Devops Chat

Data Privacy is the new front in the compliance wars. For many organizations Data Privacy is a dreaded subject with a maze of governance and compliance issues. Osano wants to make it easy. Led by serial entrepreneur Arlo Gilbert, it is catching fire as enterprises learn that complying with Data Privacy laws is possible and even affordable. Have a listen as Arlo and Alan Shimel discuss this important topic.

Ci/CD has changed the way we do software. From architecting it, to coding it, storing it, testing it, deploying it. GitLab has been a leader in this revolution. I spoke with Darby Frey of GitLab's CI/CD team about this and what the future has in store. Have a listen and hope you enjoy!

While at times it seemed the adoption of DevSecOps was like pushing rope uphill, the market has embraced the premise that DevSecOps is real and is much needed in bringing a higher level of quality to software. StackHawk is a new company out of Boulder, Co that is seeking to allow developers to better secure their code and increase quality. I spoke to two of the co-founders of the company, Ryan Severns and Scott Gerlach while I was out in Boulder recently. Have a listen to what they see as the game changing solutions they want to bring to market.

In this episode of DevOps Chats we talk with Donald Lutz, Principal Software Architect, specializing in systems integration and creating large, scalable cloud applications. Occasionally DevOps Chats is fortunate to spotlight DevOps and cloud native developers doing trailblazing work in contemporary software architectures. Donald fits that bill to a "t.", as an entrepreneur and employee at startups like Faction, BoldTech Systems, and his own company Technetronic Solutions, and established companies including Via West. Our discussion focuses on creating cloud native applications in startups and large enterprise IT. Donald's currently working with one of the world's largest financial institutions to move from legacy applications directly to cloud native apps, bypassing any interim lift-n-shift moves. His work spans many Microsoft technologies, including .NET Core, runtime framework Dapper for RDBMS mapping, Service Fabric, and Azure, and opensource Kubernetes, Terraform, and Puppet (and Enterprise). During o

Application performance company AppDynamics recently released its 2019 edition of the App Attention Index Report. The 2019 report is subtitled The Era of Digital Reflex. Whoa, that sounds heavy!! Joining me on this episode of DevOps Chats is Steve Long, AppDynamics Regional CTO, and Technology Strategy. Cisco acquired AppDynamics in 2017. Digital connections are a near-constant. Interacting with our world through digital apps and transactions are omnipresent: making a restaurant reservation using OpenTable, making payments using an app or our smartphone digital wallet, and checking our smartphones to plan and move through our day. Thus the name of the report "The Era of Digital Reflex." In addition to insights from the report, Steve and I talk about measuring the customer's experience, tieing performance back to the desired business outcoming, strategies for finding problems, and reducing the time it takes to fix problems. Join us on this compelling discussion about application performance, customer experie

Test automation and CI/CD are evolving very rapidly to achieve great speed and impactful results by DevOps teams and Agile organizations. Our DevOps Chat guest, Tricentis Chief Product Officer Wolfgang Platz, contributes his experiences to the state of the art with his newly released book Enterprise Continuous Testing. Automating software testing just for the sake of automation, is "doing the mess for less." What is the business value of each software element you are testing, and what is the right strategy for testing these software implemented functions? Automation certainly brings with it speed, but are we ultimately making incremental improvements to testing which doesn't tap into the full power and benefits of automated software testing. Our discussion with Wolfgang focuses on the need for expanding dev-testing with higher-level integration, system, and end-to-end user experience testing, which are often performed well by shared testing and operations teams. Now, think Shift Right. While Agile and de

Pulumi is bringing a new open source tool and approach for modern infrastructure as code. We spoke to Pulumi CEO, co-founder Joe Duffy about it and the SaaS version that they are bringing to market. Pulumi is an up and coming player in this market and you should watch what they are doing going forward.

RSA Conference (#RSAC) besides being the worlds largest cybersecurity conference has also become the place to see the latest innovation in the world of cyber. The woman who drives the innovation programs at RSAC is Cecilia Marinier. We spoke with Cecilia last year for RSA 2019. The program was great last year. 2020 promises to be even better. Listen to Cecilia give us the scoop on on what is in store for 2020. You can find out more about RSAC https://www.rsaconference.com/rsac-programs/innovation-sandbox

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: As you use an opensource tool like Spinnaker, the more you develop best practices and learnings. These are useful to share with others internal to the enterprise and other opensource users. Jing Vergara, Principal Software Engineer at Salesforce, joins DevOps Chats to share a preview of her upcoming talk "Demystifying Spinnaker VM Image Baking and Deployment". Jing shares with us what to include and not to include (like secrets), when baking a VM image, how to avoid configuration drift, and how to deploy to multiple cloud providers using cloud init files. Jing also shares how to use opensource Packer templates with Ansible, Chef, and Docker, and how to build your own packer templates. Jing Vergara's talk is on Sunday, Nov 17th at 10:45 AM PT. Spinnaker Summit 2019 is San Diego on November 15-17.

