Weekly Top 10: DevOps Talent and Challenges

With DevOps becoming more well-known and established practice in nearly every industry that delivers software, it is important to continually reassess its efficacy. This week’s top 10 includes a discussion on how the quick uptake of DevOps adoption in the enterprise has posed some serious challenges. Additionally, organizations who have taken the DevOps plunge must find ways to find, hire and keep their DevOps talent in order to keep the machine running smoothly.

Continue reading for more insights into DevOps, the Cloud and Agile.

As always, stay tuned to all the news coming from @ElectricCloud on DevOps and Continuous Delivery throughout the week and retweet/like to get your top news items featured in our weekly recap!

1) DevOps Isn’t Just About the New: It’s About Cleaning Up the Old, Too

By @cote| Published on @TheRegister
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/12/land_the_legacy_big_fish/

As one of my coworkers used to say when confronted with The Latest Development Improvement Methodology: “Why don’t you come down here and chum this stuff?” – except he used the language of a sailor. In trying to implement the latest breakfast cereal agenda, DevOps, one of the primary chumming tasks is dealing with all your “pre-DevOps” software and services. We call this “legacy” and it’s more or less the result of too much unaddressed “technical debt.” The techniques for dealing with legacy never leave you feeling good: just like eating a box of cereal, over the kitchen sink, all the way down to the green leprechaun dust. But, there are some pragmatic ways of making sure legacy doesn’t totally wreck your DevOps efforts to create more resilient, more productive software.

2) Why Migration to the Cloud Requires an IT Management Upgrade

By @danwoodsearly | Published on @ForbesTech
http://www.forbes.com/sites/danwoods/2016/02/29/why-migration-to-the-cloud-requires-an-it-management-upgrade/

Management practices in the world of IT range from the most advanced forms of automation as found in the lights-out data centers at Facebook, Google and Amazon, to the most haphazard and informal back-of-the-envelope stuff implemented by cousin Jimmy who “knows about computers.” The problem in the world of business, one that few like to admit openly, is that most businesses are far closer to cousin Jimmy’s methods than to Facebook’s.

3) 7 Keys to Finding Phenomenal DevOps Talent

By @GetTechSpective | Published on @TechBeaconCom
http://techbeacon.com/7-keys-finding-phenomenal-devops-talent

It’s fairly well established that DevOps is first and foremost about a change in IT culture. When seeking DevOps talent—or even just hiring for general roles in the company but with a DevOps culture in mind—what are the specific skills and traits you look for? What are the common attributes among IT professionals who excel at DevOps? DevOps is a new way of thinking. Just as agile development was a response to address the shortcomings of the Waterfall method, DevOps is part of a larger realization that there is a better, more efficient way to work together. That culture does require some unique traits, and it might not be a good fit for every potential employee.

4) Rethinking How IT Drives Business Value in a Digital Age

By @SvenGerjets| Published on @4enterprisers
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2016/4/rethinking-how-it-drives-business-value-digital-age

I remember a day, not too far in the past, when IT was the technology sounding board at our companies. If someone wanted to personally invest in technology they asked their local IT person for their perspective. Times have changed, IT no longer has a monopoly on technology. Today if someone is looking for technical advice they are more likely to go to their local 14-year old versus their local IT department. This shift in technology democratization is a serious issue for IT organizations that are unwilling to rethink their approach to delivering value to their businesses.

5) How Have You Seen IoT Change?

By @ctsmithiii| Published on @DZone
https://dzone.com/articles/how-have-you-seen-iot-change

To gather insights for DZone’s 2016 Internet of Things (IoT) Research Guide, scheduled for release in June, 2016, we spoke to eight executives, from seven companies, who develop IoT devices or help clients do so. Here’s who we talked to:Suraj Kumar, General Manager, Digital as a Service, Axway | Paul Hanson, CEO, bbotx, Inc. | Brad Bush, COO, and Jeanette Cajide, VP of Corporate Development, Dialexa | Scott Hilton, Executive Vice President Products, Dyn | Anders Wallgren, CTO, Electric Cloud | Darren Guccione, CEO, Keeper Security | Johan den Haan, CTO, Mendix |Here’s what they told us when we asked, “How have you seen IoT change since you began working on it?”

6) Bring on the DevOps, Say IT Support Managers

By @joemckendrick| Published on @ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/article/devops-to-bring-it-support-teams-into-software-development-loop/

The vast majority of IT support people say they don’t have enough of a connection with the development side, save the post-release cycle. In many cases, they’re simply not ready to handle the volume of new releases, fixes or features that are sent out by their development teams. This may be a ripe area for DevOps.

7) Financial Services Firms Shouldn’t Shy Away from DevOps

By @Sooraj_Shah | Published on @Computing_News
http://www.computing.co.uk/ctg/news/2454138/financial-services-firms-shouldn-t-shy-away-from-devops

Financial services firms shouldn’t steer clear of instilling a DevOps culture into their organisations, as they are just as likely as firms from other sectors to thrive from such an approach. That is the view of Tim Zonca, director of product marketing at Puppet Labs, who said that many of the financial services organisations that he works with actually tend to be early adopters of technologies and practices such as DevOps.

8) Ten Ways to Successfully Fail your Agility

By @kirschi_ | Published on @InfoQ
http://www.infoq.com/articles/successfully-fail-agility

In his excellent book, The Workplace Within, Larry Hirschhorn provides a lengthy analysis of the Challenger disaster. Among the many events that led to the crash, the one that strikes us most is the notion within NASA’s management that every successful launch of the space shuttle reduced the risk of a disaster. Many at NASA knew that the faulty O-ring seal that led to the disaster had potential to fail but management’s growing optimism with each launch increased the frustration and helplessness among engineers.

9) How Compliance Can Be an Excuse to Shun the Cloud

By @apatrizio | Published on @CIOonline
http://www.cio.com/article/3056020/compliance/how-compliance-can-be-an-excuse-to-shun-the-cloud.html

Every company has its reason for embracing or not embracing the cloud. In the case of companies in heavily regulated industries such as healthcare and financial services, regulatory compliance is a convenient excuse for luddites to shun the cloud and its potential benefits. And consultants who serve those markets say that while CIOs and other IT managers cite compliance as the reason for not embracing cloud services and applications, it’s really an excuse by managers who just don’t want to move to the cloud for whatever reason.

10) DevOps Firms Must Play With All – Despite Web of Alliances

By @regwatcher| Published on @TheRegister
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/12/puppet_industry_alliances/

Major DevOps players are meshing together with acquisitions, alliances and technical partnerships, but are not in danger of splitting into a series of competing armed camps, the CEO of Puppet has claimed. Puppet announced a major overhaul last week, announcing its intention to bring some of the edgier technologies into production in enterprises, and striking partnerships with Splunk and Atlassian – and losing half of its name. Puppet’s moves follows other alliances within the DevOps/Agile world, such as Chef hooking up with Canonical and… Atlassian. Meanwhile, some vendors have been flashing the cash to take over smaller interesting tech firms, such as Docker’s hoovering up of Tutum.