10+ May DevOps news, updates & tips DevOps people will love!
Summer is here and we are ready with our May DevOps digest! Our team carefully collects the latest DevOps news and the most useful tips on cloud Israel to share with everyone who can’t imagine their lives without DevOps. If you’ve missed any of the recent DevOps news and updates, here’s our latest digest for the DevOps & CloudOps community. Make a cup of coffee or whatever you prefer and get ready to read our next episode of DevOps info. We’re sure you’ll find something interesting here today.
1. Introducing Tetragon
May brought some new products onto the open-source scene — Tetragon was announced! Tetragon is a cool eBPF-based security observability and runtime enforcement platform that has been part of Isovalent Cilium Enterprise for a few years. What makes Tetragon so special? The solution combines eBPF-based transparent security observability with real-time runtime enforcement to bring a broad array of strengths while also eliminating common observability system weaknesses. Tetragon offers visibility into all kinds of kernel subsystems to cover namespace escapes, capability and privilege escalations, file system and data access, networking activity of protocols such as HTTP, DNS, TLS, and TCP, as well as the system call layer to assess system call invocation and follow process execution. Tetragon is also able to set up security policies across the operating system in a preventive rather than reactive manner. If you are interested in learning more about Tetragon, check the Isovalent blog post.
2. Istio By Example
Being quite a popular solution for managing the different microservices that make up a cloud-native application, Istio has a lot of fans. However, for a very long time, it has been criticized as complex and hard to use. We found the solution to ease your life — сheck out Istio By Example where you’ll find the cases in most common use and examples to make your experience with Istio more productive and pleasant. Among the examples are Database Traffic, Traffic Mirroring, Canary Deployments, gRPC, Load balancing, and others.
3. Introducing Amazon EKS Observability Accelerator
AWS announced EKS Observability Accelerator, which is leveraged to configure and deploy purpose-built observability solutions on Amazon EKS clusters for specific workloads using Terraform modules.
The Terraform modules are built to enable observability on Amazon EKS clusters for the following workloads:
- Java/JMX
- NGINX
- Memcached
- HAProxy
AWS will continue to add examples for more workloads in the future. For greater detail on how it works in practice, check the AWS blog post.
4. GitLab 15 is announced
GitLab, the well-known open-source DevOps service, announced the next step in the development of its platform, starting with release of its first version, 15.0. The company states that it will concentrate on observability, continuous security and compliance, enterprise agile planning (EAP) tools, and workflow automation. The upcoming features are planned to improve speed to delivery, provide built-in security scanning and compliance auditing and enrich the platform with machine learning (ML) capabilities. For more detail, read the GitLab blog.
5. Introducing Ratchet
“Quality at Speed” is the new motto in software development. Organizations are making their moves toward DevOps and Agile principles to increase delivery speed and assure product quality. In DevOps, a continuous and automated delivery cycle is the foundation for fast and reliable delivery that would be impossible without proper CI/CD tools. This is where Ratchet enters the game. Ratchet is a powerful tool for securing CI/CD workflows with version pinning. It’s like Bundler, Cargo, Go modules, NPM, Pip, or Yarn, but for CI/CD workflows. Ratchet supports Circle CI, GitHub Actions and Google Cloud Build. To learn more about Ratchet, visit its GitHub directory.
6. Introducing HashiCorp Nomad 1.3
HashiCorp announced that its Nomad 1.3 is now generally available. Nomad is an easy but flexible orchestrator used to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications. The tool can be used in both on-premises and cloud environments. What’s new in Nomad 1.3?
- You can do simple service discovery using only Nomad.
- Nomad 1.3 presents a new optional configuration attribute max_client_disconnect that allows operators to more easily start up rescheduled allocations for nodes that have experienced network latency issues or temporary connectivity loss.
- With Nomad 1.3, support for CSI is now generally available.
- Nomad 1.3 introduces a new user interface for viewing evaluation information.
For more information about HashiCorp Nomad 1.3 and its benefits, click here.
7. How to survive an on-call rotation
Incidents have a real financial impact — they cost enterprises $700 billion a year in North America alone — and they also damage the reputation of your company, your product, and your team. This is why well-organized on-call is so essential. On-call is a critical responsibility inside many IT, developer, support, and operations teams that run services offering 24/7 availability. But what do you need to know before participating in an on-call rotation yourself? Here is a short yet helpful article with some practical recommendations. It will be useful not only for those taking their first steps as a Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) but also for everyone who is going to participate in on-call rotations.
8. Introducing KEDA v2.7.1
KEDA v2.7.1 is here. KEDA is a Kubernetes-based Event Driven Autoscaler. With this tool, you can drive the scaling of any container in Kubernetes based on the number of events in need of processing.
The improvements in KEDA v2.7.1 include:
- Fix autoscaling behavior while paused
- Don’t hardcode UIDs in securityContext
Read more about KEDA v2.7.1 here and learn how to deploy it in its documentation.
9. How to security harden Kubernetes in 2022
Here is a helpful piece for all Kubernetes users. Kubernetes is currently one of the most popular container orchestration platforms, but what about security? According to a report by Red Hat about the state of Kubernetes security, 94% of respondents experienced a security incident in the last 12 months. So how can you improve security in Kubernetes? The technical report “Kubernetes Hardening Guide” initially published on August 3, 2021, and then updated on March 15, 2022, by the NSA and CISA can be really helpful here. But if you don’t have time right now to read 66 pages, check this guide where you’ll find summarized takeaway messages from the tech report and some additional insights.
10. Introducing Calico v3.23
Calico v3.23 is here. While there are many improvements in this release, here are some of the larger features to be aware of:
- IPv6 VXLAN support
- VPP data plane beta
- Calico networking support in AKS
- Container Storage Interface (CSI) support
- Windows HostProcess Containers support (Tech Preview)
For more information about Calico v3.23 and its benefits, click here.
11. New features in Terraform 1.2
The release of HashiCorp Terraform 1.2 is now immediately available for download as well as for use in HashiCorp Terraform Cloud. The new release introduces exception handling with pre- and post-conditions, support for non-interactive Terraform Cloud operations in a CI/CD pipeline, and CLI support for Run Tasks.
If you’re using older Terraform versions, these cool features might inspire you to upgrade. Read the upgrade notes to be sure you don’t miss anything important and use the latest release (v1.2.2 at this moment).
12. Amazon EKS console supports all standard Kubernetes resources
Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS) now allows users to see all standard Kubernetes API resource types running on your Amazon EKS cluster through the AWS Management Console. This improvement makes it easy to visualize and troubleshoot the Kubernetes applications leveraging Amazon EKS. The updated Amazon EKS console currently covers all standard Kubernetes API resource types such as service resources, configuration and storage resources, authorization resources, policy resources, and more. For more detail, check the AWS blog.
Do DevOps with Profisea
The Profisea team is constantly on the lookout for the latest DevOps and Cloud news to share with you. Don’t hesitate to contact us and tell us what you’d like to see in our next digests and which topics we need to feature. Our experts are always busy preparing new useful info for you.
And, of course, if your business requires any DevOps services, we are here to lend you a helping hand as we always have the best DevOps and CloudOps practices at our fingertips.
5 biggest myths about cloud computing in 2022 every organization deals with
According to the latest forecast from Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to grow 20.4% in 2022 and reach $494.7 billion, up from $410.9 billion in 2021. But despite being on the rise, cloud computing is still questioned. Does everyone need to go to the cloud? Is it a necessity for modern business or just hype? Moreover, myths continue to plague cloud computing making it more difficult to decide whether the cloud is beneficial for organizations or not. Although cloud computing is now well established and popular with IT audiences and mainstream companies, some of the myths that appeared at the beginning of the cloud era still persist to this day. New myths keep arising. With cloud technologies booming, many people see them as a silver bullet to solve every problem and save them thousands of dollars. In a chat with our experts, we highlight the most common yet harmful myths and misunderstandings about cloud computing that CEOs, CIOs, and CTOs should be aware of.
Myth#1. Cloud is a one-size-fits-all solution
Cloud has immense potential and opens a plethora of opportunities to innovate and scale up. However, it’s a huge mistake to think that the cloud is for everyone and to see cloud computing as a place where magic happens for all.
