparency to enable the collaboration and continuous deliveryyour transparency comfort zone and make the project visible of DevOps.to all. Developers will see for themselves how their app is performingStep 2: Build a Project Team that Includes Customers and shared visibility will greatly benefit troubleshooting as they(Internal or External) and Establish Trust gain experience with the app.With a clear goal in mind, build to need. Don’t let perfection be Conduct a project retrospective to incorporate lessonsthe enemy of progress. Perfect, complete plans can delay projects learned into future efforts. Even if the process wasn’t perfect, bygetting off the ground, but you do need enough clarity to start and delivering value in smaller chunks and fine-tuning along the waytest. As the results emerge, fine tuning will take place. Iterative via customer feedback, you minimized risk and enabled quicktesting and customer validation is important to the agile process corrective action, both keys to success. Most importantly, youand results in a solution that really addresses a customer need. didn’t deliver a solution totally off the mark – a real risk with legacy waterfall delivery methods. Also, having a single management system that is shared andvisible to all stakeholders is critical. Plan, track and measure your Agility in Actionwork across teams, with real-time visibility via a single sourceof truth. A good example of an enterprise that is making the agile transformation is Swisscom, the leading telecommunicationsStep 3: Limit Your WIP (Work In Progress) company in Switzerland, offering mobile communications, fixed networks, Internet and digital TV to residential customersSet reasonable expectations for the functionality to be delivered and businesses.by any task team. Avoid “feature creep.” In 2012 Swisscom was gearing up to update their IPTV Focus on the highest value/smallest chunks of work with the platform to release TV 2.0. They wanted to deliver this platformgreatest business benefit, sometimes called the MVP (minimal quickly and be flexible during development to be able to respondviable product). Small chunks of work, tested along the way and to shifts in the market. To simplify the coordination of work theydelivered rapidly keeps you moving in the right direction. consolidated their entire TV value stream under one roof, along with making the associated shifts in organization and culture. Remember that the goal is to solve a customer problem, sohaving your customer on the team keeps the focus on track. By collocating business owners, software developers and operations, Swisscom had established strong cross-functionalStep 4: Automate Deployments and teams and created a working DevOps model. In just doing “whatRelease Management made sense” and after much of this work was done, they realized they had paved the ground for agile methodology, which theyTake the time to ensure effective deployment of any new product then adopted. With the rapid and successful introduction of TVor service. This is a key function of the Ops role and an essential 2.0 they recently became market leader in the Swiss TV market,measure of Ops success. providing service to 30 percent of households – and growing, being one of the first countries in the world to introduce Ultra Automated deployments go a long way towards deliveringa project on time and without mishaps that can result from a HD live TV.casual hand-off. The requirement to specifycomponents and prerequisites, all parts of an Realizing the Full Benefitautomated release process, eliminates finger-pointing and leads to smooth delivery. By incorporating agile practices into IT Operations, your organization can begin realizing Also important is an automated rollback the full benefits of an agile transformation. With thecapability, just in case. Many automated Dev and Ops teams operating in sync you achievedeployment solutions include the rollbackfeature for a quick resolution of a failed the real benefit of DevOps - continuousdeployment. improvement of apps and services.Step 5: Share and Evaluate In addition, shared visibilitythe Results between Dev and Ops enabled by aOnce a new app or single management system goesservice is up and a long way in eliminating troublerunning, it is not the spots. The bottom line is that youtime for Dev and Ops can more quickly deliver theto declare victory services and apps that customers want and value. |25|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

IntiguaAccelerating DevOps for Enterprise-Grade Apps: It’s All in the AgentsDevOps is about speed and Intigua Agent Manager’s intuitive agility. But as DevOps matures user interface enables easy automation and includes mission-critical without coding. It deploys andapplications, it also requires even more configures the backend and agent sides of management tools based on DevOps-tools, such as configuration, monitoring, defined policies. These policy-based controls ensure correct configurationdata protection, logs analytics, new and apply appropriate tools automatically to each server based on its location andsecurity tools and backup, to make sure use. “The role-based access controls allow teams to use a centralized console,apps are secure, in compliance and without needing to log in to endpoints,” says Toren.function as required. Shai Toren We are excitedThe resulting challenge, according to about empowering any environment—on-premises and in IT departments to cloud—to support DevOps’ distributedShai Toren, GM, Intigua, is that each of join the DevOps\" set of applications. revolution by usingthese tools requires a rich set of agents our solution to Recently, the company launched radically simplify, Intigua Tool Overview, which enablesto ensure they work as prescribed. “And accelerate and system admins to get an instant report automate the about tool status: where it’s deployed, theagents, as DevOps professionals are lifecycle of their state of each agent and actionable data on management and how to close any gaps.beginning to find out, are a time-sink security tool agents Intigua has helped many enterprisesto manage, especially once apps have To protect application performance, dramatically accelerate DevOps, while Intigua manages agent resource reducing costs, increasing agilitybeen moved to the run stage, and can consumption. “Intigua’s throttling and better aligning sys admins with algorithm limits the agent’s CPU and application owners. For instance,dramatically slow both the DevOps memory utilization when applications a technology services company are running, but allows agents to run implemented Intigua Agent Manager toprocess and the applications,” says Toren. freely when there is no contention,” enhance its configuration management says Toren. The solution integrates with and cloud orchestration solutions. “ByWhile companies have started using centrally overseeing all agents across their physical, virtual, private, and publicorchestration products to automate much clouds, the client accelerated delivery by 66 percent, simplified migration byof the DevOps workflow, most solutions 87 percent and significantly improved customer satisfaction,” states Toren.don’t address these tools’ unique “We are excited about empoweringarchitectures and lifecycles. Intigua, IT departments to join the DevOps revolution without any re-staffing, bya software company based in Boston, using our solution to radically simplify, accelerate and automate the lifecycle ofMA, is the first company to do so. It management and security tool agents,” concludes Toren.keeps DevOps streamlined and agile byabstracting the complexities of tools awayfrom the DevOps toolchain, acceleratingthe whole process.Its flagship, out-of-the-box solution,Intigua Agent Manager, providescentralized and detailed visibility intoeach tool’s agent status and behavior,and orchestrates, automates, and controlsthe entire agent lifecycle, includingcontinuous monitoring, reconfiguration,consumption throttling, andsynchronization. “Intigua’s proprietary,non-intrusive container technologyallows agents to run without interferingwith business applications,” adds Toren.|26|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

