It’s official: Kubernetes has hit the big time. According to a missive from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), the Google-designed, CNCF-maintained project is the first to ‘graduate’ from its foundation, throwing its mortarboard in the air in time-honoured tradition at the Open Source Leadership Summit in Sonoma Valley, California.

So what does this actually mean? Each technology adopted by the CNCF – of which there are 16 including Kubernetes – theoretically goes through three stages. In the inception stage, with only two projects at present, the technology simply needs to add value to cloud native computing, be it containerisation, orchestration, microservices or anything in between. The incubating stage, where projects such as Prometheus and OpenTracing are based, requires further accreditations in terms of documentation and usage, before eventually ‘graduating’.

Graduating technologies, according to the CNCF’s criteria, need to explicitly define a project governance and committer process, and have committers from at least two organisations. Three of the largest cloud providers offer their own managed Kubernetes services, while adoption of containers – with Kubernetes generally at the top of the tree – continues to soar. Companies such as Bloomberg, Uber, The New York Times and eBay are using Kubernetes, with almost three quarters (71%) of the Fortune 100 using containers, according to Redmonk.

“This designation benefits Kubernetes in many ways,” wrote Sarah Conway, CNCF senior director of PR services in a blog. “It signals that Kubernetes is mature and resilient enough to manage containers at scale across any industry in companies of all sizes.

“As a graduate, Kubernetes is in an even stronger position to grow faster and sustain a vibrant, healthy and diverse technical community,” Conway added.

CNCF also announced 24 new members at the Open Source Leadership Summit, including various companies well known to readers of this publication, including CloudBees and Couchbase. The foundation now stands at 178 members strong; as CloudTech reported throughout 2017, companies such as Microsoft, AWS and Oracle joining the CNCF last year showed both a rise in the technologies and the larger organisations using it.

The criteria for CNCF projects state that projects can remain in an incubating state indefinitely but are normally expected to graduate within two years – so expect further graduands in the near future.

The word DevOps is derived from merging development and operations, and this merger is exactly what DevOps practice is all about: a set of practices to support collaborative partnership and communication between software development teams and IT operations leveraging maximum automation through key phases of solutions delivery process. Technology organizations need to promote a ‘one-team, one goal’ mentality, meaning that all members must view themselves as “critical” to the success of the team. Gone are the days of an “it’s not my job” mindset. DevOps’ core value proposition is its one-team delivery approach that covers the entire technology organisation.

DevOps is to IT industry what Toyota’s Kanban lean manufacturing was to the manufacturing industry. In today’s business environment, solutions and service delivery processes must be optimised for innovation and speed-to-market. Methodologies including Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Lean Startup, and Design Thinking are well-suited to support these objectives, and cloud platforms are the platform of choice for software solutions delivery.

Continuous integration and delivery

Gone are the days of multi-year projects and product launch parties. Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) are essential components of DevOps practice. Cultivating this culture of continuous application release is a paradigm shift in technology organizations, a shift that took off by agile methodology’s implementation and now overseen by DevOps practice. This shift requires that enterprises move at a faster pace than before – a pace that enables shorter solutions lifecycles and speed-to-market. 

If DevOps is to succeed, then you have to end the practice of running a large number of test cases manually

For error-free CI and CD, greater collaboration, automation, and information transparency is needed between business, development, and IT operations. To achieve this seamless internal collaboration and sustained innovation across the enterprise, DevOps adoption is essential. In cases where different teams work collectively towards achieving common business goals, DevOps helps companies respond to the challenges of multi-paced IT in combination with methods such as the SAFe to facilitate collaboration.

Continuous testing

DevOps demands speed and agility, at this pace traditional quality assurance (QA) testing methods are incompatible with DevOps practices. Gone are the days of “months on end” manual QA testing. If DevOps is to succeed then you have to end the practice of running a large number of test cases manually. With daily or weekend regression runs, test volume has gone up considerably, making test automation imperative.

Continuous testing is not an easy skill to master. It requires a lot of hard work at the beginning building out test cases. Traditional QA testers will evolve and transition into test automation engineers, who must have a complete grasp of application functionality as well as the underpinning infrastructure, test automation tools, and scripting languages. 

