VSHN.timer

VSHN.timer #5: DevOps or Dev… Oops?

12. Aug 2019

Welcome to another VSHN.timer! Every Monday, 5 links related to Kubernetes, OpenShift, CI / CD, and DevOps; all stuff coming out of our own chat system and making us think, laugh, or simply work better.
This week we feature interesting articles about DevOps, one of the most widely misunderstood and misquoted words in the modern business of software.
1. According to Wikipedia, the term “DevOps” is barely ten years old. No wonder then, in these days when every company is a software company and software is eating the world, to see business leaders struggling with the “DevOps” buzzword. Companies with a very “vertical” flow of information (read: hierarchies) will have a harder time to adapt to DevOps, as it is more a state of mind than a set of practices. What to do when your business software was driven by decades of disgruntled consultants, remote offshore providers, or non-agile project managers, resulting in large silos of information within organizations? Steve Howe could not say it better: silos are the greatest enemy of DevOps.
https://medium.com/@daryn_74143/how-to-do-devops-when-you-have-no-idea-who-the-devs-are-f156d42aab8f


2. The word DevOps is usually associated with software running in “Cloud” premises, as “backend” or as “server-side” stuff. The truth is, DevOps is also enabling a smartphone app near you! Bitrise is starting a series of blog posts about DevOps in mobile app development. As a topic dear to the author of these lines (an ex mobile developer), we could not be happier to see modern DevOps practices coming to the forefront. Ever setup a CI / CD pipeline to build iOS or Android apps? All we can say is, this field needs more DevOps thinking.
https://blog.bitrise.io/learn-more-about-mobile-devops-on-bitrise
3. But what about DevOps security? Higher frequencies of deployments and a frantic pace of new features increase the chance of major security incidents. Unfortunately, many software engineers still lack proper security training, so to help you here are some nice DevOps and DevSecOps security checklists, to bookmark and use and reuse. But before you do, pay attention to what Kacy Zurkus says: DevOps security is a people and culture problem, and not merely a technical one. Are you ready to change your culture?

4. If you just do not know where to start, Jeremy Morgan from Pluralsight published a excellent list of 10 books about DevOps you might want to check out. It not only includes technical books, but also some novels and even business titles. We at VSHN we are great fans of “Effective DevOps” and “Continuous Delivery” – the classics in the genre and primary resources as far as we are concerned. But we did not know that the 10th book in the list, “The Goal,” was first published in 1984! Indeed, everything is a remix.
https://dev.to/pluralsight/the-top-10-books-on-devops-you-need-to-read-45m2
5. It was not enough to have DevOps, now we have to deal with its offspring, GitOps, proposing “push to deploy” scenarios, where automation is pushed (no pun intended) to the extreme. How to couple GitOps with Kubernetes deployments? Here is a Github project with “an opinionated working solution leveraging Kubernetes and proven GitOps techniques to have a resilient, composable and scalable Kubernetes platform” that might provide some answers.
https://github.com/edgelevel/gitops-k8s
Would you like to share other DevOps-related links with us? Is your organization embracing DevOps? Would you like to embrace it but you just do not know where to begin? Or do you think it is just another hype-laden buzzword? Let us know in the comments below, and see you next week for another edition of VSHN.timer.
PS: Speaking about DevOps, here is a microservices & DevOps meetup in Zürich next month you might be interested to attend.

Adrian Kosmaczewski

Adrian Kosmaczewski is in charge of Developer Relations at VSHN. He is a software developer since 1996, a trainer, and a published author. Adrian holds a Master in Information Technology from the University of Liverpool.

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