Are Swiss companies DevOps ready?

We want to determine again the current state of DevOps. Our goal with this study is to investigate how you and your company understand DevOps and whether you already work according to DevOps principles. The current state of DevOps, reasons for and against an introduction of the DevOps philosophy and where the development is headed will be determined. We will compare the results with the ones from last year to be able to draw conclusions and see trends directly.

Survey

The survey is open until March 31st, 2022 and may of course be shared, forwarded and retweeted with others. We shortened the survey compared to last year – you should only need about 5 minutes. Click here for the survey and enjoy! DevOps 2022 Survey.

Why should you take part?

Five years after our first check on DevOps in Switzerland, it is time to take a closer look at the current state and the adoption of DevOps in 2022. Therefore, we are conducting a study on the state of DevOps in Switzerland.

We will send each survey participant a (of course anonymised) report ‘DevOps in Switzerland’ upon request, in which we compare this year’s results with those of last year, in order to be able to derive trends and better understand the development of DevOps. Therefore you will be asked for your email address at the end of the survey.

And this year we have a prize draw! If you enter your personal details at the end, you’ll automatically enter a prize draw for one (1) Digitec / Galaxus voucher of 200 CHF or one (1) APPUiO Cloud voucher worth 200 CHF! We will contact the two winners privately and separately on Friday, April 1st, 2022 (no April Fools’ Day joke, pretty promise!) The terms and conditions are available.

Help us determine the current state of DevOps in Switzerland!

What is DevOps?

DevOps is not a rigid term and is often understood differently. By hiring a DevOps Engineer, a company does not automatically become a DevOps organization. DevOps is also not to be equated with the use of certain tools or software. DevOps cannot be “bought” and DevOps is not a detached team within the organization. The cultural aspect should also not be underestimated – the corporate culture is the most important reason for a functioning DevOps organization.

The idea behind DevOps is that people work together in harmony and use processes and techniques to continuously benefit the end customer.

If you would like to learn more about DevOps, take a look at our Netzwoche article „DevOps in der Praxis“, DevOps & Cloud Computing or have a look at vshn.ch/devops.

Our understanding of DevOps

DevOps is a common term, but unfortunately as vague as ‘Cloud’: Although everyone knows that he wants it or needs it and yet it is not something that you can just order and get delivered the next day.

Our understanding of DevOps is the interdisciplinary collaboration between developers and operations of software in order to use applications quickly and systematically. Our article “What is DevOps – what does VSHN do?” explains our understanding of DevOps.

What do you think of DevOps? How do you apply DevOps in your company?

Take part in our study and tell us about your experience with DevOps and what role DevOps plays in your business.

We are already very excited about the results and especially the trends compared to 2021. Thank you in advance for your participation!

Dear customers and partners,

we are pleased to inform you about our opening hours during Christmas and New Year. Of course, we will ensure a smooth platform operation also this year over the holidays.

We are available for you as follows:

• 12/24/2021: 9:00am to 4:00pm
• 12/31/2021: 9:00am to 4:00pm

From Monday, January 3 2022 we are back recovered and ready for you from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm.

Of course, our customers with 24/7 support SLA will enjoy our support day and night also on Christmas and New Year in case of emergency. VSHN AG and all VSHNeers wish you all wonderful, contemplative, and happy holidays! See you soon and here’s to a promising 2022!

It’s BLACK FRIDAY and CYBER WEEK at VSHN!

Time is the most precious thing. That is why the greatest gift you can give someone is your time.

That’s why we figured we will offer you a special Black Friday & Cyber Week discount on the VSHNeers time, namely our prepaid hour packages.

Check out our special offer on VSHN prepaid hour packages and save 15% until Dec. 3rd 2021 and get more time to focus on your work in 2022.

Offer valid until Friday, Dec. 3rd 2021.

Please get in touch with us below and profit from this offer:

Every year all VSHNeers take a day off from the daily business, to meet and shape the future of VSHN on what we call the “VSHNday.”