[ [CXO InsightsWhen Do - IT-Yourself isNot Good Enough?By Scott Cleland, Sr. Director of Product Marketing atHGST, a Western Digital Corporation brand he millennial age is upon us. It is the age of ever increasing data ingest (2.5 Quintillion bytes of data per day) and ever increasing demands for intelligence and knowledge derived from this data for business line managers, CIOs and COOs. How many DIY projects has been the root cause to rolling out intelligence?, and new services on-time and cost effectively? How many have cause endless delays in compatibility and interoperability across the various hardware and software elements? The pendulum swings between investing in DIY and using converged, shrink-wrapped systems to meet demands in the cloud storage markets (as-a-service, backup targets, or archiving systems). It is not always easy to see when the right approach is the ultimate correct path. DI YScott Cleland Cloud, cloud, cloud. Yes. We know it’s all about the cloud. More and more data is created and stored through public, private and hybrid clouds or delivered back through the cloud to customers, and employees via any and all applications you can possibly dream of. Let’s talk about the changing landscape in IT when it comes to cloud storage. This is really a dramatic transformation and worth pen to paper time. We have heard the term bimodal from Gartner. ‘Bimodal IT is the practice of managing two separate, coherent modes of IT delivery, one focused on stability and the other on agility. Mode 1 is traditional and sequential, emphasizing safety and accuracy. |27|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Mode 2 is exploratory and nonlinear, emphasizing agility In Walks Object Storageand speed.’Within this definition of bimodal is the concept of DevOps. Cloud storage is The millennial approach to scale and cost and need not be a DIY project. Turnkey solutions provide the toolsDefinition of DevOps for the agile and lean DevOps teams to derive their respective outcomes effectively, on budget and will certainly be a tantalizingDevOps is a new term emerging from the collision of two major new approach to business lines and stake holder constituents.related trends. The first is called “agile system administration” or Enterprises as well as storage service providers should carefully“agile operations.” It sprang from applying newer Agile and Lean assess and choose which vendor (or vendors) will successfullyapproaches to operations work. The second is a much expanded support and provide scale capabilities to their IT infrastructure.understanding of the value of collaboration between development Eliminating complexity is the key to find your path to the cloud.and operations staff throughout all stages of the development Fundamentally these items should be front and center:lifecycle when creating and operating a service, and how importantoperations has become in our increasingly service-oriented world.Build vs Buy To get to a successful path a cloud IT organization should eliminate asThe reason I have defined these two terms is to amplify the notion many variables as possible to make thethat the IT landscape has evolved (oris evolving) to meet the predictable element—predictabledemands of our new digital landscape. ♦ Simple to Deploy - Power and network connections are all When deciding whether to build or buy storage to meet these you neednew requirements it is important to educate and get operational ♦ Limitless Scale - Grow your storage in line with yourbuy-in from many influencers within the operations of a large capacity needsenterprise organization. ♦ Archive Resiliency - Preservation of data through advanced high integrity storage In the transformation of enterprise IT from traditional SAN/ ♦ Highest Efficiency - Highest capacity perNAS/DAS models to cloud, this notion of Agile and Lean is front square foot and lowest power per TBand center. This can apply to bringing new services to ♦ Highly Secure - End-to-endmarket or bringing a new application or software encryption security for data-product to market consistently and with a high in-flight and data-at-restlevel of repeatability and predictability. ♦ Cloud Availability - Survive an entire data center The key question to ask yourself is “how outage with geographicalfast is my data growing and can my distribution of datavendors keep up with my demands The integration offor increased capacity and/or HGST's advanced objectperformance” and… “What happens storage software provideswhen something goes wrong?” the foundation for a resilient object storage platform that If you cannot answer either $ delivers the highest level ofof these questions then DIY data durability in the industry,may not be a good path for surviving an entire data-you as it will limit your center outage when deployedability to be fast, agile across multiple sites. Utilizing the most advanced 8TBand lean to meet newdemands your business second-generation HelioSeal hard drives, coupled with itspartners (or customers) vertically integrated hardware, the scale-out object storage systemare placing on you. delivers the performance, efficiency and scale required for public and private cloud, with extremely low $/TB and watts/TB. To get to a successfulpath a cloud ITorganization it shouldeliminate as many variables as possible to make thepredictable element—predictable. If you do not take the necessarysteps to fully understand what you are getting into the results willamount to too much “heavy lifting” and compound the projectexecution and most likely produce an unfavorable result with apoor foundation.|28|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

REAN CloudSecuring and Automating DevOps EnvironmentsWhen entrepreneurs Sri respond rapidly to any unplanned service REAN Cloud has helped various\" Vasireddy, Rupa Vasireddy, disruptions or unresolved degradation in organizations find the right path in and Sekhar Puli founded the environment,” adds Butler. their cloud and software developmentREAN Cloud in the fall of 2013, little journey. Ellucian, a firm in the education Unwanted errors are bound to occur technology space, moved its applicationsdid they know how fast their company if the cloud environments and DevOps processes lack reliable tools, which can Our Managed Serviceswould become an integral part of the jeopardize the security of the overall platform leverages infrastructure. “Our Managed Services automation to adaptDevOps and Amazon Web Services platform leverages automation to adapt to dynamic DevOps to dynamic DevOps ecosystems and ecosystems and ensure(AWS) revolution. In the past few ensure industry standards are maintained industry standards across our customer’s fleets—tagging, are maintained acrossyears, REAN Cloud has exceeded all backups, and compliance scores,” says our customer’s fleets Butler. The company also has a uniqueexpectations of IT organizations with its combination of skills and expertise to to AWS with the support of REAN Cloud. help clients implement DevSecOps to Based on their shared success, Ellucianagile approach toward cloud migration, engaged with REAN Cloud again to Ben Butler evaluate and transform their deploymentcreating an opportunity for development and integration to adopt a cloud-based make security testing an integral part agile engineering DevOps process. REANand operations units to work as a team. of the CI/CD process. “REAN Cloud Cloud supported Ellucian by developing aims at using DevSecOps on AWS cloud a comprehensive CI/CD pipeline withAmid these circumstances, Herndon, to continuously improve and secure applications running on Amazon Elastic processes in a more granular way,” Compute Cloud. Eventually, EllucianVA based REAN Cloud is enabling adds Butler. The combination of REAN leveraged the DevOps Pipeline, built Cloud’s IP, CI/CD, and MGS effectively on AWS, to deploy new code that wasenterprises to manage complex and manages a client’s DevOps and cloud automatically tested and used as machine operations, while enabling them to focus images, across multiple environments.highly scalable architectures through on their business and core competencies. Having recently closed its first roundits Managed Services (MGS) and of funding, REAN Cloud is determined to further extend its growth trajectory.Continuous Integration/Continuous “We acquired Opex Software which will fortify our already strong suite ofDeployment (CI/CD) pipeline automation. Infrastructure Automation Deployment and Testing capabilities,” says Butler.“We use DevOps and MGS offerings to Through such ambitious steps, REAN Cloud aims to strengthen its leadershipprovision infrastructure for our clients, position and brand awareness as DevOps and AWS Cloud Experts in the cloudsecure workloads, and process models arena worldwide.for building and deploying apps,” saysBen Butler, VP, Partners, Marketing, andBusiness Development, REAN Cloud.For REAN Cloud, it is all abouteliminating the walls between teamsand driving maximum value from AWS.Being an AWS Premier ConsultingPartner with DevOps Competency andaudited Managed Services Partner,REAN Cloud fosters transparency in thedeployment of software and unleashesa continuous innovation pipeline fororganizations looking for quality andfeature-rich applications. With REANCloud and its CI/CD service, softwareapplications can be developed in quicksuccessions, without risking the resiliencyof the solution. Even if bugs are detected,REAN Cloud empowers developers to fixthe issues quickly and focus on buildingthe chief application capabilities. “Ourmonitoring tools allow organizations to |29|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

CIOInsightsCloud ServicesSupporting IT GoalsBy Derrick A Butts, CIO, Truth Initiative t is important to understand how cloud services can support one of those technology services strongly considered to better IT performance goals and how end-users, both on staff and support greater access and availability to stored information. in the industry, will embrace the transition. A key to success is building consensus with senior leadership about how to Our effort to refresh our approach to technology based on thebolster secure access to corporate information while increasing strategic plan, also coincided with a move to a new building. Theoperational efficiency and productivity in daily business. move in particular gave us an opportunity to research the benefits A few years ago, Truth Initiative executives wanted to of cloud services. We presented the pros and cons of moving toreview and improve their IT delivery to meet the organization’s cloud services to our senior leadership team.strategic plan objectives. They turned to an independent ITauditing company to identify productivity, security, and service The pros significantly outweighed the cons. We were ableimprovements that would meet their objectives for fiscal year to lower capital and operating costs to support and maintain2016 and beyond. As a result of the audit, the organization various user platforms, including email, collaboration toolshired a CIO tore-engineer an IT department with performance and connectionless tools for conference rooms. We were ablegoals focused on security, innovation and alignment with the to increase access, collaboration and security through theorganization’s strategic mission. standardization of the applications on cloud services. Finally, We looked at cloud offerings and how well they would we were able to increase the experience of our end-users whilealign with the strategic plan. We viewed technology and on-line being more secure. In short, we enabled the team to work smarter,services as drivers to help increase the ease with which we fulfill not harder.the organization’s mission. The utilization of cloud services was At the same time, we were not 100 percent ready to jump exclusively into cloud services. Instead, we took a hybrid approach. We eased into cloud services, knowing that it would|30|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