You don’t need to integrate all your applications or infrastructure with the cloud – how much you do need to take to the cloud will depend on your business goals. There will always be certain areas and processes that don’t require cloud optimization. You will also need to consider the challenges and costs of integration. Finally, there is a difference between public, private, and hybrid cloud, so you can’t just click and go in the hope that everything will run like clockwork.
According to a report from Cloud Security Alliance, 90% of CIOs have reported data migration projects falling short due to complexity across on-premise (on-prem) and cloud platforms. In its report, CNCF states that only 9% of organizations have fully documented cloud security procedures, even though they are aware that security is one of the main concerns in leveraging the cloud. So, how do you avoid backing the wrong horse and, even more to the point, how do you reap cloud benefits securely? Here are three points to keep in mind:
- talk to experts to determine the cloud solution most suited to your business needs; and
- be realistic – whichever cloud you choose, it will bring added complexity for which your organization needs to prepare; and
- ensure you understand your service level requirements and communicate them with your service provider.
Leveraging cloud technologies should make your life easier, help your business run more smoothly and increase productivity. It should do all of these at the lowest possible cost. Be clear on what your organization needs and see which cloud option can best help you meet your goals.
Myth#2. Migration to the cloud is the final step
It would be a huge mistake to think that once you’ve migrated to the cloud you are done. In reality, cloud migration is only the beginning of the transformation. The true potential of the cloud can only be unlocked only when the organization fully understands its cloud operating model and achieves its cloud goals.
Once you have made the move, your task is to maintain robustness of the applications and know which operations could be improved by cloud benefits such as scalability and automation. Your team ought to monitor the changes gained from migration, evaluate the positive consequences, and work towards neutralizing the unwanted ones.
Myth#3. Cloud isn’t secure, so it’s better to avoid it
This myth isn’t as common as it once was, but there is still a lot of confusion about the right way to manage cloud security to prevent data breaches and cybersecurity attacks.
In recent years, new tools and methods have been created to enhance cloud security, which means that developers have taken on some of the responsibility for security, rather than leaving the whole burden for in-house security resolution. This came about because almost all public cloud breaches have been caused by insecure customer configurations. In fact, Gartner forecasts that through 2025, 99% of cloud security failures will be the customer’s fault.
To combat cloud security failures, it is vital to implement and execute policies on cloud ownership, responsibility, and risk acceptance. For these new cloud policies to be effective, organizations must implement DevSecOps principles that integrate security as a shared responsibility throughout the entire IT lifecycle. DevOps security is automated, integrating security solutions with minimal disruption to operations. Its features include source control repositories, container registries, a continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline, application programming interface (API) management, orchestration and release automation, and operational management and monitoring. In addition to all of these, most cloud vendors work hard on security in various aspects, for example by offering PCI DSS compliant services or helping to achieve HIPAA compliance.
Myth#4. A multi-cloud approach will prevent lock-in
Most companies usually begin with one cloud provider, and that’s totally fine. However, organizations eventually become concerned about being too dependent on one vendor and start considering leveraging several cloud vendors concurrently. This is known as multi-cloud. It can also work as a functionality-based approach. For example, an organization may use AWS as its main cloud provider but choose Google for analytics and big data. According to Flexera, 89% of respondents reported having a multi-cloud strategy and 80% are taking a hybrid approach by combining the use of both public and private clouds. However, leveraging a multi-cloud approach isn’t the same as preventing lock-in, whether technical, commercial, or operational.
IT leaders should not assume that they can avoid lock-in simply by having a multi-cloud strategy. Multi-cloud does not in itself prevent a lock-in scenario. If lock-in is identified as a potential issue, it will require a more focused effort to address it.
Myth#5. The cloud is too expensive for your business
Cloud technologies can undoubtedly be expensive. According to Flexera, public cloud spending is now a considerable line item in IT budgets. 37% of enterprises declared their spending exceeded $12 million per year and 80% reported that cloud spending exceeds $1.2 million annually. As SMBs generally have less intense and smaller workloads, their cloud bills are generally at the lower end of the scale. But this is changing fast: Last year, 53% of SMBs paid out more than $1.2 million, compared with 38% the previous year. Does this mean that cloud adoption will cost too much for your business? Not necessarily, as the cost depends on the size of your enterprise and your business goals. Migrating to the cloud will cost money, and that’s unavoidable. At the same time, many organizations overspend when implementing the cloud simply because they have not analyzed options and have overlooked the hidden costs and challenges inherent in cloud migration.
The goal of leveraging cloud technology is to accelerate, improve and automate processes for better performance, security, and customer experience. To achieve these ends, organizations need to apply a strategic approach that will optimize costs in the long run for both the IT team and the rest of the enterprise. An accurate and detailed cloud migration roadmap that assesses the total expenditure of the migration and identifies short- and long-term business goals is a must-have.
As CIOs and other IT leaders plan to leverage cloud technologies in 2022, they need to have a strong understanding of what’s a myth and what’s a reality in the cloud world as this will help them build realistic expectations around cloud computing. Debunking these myths will be crucial for companies to successfully adopt the cloud and reap the many benefits that cloud offers.
Move to the cloud with Profisea
While cloud technologies promise innumerable benefits, these are only achievable through optimum choices that balance your business goals, meet your budget, ensure successful implementation, and the right selection of the vendor/s and applications to be migrated, secured and managed. You may choose a single cloud strategy or you may prefer to use several cloud vendors offering various options for your business. You need to find your approach to meet your unique needs. This is where Profisea comes to your assistance. Our experienced professionals are knowledgeable in all the areas related to cloud computing and bring years of experience, numerous successful projects, and recommendations from satisfied clients to support you as you move to the cloud.
We help big and small businesses to develop and succeed using cloud technologies. Whether you are planning to design a cloud implementation plan, move to the cloud, or optimize your cloud usage, we are ready to take on any challenge and support you along this way. So, don’t hesitate; book a free assessment to take your business to the next cloud level.
Profisea is now a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider
We are proud to announce that Profisea has become a Kubernetes Certified Service Provider (KCSP). This huge milestone manifests Profisea’s expertise in Kubernetes and Cloud native consulting and professional services as our company implements best DevOps, GitOps, and Kubernetes practices to optimize CI/CD pipelines and deliver safe clusters.
What is KCSP?
Organized by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) in collaboration with the Linux Foundation, the KCSP program is a pre-qualified tier of vetted service providers who have in-depth experience helping enterprises successfully implement Kubernetes. The KCSP program ensures that businesses get the support they need to launch new applications far more quickly and efficiently, secure in the knowledge they have a trusted and qualified Kubernetes partner available to support their workloads, including production and operational needs.
Profisea Kubernetes services
Profisea, a boutique DevOps and Cloud company headquartered in Israel, offers a full portfolio of services. For more than six years, we’ve been implementing best practices in GitOps, DevSecOps, and FinOps, and providing Kubernetes-based infrastructure services to organizations and businesses of all sizes that wish to remain productive and innovative.
In early 2022, Profisea became a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the Linux Foundation. We are also proud to be a recognized partner of several leading technology providers, including AWS, which ensures that our team delivers AWS expertise to customers based on proven experience designing, building, and supporting AWS workloads.
Profisea makes it easy to build, manage and operate open-source Kubernetes-based solutions. As a Linux Foundation and Cloud Native Computing Foundation member with profound Kubernetes expertise, our team guarantees top-notch Kubernetes services customized for your business.
With Profisea, you can:
- reduce your total Kubernetes costs
- accelerate delivery and deployment of new features
- quickly scale applications and clusters
- improve your resilience against production failures
- increase developer team productivity
- access ready-to-use solutions with proven and live-tested configurations.
Our Kubernetes Certified Service Provider status is your guarantee of Profisea’s advanced expertise in consulting and professional services if your organization is embarking on its Kubernetes journey. To learn more about KCSP and its partners, click here. Also, check our case studies for a full picture of working with Profisea and see how we overcome the toughest cloud challenges to ensure business success. If you plan to leverage Kubernetes or want to optimize your Kubernetes hosting, deployment, and management, get in touch with our experts, and we’ll find the best solution for you.