VSHNday 2021 will take place on Friday, September 24th, 2021. For this reason, on that day VSHN will only be available for incident handling. We will keep an eye on incident tickets, and answer the technical support phone number. Our OnCall service is not affected.

Hi there!

I’m Sebastian and I’m joining team Tarazed as a System Engineer.

In the last few years, I worked as a software engineer on proprietary log management and monitoring software. Loads of work went into managing and keeping the appliances updated at the customer site, often in air-gapped environments. This gave me the full full-stack experience (almost the full IT department experience) from managing a Linux distribution to fine-tuning application performance in environments with 100+ milliseconds input latency.

In my time off I love to spend time on my mountain bike (and talk about mountain biking 😉). If my bike is broken or there is more than half a meter of snow, I enjoy ski touring, hiking, and nerding about coffee and cooking.

I’m looking forward to meeting all the new people here at VSHN and finding great solutions to complex problems.

Sebastian

Startup.info talked to Patrick Mathers, Co-founder of VSHN on how we automate the operation of applications in the cloud or on-premise, so that software developers can focus on their business and here is what he said about it. 

The interview was published 11/03/2021 by Kossi Adzo of startup.info.

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Patrick Mathers: My family and I are doing well under the circumstances, thank you very much. Despite two lockdowns so far and the limited freedom to travel, we have had an eventful 2020. Last May we moved to a new home and in August our second daughter Aylin was born.

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded VSHN.

Patrick Mathers: I grew up near Zurich as the son of a Northern Irish father and a Swiss mother. I started my first job at KPMG, after which I was the CEO of an IT startup for seven years.

In 2014, I co-founded VSHN AG with Aarno Aukia, our CTO, as we identified a business gap between software developers and traditional hosting companies. As a Lean Startup, VSHN specialized in the operation of IT platforms through automation, agility, and a continuous improvement process so that software developers could focus on their business and IT operations were relieved. Completely location-independent and without its own hardware, VSHN today operates applications according to the DevOps principle on any infrastructure or cloud.

Based in Zurich and with over 40 employees, VSHN currently manages more than 1,500 servers in various clouds and on-premises for 350 different partners and monitors more than 100,000 services. VSHN counts Swiss banks and fintechs, telcos, large e-commerce retailers, and the Swiss as well as the Australian government among its customers.

How does VSHN innovate?

Patrick Mathers: Today, digitalization no longer stops at a single business sector. This means that virtually all corporations must now also be IT companies, whether they are financial service providers or retailers. In addition, the IT required is becoming more complex, fast-moving, and risky, which is why software must be continuously developed.

VSHN supports its customers on their path to digital transformation in order to make applications automatically testable, deployable and scalable and run them on any infrastructure. In addition to close, agile and open collaboration and consulting, we also take responsibility for the stability of our services, including 24/7 support.

VSHN has prioritized strong customer relationships since the very beginning. Our ecosystem of partnerships has enabled us to drive innovations systematically and achieve a high level of quality. This has resulted, for example, in APPUiO, our Swiss container platform, which we built together with our partner Puzzle ITC.

Security is a further top priority, which is why VSHN AG is also ISO 27001 certified and audited according to ISAE 3402.

How does the coronavirus pandemic affect your business, and how are you coping?

Patrick Mathers: In spring 2020, we adjusted our risk analysis due to the pandemic and then assumed no increase or even a decrease in turnover over the next few months. Fortunately, this did not happen. We were able to close 2020 with strong growth.

When the first lockdown was called here in Switzerland in mid-March 2020, all staff transferred to the home office. This went relatively smoothly, as the home office had already been possible for all employees beforehand and was being actively used. Additional hardware besides the laptop, e.g., extra monitors, were provided by VSHN. Since the COVID situation has not yet calmed down and we are now in the second lockdown, most staff members have consistently remained in the home office since last March.

The real challenge was to compensate for the loss of direct social interactions. With the absence of informal conversations in the office lounge or when fetching a glass of water, an emptiness opened up that had to be filled in order to prevent employees from feeling lonely at home.