provide business continuity and overlap to the internal IT Derrick A Buttsservices that already existed. We looked at email cloud solutions,application suites that integrated conference room scheduling and The utilization of cloudvisitor notification tools that were innovative and interoperable. services was one of those technology services strongly Our previous system used individual applications andplatforms—an email server on the premises in Washington, D.C., considered to betterwith a back-up server in Chicago, and a variety of document support greater accesssharing tools and other collaboration platforms. Our conference and availability to storedroom scheduler was a separate app with no interoperability withan open architecture email platform, collaboration document informationsharing or video conferencing. Consolidation of applicationsand tools into cloud-based platforms allowed us to achieve both The ease of using innovative cloud technologies and servicesintegration and standardization. The integration of new tools helped to promote greater productivity and IT delivery satisfactionwith embedded security and services into existing applications among our employees. Since the majority of the new technologiesreduced the learning curve and users would not have another we utilize are cloud applications that are consolidated into servicesapplication or tool to keep track of on their computer. Shortly our users are familiar with, they felt more confident embracingafter the completion of our technology refresh, we were able to the cloud services and tools.see some significant changes and benefits. With the consolidationof collaboration tools and move to cloud-based systems, we saw The approach we used should be easily applied or replicateda 35 percent reduction in monthly recurring costs and about a 20 across industries. However, the extent which cloud services willpercent reduction in technology resources and spending. be embraced by senior leadership and end-users will vary. And results in terms of overall IT operations, productivity and cost Implementation of cloud innovations also helped to meet the IT savings should vary based upon an organization’s strategic plan.performance requirements of senior management. The integrationof all new applications, security, technologies and services was ateam effort. All selected cloud technologies supported a foundationfor a cable-free and paperless environment. The layering of ourapplications ensured secure business continuity across platformsfor availability and connectivity from virtually anywhere. Finally, enhancing the experiences of our end users startedwith providing staff with laptops and docking stations, untetheringthem from desktop devices. In an open space environment withsecure wireless services throughout the facility, the flexibilityof using a laptop or mobile device provided end-users theability to move around and connect wirelessly to business tools,presentation devices, and collaborate spaces in real-time. The flexibility extends beyond our offices. Whether theend-user is in our headquarters or away from the office, wemaintain a strong level of security using Active Directory (AD)authentication synching, while pursuing two-factor-authentication(2FA) using smart phones, with our cloud-based applicationsversus establishing a VPN tunnel to access Intranet data-basedapplications and services. This was important, as the majority ofour users have smart phones to access cloud services and conductbusiness away from the office. Access to our IT trouble ticketingsystem is easier with cloud access and allows trouble tickets tobe generated from any mobile device or browser. We continuedto expand cloud-based services with virtualized applications toinclude Fax, One-Number Mobility functions, and using availablemobile Wi-Fi access versus a cellular data plan to make andreceive business calls through the Web cloud. |31|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

SaltStackOrchestrating ComplexInfrastructures to PerfectionThe urge to stay ahead in the game has led businesses \"daemon. By doing so, SaltStack prevents untimely configuration to adopt innovative IT technologies to improve their change, thus helping the operations teams to smooth out productivity. Burgeoning IT innovation has led to spiraling aberrations in the production environment automatically.IT complexity spurred by globally distributed data centers, neweropen source standards, cloud, and DevOps. Aligned to With these capabilities, SaltStack has been helping severalthe modern computing needs, DevOps is becoming large organizations including Rackspace, CloudFlare,the onramp for companies to build software Adobe, HP, and NASA. HATech, a DevOpsquickly through seamless collaboration consulting services company, planned to build anbetween the development (dev) and operations OpenStack private cloud for the highly regulated(ops) teams. But lack of automation, siloed gaming industry, challenges were aplenty inand legacy IT environments, and subpar tools the form of complex deployment and releaseand workflows stifle DevOps adoption among workflows, need for regular software updates,enterprises. With capabilities including systems and the dearth of automation platform fororchestration, automation, and configuration orchestrating multiple servers across Windowsmanagement, SaltStack supports DevOps teams and Linux platforms. SaltStack was taken onboardto simplify distributed cloud infrastructure while for their capabilities in systems management andboosting collaboration between the dev and ops teams. configuration automation. With an intuitive solution DevOps companies leverage SaltStack Enterprise software powered by SaltStack’s DevOps orchestration prowess,to orchestrate easy movement of code into production. By HATech has realized its first OpenStack private cloud for thestreamlining complex infrastructures, the companies achieve gaming industry.application delivery and optimal business service. Furthermore,SaltStack aids in the deployment and configuration of dynamic SaltStack prevents untimely configurationapplications and better functioning of the infrastructure to change, thus helping the operationsachieve continuous delivery. The SaltStack platform supports teams to smooth out aberrations in theworkflow automation tools such as Puppet, Chef, Docker, and production environment automaticallyJenkins for better application orchestration. SaltStack plays a key role in the orchestration of multi-cloud Aligned to today’s complex cloud computing environments, infrastructure, business applications and services. With openSaltstack supports DevOps practices by providing systems source making headway into the business world, SaltStack’smanagement products and services to enterprises at scale. Built open source software, Salt Open, is leveraged by organizationson a remote execution engine, SaltStack delivers efficient cloud to manage data center and application environments in anorchestration and configuration management by having complete automated fashion. Furthermore, SaltStack’s support servicescontrol over distributed infrastructure encompassing software, provide dedicated and prioritized access to the Salt brain trust forresources, and the data. The SaltStack Enterprise software any Salt implementation.delivers an exclusive API layer built to provide easy and efficientintegration with proprietary third-party technologies, existing With SaltStack Enterprise 5.0 on the cards, the company isinfrastructure investments, or line-of-business applications. bullish about its intelligent infrastructure orchestration, event- driven IT automation prowess. For the future, the company looks The company has introduced its new software, Boron, which forward to expanding its support for even more platforms as itenhances the control capabilities of the Salt systems management strives to automate the management of large infrastructure asplatform through greater reliability and support for more cloud well as complex and mission-critical software.platforms. With intuitive features such as Salt Minion blackout,the software deals with inadvertent changes in the configurationby disabling all remote execution commands on Salt Minion|32|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