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has garnered a great deal of attention as organizations pursue automation routine tasks through automation software. RPA automates tasks integrated into digital business process automation. Wayne Ariola, Tricentis General Manager of RPA, joins DevOps Chats to discuss how Tricentis brings its strengths and heritage in software testing automation into the world of RPA. The expansion into RPA makes a lot of sense when you consider testing technologies that operate on UX domain and data models, avoiding the pitfalls of brittle screen scraping approaches. Together, Wayne and I explore how business process automation using RPA intersects with DevOps tools, processes, and teams, and how RPA benefits from the experiences gained in the DevOps community. Join us on this episode of DevOps Chats as we explore Robotic Process Automation and DevOps.

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Debugging production issues in any environment can be challenging, and Spinnaker has its production learning curve. Problems aren't always replicable in a smaller environment, and DEBUG messages can be verbose and confusing to triage what's happening. Our DevOps Chat guest Chuck Lane, Salesforce Lead Software Engineer, is giving a talk on "Debugging & Profiling Spinnaker Applications Live" at the Spinnaker Summit 2019. In Chuck's talk, you'll learn skills like remote JVM debugging, custom profiling builds, and the magic of figuring out what's going on with a multithreaded microservice using htop! Chuck's talk is on Saturday, November 16, at 3;40 PM PT. Spinnaker Summit 2019 is November 15-19 in San Deigo.

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Canary deploys give us a window into how new code deploys perform in production on a limited basis. The technology holds great promise in helping us learn the positive or negative effects of deploys without putting the more extensive set of microservices, application functions, and beyond at risk. How do you route traffic? How do you apply a virtual service manifest? Is there a quick way to perform a smoke test to find server errors? When comparing metrics from new code to old, how do you know which results are good or bad? There is a lot to know and learn how to deploy and use Canarys. Our DevOps Chat guest Omar Al-Hayderi (Engineering Manager and Principal Engineer at Autodesk) is giving a talk on "Canary Deploys with Istio: Lessons Learned" at the Spinnaker Summit 2019. His talk is on Sunday, November 17, at 1:30 PM PT. Spinnaker Summit 2019 is November 15-19 in San Deigo.

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Secrets Management is vital to any vibrant DevOps and GitOps toolchain. As part of its opensource maturation and thanks to the contribution of our DevOps Chat guest, Spinnaker now has a secure secrets management capability enabling GitOps, taking non-application secrets out of plaintext in Hal config files. (Always a good idea!) Cameron Motevasselani, Software Engineer at Armory, is giving his talk "Spinnaker Plugins: Extending Spinnaker for the Enterprise" on Sunday, November 17, at 10:45 AM PT. In addition to his contributions to Spinnaker's new secrets management facility, Cameron shares the work in progress to create an extensible Spinnaker plugin system. The current work is an early MVP to be followed by the implementation of PF4J and concrete extension points as part of Spinnaker stages. Spinnaker Summit 2019 is November 15-19 in San Deigo.

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Most open source software isn’t one size fits all, and Spinnaker is no different. While it captures the most general use cases of software delivery, most organizations find that it lacks some features they need to automate their entire delivery pipeline such as integrations with internal tooling or compliance systems. Out of the box (figuratively), Spinnaker provides Run Job and Webhook stages that teams can use to build custom integrations to help fill any void and enable adoption by a wide range of users. Ethan Rogers, Staff Software Engineer with Armory, joins us on DevOps Chat to share a preview of his Spinnaker Summit 2019 talk on Spinnaker extensibility. Ethan shares how Run Job and Webhook stages are used to build custom stages to capture any number of use cases with no code and simple configuration. He also covers situations when it's necessary to write code. Ethan's talk, “Making Spinnaker Your Own”, is Saturday, November 16, 3:45 PM, at Spinnaker Summit 2019 in Sa