We appointed a “remote advocate,” Adrian, to give all team members a good start in their home offices. Michèle, our manager responsible for PeopleOps (that’s what we call our HR), sent everyone a small plant to take care of and bring back to the workplace once things have calmed down. In the meantime, our plants have become an emotional topic of numerous conversations.

We also have a Zoom Room, which is open during the day and where staff can meet and chat with a coffee at hand. Remote gaming sessions are often arranged, e.g., playing a few rounds of “Among us.”

Since our annual Christmas dinner fell flat, each employee got a fondue and wine to serve themselves. We then held a joint Christmas dinner via Zoom. We did the same during Advent with mulled wine and do so every now and then after work.

Another challenge was the training of new staff. Last year we hired ten new employees, most of whom we have not yet been able to welcome personally at our offices. Induction by means of video calls led to Zoom fatigue. Therefore, it was and is right and important to consider exactly which calls are necessary and which could be dispensed of.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Patrick Mathers: Especially when you are not together on location in the office, communication with the staff is immensely important. How are they doing, how can we support them, what do they need from us? In recent months, countless one-on-one meetings have been held to meet this need.

One project we had to postpone until after the pandemic was setting up new offices in Vancouver and Kuala Lumpur. Since we offer 24/7 support to our clients, a follow-the-sun strategy with offices around the world is the way to go.

What specific tools, software, and management skills are helping you navigate the crisis?

Patrick Mathers: We made a virtue of necessity and turned our management upside down. Since we were already all decentralized and had a flat hierarchy in the company, we invested a lot of time developing the company and increasing scalability through self-organizing, customer-oriented, and semi-autonomous teams and further evolved the necessary organizational structures, based heavily on the concept of Sociocracy 3.0. We are already seeing the fruits of this development: Management meetings have become noticeably shorter, as many decisions are now made in the aforementioned teams.

As an open and transparent company, we furthermore feel committed to the open-source idea, supporting the Linux Foundation and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, among others, and therefore now also publicly communicate our principles, goals, and values and how we work in our handbook.

Most of the tools we use, such as ERP, CRM, ticketing system, chat tool, Wiki, or our document management system, were already running on our private cloud and therefore could be easily accessed from home. Zoom, as our tool of choice for video calls, we now additionally use for incoming and outgoing phone calls. Each employee thus has his or her own telephone number and the required soft clients on their devices.

For training, retrospectives, and our annual strategy day, which all staff attended remotely this time, we now use collaboration software such as Miro Boards, Retrotool or Kahoot! 

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Patrick Mathers: Our competitors include providers of Managed Services, especially Managed PaaS. Increasingly, the big cloud companies are also entering the market. This is another reason why we are constantly developing our services and building on our existing products such as APPUiO.

With Project Syn, we are establishing the future basis for our Managed Services on any Kubernetes cluster, whether in the cloud or at the customer’s premises. The decisive factor for the development is our experience in the operation of Managed Services on classical virtual machines with means that are no longer up to date for modern cloud-native infrastructures. With Project Syn, we can achieve almost 100% automation of our services and optimize the self-service for the consumer by using sophisticated tools. The focus is always on the software developer and the application that is being operated. DevOps, the seamless interaction of development and operation, is supported by many integrated tools. For example, GitOps, the versioning of configuration data, plays a key role.

Project Syn is an open-source project initiated by us and can be used by everyone. The code is stored on GitHub. This way, we can actively contribute to the open-source community and expect to expand our technical lead.

Your final thoughts?

Patrick Mathers: When it became clear that the pandemic would affect us all, the uncertainty was huge. But with excellent staff who are all pulling in the same direction, such a disruption can also be a great opportunity to push for profound changes.

– Home office requires that you trust your staff completely. There is no alternative.

– And in the current troubled phase, it’s even more important to take care of each other.

– And last but not least: I am already looking forward to the day when the pandemic is over, and we can all meet again at the office. And if you, dear reader, are close to Zurich’s main station, then: come and see us. Our coffee is excellent!