CXO InsightsGetting to DevOps Nirvana—Putting DevOps ManagementFront and CenterBy Eric Hoffman, VP & Oleg Chunikhin, Chief Software Architect, Technical Partner, EastBanc Technologies he adoption of DevOps processes is often touted as the and unifying mission-critical IT functions (such as backup and cure-all solution for silo-centric enterprise IT cultures disaster recovery) organizations will save money, and ensure where business units and teams operate as individual business continuity. entities, and processes and information are kept close tothe chest. Yet the promise of DevOps—that of an agile relationship However, it takes awareness and exploration to reach thisbetween developers and the rest of IT–is still a complicated one state of nirvana. Most deployments are architected in uniquethat continues to pose release management challenges. ways. Re-architecting your infrastructure is painful, costly, and Today’s IT environments are complex and heterogeneous. fraught with risk. At the same time, a lack of repeatable solutionsEven in the DevOps world, these IT systems must still be for infrastructure-level problems is still a source of inefficiency.monitored for compliance and availability, secured and scaled,load balanced and configured, without interruption. So re-architecture is off the table. And without an off-the- shelf, standardized solution, what are the options?Pre-DevOps Habits Hamper Success A number of trends are emerging that aim to tackle thisThe problem for the DevOps enterprise is that there’s no universal, discrepancy–but they come with a big fat disclaimer—noneeasy set of tools to address these essentials. With a team mainly check all the boxes. Let’s take a look.focused on development, it’s almost impossible to manage DevOpssoftware problems out-of-the-box. Implemented incorrectly or Cluster Management Softwarepoorly managed, many pre-DevOps habits have the risk of beingcarried over. As problems arise, such as release management Cluster management software, such as Docker Swarm andglitches or broken disaster recovery processes, they are Kubernetes, is developing as an important and required componentdealt with then and there or ignored until they reach of DevOps architecture – they also play especially well withcritical mass. Moreover, it is a time-consumingprocess that is repeated again and again. cloud technologies, but aren’t contingent on it. By opening a way to abstract out common It’s a painful cycle that gnaws awayat the very promise of DevOps–the aspects of software operations, such asability to meet customer demand for backups, efficiencies are introduced intoservices through agile, fast, and stable highly complex systems deploymentworkflows that ensure the optimal and management tasks.running of software, with minimal glitches. Containerization and PaaSIt’s Time to Give for SaaS-like `DevOpsDevOps Management its Due ManagementInstead of focusing on manual fixes, the Another trend is driven by theforward-thinking enterprise must put convergence of IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS.DevOps management front and center on As organizations seek the flexibilitythe radar. By streamlining, standardizing, of IaaS, along with SaaS-like time- to-market, new DevOps approaches are evolving that satisfy this need. One such approach combines containerization technology and PaaS to provide SaaS- |33|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Oleg Chunikhin Quick Action Can Help CIOs Realize Bringing it all together, a solution that DevOps Upside combines best practices and modern open Instead of focusing source DevOps, containerization, and on manual fixes, It’s important to recognize that there are cloud technologies provides a powerful the forward- no quick fixes here and no one-size fits all platform for robust, production quality, thinking enterprise approach. But recognizing the problem, elastic, scalable infrastructural services must put DevOps before it’s too late, can help smart CIOs (security, backup, disaster recovery, management front realize the true upsides of DevOps. logging and monitoring, scaling up or and center on down, portability, continuous delivery, the radar You can’t buy DevOps. Yes, there cost optimization, and more). are tools and products that help, like thelike characteristics for custom software ones discussed above. But every quick It’s a smart approach that(faster service delivery, out-of-the-box fix tool or solution must be integrated to compliments and unifies your DevOpsproduction quality, reliability security, back-end systems and compatible with efforts—streamlining custom softwaredisaster recovery, etc.). existing environments—something that’s development and delivery and giving difficult in increasingly complex hybrid your IT team the freedom to build great By reducing the need for custom environments. Everything must work software and deliver business value. Withsoftware development, lowering together to create that seamless, unified inherent flexibility of the cloud and openmaintenance costs, and streamlining DevOps experience. source, you can also supercharge yourpreviously complex approaches, the SaaS DevOps automation with the option ofand PaaS cluster management market It’s not all doom and gloom though. pre-packaged, production-ready, openis advancing to satisfy the need for out- Many CIOs are exploring and investigating source software components such asof-the-box quality functionality while DevOps. They’re uncovering ways that identity management, single sign-on,relieving the pressure on DevOps teams. DevOps concepts and challenges can fit business intelligence and analytics, dataIt’s an approach that also introduces in their organizations. They’re looking to storage, etc.—all of which can be readilyautomation (across the board). With many eliminate the burden of non-repeatable integrated into existing infrastructures.of the DevOps processes now automated, cycles, and strike a balance between theorganizations will also realize cost demands of the business and the need Eric Hoffmanreductions as less expertise is required for to operate in a compliant, stable, andover-arching DevOps workflows. secure environment. So while the future may seem uncertain, it’s important to recognize and The trick is to act now before such co- leverage the transformative power of interdependencies become unmanageable. DevOps. Done well (and managed with Before processes are broken and critical forethought), DevOps breaks down the systems are out of synch. walls that stall application roll-out, drives more productive collaboration, and puts Supercharge your DevOps Efforts products into the hands of your customers, before the competition is even out of Where does the future lie? With no one- testing mode. size-fits-all, the best advice is to look for a solution that is based on modern leading technologies, that unifies and simplifies containerized software management. A PaaS solution can provide many benefits because it provides pluggable infrastructure services that are extensible and ready- to-use, making it easier to configure new services, introduce development efficiencies, and take care of the majority of operational concerns that arise on the road to DevOps. DevOps automation and cluster management technologies also augment cloud strategy and multiply its benefits by an order of magnitude.|34|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

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[ [CXO InsightsThe Devops Culture ChangeGoes Way Beyond ITBy Raman Sapra, VP & Global Leader, Dell Digital Business Services Raman Sapra evOps got its name from its inclusion of IT Operations participants on application development teams. That’s unfortunate, because Dev + Ops is not only what’s least interesting about DevOps, it’s also its most transient characteristic: Companies like Pivotal, RedHat and Chef are providing so much automation for provisioning, integration, isolation, and deployment, that Operations’ role in DevOps is shrinking on a daily basis. What the name does hint at is that at its core DevOps isn’t about processes, or techniques, or tools. Talk to anyone who’s been through the DevOps transformation and you’ll hear the same thing: Before it’s anything else, DevOps is a change in culture. For those who have been through it, this change in culture is often so permeating that articulating just what it means can be difficult. Start with a definition. While anthropologists have several definitions of culture, and consultants use the term in several different ways, in the end culture means “how we do things around here.” It’s the shared set of hidden assumptions, unwritten rules, and attitude about things that gives the word “we” some bite. For DevOps teams, how we do things around here means: ► Collaboration– This was the first DevOps breakthrough. App Dev and IT Operations usually exist in a state of uneasy truce, with App Dev trying to change the production environment by promoting new code to production, and IT Operations trying to keep the production environment stable and prevent frequent changes. DevOps turned this hostile DevOps culture can’t succeed in traditional businesses|36|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

relationship into collaboration, and is now the most prominent of good enough,” which is the point where testing an idea iselement of the DevOps culture. superior to analyzing it.► Automation– The usual approach to business decision- Speed might, in fact, literally rule the business, if executivemaking when it comes to automation is to perform some form suite strategists make the OODA loop (for “observe, orient,of return-on-investment analysis, which presupposes that cost decide, act”) the centerpiece of business strategy. Even if itminimization is the be all and end all of process optimization. The falls short of that, businesses with a DevOps culture will, at aDevOps way is to automate everything that can be automated, not minimum,replace “Has this reached the point where we haveto only automate everything whose automation passes a financial no choice” with “Is there any reason we can’t proceed?” as theROI hurdle. Everything. That’s because speed rules. trigger for important decisions and actions.► Speed rules– DevOps is all about speed in both of its Business managers that insist on yet one more analysismeanings – reducing cycle time and increasing throughput. It’s before acting will find that increasingly, their peers who haveabout each requested change producing value faster than before, participated in DevOps projects will ask them a simple question:and increasing IT’s overall capacity to deliver changes. Among What if Amazon made decisions this way? Google? Facebook?DevOps devotees, cost-cutting is nice, but any false economies Think they’d lead their industries if they did?that slow a project down are off the table. Beyond this, the DevOps culture of collaboration and inclusion► Quality is more than the absence of reinforces a trend that’s been incubating for years and is finallybugs– Standard practice in App Dev teamsis that quality is defined as bug-free code, a coming into its own: a change in managementbug being software that doesn’t do what it’s culture that begins with the recognitionsupposed to do. Among DevOps developers, that there is no such thing as an IT projectpoorly structured code that violates good – every project is about business changeprogramming practices is low-quality code, and improvement.whether or not it runs and yields the right It extends to recognize that very fewresults. business changes can happen without changes to the supporting► Recognizing the exalted state of information technology.“good enough” Quality is one thing. Its logical end-point is thatNeedless insistence on “just one more test” is something else “Business/IT alignment” is no longerentirely– a pointless nod to the timid that violates the speed-rules good enough. Business/IT alignmentrule. is a relic of a time when IT was supposed to be run like a business – a This DevOps culture can’t succeed in traditional businesses.It can’t because businesses that have these characteristics won’t supplier of technology to its “internal customers.”let IT develop the DevOps way – for the rest of the business, the But if there’s no such thing as an IT project because allDevOps culture just isn’t how we do things around here, the waywe do things around here including an intense emphasis on cost- projects are about business change, then IT has to be a peer, acutting, excessive risk aversion, and organizational siloes with partner, and a collaborator in making those changes happen.high walls and wide moats – the polar opposite of collaboration. And in particular IT has to be a partner in creating value for Which means companies that want IT to successfully the company’s real paying customers.implement DevOps will find themselves adopting equivalentcultural traits, in particular: The habit of collaboration, and all Business/IT alignment? Hardly. Business/IT integration is thethe silo-busting it implies; the automation of anything that can wave of the future.be automated, not mere process enablement; and speed ruling thebusiness too. No, make that the wave of the present, where the highest level of effectiveness is a collaboration of business, development And an additional point: In DevOps businesses, the culture and operations, working in a “BusDevOps” partnership –onereorients from slow and steady to quick and agile. DevOps that moves beyond a “paint-by-numbers” approach to focus onbusinesses recognize that failing fast and failing forward is a creating a unique and superior customer experience with thecompetitive advantage – they recognize their own “exalted state marketplace. DevOps is a handy way to make and deliver software, especially the software that delivers a brilliant customer experience across all of the channels customers use to communicate and do business. But compared to the culture change DevOps can drive into the business, fast software delivery probably pales in importance. |37|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