Profisea is Recognized as a Top 100 DevOps Consulting Company in 2022
We’re pleased to announce that independent analytics company Techreviewer has featured Profisea among the Top 100+ DevOps Consulting Companies 2022. Only three Israeli companies made this prestigious list.
Techreviewer’s list of top DevOps companies was compiled after conducting market research and features the most experienced and trusted DevOps companies. Listed companies have a solid background in the field as well as in-depth technology expertise and vast experience in delivering the most complex DevOps and CloudOps projects.
Profisea, a boutique DevOps and Cloud company headquartered in Israel, offers a full portfolio of services. For more than six years, we have been implementing best practice in GitOps, DevSecOps and FinOps, and providing Kubernetes-based infrastructure services to help businesses of all sizes – from small companies to large enterprises – remain innovative and effective.
Earlier this year, Profisea became a member of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and Linux Foundation. We are also proud to be a recognized partner of several leading technology providers, including AWS, which ensures that our clients enjoy top-notch cloud services in the most cost-effective manner.
To view our profile and learn more about Techreviewer, click here. Also, read our success stories to see how we help our clients in their digital and DevOps transformations. If you’re looking for top-notch DevOps services, feel free to contact us and get a consultation.
NOC best practices: the ultimate guide to taking your NOC from zero to hero. Part 2
We continue to explore NOC best practices (check the first part of our guide) and today, we’ll talk about the most effective tools for your NOC. We’ll also share some exclusive tips that will help you smoothly implement NOC best practices into your operations.
How to choose the best tools for your NOC
When you plan to build and set up a NOC from the ground up or improve your existing practices, you should draw on the best tools for every aspect of your NOC. But before getting into the detail of comparing one tool against another, you need to think more broadly about what exactly you need and how you want to achieve your goals.
You’ll find dozens of tools for your NOC, however, it’s easy to get confused by the variety of options and concentrate on the pros and cons of utilizing one tool versus another. And while sometimes it’s a good idea to look through the whole assortment of NOC tools, this confusion may be a sign of deeper problems regarding the way in which your NOC uses those tools, or how you implement those tools into your workflows. Therefore, you need to invest time and effort to define what exactly your NOC team requires, and what NOC activities you need to cover.
Here is a list of questions to think about while choosing the tools for your NOC:
- How are we going to use the tool? What functionality is crucial to us?
- How do the features of the tool help to support our operational workflows?
- Do we have everything needed to use this tool effectively and to the full extent of its functionality?
- How will this tool work when our operational workflows scale up?
- Does this tool include upgrade options to ensure the solution is ‘future-proof’?
- What is the price? Is the pricing plan for the tool transparent? And do the licensing models fit our organization’s requirements?
- Can we integrate this tool with our other tools? Do we know how to design and set up that integration?
- How quickly can we implement the tool? How much time do we need to invest to see the first results?
This list isn’t exhaustive, and you should add specific questions that are relevant to your organization. Here is a quick look into five categories of tools you would probably find useful at work inside any high-performing NOC: monitoring, ticketing, knowledge base, reporting, and process automation.
Monitoring
There are two main types of monitors: infrastructure monitoring and end user experience monitoring. Both types are necessary for your business, but you need to understand the difference and how to use each of them to enhance your NOC strategy.
Infrastructure monitoring is about servers, networks, and data center equipment. An efficient infrastructure monitoring solution creates a snapshot of a network’s health that is crucial for your NOC team. With the help of infrastructure monitoring tools, your NOC engineers can identify issues as they emerge and remotely address them. It’s essential to have a full understanding of network architecture to define which issues most affect the experience of end-users. This will allow your team to concentrate on the aspects most important to maintaining the workflow and keeping your users happy.
Examples: SolarWinds, LogicMonitor, OpenNMS
End User experience monitoring helps you observe user behavior and activities, detect problems, and find effective solutions. This aspect is crucial for overall NOC productivity as it will allow your team to handle the problems encountered by users and improve the customer experience. You can use the results to create future knowledge base content and help identify areas for improvement should some issues be persistent.
Examples: Dynatrace RUM, AppDynamics Browser RUM, New Relic Browser, Pingdom
Ticketing
Choosing the right ticketing system is necessary to maintain effective workflow when issues arise in your NOC. There are numerous tools available nowadays, so you can find the one that best meets your needs. To do this, you need to have a full understanding of the types of tickets most common to your network and the full scope of what your NOC team will be monitoring.
Examples: ServiceNow, ConnectWise, Jira
Knowledge base
A well-organized and extensive knowledge base will help to resolve many tickets faster and by the first person who starts to work on the problem. Gathering information about the most common issues faced by users and building up a knowledge base to handle these problems require a lot of time but this investment will pay massive dividends in the long run. You need to choose the right knowledge base tools to make the experiences referenceable to the whole team and helpful in making future decisions for the organization.
Examples: Stack Overflow for Teams, MangoApps, Confluence
Reporting
In NOC operations, reporting has two main goals. The first is to see how the NOC is operating to enhance and better organize its elements, including tools, team members, and processes, for day-to-day activities and to understand what should be done in terms of mid- to long-term planning. The second goal is to recognize patterns that lead to persistent issues and detect their root causes. This is essential for effective long-term problem management.
To reap the benefits of reporting, you need tools that take complex data and allow your NOC team to analyze and present them in an easy-to-use way.
Examples: Power BI, Tableau, Snowflake, AWS Redshift
Process automation
We all know that automation is the future of IT, and NOC activities are no exception. By automating repetitive daily tasks, time is freed up for revenue-generating projects. You can also reduce Mean Time to Resolution (MTTR) in critical incidents thanks to process automation. Essential events in the system can be managed through the triggering of specific workflows during off-work hours.
Examples: BigPanda, Moogsoft
Ready, set, implement: tips to leverage best NOC practices
In the first part of our guide, we’ve shared our NOC best practices, but they are beneficial only if they are adopted correctly. Here are several tips to help your NOC successfully implement best practices across your organization’s network operations.
1. Opt for a step-by-step approach to implementation
Building your NOC from scratch and implementing NOC best practices can be a long process, so try to do it gradually. Make sure that all NOC team members know, understand, and follow a selected best practice and can teach others how to use and comply with it. Then, move on to the next best practice.
2. Be realistic
While implementing NOC best practices promises a lot of benefits, try to avoid unrealistic expectations. Consider that NOC best practices can be challenging to implement, and your team may make mistakes along the way. Don’t rush them – give your team time. It’s important to understand that errors may occur and are probably inevitable while implementing best practices. Accept that there will be errors, add important info to your knowledge base, and learn from that experience.
3. Track progress
Assess the effectiveness of particular NOC best practices. Some best practices may fit your organization and its NOC better than others, so try to find the perfect match. With continuous evaluation and improvement of NOC operations, you can decide which of these practices you really need for your organization.
NOC as a service: how to choose the right provider for your needs
All businesses — large and small – understand the essential role that their NOC plays in all their functions. Proper operations mean stability, consistent availability, and security through continuous monitoring and maintenance of the IT infrastructure.
But what is better: to build your NOC from scratch or outsource it? In an era when almost everything can be outsourced, why not consider this option? There are definitely pros and cons to outsourcing versus building your own NOC. When it comes down to it, each organization will have its own business goals and set of criteria to help make this decision.
Imagine you have weighed the advantages, disadvantages, future costs, and benefits and decided to outsource your NOC services. A wise decision! But how do you choose a good NOC service provider? When choosing an outsourced NOC partner, look for one that provides a broad array of customized options. Your business is unique and comes with its own set of challenges and these require a tailored approach.
Here is a set of criteria you should consider before starting the collaboration:
1. Your NOC partner should be able to monitor complex systems
A good NOC partner should be able to support virtual, distributed, and cloud-based environments, as well as their hybrid forms.
2. Flexibility is crucial for alerting
Your NOC provider should offer you alerting options, depending on who needs to be notified as well as the seriousness of the issue.
3. Troubleshooting skills are a must-have
Monitoring and detection are important, but they are only the first steps in keeping your network healthy. The main goal of the NOC is to prevent outages (and fix them quickly if they happen). Choose a NOC provider with a proven track record in troubleshooting.