Thanks Kossi Adzo and startup.info for the interview!

We have been working in our home offices for almost a year now. VSHN has not been deterred by this and has diligently recruited and trained new VSHNeers, all remotely instead of on-site. Of course, this brought new challenges, which many companies are struggling with. What is the recipe for success so that new team members can be successfully trained and integrated without ever having met a colleague? Our tips should help you to carry out a successful remote onboarding process. 

Work equipment

Make sure your new team member has a work tool on the first day. We now send this directly to the new employee’s home, as there is no one in the office to receive the package. Allow some lead time for the delivery to be on time. The post office is still overloaded and sometimes a device is not immediately available. Since everyone has a personal hardware budget to choose their preferred work tool, it is a tradition at VSHN that everyone sets up their work tool themselves (if needed, you can get help of course) and sets it up so that they can work with it optimally. This can be done on the first day of work together with the mentor.

Welcome Box

One of the highlights of home office: getting packages unexpectedly! We let our newest team members know that we are happy they are now part of VSHN with a nice welcome box. This consists of some company swag, some sweets, and a nice welcome greeting card.

Provide a mentor

The first day in a new job is exciting in itself for new VSHNeers. Whether we work remotely or in-person, at VSHN we assign an experienced VSHNeer as a mentor to each new colleague, providing them with advice, support, and other superpowers. In a remote setup, such a reference person is worth his or her weight in gold. Not only is the mentor a direct and emotional companion during the start-up process, but it also helps introducing other teams and the company culture – which, needless to say, is much more difficult to do remotely than in person. A mentor can best convey what the company stands for, what makes it tick, and what working here is like.

Meet every day!

Just 10 minutes is enough! The best time is right at the first coffee in the morning to plan the day and possibly again after lunch. Discuss how the new employee’s workload is, whether they know which topics they should work on today and where they might have difficulties. 

Integrate into the team

Something you can’t underestimate remotely: it’s not so easy to make connections if you don’t know anyone yet. Whereas on-site you could just start talking to new people during breaks, remotely you have to actively add yourself to Zoom meetings to get to know your new colleagues. We support our new colleagues by having the mentor formally introduce them to the team and make sure they are invited to all the necessary meetings. 

Plan workloads for the first few weeks

Structuring the probation period helps both sides to assess how the new employee is developing, and where they still need some help. We have solved this with weekly tickets so that the new VSHNeer has an overview of what work is still ahead of them. But don’t overload these weeks and leave enough time to get acquainted with other topics and ask questions. A 60/40 ratio has proven in practice to be a good proportion.

Keep appointments

It is a sign of appreciation to keep your promises. Don’t postpone appointments until the last minute, take your appointments with team colleagues just as seriously as client meetings (this is not only valid for new hires!)

Proactively invite to company events!

If your company has a daily coffee together via video call, or a beer get-together in the evening, actively invite the new employee! The inhibition threshold to get to know your new colleagues remotely can sometimes be quite high for newcomers. Make it easy for them to get started and invite them to join.

We hope that these tips are helpful for you. How do you train your new teammates remotely? What has worked well, and what have you failed with?

In our blog post last November we already talked about our ISO27001 certification and our ISAE 3402 Report Type 1. I am happy to announce that we successfully completed the ISAE 3402 Report Type 2 in January 2021.

About ISAE

Even though not mentioned explicitly in the Rundschreiben 2018/3 circular, lots of FINMA regulated companies requires a ISAE 3402 Report Type 2 from their suppliers. This report provides substantial added value, ensuring conformity to current regulations.

In Switzerland there are the two FINMA circulars: Rundschreiben 2008/21 and Rundschreiben 2018/3, the latter regulating outsourcing rules for companies in the financial sector.

As mentioned before, we completed the ISAE 3402 Report Type 1 in June 2020, which assesses the suitability, design, and implementation of controls. During January 2021 we completed the ISAE 3402 Report Type 2 for the year 2020. This report additionally evaluates the effectiveness of the controls during the test period, that is, their definition and concrete implementation.