SysdigBringing Visibility intoContainerized EnvironmentsFor Sysdig’s Founder and CEO, DevOps can monitor not only containers, understand communication patterns at a Loris Degioanni, the key to but also the software behavior from inside glance; automatically collect the correct successfully deploying the next the containers as well. Sysdig’s container- metrics via application auto-discovery;generation of applications directly native technology also provides deep and detect and alert on anomalies. insight into underlying infrastructure:intersects with the move to container- hosts, filesystems, networks, and clouds Monitoring systems should be flexible all can be monitored with just a single enough to adapt to different environments.based infrastructure. By developing a point of instrumentation. “Our system can automatically detect when new applications are run, or existingcontainer-native monitoring platform, Sysdig’s technology resonates with microservices are scaled. This automates customers in the public cloud as well as the complex process of deployingSysdig positioned itself at the intersection those who operate their own data centers. integrations in dynamic, constantly “We offer Sysdig monitoring as a cloud changing containerized environments,”of three major trends—containerization service and as software for clients’ private says Degioanni.of applications, the infrastructural Sysdig matches “We work with customers closely to the technical deploy Sysdig, tuning it to their needs,shift to public and private clouds, and design of\" and even training users on container best containers to practices,” adds Degioanni. “In all, we’remicroservices based re-architecture give DevOps focused on end-to-end simplicity and teams complete productivity for our customers, and areof software. visibility into willing to go to great lengths to ensure containerized their happiness.” For example, DegioanniContainers hold huge potential applications and highlights a case study which involves a microservices major telecommunications company thatin fostering agility in software was building its newest service offerings cloud,” explains Degioanni. “In both using Docker and Kubernetes as keydevelopment processes, but fall short cases, we provide a robust set of analytics, infrastructure components. Initially, the dashboarding, and alerting features client tried to build an in-house monitoringwhen it comes to operating, monitoring, that save time and money by ensuring system, but the technical challenges high software performance of your own associated with Docker containers madeand troubleshooting services. “From software.” The monitoring service can this approach untenable. In response, automatically create topologies of an entire Sysdig quickly enabled the client toa DevOps perspective, you need deep environment, enabling organizations to build a robust monitoring plan around its microservices, with deep actionablevisibility across containers rather than data for the applications running inside their containers.just being aware that they exist in your For the future, Sysdig is gearing toenvironment,” highlights Degioanni. expand its footprint across the globe to better support its customer base. TheSysdig’s core technology, company is also adding new features to assist organizations in seamlesslyContainerVision, gives developers managing large enterprise and microservices environments.visibility into what is happeninginside containers without invasiveinstrumentation or manual tuning.“ContainerVision matches thetechnical design of containers to giveDevOps teams complete visibility intotheir containerized applications andinfrastructure,” says Degioanni. Theplatform integrates with orchestratorslike Kubernetes, Mesos, and Swarm tointerpret infrastructure data through thelens of the organizations’ microservices.“This approach excels at containermonitoring where legacy platforms fail,and at the same time, makes monitoringapplications and microservices simplerand more robust,” adds Degioanni. Byinstrumenting the system calls of hosts,|38|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

[ [CXO InsightsAsk Your Managers WhatThey Really NeedBy AshLea Allberry, VP-Operations, Nanonation, Inc. f managing technical people management skills AshLea Allberry personnel were an exact and the ability to connect science, we would have with brilliant minds equals a thoroughly enjoying getting to know them is a requirement of the all been taught how to happy team. technical leadership role. It does not matter if you are managing ado it in our management wait staff or the most intellectually astute software developer; youcourses and studies. The fact As our organization must love people and really get to know them at a personal level.is managing brilliant minds has been transformed into Smart people can figure out the paths to success in a technicalis quite difficult. Frankly, a very desirable workplace, environment, but the best of the best, understand people.from a software development what we have found is somestandpoint, I have only of our most experienced When I first started working at Nanonation, the mostfound two people who do and technical resources are intimidating managerial task was taking on the management oftechnology and organizational attracted to advancement a founder of the company. Talk about an uphill battle. However,management equally well. but not organizational there was one secret sauce that made it all work out better than While it may seem unfair management. What they ever expected. I had to understand and really believe in histo say technical folks just desire most in a senior level value to the company. There is not one introduction that goes bycannot manage people and role is mentorship of junior where I do not acknowledge his unbelievable talent and serviceprocesses, the reality is, most developers and similar to the company. The reality is, he has a lot more experiencedo not want to do it anyway. professionals. It tends to fillIn Nanonation’s case, it turns the career progression needout, figuring out how to as well as build a strong team.motivate a team, managing After nearly ten years withutilization and scheduling the company, one of our mostand approving time off, is senior developers found lightnot nearly as interesting as in what was a bit of a slumpcreating software for one of in his career by increasingthe world’s most recognized the amount of technicalshoe brands. Where that mentorship he provided to aleaves us is, we must find team of Windows developers.individuals who understand Today, he is more motivatedthe intricacies of technical and happier than ever andpeople and who have the not only is it fun to see, theaptitude to at least understand company is benefitting fromwhat they are saying. It is the transformation.actually quite difficult to findthat person as well, but when Perhaps one of the mostyou do, you are set. Solid important areas to address is a skill that cannot be taught. That is, loving people and |39|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

inside and outside of the company than I do. The secret is, the answer was to make sure our estimates were accurate andacknowledgement and taking each piece of his knowledge and ensure people were utilized as much as we require. The fact is,learning from it myself. Managers need to manage well, while estimates are estimates and we trust our people, so time loggingstill learning from the people they lead. just did not make since anymore. Actually, the time it was taking to time log, would have paid for another software developer. We Smart people can chose the software developer. figure out the A common theme throughout my time at Nanonation and paths to success throughout DevOps training is to make sure you are doing things in a technical that work for your organization. The implementation of project planning tools you choose are no expectation. At Nanonation, environment, but we have tried a handful of tools in my tenure and each of them the best of the best, is good and bad in their own ways. The successful way we understand people found to choose our current tool, was to gather a small group of key users and mangers in a room and ask ourselves what we Once you have the people management side down, it is really needed. Our first list was two pages long and what wetime to talk about the tools and utilization to employ within ended up with was a list of four things: intuitive issue tracking,your team. Over the past four years, Nanonation has been ability to create estimates, project creation and tracking. Afterevaluating software production processes. After attending a we came to what we really needed, we chose a tool and have notDevOps conference a few years ago, I quickly realized each looked back.organization is unique in its own way and there is not a singleway to approach agile or any other process for Outside of tools and processes and back to people, is thethat matter. topic of blending teams. Software production includes more than developers. In our case, it includes design, development, Our environment has evolved from a text- quality assurance and project management. Each team consistsbook waterfall organization to agile and now of employees who are wired slightly differently from onewe are somewhere in-between—and that is ok. another and have different skill sets. The key to cultivating aIn fact, I think most organizations need tothink more along the lines of what works team atmosphere is to treat the team like one, whilebest for them, rather than the way allowing a certain amount of autonomy. Whethersomeone in an article or speaking at you are leading all of the teams or you are managinga conference tells you to organize. managers, you must lead and treat theCurrently, Nanonation fosters a teams as one. Breaking down silos isscrum based environment with incredibly difficult if all teams aresprinkles of our own meth- managed differently and without someodology. We have high consistency in expectations.delivery expectations, In the end, you have to operatewhile encouraging a very the way it makes mostrelaxed and balanced work environment. sense to you. I suggest you take a closer look at those Regarding our processes, we recently dropped time logging managing your technicalaltogether. While not possible in some services organizations staff and make certainwhere hourly billing is a must, in a product organization like you have the peopleour own where projects are pre-estimated, it makes complete side in place, whichsense. When we asked ourselves what we were time logging for, in my opinion, create a significant return in productivity and ultimately delivery of your product or service. As it relates to processes, do not over think it. Take a look at what you have, understand what you really need and adjust frequently. It costs the company money to readjust, but it costs more to keep something in place that does not work.|40|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