4. 24×7 support if you need it
If your business requires 24×7 support and a fast response, be sure that your NOC partner can offer you this option.
5. Attention to continuous improvement
Continuous improvement is a key to success in the IT industry. Your NOC provider should continuously enhance their monitoring as they understand more about your organization, your network, and your team.
Bottom line: it’s time to start a NOC with Profisea
If you’re looking for top-notch NOC services, Profisea is here to help.
Our company provides a full spectrum of NOC services to ensure the health, availability and status of your system. The Profisea professional team supervises, monitors, and maintains the entire cloud infrastructure and related services to maintain highest availability of your critical business services. Our AWS certified engineers keep a close eye on cloud infrastructure to guarantee that system uptime is not compromised in the event of outbreak alerts, system errors, or other issues.
10+ April DevOps news, updates & tips DevOps people will love!
May is already here, so it’s time for our April DevOps digest! Our team continues to collect the latest DevOps news to share with everyone who loves DevOps and works on DevOps projects. If you’ve missed any of our DevOps news and updates, here’s our latest digest for the DevOps & CloudOps community. Get ready for our next episode of DevOps info and read on. We’re sure you’ll find some helpful ideas here today.
1. AWS Lambda Function URLs is generally available
AWS Lambda is widely used to build applications that are reliable and scalable. In building their applications, users can leverage multiple serverless functions that implement the business logic. This process has now become even easier. AWS announced the general availability of Lambda Function URLs, a cool new feature that allows users to add HTTPS endpoints to any Lambda function and configure Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) headers if needed.
AWS Lambda Function URLs take care of configuring and monitoring an HTTPS service, leaving developers free to focus on improving the product or other critical tasks. To see how AWS Lambda Function URLs works, check this AWS blog post.
2. HashiCorp Consul 1.12 to improve security on Kubernetes
HashiCorp Consul 1.12 is yet another significant update in the cloud architecture world. This release lowers Consul secrets sprawl and automates the rotation of Consul server TLS certificates by using HashiCorp Vault, another solution from the company. Consul 1.12 also helps users understand their Consul data center status and evaluate control list (ACL) system behavior. The solution could be helpful for anyone who wants to build a zero-trust security architecture. For more detail, read the HashiCorp post.
3. Limiting access to Kubernetes resources with RBAC
Here’s another helpful tutorial for Kubernetes users. As the number of applications and actors increases in a cluster, you may find it necessary to review and restrict the actions they can take. This is where the Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) framework in Kubernetes can be helpful. Here is a comprehensive guide on how to recreate the Kubernetes RBAC authorization model from scratch and practice the relationships between Roles, ClusterRoles, ServiceAccounts, RoleBindings, and ClusterRoleBindings.
4. The API Traffic Viewer for Kubernetes
Another useful tip for all Kubernetes users — an API traffic viewer for Kubernetes can make your life easier. This simple-yet-powerful solution helps troubleshoot and debug APIs in a convenient way and view all communication between microservices, including API payloads in real-time. In addition to all the benefits mentioned, the tool is lightweight, supports modern applications, and requires no code instrumentation. View the documentation for more details here.
5. Kubernetes 1.24 is here
Although the Kubernetes 1.24 release date has been rescheduled from April 19th to May 3rd, we decided to include it in this digest. The release comes with 46 enhancements, on par with the 45 in Kubernetes 1.23 and the 56 in Kubernetes 1.22. Of those 46 changes, 14 enhancements have graduated to stable, 15 are moving to beta, and 13 are entering alpha. Also, two features have been deprecated, and two features have been removed.
Here are some of the most important enhancements:
- the removal of Dockershim
- beta APIs off by default
- storage capacity and volume expansion are generally available
- gRPC probes graduated to beta
Check the Kubernetes page for more details and enjoy!
6. That sweet word ‘automation’
Automation is what DevOps has been about and automating everything is the fundamental principle of DevOps. Automate, automate, automate — but could we be wrong here? And what should we do to better understand this automation trend? Kelsey Hightower’s answers to these questions draw attention to the importance of understanding what we are going to automate and how to go about it. Check his valuable piece of writing here.
7. Have you heard about Kyverno?
Kyverno is a powerful policy engine created specifically for Kubernetes. Kyverno allows users to manage policies as Kubernetes resources without requiring any new language to write policies. This also means that familiar tools such as kubectl, git, and kustomize can be used to manage policies. Here is a guide on how to get started with Kyverno and reap its benefits in practice.
8. Introducing EKS Blueprints
During April, AWS introduced a new open-source project called EKS Blueprints that aims to accelerate and simplify Amazon EKS adoption. EKS Blueprints is a set of Infrastructure as Code (IaC) modules to help users configure and deploy consistent and reliable EKS clusters across accounts and regions. EKS Blueprints can be used to bootstrap an EKS cluster with Amazon EKS add-ons as well as a broad array of open-source add-ons, including Prometheus, Karpenter, Nginx, Traefik, AWS Load Balancer Controller, Fluent Bit, Keda, Argo CD, and more. Read more about this project here.
9. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 is generally available
AWS announced that the next version of Aurora Serverless is generally available. Amazon Aurora Serverless v2 allows automatic capacity scaling to support demanding applications, which should help to reduce cloud costs and achieve best performance. With Aurora Serverless v2 you don’t pay for computer resources you don’t use.
Amazon Aurora Serverless is an on-demand, autoscaling configuration for Amazon Aurora. It automatically starts up, shuts down, and adjusts capacity to your application’s needs. Aurora Serverless v2 provides the full array of Amazon Aurora capabilities, including Multi-AZ support, Global Database, and read replicas, making it the perfect choice for various applications. To delve deeper into Amazon Aurora Serverless v2, check the documentation.
10. Datadog Application Security Monitoring (ASM) for more protection
Cloud security is nowadays one of the most discussed topics in the cloud community. Data breaches, misconfigurations, insider threats, and insufficient access management control can lead to serious cloud issues and financial damage. At the end of April, Datadog introduced its solution for security management. They announce the general availability of Datadog Application Security Monitoring (ASM), a new offering within the Cloud Security Platform that allows security, operations, and development teams to design, build and run secure and reliable applications. For more info about the solution, read an official post on the Datadog site.
11. GitLab adds fourth DORA metric API to CI/CD platform
The recent update to GitLab’s CI/CD platform has brought more than 25 improvements, including the addition of support for the application programming interface (API) for measuring change failure rates. This release supports the fourth metric as defined in the DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) framework. In addition, GitLab 14.10 extended the GitLab Runner Operator for Kubernetes to any distribution of the open-source platform and made it possible to manually trigger incident responses when needed. Check for more details here.
12. New releases of Calico, Cilium, Kuma and Istio
April brought us a lot of exciting news and releases. We’ve already mentioned Kubernetes 1.24, but there are many more updates of which you should be aware. Calico v3.20.5 was introduced, and Cilium v1.11.4 became available with numerous improvements, including two minor changes, 16 bug fixes, five CI changes and 24 miscellaneous changes.
Kuma also announced the release of Kuma 1.6.0, packed with cool features and improvements. Kuma 1.6.0 comes with:
- Kubernetes Gateway API support
- ZoneEgress improvements
- many improvements to the Helm charts
- a new metric to see how long configuration changes take to propagate to data plane proxies
Last but not least, there is Istio 1.13.3. This patch release includes bug fixes to improve robustness and some additional configuration support.
13. AWS IAM for better resource management
AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) added a new capability for better resource management — now users can control access to their resources based on the account, Organizational Unit (OU) or organization in AWS Organizations that contains those resources.
AWS generally recommend using multiple accounts when workloads grow as they allow setting up flexible security controls for specific workloads or applications. This new IAM capability helps to control access to resources as users can design IAM policies to enable the principals to access only resources inside specific AWS accounts, OUs, or organizations. Read the AWS post to learn more about this update.
14. LemonDuck bot targets Docker cloud instances to mine cryptocurrency
The CrowdStrike Cloud Threat Research team found the well-known cryptomining bot LemonDuck targeting Docker cloud instances for cryptomining operations. It runs an anonymous mining operation by the use of proxy pools, which hide the wallet addresses.