Our ISAE 3402 Report Type 2 was audited by ERM Solution AG.

More Information

If your company requires a yearly ISAE 3402 report for audit or revision, please contact our sales and marketing team. We remain at your service for any enquiry; contact us if you need more information.

Yesterday I had the pleasure and the privilege to talk with Victoria Marchand and Thierry Weber in their daily “Cominmag” podcast. We talked about Cloud, DevOps, and the Swiss perspective: is it mandatory to jump into the Cloud? Are there providers here in Switzerland? (TL;DR: Yes there are!) What about the “hybrid” cloud? And much more!

Watch the video (in French) here or directly at cominmag.ch, the most important magazine about media, web, and marketing on the French side of Switzerland!

2020 – what a year. The Corona pandemic has overtaken every area of life, including ours, of course. For most of the year, VSHNeers saw each other in Zoom calls instead of meeting in person. Our office would probably be unrecognizable to many of us, some VSHNeers who started new at VSHN in 2020 only know our office from photos (see also: Hiring and Onboarding New Employees During Corona and if you still need home office tips, see here, but don’t forget to have fun while doing it :). ).

But it is what it is, we just have to make the best of the situation. And VSHN made the best of it: despite the difficult and unplannable situation, we reacted in the best way possible. The transition to home office went smoothly, as we were already practiced in working remotely; the only thing we still had to “digitize” was the landline. Of course, we in the IT world are also privileged – not every industry can switch to home office “just like that”, and we should always be aware and gratious of that.

Now we have been in this situation for almost a year and of course the first “signs of wear and tear” such as “Zoom fatigue” are appearing, but what the VSHNeers miss most is socializing. Simply doing something together, be it a joint lunch or beers after work. At the beginning of the pandemic, the “Zoom beerings” were fun, but today no one wants to hang out in yet another Zoom in the evening. 🙂

Despite all this, VSHN as a company has also developed positively in 2020 and we have now grown to over 40 VSHNeers. We are very happy about this, and also a little bit proud. Each and every VSHNeer deserves a big thank you at this point. A big thank you also goes to our partners and customers, thank you for staying loyal to us despite the difficult situation.

In 2020, we initiated important topics such as organizational development through the introduction of Sociocracy 3.0 practices, rebuilt the teams and divided them into solutions and product teams (related: people are not resources), launched VSHN Corporate Governance 2020 and 2021, which has led to the new management and executive board. We also produced an extremely large amount of content. Our start into the video / YouTube business should be mentioned here. 🙂 Or our first podcast.

Project Syn, our open source managed service framework, has been further developed (see intro video) and will continue to play a key role in our product portfolio in 2021.

In addition to the ISO 27001 certification, we are now also audited according to ISAE 3402 Type 1 (very recently also according to Type 2, more information on this soon on vshn.ch).

Transparency and openness are among our cornerstones, which is why we have further expanded our employee handbook and almost everything is open to the public.

We have organized a lot of events or participated as speakers, e.g. the WeAreDevelopers Live Week with Aarno & Adrian as speakers, participated in the Crossplane Community Day where Tobias held a lightning talk, went to the Red Hat forums in Austria and Germany, participated in the first Swiss Rancher Rodeo and organized the CNC meetups, APPUiO beerups, initiated the NGINX Meetup group Zurich and held a joint webinar with GitLab on Improving collaboration & software delivery using GitLab CI and Kubernetes.

We were awarded the “swiss hosting” quality label in 2020, published the DevOps in Switzerland Report 2020 (the DevOps Study 2021 is still running if you still want to participate), many new partnerships such as with SUSE Rancher, GitLab, Crossplane or our further extended Red Hat partnership. APPUiO has also evolved extremely, if you haven’t seen the new APPUiO explainer video, check it out.

We hope you enjoyed our year in review and we’d love to hear from you about how you felt about 2020.

To a great 2021!

Your VSHNeers

Past years in review

year in review 2019

year in review 2018

year in review 2017