DevOps success hinges on getting continuous testing right. It’s a key indicator that your DevOps/agile practice is mature, and your QA strategy must take into account that 100% test automation is not practical – nor it is possible.

Infrastructure as code

One of the key components of DevOps is Infrastructure as Code (IaC) which is used in conjunction with CD. It is based on code development methods in the developments and deployment of Infrastructure configurations. IaC should not be confused with infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and should not be mistaken as part of configuration management tools provided by different vendors for infrastructure provisioning capabilities.

Teams should create IaC execution plans for building, versioning, and change automation of infrastructure services. Ops team should use same repository and versioning as Dev team uses for source code. Just as the same source code compiles the same binary, an IaC code should generate the same environment every time it is run. This allows DevOps teams to test solutions in production-like environments early in the development cycle. Gives them the ability to validate and test to prevent deployment issues. Teams are able to deliver stable environments rapidly and at scale.

Final thoughts

Combining DevOps culture with agile approaches such as SAFe and platform as a service provides resource elasticity and frees Ops from purchasing, shipping and receiving, so they can focus on optimising infrastructure and developers can focus on functionality rather than scalability. 

Continuous testing and Infrastructure as Code are the two most important components of DevOps

Continuous testing and Infrastructure as Code are the two most important components of DevOps. They both need most attention, training, tooling, re-skilling, and deployment of team members. Applying software development best practices to test automation and infrastructure configuration teams streamlines solutions delivery. DevOps teams should adopt a homogeneous set of tools and practices in order to deliver solutions and their supporting infrastructure rapidly, reliably, and at scale. Company-wide DevOps standardisation is paramount.

For business executives and technology executives (CIOs/CTOs), the main concern is the ability of DevOps to enable business transformation through faster innovative solutions development without disruptive blackouts, so to fulfill emerging business needs.

At the same time, for senior solutions development executives (SVP product development/SVP solutions delivery), their primary focus is on improving key metrics such as reducing risk and cost and improve quality, productivity, speed and agility in the SDLC. Adopters of DevOps focus on value-driven development and delivery, waste elimination, and automating repetitive tasks. Business transformation objectives and IT efficiency objectives need to be aligned.

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

It has been an interesting week or so for Google Cloud, both directly and indirectly. The company has announced new APIs, updates and customers for its healthcare cloud initiative, while other high-profile customers have been disclosed.

At HiMSS, the healthcare information and management systems society conference, Google launched a new cloud healthcare API, which is better equipped to focus on data types such as HL7, FHIR and DICOM, and also allows customers to crunch the numbers using analytics and machine learning in the cloud.

On the security side, Google’s App Engine and Cloud Machine Learning Engine are now HIPAA-compliant, joining various other services, including Compute Engine, Cloud Storage, and BigQuery. As a company missive explains, these services are covered by a HIPAA Business Associate Agreement (BAA), so while there is no formal certification process, the company has undergone various independent audits to assess compliance, with the complete list of services covered by the BAA including ISO 27001, 27017 and 27018.

Alongside this, Google rolled out a list of customers who are actively involved in its healthcare cloud. Many are utilising Apigee, Google’s API management platform, including The Chilean Health Ministry, Cleveland Clinic, and Rush University Medical Center, with several exploring machine learning-based predictive models to give clinicians greater insights or to identify security threats.

“Ultimately, we hope that better flow of data will inspire new discoveries with artificial intelligence and machine learning, leading to insights that improve patient outcomes,” wrote Gregory J. Moore, Google Cloud vice president of healthcare.

Regular readers will be aware that Google likes to illustrate product announcements with a sampling of customers, whether it’s launching a private ‘on-ramp’ network connection to its cloud or preemptible GPUs. Yet you can add Spotify and Apple to Google’s increasingly-impressive list of flagship customers.

Spotify’s custom was revealed in its recent IPO filing – on page 30 to be precise, deep into the list of risks the company has to provide to investors. “Currently, we are in the process of transitioning all of our data storage (including personal data of users and music data licensed from rights holders) and computing from our own servers to [Google Cloud Platform],” the filing reads. “We cannot easily switch our GCP operations to another cloud provider… while the consumer side of Google competes with us, we do not believe that Google will use the GCP operation in such a manner as to gain competitive advantage against our service.”

