For the second year in a row, the DevOps community came together virtually for our DevOps Loop conference. This event allowed us to examine DevOps and its core principles in the context of modern applications, multi-cloud, and Kubernetes. Organizations are increasingly looking to internal platform teams to deliver an awesome developer experience while ensuring reliability, scalability, and security, by unlocking the path to production for modern apps and helping their products soar! With this in mind, our theme for this year was putting “Dev” at the heart of DevOps.
All the sessions are now available to view on-demand. Here are a few insights from the various sessions throughout the day:
- Platform matters – Thinking about the platform has increasingly become essential to accelerate and simplify the delivery of software at scale.
- Eliminating complexity is critical – Complex technologies and architectures impede progress and hinder application development. How do you streamline the process?
- Structure and architecture for productivity – Organizational structure and architecture (both human and technological) are now becoming a requirement for maximizing the value of DevOps.
Putting the “Dev” back in DevOps
As organizations adapt to the new cloud native world, DevOps continues to have a very important role. But in order for them to execute and drive business outcomes, new patterns and technologies, as well as tools and roles are needed. Applications are distributed, and need to be secure, scalable, and meet service-level objectives. Many of the speakers at this year’s DevOps Loop conference suggested that it is time to put the focus back on “Dev.”
Here are a few highlights from some of the sessions.
Gene Kim’s opening keynote address discussed the wide spectrum of cultural, experiential, and value-based decisions that foster greatness or may create underperformance. When organizations are siloed and the flow of information is restricted, the ultimate result is a slow-pace of movement and change. Compare this to organizations where integrated problem solving is happening at the edge, and it’s clear that the latter has better value-driven outcomes.
Dr. Mik Kersten’s session, which focused on recommendations for measuring digital transformation, highlighted some of the challenges teams face, from understanding the DevOps flow processes end-to-end, insights into structural organizations, developing customer value, and not only identifying bottlenecks, but being able to measure ebbs and flows. In short, visibility and understanding of key challenges is crucial in being able to address and correct these obstacles.
Open source has become a critical part of global infrastructure. Kubernetes and cloud native adoption is seeing record growth, especially at large companies. While an estimated 5.6 million developers use Kubernetes today, software supply chain attacks are on the rise with reports showing an increase of 650% in 2021. Tracy Miranda’s Blueprint for Secure OSS Supply Chains discussed the power of the open source movement. She shared a plan for software supply chain security to follow in regards to open source projects which highlights frameworks for security, transparency, and interoperability.
Additionally, she delved into the necessity of making your own projects more secure, while understanding the security constraints of software supply chain. This was done via an overview of open source projects that are currently innovating this space and serve as a model for the future of software.
Observability is going mainstream
We are excited to launch the 2022 State of Observability report. Observability focuses on helping IT firms understand what processes are functioning in an application by looking at its output. Observability also helps developers and IT administrators understand problems in the application operation by pinpointing how, where, what, and why the operation is malfunctioning. It also provides insight into which process has failed.
The need for observability in DevOps can’t be overlooked. It’s a major component if you want to harness the maximum benefits offered by DevOps. Since DevOps consists of practices that involve constant delivery of projects, it’s important to get feedback.
Key highlights from this year’s report include:
- Use of observability tools grew from 19% to 24%, increasing more than 25% in a single year.
- Multi-clouds can be complex. A typical application request touches clouds, microservices, networks, virtual machines, containers, storage, APIs, etc. The report shows 37% of the respondents touched 10–25 technologies for every application developers worked on.
- Respondents reported using a tremendous number of different monitoring tools. Almost half (46%) used more than five different monitoring tools, further creating complexity.
VMware Tanzu Mission Control now offers Flux-based continuous delivery
Another exciting piece of news is that VMware Tanzu Mission Control users can now drive clusters via GitOps. This new feature of Tanzu Mission Control is built on Flux CD and enables users to attach a git repository to a cluster and sync YAML artifacts (using Kustomize) from the repository to the cluster.
Previously, GitOps-style solutions required a DIY set of tools that were cobbled together. DIY GitOps can create inconsistencies and slow down the route to production as well as increase security risks. However, with the announcement of GitOps capabilities available in Tanzu Mission Control, operations teams can introduce consistency in their GitOps toolchain and eliminate ClickOps frustration. Read the blog to learn more.
Get access to all of the DevOps Loop sessions. Individual sessions are listed below:
A Cloud CXO’s Guide to Driving Value from DevOps Investments – Jeffrey Hammond
Project to Product: Measuring Digital Transformation with the Flow Framework – Dr. Mik Kersten
What Has Public Speaking Ever Done for Us? – Stacy Cashmore
Kubernetes: Zero to Productive in 5 Minutes – V Körbes
Observability: Bird’s-Eye View of Your Enterprise – Jenna-Shae Harris
What is Platform as a Product? – Matthew Skelton
Designing for Habitability – Sam Newman
Improving JPMorgan Chase’s Developer Experience on the Cloud – Nadi Awad
Kryptonite or Superpower: Building Internal Developer Platforms That Will Make the Engineers Your Best Friends – Crystal Hirschorn
Blueprint for Secure OSS Supply Chains – Tracy Miranda
Attend VMware Explore
Love VMworld? Well, we’re doing it bigger and better than ever before. That includes its name! VMworld is now VMware Explore. Learn how you can shift security left and integrate it in the pipeline end-to-end to build a secure software supply chain (including SBOMs), test vulnerability, increase API security, and monitor incident management. Sessions will focus on speed and security in the software delivery value stream, Dev(Sec)Ops culture, optimizing application operation, and measuring success.
More coming soon
Thank you all for joining us for another successful DevOps Loop! Keep an eye on the Tanzu blog for key DevOps/DevSecOps announcements. Be sure to peruse the stellar lineups for VMware Explore (starting in the Fall) and SpringOne (in December). We hope to see you there.
