Weekly Top 10: Your DevOps Flavor

If there is anything we have learned by now, is that every business paves their own unique path for releasing software- every pipeline, implementation and practices are a bit different, and DevOps comes in all shapes and sizes. Software delivery practices are often comprised of set of several complementing (or even competing) methodologies – such as leveraging Agile, DevOps and even a mix of ITIL, to create the combination that’s most suitable for your organization and that maximize your business value. Our top 10 industry posts this week cover all the bases of software development/delivery and dig deep to discover more on the roles of Agile development teams, ITIL in FinServ and the emergence of microservices and containers as buzzwords.

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

1) DevOps, Culture Change, and the Brass Ring of Velocity

By @gothamCulture| Published on @Forbes
http://www.forbes.com/sites/chriscancialosi/2016/03/28/devops-culture-change-and-the-brass-ring-of-velocity/

The world of tech is not for the faint of heart. It can be high-stakes and the margin between wild success and yesterday’s news is razor thin at times. In order to stay one step ahead of the competition in the war for market share, many tech companies have begun to fundamentally shift how they work in order to increase the velocity with which they build, test and release software. What originally started from the agile movement is now evolving into a new philosophical way of working: DevOps.

2) 4 Key Roles on Agile Software Development Teams

By @bdehaaff | Published on @HuffPost
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-de-haaff/4-key-roles-on-agile-soft_b_9547788.html

Agile teams work with a sense of urgency that is tough to match. That’s because responding to change is their core value. They know how quickly today’s software market moves. So, they use adaptive planning to practice dynamic software development. And each role on an Agile team helps to form a cohesive whole. Members of these teams often have different roles. And these roles can have different names depending on the methodology used. Still, some roles are fairly universal. And knowing how they contribute is important.

3) ITIL vs. DevOps in Financial Service Organizations

By @stbrodie| Published on @Finextra
https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/12402/itil-vs-devops-in-financial-service-organizations

In today’s world, where technology is central to every industry, it has become increasingly important to deliver software not only faster, but safer, in order to stay competitive. One of the markets where security and compliance is a crucial element to the software delivery process is in Financial Services (FinServ). Many FinServ organizations are reliant upon technology to achieve their goals and remain competitive in the marketplace. As Jeffrey Snover, a distinguished engineer at Microsoft, observed, “In previous economic eras, businesses created value by moving atoms. Now they create value by moving bits.” The irony is that if there’s any industry that has created (and occasionally destroyed) massive amounts of economic value by moving bits as quickly as possible, it’s FinServ. While these organizations need to move fast, they must simultaneously emphasize aspects of security and compliance to eliminate risk. Whether it’s at the ATM or on a mobile app, FinServ organizations must also ensure that their customers’ private information is just that – private.

4) Developers Turn to Containers, Microservices, to Stay on Top of Frenzied Release Schedules

By @joemckendrick | Published on @ZDNet
http://www.zdnet.com/article/developers-turn-to-containers-microservices-to-manage-intense-release-schedules/

The age of containers has arrived in full force. A new survey of 1,800 IT professionals finds two-thirds of organizations are using, or investigating using containers to faster and more efficiently integrate and provide microservices and services. The rising use of containers maps to the increasingly hectic pace of software delivery demanded of developer shops. The recent survey released by NGINX, Inc., finds 28% of developers report they are required to issue updates or new releases “several times a day.” Another 70% — virtually the remainder of the batch — release new code at least once a week.

5) Outside In Or Inside Out

 By @ToBeAgile | Published on @DZone

Most of the time when we’re building software, we’re thinking inside out. We focus on the behavior that we want to create, and build the system up from that. We do this because we’re anxious to get at the heart of the problem and solve the core issues. But there’s a problem with this approach because as we move up levels of abstraction connecting those core issues to a broader system, it can be hard to forge the right interfaces. This is inside out programming. By contrast, outside in programming starts from the big picture, from the caller’s perspective, and drills down into the system.

6) Open Source in the Enterprise: Perspectives for CIOs

@anders_wallgren| Published on @ITProPortal
http://www.itproportal.com/2016/03/28/open-source-in-the-enterprise-perspectives-for-cios/

A myriad of point-tools are involved in every organisations’ software production. Some of our enterprise customers report using over 50 tools along their pipeline, from code development all the way to releasing into Production. For the majority of development organisations today, these tools are comprised of a mix of commercial and Open Source (OSS) technologies. Existing Open Source tools can be found throughout your software Dev and Ops teams – from programming languages, infrastructure and technology stacks, development and test tools, project management and bug tracking, source control management, CI, configuration management, and more.

7) Five Agile Testing Approaches That You Should Know About

By @jmsilberman  | Published on @DZone
https://dzone.com/articles/five-agile-testing-approaches-that-you-should-know

Agile Testing, which checks for bugs and performance bottlenecks within the Agile workflow, has different approaches and strategies. Agile testing includes participation by many members of different IT teams, with special expertise contributed by testers. The overall goal is to ensure the quality of the product, while keeping pace with rapid development and releases. There has been a lot written about Agile testing, and the related concepts of continuous testing and continuous quality. I recently came across some articles and blog posts that present a nice introduction to the topic of Agile Testing, and some of the challenges and strategies surrounding it. You’ll want to read these, as they provide valuable analysis and insight.

8) Why Shadow IT Can Be Your Biggest Opportunity

By @MindaZetlin | @4enterprisers
https://enterprisersproject.com/article/2016/3/why-shadow-it-can-be-your-biggest-opportunity

Simplifying IT and streamlining IT operations is the best strategy for better meeting business goals, according to Chris Borkenhagen, vice president of IT at travel expense management company Concur. In an interview with The Enterprisers Project, he explains how this works at his company.

9) CIOs Need to Avoid a Mistaken Path to DevOps

By Peter Bendor-Samuel | Published by @CIOonline
http://www.cio.com/article/3047667/agile-development/cios-need-to-avoid-a-mistaken-path-to-devops.html

DevOps is the completion of the Agile methodology and creates an engineering environment in which developers can achieve speed. How fast is the difference? Agile is like a person running fast – about 20 miles per hour tops. DevOps is like a person driving a Ferrari who can exceed 200 miles per hour. Often as I talk with CIOs, I learn they focus on automated provisioning as an important aspect of DevOps. And it is. But it’s only a small component. Achieving the engineering environment similar to the acceleration of a Ferrari requires fundamental operating changes.

10) Report: Apple Designing its Own Servers to Avoid Snooping

 By @JBrodkin| Published on @arstechnica
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/03/report-apple-designing-its-own-servers-to-avoid-snooping/

Apple has begun designing its own servers partly because of suspicions that hardware is being intercepted before it gets delivered to Apple, according to a report yesterday from The Information. “Apple has long suspected that servers it ordered from the traditional supply chain were intercepted during shipping, with additional chips and firmware added to them by unknown third parties in order to make them vulnerable to infiltration, according to a person familiar with the matter,” the report said. “At one point, Apple even assigned people to take photographs of motherboards and annotate the function of each chip, explaining why it was supposed to be there. Building its own servers with motherboards it designed would be the most surefire way for Apple to prevent unauthorized snooping via extra chips.”