VersionOneContinuous Visibility and Delivery Managementfor DevOps“Enterprise organizations capability to easily attune to the existing with version 3.0 of SAFe. VersionOne’s DevOps toolset or can also act alone as a support for SAFe 3.0 combines with deeparound the world are striving complete delivery solution. It reduces the enterprise-level capabilities such as a portfolio-level environment; VersionOneto accelerate the delivery PlanningRoom specifically tailored for scaling agile, and the recently releasedof software to respond to the changing manual effort associated with documenting mobile collaboration to make scaling agile easier for large software developmentbusiness demands and outpace competitive production release and untangles the organizations. “We help businesses scale agile easier with SAFe by improving andmarket challenges,” begins Robert Holler, coordination of release events across all accelerating business decisions at the portfolio level,” says Holler.CEO and Co-Founder, VersionOne. business stakeholders. Vindicating such expertise, VersionOne“However, to successfully achieve this Since its inception, VersionOne assisted Axway—a business interaction networks company which providesgoal, they need real-time visibility and is committed to its agile community the tools to manage, run, secure, and monitor all business interactions. With atraceability across the entire software roots and continues to be an active complex team and development structure, Axway was in need to maintain a highdelivery lifecycle.” To this end, VersionOne sponsor of and contributor to agile level of communication across functions and locations to carry out operationsoffers VersionOne Continuum—an events, conferences, and user groups efficaciously. The implementation of VersionOne significantly improved theenterprise continuous delivery solution for worldwide by supporting the Scaled Agile\" operating model and delivered visibility into release forecasting while identifyingaccelerating the delivery of high quality Framework (SAFe). Through this agile misalignment between market demands and feature requests. “Managing our iterativesoftware. It revolutionizes the way teams development, teams accelerate software development in VersionOne provided us with the foundation to assess and reassessvisualize and track business value right whether what we were delivering met the market’s needs,” says Jorge Rodriguez,from the beginning through production and Senior VP of Product Development, Axway. “We were able to look at trends in our keydeployment to unify agile and DevOps. metrics using VersionOne and course- correct early on.”Continuum is easy-to-use as it starts We help businesses scaleworking with the delivery tools that are agile easier with SAFe by Armed with their socio-cultural officealready in practice like Jenkins, Chef, improving and accelerating environment, VersionOne is focused onand Selenium. business decisions at the building deep-rooted relationships with portfolio level customers and providing sustainable VersionOne Continuum—a suite of results. “VersionOne continues to focus onDevOps tools—tracks user histories and innovation that helps transform software organizations through agile at-scale,”defects precisely in each stage of delivery concludes Holler.with zero-time delay, as they flow from delivery and provide improved visibilitydevelopment, through pre-production into their software development lifecycle.environments, and ultimately into Similarly, advancements in monitoring andproduction. This provides complete analytics have helped IT operationsvisibility to streamline the gain more visibility into thesoftware delivery process health of production software.and minimizes deployment In VersionOne, multiple agilerisk. Moreover, it provides methodologies and processes suchdetailed audit and timeline as Scrum, Kanban, and Lean canreporting and ensures that operate within one easy-to-adopt,every minute step is subjected simple-to-scale system.to internal and external As a provider of agile lifecyclepolicies by documenting management software solutions,the precise business VersionOne has introducedcontents of each new capabilities forincremental software enterprise-scale agile,release. Continuum including portfolio-levelis designed with the metrics in alignment Robert Holler |41|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

CIO InsightsInnovating IntelligentlyBy Joe Iannello, VP & CIO, Capital Metrologies egardless of what business you are in, whether you will be ever more important as we move into the future. This work in the private or public sector—if you are selling article focuses on innovation based upon mobile ticketing app or providing a product or service to your customers— technology and the benefits and impact on customers. then innovation is a critical success factor in gainingand retaining market share. This has become a reality today and Less than a decade ago, in 2007, Apple first introduced the iPhone. Google soon followed with Android phones and later Microsoft with Windows phones. A revolution began with smartphone and tablet mobile apps becoming available for just about everything. An amazing number of more than three million different mobile apps exist today across all of those platforms. While there are many apps to choose from and many are variations on the same theme—a unique element that you control is related to whatever product or service you sell. Take for example, a public transit agency that provides mass transit bus and/or rail services. There may be other transportation providers and many mobile apps supporting travel—but, only the transit agency provides its transit services and only it can establish or change service routes and sell tickets. Mobile ticketing apps for transit existed in Europe a number of years before becoming available in the USA. Capital Metro, the public transit agency that provides services in Austin, Texas, was one of the first transit agencies in the nation in January, 2014 to introduce mobile ticketing, through its’ partnership with mobile ticketing app provider Bytemark, across all services—including Local, Flyer, Express, and MetroRapid bus routes; MetroRail and MetroAccess services. The app, known as CapMetro, is available for free download in the Apple, Android or Windows app stores. Using the app, tickets can be purchased and then the smart phone or tablet can be used as the electronic ticket to board the vehicle. Additional features include various traveler tools including trip planning, schedules, maps and next departure times based upon real-time data. The CapMetro app has been very successful and it has generated, to date, millions of dollars of ticket sales and hundreds of thousands of downloads and usage continues to increase significantly. Additionally, this solution has received many innovation awards each year since its’ initial launch. In addition to the customer/traveler benefits and the recognition received—a key point is that— innovation breeds innovation. Technology companies and others will be more inclined to partner with an organization that is not only willing and able to try something new but, also, if there has been some prior success with innovation projects. Additionally, innovation|42|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

Joe Iannello Developing a balanced portfolio that includes customer focused innovation is a critical success factor spawns other opportunities. For example, Capital Metro success with mobile ticketing and other innovations such as smart infrastructure supporting vehicle movements and real-time open data have been factors in Austin being selected, in 2015, as the lead city in nation for the Mobility Transformation Initiative that is being facilitated by the Rocky Mountain Institute. Another example was Austin being selected, this year, as a finalist in the Smart City Challenge by the US Department of Transportation. Innovation is like so many things—easier said than done—especially when you consider not only competing priorities but, also, the resistance that might be encountered or the cultural change required. That is why there is increasing discussion of “Bi-Modal Approach” to projects— one mode that has been in existence for decades addressing traditional projects and systems— and now a second newer mode focused on innovation projects which require not only an agile project development methodology but, really needs to address the mindset and process changes needed throughout the organization to address the full life cycle of exploration, budgeting, acquisition/procurement, project management, development, testing, marketing, piloting, launching, refreshes and leveraging investments. CIO’s today are undoubtedly faced with many challenges including Internal Systems Modernization and Support, On-premises and Cloud Infrastructure, Cyber Security, Data Management, Staffing, Vendor and Project Management, just to name a few. The good news is that there are opportunities everywhere including emerging technologies such as Advanced Mobile Technology, Internet-of-Things, Autonomous Devices and Vehicles, 3D Printing and Gigabit Wireless Communications. Developing a balanced portfolio that includes customer focused innovation is a critical success factor which will result in not only serving your customers but, also, will yield additional opportunities as we move into the future. |43|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