Confirmation that Apple was a Google customer – as well as a customer of AWS – was buried even deeper, in a January update to its iOS Security Guide. First spotted by CNBC, page 16, focusing on iCloud, explains after files are broken into chunks and encrypted, they are stored ‘without any user-identifying information, using third-party storage services, such as S3 and Google Cloud Platform.’

One of the key themes this publication has explored over the past year is how Google has secured larger, blue riband cloud customers. At Next last year, three of the company’s announced customers, Verizon, Colgate-Palmolive and eBay, were ranked in the Fortune 500.

You can read the full healthcare announcements here.

Microsoft has beefed up its government cloud offerings, launching government-specific editions of Microsoft 365 and Azure Stack, as well as greater security and compliance in Dynamics 365.

Microsoft 365, which comprises Office 365, Windows 10, and Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS), and Azure Stack, which extends Azure to on-premises environments, are being upgraded as Microsoft acknowledges faster acceleration of government organisations moving to the cloud.

“This move is driven largely by the desire to bring the most up-to-date tools and capabilities to employees to meet demands for mobility and create a more modern workplace – and to ensure they are better equipped to face rising security challenges,” wrote Josh Rice, general manager for Microsoft’s worldwide modern workplace in a company blog post.

The Microsoft 365 government cloud will be made available in three flavours; Government Community Cloud (GCC), aimed at agencies at the state, local and federal level, GCC High, for government customers in more sensitive situations, and DoD Cloud, as the name suggests, specifically for the Department of Defense.

“What Microsoft 365 for US Government brings to the table for government agencies of all sizes is the value of cloud services with the unique compliance commitments for handling controlled unclassified information,” Rice added.

Azure Government will also see two new regions for data classified as secret, bringing the total to eight dedicated government regions. As Microsoft’s region map shows, there are currently four dedicated government regions – in Arizona, Iowa, Texas and Virginia – as well as central and eastern DoD-dedicated regions.

Microsoft’s government customers, totalling at more than 7,000 in the federal, state and local ranks, include the Commonwealth of Virginia, the US Air Force, and the City of Chicago. “Evidence that we are at a tipping point for government to modernise IT with the cloud is coming from agencies across every level and branch of government,” wrote Julia White, corporate vice president of Azure in a blog post.

Clare Hopping

Clare Hopping

It’s a simple proposition for traditional companies in today’s tech-heavy marketplace: assess the prospects of technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain, the Internet of Things and more, or be left behind.

That is the verdict of mergers and acquisitions advisor Hampleton Partners in its latest report focusing on the tech M&A outlook up until 2020.

Back in August, the company’s assessment was that M&A for the Internet of Things was going at a ‘steady’ pace, with the primary acquirers being Verizon, ARM, and Intel. The verdict today is that 2018 ‘may be a good year for acquisitions’, albeit sounding a note of caution around the risks of a market correction.

When it came to enterprise software and software as a service (SaaS), the figures look promising. Hampleton argues that there were a series of ‘eye-catching’ deals in the industry, with vertical applications providing the most transactions during the second half of 2017, at 147. ERP apps also scored highly with 141 transactions, ahead of information management (58) and BI and customer analytics (47).

Among the more intriguing acquisitions the industry has seen in the latter half of last year include VMware’s buying of SD-WAN provider VeloCloud in November; Rackspace acquiring managed services firm Datapipe in September; and Microsoft buying Cloudyn, a cloud management provider, in June. The latter appeared to be a particularly hot area, with Gartner research director Mindy Cancila saying in an article at the time that ‘interest in cloud management tools [was] very high.’

The past few months have seen acquisitions around a couple of key trends; containers – Red Hat buying CoreOS – and multi-cloud, with Cisco acquiring Cmpute.io.

Hampleton looked at various industries, with automotive technology – a key component of the Internet of Things – having a positive outlook. The report argues that the second half of 2017 was stable in the industry, with an active 2018 anticipated. David Riemenschneider, Hampleton Partners director, added that 2018-19 will likely be the ‘peak’ of the autotech M&A boom.