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Never underestimate an entrepreneur looking to solve a real-world problem. Aerobotics is bringing drones, imagery, mapping, containers, Kubernetes, Spinnaker, data pipeline processing, and machine learning to agriculture. Sounds interesting, right? Aerobotics uses aerial drones and sophisticated image processing to help growers manage yield, pest & disease in their farms through Artificial Intelligence. Speaking at the upcoming Spinnaker Summit in San Diego, Aerobotics’ head of software Nick Coles, shares with us how his company evolved from making drones to map orchards into a software company using raw image data to create high resolution, georeferenced maps of orchards. Aerobotics technology is comprised of a map engine and tree engine. It's both a fascinating problem space and exciting application of cloud-native technologies, including Spinnaker. This episode of DevOps Chats features a preview of Nick's talk; “The Future of Farming with Aerobotics”. Nick's talk is on Su

In the traditional datacenter world, security was (or is) very network-centric. Firewalls, IDS, Network Access Control, focus on the aggregation of all traffic traversing in, out, and across the network. Cloud-native applications rely upon different constructs and methods of building applications. It's not just the software and technology stack that requires different security in the cloud-native era. We can't just surround cloud-native applications with security; we must build in security. And to do that requires you understand how container and microservices applications are made using DevOps. You must think about how DevOps works to build in security properly. Enter Lacework, a platform built for DevOps teams to build security into cloud-native applications. Vikram Kapoor, Lacework Co-Founder and CTO, joins DevOps Chat to explore API-centric applications and infrastructure-as-code. We discuss how to build security into cloud-native applications through the DevOps-based software creation process, and not

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Airbnb is rapidly moving from a monolith Ruby on Rails application to a distributed SOA/Kubernetes architecture in Kubernetes. The new architecture uses self-service codified pipelines and easy webhook integrations scale adoption and collaboration across the company. Even though continuous integration isn't new to Airbnb, every team now needs to be able to scale CI across 100's of containerized services in AWS EC2. Software Engineer Brian Wolfe co-led the decision to move to Spinnaker and build in more automation. At one year into the project, Airbnb has 40 services in production with many more to follow. This episode of DevOps Chats features a preview of Brian's talk; “Scaling a Migration to Continuous Delivery (Aribnb)”. Brian's talk is on Saturday, November 16 11:00 am, at Spinnaker Summit 2019 in San Diego.

The life of an acquired company can be an exciting one full of unexpected twists and turns, and that’s been true of Automic software. Scott Willson, a repeat podcast guest and long-standing member of the DevOps community, joins us again on DevOps Chat. He describes his acquisition journey as being akin to a “barracuda, eaten by a great white shark, eaten by a whale." Scott is Product Marketing Director - Release Automation at CA Technologies, a Broadcom company. (The new proper name of Automic + CA + Broadcom). Scott shares what it’s like being a software DevOps company inside Broadcom, whose strong roots come from the chip manufacturing business. While software has its many differences from chips, of course, Scott shares how many of the DevOps principles and heritage from lean manufacturing made the transition easier. There are valuable lessons here for all of us. Amid all the change, Automic shifted its products to the freemium model. Automic Continuous Delivery Director is now free to use for up to 10 a

We can’t seem to generate enough data. And as they say, you haven’t seen anything yet! Cloud-based managed services are a natural solution to ingest, store, and access large amounts of data from a variety of sources across private and cloud locations. An enterprise solution hosted in the cloud is good, but a developer-friendly, API -based solution, with non-enterprise usage-based pricing, reaches an even broader audience. Enter InfluxDB Cloud 2.0. The name just about says it all. InfluxData VP Products Tim Hall joins DevOps Chats to discuss their new cloud-based time-series database offering. InfluxDB Cloud 2.0 represents that shift to a cloud-based, developer-friendly offering with much greater accessibility. We discuss their use cases, the free and usage-based pricing, the new FLUX language for querying, analytics, and data processing, common APIs, and that TICK stack. TICK stands for Telegraf, InfluxDB, Choronograf, and Kapacitor. It is a feature-rich conversation, so join us. Also, check out InfluxDa

Spinnaker Summit 2019 Preview: Software Engineer Rainie Li played an essential role in implementing Spinnaker as part of Pinterest's CI/CD pipeline. The results moved Pinterest from two scheduled deployments per day to continuous deployments, greater than 15 during business hours. This episode of DevOps Chats features a preview of Rainie's talk; “How we introduced CI/CD for Pinterest’s largest monolith services (API and Web) to improve developer velocity, quality & reliability (Pinterest)”. Topics including how Spinnaker was selected, important metrics, Pinterest's future CI/CD platform Hermez, Canary analysis, and lessons learned from the journey are shared. Rainie's talk is on Sunday, November 17th, 1:30 pm PT, at Spinnaker Summit 2019 in San Diego. Joining Rainie on the talk is Jasmine Qin, Software Engineer with Pinterest. https://www.spinnakersummit.com