[ [CXO InsightsOperational Visibilityin the SDDCBy Dirk Wallerstorfe, Technology Lead for SDN & OpenStack, Dynatrace oday developers and operators face the requirements of was to place a physical probe that was able to capture and identify thousands of users expecting hundreds of application all traffic and the communication endpoints of all applications. to operate without any disruptions at a high speed In combination with real user data and performance metrics of from everywhere around the globe. That is why cloud the application servers operators were able to pinpoint the exactcomputing is and will be of rising importance to companies reason for performance degradation with ease. In increasinglyof all sizes. As a logical consequence, so is the demand forcapacity and availability of the underlying IT infrastructure. With today’s network virtualizationThe developers, operators, and users should have the luxury of capabilities it is hard to determinebeing able to focus on applications and not on capabilities and if the network connectivity of anylimitations of data centers. To this end the implementation of given operating system is physicalan adaptable Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC) is a viableoption that gains more and more traction. or virtual The foundation of an SDDC is virtualization of CPU,memory, storage, and lately even networks. Virtual servers are virtualized environments the placement ofcreated and maintained using an API and provide unprecedented physical probes becomes more and moreflexibility compared to provisioning of physical servers, let difficult, and less practicable. If two virtualalone saving of time. The main challenges of SDDC are the servers running on the same hypervisorsame as with traditional data centers—keeping costs at talk to each other, it is very unlikely thata minimum, while providing good user experience. even one byte of data will pass the physicalSoftware-defined data centers are inherently network interface of the host running thebuilt to scale all kinds of resources up and down hypervisor, because the whole networkin a timely manner by utilizing provisioning and communication between the two virtualorchestration tools. However, this dynamism machines happens within the hypervisor.is not feasible with traditional networks that This might leave important gaps in probe-rely on human beings configuring switches, based monitoring.routers, and firewalls by hand. That’s where Agent-based monitoring is anetwork virtualization comes into play. complementary approach to stay on topSoftware-defined networks (SDN) provide of the complexity and the dynamicsthe required network programmability and are of software-defined datathereby an integral cornerstone of every SDDC. centers. Though, one ofThe shift to software-defined networks doesn’t the drawbacks is,void the necessity of monitoring network traffic, butthe approach to monitorinneeds to be adapted. Up until the rise of networkvirtualization, the best way tomonitor network traffic|44|CIOReview Dirk Wallerstorfe SEPTEMBER 2016

Two processes on different servers communicate using an performance appears to be the tradeoff for faster provisioningoverlay network and easier administration. That is why operators need several observation points at different levels of virtualization to be ablethat operators need to take care of installing agents in multiple to get a holistic overview of the infrastructure and to correctlylocations throughout the data center: in hypervisors, in virtual pinpoint failures.machines, in containers, and ideally also in active networkingcomponents. Then again, modern provisioning and orchestration Let’s say you start two containers connected by a network intools provide mechanisms to take care of the agent installation, two virtual machines running in a tenant network in a distributedso you don’t have to bother with doing that manually. OpenStack cluster that runs on a Ravello application, published to AWS. You then would have at least four layers of network Network interfaces, networks, and the Internet are inherently virtualization in place: VXLAN encapsulation of the containershared resources and have therefore the largest potential to cause network overlay, VXLAN encapsulation of the tenant networkend user performance degradation. So there are obvious reasons to on OpenStack, Ravello’s HVX SDN abstraction of AWS, andmonitor traffic and activities in software-defined networks. AWS SDN abstraction of the physical network. Nevertheless,To that end, it is essential to understand how the technologies the network configuration in the containers still looks like theyimplementing SDNs work. Network overlays, one manifestation have a physical network interface. A lower MTU of said networkof SDN, are often used to create networks for containers on interface might be a good indicator of this virtualization. Thentop of an existing network infrastructure. For operators it is again, in contrast to VXLAN, alternative protocols like STTimperative to know if the virtual network has been configured (Stateless Transport Tunneling Protocol) and Geneve (Genericcorrectly and that it works as intended. Therefore agents must be Network Virtualization Encapsulation) make use of the networkable to detect network overlays and the data collector must have interfaces’ capability to do TCP segmentation offloading,means to correlate network data from network overlays with which on the one hand might result in a steady MTU value ofphysical network traffic, in order to be able to uniquely identify virtualized network interfaces and on the other hand might resultall communicating parties. in a dramatic performance increase under heavy loads. With today’s network virtualization capabilities it is Admittedly, this multilayered network “inception” scenariohard to determine if the network connectivity of any given sounds a bit complex at first. However, this is already a realityoperating system is physical or virtual. Of course network in some productive environments and should give you a roughtraffic has to hit a physical transfer medium at some point, idea of what kind of complexity to expect from networkexcept the communication takes place within the hypervisor. virtualization and virtualization in general in the mid-term.But it’s virtually impossible to tell how many layers of network Needless to say, smart monitoring solutions that can manage thisvirtualization are in place from an operating system’s point complexity and provide precise information about topologiesof view. Since encapsulation causes additional overhead in and status of connectivity at all layers of network virtualizationnetwork traffic and de- and encapsulation takes time, it is valid are mandatory, but yet to be built. An agent-based approach,to argue that network virtualization has a negative effect on where hundreds of observation points are distributed throughoutoverall performance. Everything comes at a price—impaired different layers of the entire application infrastructure, appears to be a reasonable solution towards application performance management in the era of holistic virtualization. |45|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

XebiaLabsHigh-Performance Driven by DevOpsIn the recent past, Stater—Netherlands’ \"automation, the richest content set for Derek Langone mortgage broker for premium enterprise middleware and seamless financial service companies—wanted integration into the application delivery delivery pipelines, resulting in fasterto speed up their time in marketing for ecosystem. Being more flexible, scalable, delivery of software. With the launch ofnew features and applications and also and cost-efficient, the application offers XL Release 5.0 business features can bereduce the number of production problems out-of-the-box deployment options for managed at a more dynamic level. “Withcaused by new releases. Stater approached complex deployment scenarios, like our new subrelease capability, individualXebiaLabs, a service firm that develops plan optimization and automatic parallel teams can build their own releaseenterprise-scale Continuous Delivery and deployments. Adding to its momentum, pipelines and string them together intoDevOps software to execute operations XebiaLabs’s version 5.5 of its popular one pipeline while maintaining overallflawlessly. XebiaLabs assisted Stater with XL Deploy product provides enterprise- control,” notes Langone. “We designedtheir agile DevOps process featuring their scale deployment automation for any the new capabilities to meet the needsXL Release, XL Deploy, and XL TestView environment, from Docker to mainframes. of large enterprises that are focused onto automate, standardize, and orchestrate The new version integrates provisioning achieving business results—whether theythe software delivery process. As a result, of cloud environments as part of the are working with existing middleware andthe client’s software deployment time deployment process, eliminating the need big data systems, or implementing newdropped from 1-2 weeks to 30 minutes. It to wait days or even weeks to get the cloud container or IoT initiatives.”accelerated their release process and their resources that teams require.time to roll out new machines. With a wave Adding further credence is the firm’sof change driven by DevOps, XebiaLabs XL Delploy handles XL Test View—a unique test managementoffers its clients a clear path in preparing environment solution that allows development teams tofor their success journey. specific values like consolidate, centrally control and report database credentials on all tests used to measure the quality “We believe in our developers’ and allows users of a new application. With a provenability to stay on top of key trends is a to centralize the stage-growth success, XebiLabs aimslarge part of what makes the XebiaLabs management of to vanguard the pace of technologicalcommunity so valuable to our users,” environment settings change through their pragmatic toolsasserts Langone. XebiaLabs helps in one place and be the backbone for companiescompanies to accelerate their software looking forward to deploy DevOps withinreleases with more reliability, despite Alongside, XL Release is enterprise- their environment.diverse infrastructure and complex scale release management software thatprocesses. The firm’s XL Deploy—an manages plans, automates, and analyzesapplication release automation tool that the entire software release pipeline withworks ideally right from continuous measurable steps. Being an end-to-endintegration, provisioning, middleware, plan orchestrator for DevOps, it identifiescloud platforms, and old legacy systems to bottlenecks, reduces errors and lowers thethe most advanced, modern architectures. risk of release failures. With this, DevOpsIt is designed to make the process of and application teams can integratedeploying applications faster, easier, and release management and executionmore reliable in a productive way. providing them a path to fully automated The application handles environmentspecific values like database credentialsand allows users to centralize themanagement of environment settingsin one place. Moreover, XL Deploycombines intelligent deployment|46|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