LemonDuck is a cryptomining botnet involved in targeting Microsoft Exchange servers via ProxyLogon and the use of EternalBlue and BlueKeep to mine cryptocurrency. But now, Docker cloud instances are at risk. As Docker usually runs container workloads in the cloud, a misconfigured cloud instance could expose a Docker API to the internet. This API could then be exploited to run a cryptocurrency miner inside a container. For more details, read the CrowdStrike report on this case.
The bottom line
The Profisea team is constantly on the lookout for the latest DevOps and Cloud news to share with you.
Don’t hesitate to contact us and tell us what you would like to see in our next digests and what topics we need to feature.
Our experts are constantly busy preparing new items of useful info for you.
And, of course, if your business requires any DevOps services, we are here to lend you a helping hand as we always have the best DevOps and CloudOps practices at our fingertips.
NOC Best Practices: The Ultimate Guide to Taking Your NOC from Zero to Hero. Part 1
Today, more than ever, business organizations are shifting to cloud computing since they understand that cloud leveraging is necessary to stay competitive. According to Gartner, 85% of enterprises will have a cloud-first principle by 2025, and for good reason. Moving to the cloud comes with a bunch of benefits for companies, including slashed IT costs, increased flexibility, and elevated efficiency. To achieve these benefits, cloud infrastructure needs to be well-architected and well-supported since if anything goes wrong, there will be a serious negative impact on productivity and customer satisfaction.
One way to prevent incidents and speed up their resolution when they do occur is by having in place a network operating center (NOC) or sourcing NOC as a service. A NOC is also crucial when considering that one of its key tasks is to reduce loss due to incidents as even just one hour of downtime can cost a business as much as $1 million in lost revenue.
In this guide, we’ll cover the most important aspects of NOC, share NOC best practices and explain how to implement them into your business processes. But first, what exactly is NOC?
What is NOC and what happens there?
Network Operations refer to the operations performed by in-house networking staff or third parties that organizations rely on to monitor, manage, and respond to alerts on their network’s availability and performance. Employees whose main responsibilities are related to network operations are usually called network operations engineers.
A Network Operations Center, a NOC, is typically a centralized department where network operation specialists provide 24x7x365 supervision, monitoring, and management of the network, servers, databases, firewalls, devices, and related external services. This infrastructure environment may be located on-premises and/or with a cloud-based provider.
Generally, the main task of any NOC is to maintain network performance, assure availability, and ensure continuous uptime. The NOC manages a wide array of activities that are crucial for an organization.
NOC best practices to follow
To ensure availability and prevent downtime, the NOC team evaluates current NOC activities and explores ways to improve everyday activities. The team may also implement NOC best practices or create some of its own. Here are several best practices that NOC specialists can leverage to enhance the enterprise’s network operations.
1. Create a clear and efficient NOC workflow
Organizing NOC activities and workflows is probably one of the most difficult tasks, but this is the keystone of NOC success. The NOC structure should be based on the specific technologies used in the organization and its skill levels. One of the most effective options here is to build a tiered NOC to handle the variety of NOC tasks on different levels. You need to define which type of events, requests, and incidents should be handled at Tier 1, reserving Tier 2 for more advanced issues. Organizing your NOC into transparent and tiered levels allows your company to prioritize the most crucial problems and fix them more quickly.
2. Implement continuous monitoring
A proactive approach to infrastructure and network system monitoring is a must. If NOC specialists continuously track infrastructure and network activity, they can detect any suspicious changes before they turn into issues. With continuous monitoring, it will be easier to prevent IT outages and downtime that could otherwise damage your company’s brand reputation and revenues.
3. Metrics are your best friends
NOC teams tend to manage a host of critical activities and are always busy. But you should correctly assess the workload to understand how many specialists you need and how to improve the performance of your NOC team. This is where metrics are helpful.
However, modern NOC tools help generate dozens of metrics and choosing the most meaningful ones is challenging work. As the amount of data available to a NOC team can be overwhelming, choose the metrics that are most applicable for your business. These should consider the size and scale of your organization and the KPIs that measure performance. The most common KPIs for a NOC include: first-call resolution, percentage of abandoned calls, mean time to restore, and the number of tickets and calls handled. You might also focus on more specific KPIs relevant to your organization.
Aside from KPIs, pay attention to utilization metrics as they will allow you to see when your NOC is busy and, what’s more important, which tasks are the most common. This information will help you staff your NOC levels for the best efficiency during peaks.
4. Create a standardized framework for incident and problem management
Inconsistency is one of the greatest enemies of NOC efficiency. To make your NOC reliably consistent, implement a standardized process framework that provides your NOC team with detailed and clear instructions for handling various situations.
There are several code of practice frameworks you can use for incident and problem management, including MOF, FCAPS, and ITIL. The ITIL (IT infrastructure library) service framework is among the most popular as it’s helpful in getting ISO 20000 certification. The framework includes a number of best practices to bear in mind when providing technology support services. It also offers a high level of flexibility as you can include your company’s customized procedures under its umbrella.
5. Documentation, documentation and documentation
Your NOC is only as good as its documentation. A successful NOC knows everything about the technology, system and infrastructure it monitors and manages, and this would be impossible without comprehensive documentation that covers the varied aspects of NOC activities.
All incident response activities should be properly documented and tracked. NOC specialists must record when an incident occurs and what actions were performed to resolve it. The NOC team should also check and review incident reports regularly to determine the root causes of issues and the most common problems. Leveraging these insights, NOC team members can find effective ways to enhance the response of your business to network incidents.
6. Test your NOC systems regularly
Here is an old but golden rule: all systems must be checked and tested regularly, and a NOC is no exception. The results of these NOC tests should be thoroughly tracked and evaluated. If any system issues are detected, they should be fixed as soon as possible. NOC system testing offers valuable insights into potential availability and performance problems and gives its NOC team members more information to prepare for potential outages.
7. Prioritization is a key
Every company is unique; the same goes for a NOC. Therefore, the priorities for the NOC team should be clearly defined. A first-come, first-served principle isn’t the best for resolving incidents. Instead, your NOC team must prioritize incidents and cases based on the importance and impact on business processes. Every team member should know your NOC priorities and be aware of what indicates a critical incident to be able to fix it immediately.
8. Design your NOC for scalability
Business planning typically includes a lot of aspects, including marketing strategy and budget planning. However, it also should consider scalability and potential growth in all aspects of the network, including expansion of the technical and operations teams otherwise, with the company’s growth, the NOC team would be unable to deliver ongoing support, which would in turn lead to customer dissatisfaction.
The NOC’s ability to scale and adjust to expansion requires consideration of several aspects:
- Team: you need to have enough employees to absorb growth without compromising the level of service.
- Architecture: your system should be well-architected to ensure scalability; the ability to easily deploy additional resources enables you to handle sudden spikes in growth.
- Process standardization: standardized frameworks for delivering service are one of the key components of a scalable and top-notch NOC. You should choose and adopt a process standard that fits your business needs, and your NOC team can then be trained to follow the established standards.
Bottom line: enhance NOC with Profisea
Even though an effective NOC is crucial for business stability and a company’s reputation, building and setting up your own NOC can be a challenging task. The good news is that in many cases you can outsource the NOC to someone else. This is where Profisea can help you.
We are experienced professionals knowledgeable in all NOC-related areas with years of experience in resolving the most complicated NOC issues across numerous successful projects. The Profisea helps big, medium, and small businesses stay innovative and resilient in the face of network challenges. Whether you need top-class NOC services or want us to build well-architected cloud infrastructure for your business, we are ready to take on any challenge and support you along the way. So don’t hesitate and contact us for a free consultation to take your NOC from zero to hero.
In the next part of our guide, we’ll explain how to choose the right tools for your NOC and share some exclusive tips that will help you smoothly implement NOC best practices into your operations. Stay tuned!
In-house DevOps or DevOps as a Service: What is Best for Your Business?
Like most cutting-edge innovations these days, DevOps poses a dilemma for business: should you build your DevOps from scratch leveraging your already considerable investments in your IT department, or should you outsource it and choose DevOps as a service? Actually, this question has more than one correct answer, and let’s see why.