You can read the full report here (email required).

HR has its head in the clouds. Of course, this conjures images of wistful thinking, while not focusing on the job in hand. However, in this instance, nothing could be further from the truth. HR is getting “smarter”, driven by cloud technology and innovations, enabling things to happen quicker, while adapting to new ways of working.

It is offering businesses the opportunity to – flexibly and cost-effectively – make use of the latest and most appropriate applications that can automate processes, provide detailed analytics and make the most of the Internet of Things. The smartest applications can help deskill dull and repetitive tasks, so that employees are able to do more creative and high-value tasks improving job satisfaction, recognition and career development.

HR to HCM

Despite the benefits, the adoption of cloud technology is far from universal. In many cases, employees have to work with old, cumbersome legacy systems that impede processes and drive inefficiencies. They’re slowed down by silo systems that prevent speedy access to vital data and discourage collaboration or software that make simple tasks onerous. It’s well publicised that the UK is far behind much of the EU in terms of workforce productivity, according to this chart from OECD.org.

Yet there is no reason this should be the case. Cloud is providing a great platform on which consumer-grade, mobile accessible and scalable applications, like HR, can exist. Greater HR capability, combined with cross-product (SAP acquired Multiposting to enable it to deliver job board postings as part of its recruiting solution) and inter-platform interaction (think of using LinkedIn to search then initiate a job application) means that a wider range of HR information is available. Organisations are now going beyond just “paying” people to better manage their talent; we’re seeing a cloud-driven shift from HR to Human Capital Management.

Death of the spreadsheet

Then, of course, there are the employees to consider. We all have a different relationship with work which is changing across almost every industry. We travel more, work flexitime, home work and job share all the pursuit of an acceptable work life balance. Part time work accounted for 8.4m people in the UK in 2017. Now more than ever, the ease of access to tools to do our job is important.

Although the concept of remote working is a perceived challenge for managers, this need not be the case. The cloud delivers a resilient platform that drives mobility and connectivity, regardless of location and physical hardware. Cloud computing delivers ‘borderless environments’, providing employees a seamless experience and reliable connectivity wherever they happen to be. It allows organisations to deliver IT at scale, so as businesses continue to grow and increase the size of their teams, each employee benefits from access to the same tools, platforms and information. In the process, staff are better supported with technologies that improve collaboration and communication. This not only helps to create an efficient workforce, it can improve morale and make for more engaged employees, while simultaneously killing off the Excel spreadsheet. Talk about every cloud having a silver lining.

Inform or perform

The end result is that more data is available. Used in the right way, and noting GDPR, this information can be harnessed to provide a better experience for employee, manager and executives alike as well as putting analytics in the hands of decision makers. This data can tell a multitude of stories and is able to be tailored, changed and adapted to country, region or person. It can inform promotions – when, where, how, why and who – as well as instruct which divisions or business units in need of help. Look hard enough and the answer is there. Seek and ye shall find.

In spite of this, we’re still seeing specific HR functional areas with reporting dashboards – mostly for operational reasons and not performing or informing anywhere near their potential. It’s like having an F1 car you don't take out of first gear. Of course, cloud systems have APIs to make this data accessible, subject to right security permissions.

Analytics: when two worlds collide

Good analytics is when two worlds collide; there needs to be good quality data and well-defined insight objectives (so you have a clear understanding of what you want to know). If done correctly, the C-suite is then able to utilise this information in the context of other business data like sales revenue per department, terminations of high performers across geographies/departments, high performer pay vs pay scale external market data metrics.

With the cloud, HR managers have a unique opportunity to create a level playing field – regardless of office location or employee type. From performance metrics that apply to all, to structured training and salary schemes, cloud-based HR software enables every aspect of employee management to be centralised. Establishing universal benchmarks ensures that everyone is working within the same framework – a crucial step towards building a cohesive, collaborative culture. With cloud-based solutions, HR managers can turn company goals and values into trackable, actionable metrics whilst creating a more collaborative environment for all.