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[ [CXO InsightsWhat is a Low-Code/No-Code Platform?By Thierry Ciot, Software Architect & Product Owner, Progress Thierry Ciot ou may have heard that developing on low-code/no- relationships between objects. The second step… Wait, there is code platforms is an important strategy to create all no second step. At this stage, you have, out of the box, a web sorts of applications at an unprecedented speed and at application that works across multiple devices, from smart phones a drastically reduced cost and that they are well suited to desktop. Yes, that’s right. You get responsiveness withoutfor the cloud and for starting small and scaling very quickly. In having to hire hard-to-find developers who are knowledgeablethis article, we will explore what a low-code platform is and why both in responsive techniques and IOS or Android platforms.it matters to you. Here are a few screenshots demonstrating the above:What is a Low-Code/No-Code Platform? The first two screenshots show how one creates an application, its associated objects, the attributes and fields for each object and,Offering an academic definition is not very useful because these finally, the relationships and cardinality between objects:platforms are still evolving very fast as the market they areaddressing is increasing exponentially. Instead, let’s look at itsintrinsic characteristics. A low-code platform offers the following advantages overtraditional development platforms:1) It allows developers to create web applications using point- And here is how a simple application renders on a desktop,and-click/drag-and-drop and metadata model methodology and to a Samsung Android smartphone and an iPad Mini tablet,extend the application with code at specific hook points. respectively. This application lists travel destinations with hotels2) It offers lots of built-in services. When you come from a world and flights in a 1 to n relationship and has been pre-populatedof traditional web programming, this is a huge departure from it with sample data.as you won’t have to re-invent many services that you will needsooner or later.3) It provides an environment where you can develop, deploy,run, scale and manage your application, all from a single place. The net effect is these platforms allow building applicationsin days and weeks, not months or years. Let’s dive into the practical tenets of these platforms with theexample of Rollbase, the low-code/no-code platform of progress.With Rollbase, developers prototype, design, implement, deploy,run, install and publish to marketplace their applications, allfrom a web browser. This is one of the key features to make theplatform a first-class citizen in the cloud.How does it Work?To develop an app using a low-code/no-code platform, the firststep is to define objects and their properties, then establish|48|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

custom reporting capabilities and document creation from your application data in various formats. At the back-end level, the platform provides a strong security and permission model (authentication, authorization, role attribution and auditing); data connectivity such as import/ export capabilities, search and indexing; workflow control; and built-in integration with various email systems and authentication providers (SAML, ADFS, OpenID Connect, LDAP, Kerberos). For cloud-centric environments, it provides services like multi-tenancy (complete isolation for multi-customers on same instance for reduced cost) and marketplace for applications distribution. In the interest of keeping this article short, I won’t get into the details of each service, but it is important to recognize when your initial applications are successful and the requirements start to pile up, these built-in services will come in handy and save your team a considerable amount of time. It is important to recognize when your initial applications are successful and the requirements start to pile up What Makes Low-Code/No-Code Platforms so Attractive? There are many reasons why these platforms are emerging and are successful, most notably, because they address the following real business needs:Built-in Services ■ Need for agility and delivery speed to show relevance and innovation (to be able to start small, fail fast or grow andAs mentioned above, the next big advantage of a low-code/no- scale quickly)code platform comes from the large set of built-in services. ■ Need for modernization at low cost, in particular to unlock data from legacy apps As we just saw, the platform provides responsive and adaptive ■ Lack of skilled workers and the ever increasing number ofUI for multiple devices but it also includes built-in themes, UI technologies and frameworks developers have to keep up withblueprints, white labeling, support for multi-national markets ■ Too many applications do not get built (according to Gartner 80(multi-lingual, including left-to-right and right-to-left support to 85% of IT budget is spent on maintenance)for languages like Arabic, Farsi and Hebrew), user management(self registration, provisioning, password management, etc.), In conclusion, a low-code/no-code platform really shines not only when you want to build applications rapidly, but also when you need to accelerate delivery and scale as demand rises. Whether you want to modernize existing applications, reduce your IT backlog or create brand new multi-devices applications in the cloud, you should investigate how a low-code/no-code platform can empower your organization’s agility and capacity to quickly and inexpensively innovate. |49|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016

[ [CXO InsightsThe New Normal:Achievable But Not SimpleBy Michael Nygard, VP, Cognitect Michael Nygard e’re ten years into the “devops + microservices” intended effect, roll it out broadly. If not, revert. This means era. As I’ve consulted with companies in business and technical metrics must be unified. Marketing cannot transformation, I've seen common patterns in have one set, development another, and operations a third. those that succeed.Adrian Cockcroft, formerly of Netflix, has talked about their Disposable Code—Code is a liability, not an asset. It has adevelopment prowess. A listener asked where they found such carrying cost: your maintenance budget. The more lines of codetalented developers. Adrian replied, “We hired them from you, you have, the more risk you have. Very large code bases generatethen got out of their way.” Team-scale autonomy is impossible in fear of unintended effects.most companies. Inter-team dependencies and high per-incident The Right Tools—Use tools that encourage greater modularity,risks prevent it.You can create a world where it is safe to “get out of their loose coupling, and reduced dependencies. They should helpway.” It requires effort and creative thinking among developers, you develop general purpose services more easily than specificIT executives, and business executives. When designing solutions. Functional languages have advantages here.the organization: Team Scale Autonomy—Eliminate or invert dependencies between systems, components, and teams. Give each team powerAnticipate and Embrace Breakage—Don’t expect and responsibility.everything to run like clockwork. Everything breaks. It's just aquestion of when. Continuous partial failure is normal. Plan for Failure Domains and Safety—Minimize the cost ofit and big changes become possible because incidents. Reduce the impact of anyyour team will know how to handle disruption. service failure. Make it quick to detectAim for Antifragility—Resilience is Lean is good, but too much and correct. Turn hard dependencies into of it will make you fragile soft ones.not enough. Resilient means that the systemresists shocks. Antifragile systems love Data Leverage—Focus on the data onuncertainty. They get better with rapid change. the wire. Use languages and frameworks thatEvolutionary Architecture—Allow teams to create and destroy expose it, instead of locking it inside domain objects and DTOs.components at any time. Microservices are just one approach toaccomplish this. New services “spawn” from ones that already Tempo—Shorten the decision loop. At the micro level, use teamwork. Services that gain users survive, while services with few scale autonomy and antifragile architecture. At the macro level,or no users should die. A service that can never be replaced is refactor your organization for the next war instead of the last one.a failure. Realizing the New Normal—This new normal is achievableThere is No Silver Bullet—Agile development—effective at but not simple. You must incorporate all these ingredients, all thethe team level—does not create antifragility. That is a property of time. Start small. Make small steps in each area. Iterate within athe whole organization. Lean is good, but too much of it will make shared vision. Don't get discouraged: we all overestimate changeyou fragile. Both are micro scale tools only. in the short term and underestimate it in the long term. This culminates in an antifragile infrastructure for autonomousMinimize Risk by Maximizing Change—Make changes high-velocity teams, an organization that is attentive andfrequently, but make each small–quick to roll out and quick to responsive to changes in the market, and a company that operatesrevert. Expose each change to a small audience. If it has the with greater flexibility, adaptability and at a higher tempo.|50|CIOReview SEPTEMBER 2016