It’s been more than 12 years since DevOps methodology shook up the digital market, winning the undivided attention of IT executives worldwide. During these years, thousands of specialists provided their explanation of DevOps and how it should work — so many experts, so many opinions. However, one point is clear: everyone recognizes that DevOps is all about simplification of software delivery processes for faster production of high-performing, customer-oriented products. According to an Atlassian survey, 99% of IT professionals said DevOps had a positive impact on their organization by improving the quality of products/services, time to market, and team performance.
That’s why many IT companies are craving to implement DevOps in their teams and looking for an easy way to do so. There are two options: Either they develop their own DevOps team by hiring DevOps engineers, or they turn to professional DevOps outsourcing companies to provide them with DevOps as a service. If you are still deliberating about which DevOps option is good for you, or if you find yourself not completely satisfied with how it was carried out in your organization, this article will come in handy.
In-house DevOps: A long-awaited dream or a nightmare?
According to Glassdoor, ‘DevOps Engineer’ is ranked 5th of the ten best jobs in America following Java Developer, Data Scientist, Product Manager, and Enterprise Architect, and comes with a median base salary of $110,003. Do organizations want to hire DevOps engineers and develop their own DevOps teams? Of course, they do. In 2021 there were c. 7,000 DevOps job openings. Clearly, there are benefits in having your own DevOps team. But what are they and are they cost-effective? Well, an in-house DevOps team provides control over each phase of the SDLC (software development lifecycle), and so your infrastructure will be tailored to your team’s toolkit and skills. However, for DevOps to work, it has to be implemented correctly. Atlassian’s study found that almost 85% of organizations faced problems when applying DevOps, whether related to a lack of employee skills, outdated infrastructure, or difficulties in adjusting to a new corporate culture.
Source: Glassdoor.com, best jobs in America for 2021
It takes lots of resources to build customized infrastructure and support an in-house DevOps team. As the DevOps base salary is $110,003 a year, this means that you will be paying out each month more than $9,000 (AVG) to a DevOps specialist plus overheads and taxes, which is more than 40% higher than the average USA salary of workers in professional, management, and related occupations. DevOps is of course a very difficult role since DevOps engineers are expected to work with development and IT operations teams, quality control specialists, and production teams to oversee the delivery and release of code features. Moreover, DevOps engineers are expected to have and use well-developed soft and hard skills to expertly bridge the gap between diverse software production teams while seamlessly managing cloud infrastructure. In addition, DevOps engineers must have excellent leadership and business skills to work with teams and clients successfully. We’re sure you will agree that not every ex-developer or ex-sys-admin can grow into a high-performing DevOps expert. Plus, even if DevOps-level salaries do not scare you, the hiring period is long and expensive. Given that the hiring period for a software engineer is about 65 days, with DevOps, it’s logically more protracted and also involves a hefty hiring/onboarding spend, not to mention recruiters’ remuneration, managers’ impact on test tasks/interviews, and so on.
Are you sure you need full-time DevOps for each of your projects? In our experience, large businesses may need internal DevOps only in 30% of cases, while small businesses and startups may need it only in one or two cases. Simply put, DevOps specialists can help improve your infrastructure, automate and optimize key processes, and then monitor the systems. If this is your case, go outsourcing.
DevOps as a Service: perks and pitfalls
A DevOps team of mature DevOps professionals can provide DevOps as a Service (DaaS) and enable you to quickly deploy your products and focus on streamlining and simplifying internal SDLC processes and improving your core product/services. A key advantage to DaaS is that the DaaS team will have all the expertise and experience needed to leverage DevOps best practices and handle virtual infrastructure processes easily and is best placed to troubleshoot any ad hoc issues.
As well as cutting the costs of implementation, you also save time/money on recruiting and onboarding new team members, and thus reduce the risk of staff turnover. At the same time, your employees can remain focused on things that are more important to your business goals. In addition, if you are satisfied with the result of your DaaS cooperation, you can continue the partnership. If not, you can source a new partner. So basically, when you deal with DevOps as a Service, you get:
- End-to-end IT services covering all phases of SDLC. Plus, mature DevOps specialists’ decisions are driven by an ethos of enhancing the value of your business.
- Improvements to your existing cloud infrastructure. Experienced DevOps engineers will design and implement cloud infrastructure of any size and complexity or upgrade your existing systems to fulfill your business requirements utilizing DevOps best tools and practices.
- Vetted & handpicked DevOps talents. Many companies, when dreaming about streamlined and automated product delivery processes, find it difficult to attract serious DevOps talents. Dedicated DaaS teams help overcome this problem.
- Management and professional advice. You can turn to a mature DaaS company for consulting services to help you clarify ideas on how to improve your product/service delivery processes.
However, as with most business-critical decisions, deciding between DevOps inhouse and outsourcing to a DaaS is not a piece of cake! Far more than costs and deadlines are involved, so here are some key questions to ask:
1. Which of your DaaS candidate companies has the most inside knowledge and hands-on experience of your type of business?
2. How reliable are the DaaS candidate companies – they will after all have access to the heart of your business. Security is key. Is there a risk of business espionage? Is your standard NDA strong enough?
3. Day-to-day communications: How will a DaaS team communicate and interface with key people in your company and which of your people, processes and tasks will be affected and/or need to be?
How to choose a good DevOps service provider
As interest in cloud computing only grows, the need for DevOps services is growing too. The pre-pandemic numbers from Global Market insights suggested that this market would increase four times and reach $17B by 2026. North America was leading the implementation of DevOps solutions, with 45% of the market share.
With so many companies and agencies offering DevOps as a service in the ever-changing IT market, it can be difficult to make the right choice. How to distinguish between a good and a bad DevOps service provider? And what will work for your business? Is it a matter of technical skills or the knowledge of DevOps best practices? Here are a few things you should keep in mind as you embark on your quests to find a DevOps service provider.
1. Decide what processes you want to improve with DevOps. Whether you plan to move to cloud, scale up your infrastructure or reduce your cloud spending, be sure you set realistic goals and KPIs. And remember that you may also need to invest effort in cleaning up your existing infrastructure.
2. Focus on what you need. Look at DaaS providers with experience in your domain.
3. Pay attention to tech expertise. Some companies work only with one cloud, some provide a wide range of DevOps services (including setting CI/CD pipeline or cloud-to-cloud migrations). Choose a company with comprehensive tech expertise to cover all your needs.
4. Check their portfolio. While choosing between several options, opt for a company with a proven record of successful projects.
5. Reduce the risks. Choose a company with a spotless reputation and all necessary certifications to ensure the security and the quality of the services.
With the above-mentioned tips, you’ll definitely be among those who benefit from DevOps. Our DevOps specialists meet all the requirements for the best DevOps as a service provider and will help you hit DevOps milestones in no time.
Final thoughts
The author of this 2016 article in Forbes compared DevOps implementation to gear shifting, which means that improvements to DevOps are visible at every stage of the development process since engineers could once again focus entirely on the product rather than manually performing routine tasks. The best DevOps engineers can simplify product development, improve communication between individual project teams, and save the company money. DevOps functions run in the background, ensuring that all systems are constantly monitored and operational. In addition, when problems arise, DevOps engineers act as good problem solvers. At the same time, hiring for DevOps is not an easy thing to do. Many businesses cannot afford to spend months recruiting and onboarding. Moreover, it is quite expensive to hire and maintain your own DevOps engineers. Many businesses simply do not have the time and resources to build an in-house DevOps team.
We, at Profisea, know what to do. We have enormous experience with DevOps and leverage DevOps best practices to ensure transparency, collaboration and cross-functionality of your teams, and lead you to DevOps success. Contact us and book a free appointment today!
DevOps Automation in 2022: Best Practices for Your Business
According to Gartner, IT spending worldwide is forecasted to grow by 5.5% from 2021 to 2022, reaching $4.5 trillion and making the largest year-on-year jump in more than a decade. While many enterprises invest in building new technologies, a lot of IT resources — whether money, time, or top talents — are locked into simply keeping the lights on. Manual handling, time-consuming operational processes, functional silos, plus an overwhelming collection of tools can hamper the ability of IT to meet business needs. When IT is unwieldy and slow, businesses become ineffective and miss new opportunities, encouraging executives to look for alternatives — now widely available due to the rise of cloud service providers and the popularity of DevOps automation practices.
While DevOps automation can work as a catalyst to engineering excellence, not every company can benefit from it. It’s like a jigsaw puzzle: you have thousands of pieces in your hand, but if there is no reference picture, you will struggle to succeed. This is the situation many IT organizations face despite the fact that DevOps automation isn’t a new concept. Many enterprises don’t realize the full benefits of DevOps automation because they don’t have a full picture and so won’t be able to scale it across the organization. So, why should you consider DevOps automation and its benefits? What are the best practices and tools? What makes for good DevOps automation? At Profisea we’ve helped many companies adopt DevOps automation, and this is what we’ve learned along the way.
Why do you need DevOps automation?
Before we dive into best practices, let’s consider a more general question: Why do you need DevOps automation? Automation is an essential part of DevOps transformation since it allows enterprises to enable efficiency, contingency, and reliability within the organization. It also eliminates delays so will free up time for more important goals. Since DevOps methodology first emerged back in 2007, automation has significantly evolved and moved to new areas — from automating delivery, integration, and deployment to using innovative automating approaches to observability, reliability, and remediation. But what are the benefits? Well, that depends on who you ask. Let’s take a look at the advantages from both engineering and business perspectives.
From an engineering perspective, DevOps automation:
- helps development teams become more effective;
- lowers cross-team dependency;
- allows engineers to cut back on manual processes for infrastructure provisioning and configuration by using Infrastructure as Code (IaC);
- improves transparency, leading to higher productivity;
- leaves more ‘mind space’ for creative thinking and innovation;
- improves product quality and increases release frequency;
- helps to get faster feedback.
From the business perspective, DevOps automation:
- reduces lead times for feature deployment;
- increases reliability and availability by automatically finding and fixing errors;
- reduces human error;
- eliminates the need for large teams, saving money for other goals;
- reduces repetitive efforts by different development teams;
- minimizes time wastage;
- offers easy yet effective problem-solving techniques;
- reduces IT costs and increases business value.
However, to fully reap the benefits of DevOps automation, the methodology needs to be properly understood and implemented. You can buy a lot of DevOps tools in the hope of saving time, money, and resources, yet see no results. Why does this happen? Mainly because of the myths and misconceptions about DevOps, as it is not only about new tools, but also about more effective collaboration and communication across the organization.
According to Puppet, the main goal of perfect DevOps automation is to create a self-service system in which:
- incident management is automated;
- resources are available to developers on demand;
- applications are re-architected to meet business requirements;
- design and development teams work in close cooperation with security specialists.
While it may sound too good to be true, organizations should move as closely as possible to this model. Generally, this starts from fixing the common bottlenecks engineers have while releasing and deploying new code to production and continues with looking for ways to automate the operational processes when software is in production. To reduce difficulties in the operational stage, it’s essential to analyze incident data — particularly repetitive incidents — and identify the issues that led to frequent and chronic incidents.
Before deciding what and how to automate, ask your engineering team about the most annoying sources of repetitive tasks. This will help you identify which repetitive and manual tasks are most in need of automation. Here are several common tips to also keep in mind:
1. Prioritize creation of a Continuous Delivery Pipeline (CDP) for releases and improved business agility.
2. Use open standards to simplify onboarding, save time on training and make your DevOps practices more ubiquitous. Community-driven standards for packaging, runtime and configuration are even more crucial when moving to the cloud.
3. Use dynamic variables to make your code reusable and suitable for different environments.
4. Opt for MACH architecture for increased speed, lower risk, and better customizations.
5. Choose flexible tooling to minimize rework and remain effective when your business goals change.
If you are planning DevOps automation, you can also contact our DevOps experts as we have hands-on experience in this field and can offer you the most effective solutions to meet your business needs.
Best DevOps automation practices: what and how to automate
Now that you have a bunch of tips about DevOps automation, it’s time to evaluate which processes we need to automate and which tools exist to manage the various aspects of the software development process. Let’s identify the main areas of automation, the best DevOps automation practices, and the tools available to achieve our goals.
1. Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD)
One of the main principles of DevOps is connected with CI/CD. CI and CD let contributors build, test, and deploy code changes safely and consistently. With CI/CD tools, you can have fewer manual processes or even no human intervention at all, while creating a deployment pipeline. This starts from a commit in a version control system, then continues with assessing the code in a series of tests, and if all is OK, it then ends with deployment of the version into production.
2. Configuration and Infrastructure as Code Tools
Having all infrastructure, configuration, and application code stored in a convenient place is another important part of DevOps automation. Configuration and infrastructure as code are practices that allow engineers to reduce manual processes, eliminate errors and apply similar principles of auditing to infrastructure code as they do to application code.
There are several aspects and types of tools we need to mention here.
Infrastructure provisioning. It means provisioning various infrastructure components (for example, network components, virtual machines, and managed services) from code. While infrastructure provisioning in the Cloud might be complicated and error-prone due to the manual building of scripts, IAC helps to do it automatically, saving time and effort.
Configuration management. To make your work effective, you must configure the operational system, software requirements, package dependencies, and system files on the machines.
Container technology. Using containers isn’t a new trend in the IT world. According to the IBM survey, 61% of respondents who have already adopted containers said they were using containers in 50% or more of the new applications they created throughout the previous two years; 64% of container users anticipated 50% or more of their existing applications to be transformed with containers during the next two years. Containers are lightweight, faster, and easier to manage and automate, especially in the combination with the right tools.
Serverless functions. Here, we also have some approaches to automate and deploy the serverless function in the most effective way.
Tools vary widely depending on the technology stack and business problems they are expected to solve. Experienced DevOps specialists can mix tools and create the best combination to achieve infrastructure and configuration as code. When choosing tools for your organization, be sure they allow your engineers to deploy infrastructure in a trouble-free and safe manner.
3. Continuous monitoring
Like CI and CD, Continuous Monitoring (CM) plays a huge role in DevOps automation. It allows monitoring of performance and the stability of applications and infrastructure during the software lifecycle and helps operation teams to get valuable insights and data to troubleshoot. For engineers, it delivers the information needed to debug and patch.
4. Reliability
Reliability and resilience are crucial elements of DevOps automation as they help organizations stay ahead of major issues and thrive in the dynamic business environment. Reliability and resilience tooling is booming, offering new innovative solutions to automate the organizational incident process of on-call management, incident process management, and remediation.
At this point, we’ve learned a lot about DevOps automation, but is it possible to go too far by going for ALL those best practices? Well, yes, as some organizations, unfortunately take DevOps to an extreme.
David Linthicum, Chief Cloud Strategy Officer at Deloitte Consulting LLP, says that many enterprises in an attempt to automate development processes link together too many tools and practices, which leads to over-automating. Too much automation has many hidden risks and can result in all sorts of negative outcomes. So how does one strike a balance and reach DevOps heaven? At Profisea, we know all the secrets of effective and seamless DevOps automation.
Bottom line: automate with Profisea
While DevOps automation promises numerous benefits, it can be a serious challenge. With many expensive tools for automation and DevOps vendors that offer prospects of making you the next Facebook or Netflix, you need to find your unique approach. This is where Profisea comes to help. We are experienced professionals knowledgeable in all areas related to Cloud Computing and DevOps. We also have years of experience under our belts and numerous successful projects and happy clients.
We help big and small businesses to grow and excel using cloud technologies and innovative DevOps practices. Whether you plan to move to the cloud, implement DevOps automation or improve your existing DevOps practices, we are ready to take on any challenge and support you along the way. So, don’t hesitate and book a free assessment to take your business to the next DevOps level.
7 DevOps Skills Business Leaders Need to Succeed in the New Normal
In recent years, IT organizations have changed significantly and adopted a lot of innovations — for example, cloud computing, virtual reality, AI developments, and visualization technologies. These have made business processes faster, more effective, less expensive, and opened a plethora of new opportunities for creating new products and services.
The coronavirus pandemic further accelerated the shift to innovations, making digitalization a core trend of the last two years. According to McKinsey & Company, organizations digitized their activities 20 to 25 times faster during COVID-19, and this transformation isn’t going to end anytime soon. What skills do business leaders need to stay competitive in this new reality? How can they help their organizations with security, usability, and scalability? Actually, they can learn a lot from DevOps specialists.
Skills leaders need to help their businesses survive
According to the Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report, the adoption of DevOps practices remains popular with 36% at the project level and 20% across the entire organization, and it seems that these rates will only grow. If you’re a CEO, you probably know what DevOps can do for your business in the post-pandemic world. With faster deployment, increased stability, and significant improvement in product quality, DevOps culture can change almost everything in business for the better. And what about specific and general DevOps skills? There are some skills that have become crucial today, and many DevOps folks already have them because of the need to continuously develop and stay resilient in the fast-evolving environment. Many leaders in business can benefit from developing them as well. The world of the next normal is demanding, so let’s get prepared to survive in the face of continuous turbulence.
1. Communication and collaboration skills
Strong communication and collaboration skills are crucial for DevOps people. While you might be sick and tired of hearing this, DevOps is all about breaking silos. All DevOps practices focus on bridging the gap between development and operations through continuous integration, delivery, and deployment, with the overall goal of creating a smoother if not seamless deployment process. DevOps people build connections and fix bottlenecks by talking to people. The aforementioned report says that 69% of survey respondents selected human (soft) skills e.g. communication, collaboration, empathy as a major skill category for DevOps. However, they are crucial not only for DevOps. While DevOps practices mainly focus on development and operation teams, collaboration and cooperation should ideally work across the whole organization. Collaboration is becoming a new source of competitive advantage in the new normal, especially in an era of rapid digital adoption.
2. Understanding cloud computing
Cloud computing is hardly a new player on the market, with more and more businesses seeing many benefits from moving their assets to cloud infrastructure. According to Gartner, end-user spending on public cloud services is expected to reach $482 billion in 2022, making it one of the major IT expenses for enterprises. Public cloud spending will exceed 45% of all business IT spending by 2026. Organizations that use innovative IT solutions such as cloud computing have a higher competitive edge in the post-pandemic world compared to those that rely on outdated approaches and workflows.
Nowadays, cloud computing is a key factor of better business outcomes. Implemented properly, the cloud enhances agility, improves scalability, enables flexibility, and helps to improve customer insight and cost efficiencies. Like most cutting-edge technologies, this is more than just a new way to store your information. Cloud computing is a way of transforming your organization from a traditional, rigid IT infrastructure to a flexible environment that saves resources that can be used for solving core business tasks. Cloud computing promotes the shift from a maintenance-led approach to one that supports innovation, automation, and mobility. However, to reap all the benefits of the cloud, your organization should implement it correctly, but choosing, creating, and managing the cloud infrastructure can be a huge challenge even for the most experienced IT leaders. If your organization needs cloud computing as a service, we can help. Our cloud experts will maximize the scalability and reliability of your cloud infrastructure, and create an automated multi-cloud environment optimized to your business.
3. Attention to upskilling and certification
Now could be a good time to consider how organizations can help their employees adapt to a new reality with new knowledge and skills. Upskilling and certification might be the best investment amidst the global pandemic. According to a McKinsey & Company report, 87% of executives admit they were experiencing skill gaps in their human resources or expected them within several years, and just 28% said their organizations were making efficient decisions to solve this problem. Upskilling 2021: Enterprise DevOps Skills Report demonstrates that 42% of respondents agree that professional certifications are nice-to-have in the DevOps world. But DevOps specialists aren’t the only ones who should regularly invest in upskilling and certification, in fact, the whole organization needs them.
Training and development should be made available within the whole company, and from various providers such as technology leaders, vendors, and partners, to expand employee skill sets and improve the chances of survival in a new reality. This type of upskilling is not just for the IT department or already-trained staff but for the entire team, so they can effectively work with new instruments and develop their own digital products by leveraging innovative technology and processes.
4. Understanding automation technologies
Over the previous decade, no one doubted that automation would be the future of business, but the pandemic boosted the need to adopt technologies like AI and automation at speed. Digitization, remote work, and the necessity to streamline business processes are increasing the demand for innovative workflow automation management solutions, a market expected to increase from $4.8 billion in 2018 to more than $26 billion in 2025, according to Grand View Research. Almost all (97%) IT decision-makers agree that process automation is essential for digital transformation.
Automation is the lifeforce of DevOps, so business leaders can learn a lot about its importance from DevOps experts. Automation reduces human error, improves speed, increases accuracy, enhances consistency and reliability while saving time and effort. Eventually, this leads to more effective business processes, higher-quality delivery of products to customers, and, as a result, increased revenue. If you’re planning to implement DevOps in your organization, our experienced DevOps team is ready to help. You can book a free assessment, and our DevOps professionals will evaluate your business needs, current development, and operation processes to offer the best DevOps practices for your delivery unit.
5. Software security skills
In 2021, data breach costs significantly increased from $3.86 million to $4.24 million, the highest average total cost in the 17-year history of the Cost of a Data Breach Report from IBM. According to Varonis, only 5% of organizations’ folders are properly protected. And the number of cyber-attacks has broken records. The FBI, for example, has seen a 300% increase in reported cybercrimes since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. This all makes the security aspect one of the crucial things IT leaders should think about, and that’s exactly why DevSecOps has been one of the hottest buzzwords in the tech world in recent years.
Business leaders need to address the issue of application security more effectively nowadays, otherwise, they put their businesses at risk. The cybersecurity skill gap remains an issue, with 90% of cyber data breaches being a result of human error in 2019, according to a study of data from the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) by the British cyber security and data analytics company, CybSafe. Along with educating employees and regular cyber security awareness training, a more complex approach is required. This is exactly where DevSecOps evolves from a buzzword to a game-changer. In a new normal, every IT leader needs to know the rules of this security game to be able to protect their organizations.
6. Understanding of DevOps tools
While this skill might be seen as a must-have only for DevOps professionals, it isn’t quite true. Since DevOps has become one of the most discussed and widely-used software development approaches, CEOs and CTOs just can’t ignore it anymore. If you’re planning to implement DevOps or want to improve your current DevOps practices, you must understand how DevOps works and what tools are the most effective for your business problems. With numerous tools for any facet of DevOps, picking the right one can be a huge challenge for each business leader. Moreover, buying a good DevOps toolchain and spending thousands of dollars on it doesn’t mean that you implemented DevOps. According to Gartner, 90% of the DevOps initiatives will fail to fully meet expectations by 2023, and it will happen not due to technical reasons, but mainly due to the limitations of the leadership approaches. For a successful DevOps journey, consider outsourcing DevOps. Our expert team can not only help you with DevOps implementation but also explain which specific tools are the best for your needs and how to make your DevOps cost-efficient.
7. Understanding the principles of servant leadership
Back in 2017, the State of DevOps Report from Puppet demonstrated a correlation between the type of leadership and organizational performance — teams perform better if their leaders work not as traditional managers but act more as coaches and servant leaders who help employees and the organization. Servant leaders focus on setting a vision and creating a mission statement that provides a sense of purpose for the entire team. A successful leader should be able to understand every aspect of the business to direct and support their team. Let’s take, for instance, digital transformation and automation. While these new approaches can significantly boost the performance of your team, you, as a leader, should know what exactly should be digitalized and automated and choose the solutions that fit your business needs. No one knows your business better than you do. Otherwise, investing in even the most innovative products won’t pay back. If your business needs expertise in DevOps and Cloud Computing, schedule a consultation with our specialists. We offer the best DevOps and CloudOps practices for our clients to meet their unique business requirements.
Bottom line
Over the last two years, the whole world has been pushed toward the next normal. While the coronavirus crisis negatively impacted business productivity and profits, it accelerated the move to digital channels, innovative IT solutions, and new ways of working. Now, if businesses are to survive, they have no choice but to adapt to a very different future. By embracing these seven skill areas – business leaders have a better chance of surviving in the highly competitive market and transforming themselves and their businesses to the next normal.
If you need help on the way to a more innovative, resilient, productive, and profitable business, we will be honored to help. Profisea offers cost-effective and flexible DevOps and CloudOps services to improve product quality and enhance collaboration within the organization to help your business thrive. Don’t hesitate: book a free consultation.
