New Heroes in the DevOps Saga: DevSecOps and DevNetOps

This article was originally published on September 26 at DevOps.com https://devops.com/devsecops-devnetops-new-heroes-devops-saga/

The evolution of DevOps is by no means done, but it’s safe to say that there is enough agreement and acceptance to declare it a hero. DevOps has helped glorify IT to the point where it’s no longer preventing business, nor a provider nor a partner of the business.

Often IT is the business, or its vanguard for competitive disruption and differentiation.

Splintering the success of this portmanteau hero, we now hear more and more of two trusty sidekicks: DevSecOps and DevNetOps. Lesser understood in their adolescence, these tots are still frequently misunderstood, are still forming their identities, and still need a lot of development if they’re to enter the IT hall of fame like their forerunner.

Just as the terms look, DevSecOps and DevNetOps are often assumed to be about wrapping DevOps principles around security and networking: operators hope to assuage technical debt and drudgery by automating in proficiency and resiliency. For networking, I’ve covered how there is a lot more to that than coding, but to be sure, these sidekicks certainly espouse operators learning how to do develop while DevOps was equally, if not more, about developers learning to operate.

The Shift Left: SecDevOps and NetDevOps

As if it wasn’t hard enough to tell what DevSecOps and DevNetOps want to be when they grow up, we’ve gone and given them alter egos: SecDevOps (aka “rugged” DevOps) and NetDevOps. Think about them exactly as the words look – it’s about the shift to the left. Left of what?

Traditional DevOps practices focus on business-specific applications development. The development timeline is known as concept to cash, and with all the superpowers of DevOps we try to reduce our enemy: the lead time and repeatable processes between code and cash.

Security and building infrastructure – like networks – were supporting tasks, not revenue-generating nor competitive advantages. Thus, security and networking were far to the right on the timeline with concerns that deal with operational scale, performance and protection.

Today’s shift left propels security and infrastructure considerations earlier on the timeline, into coding, architecture and pre-production systems. It’s a palpable penny-drop amid daily news of security breaches and infrastructure outages causing technology-defined establishments to bleed money and brand equity.

Fill the bucket with cash, but don’t forget to forestall the leaks!

DevOps and Infrastructure: Challenge and Opportunity

Automation sparks have flown over the proverbial wall into the camp of I&O pros. Operators trading physical for virtual, macro for micro, converged for composed, and configuration for code is proof that the fire has caught security and networking. Controlling the burn now, is key, so that healthier skills and structures arise in place of the I&O dogma and duff. Fortunately, this is precisely the destiny for our newfound heroes, DevSecOps and DevNetOps.

However, doing DevSecOps and DevNetOps, embracing security and networks as code, we mustn’t be so credulous as to forget the formidable DevOps practices and patterns that need transforming along the ultimate automation journey. Testability, immutability, upgradability, traceability, auditability, reliability, and other __abilities are not straightforward to achieve.

Discounting “aaS” technology consumed as a service, a fundamental challenge to innovating SecOps and NetOps, compared to application ops, is that applications are crafted and built; security and networking solutions are mostly still bought and assembled.

Security and network infrastructure as code is something that needs to be co-created with the vendors. Other than in the cloud, it will take a while before security and networking systems are driven API-first, and are redesigned and broken down to offer simulation, composition and orchestration with scale and resilience.

While this will land first in software-defined infrastructure, there is still a ways to go to manage most software-defined security and networking systems with continuous practices of artifact integration, testing, and deployment. Hardware and embedded software will be even more challenging.

Finding Strength in Challenge

So on one hand, DevOps is evolving with security and networking shifting left. On the other hand, traditional security and networking ops are transforming with DevOps principles.

Is the ultimate innovation to squeeze out those traditional operations altogether? Does NetDevOps + DevNetOps = DevOps?

There is a parallel train of thought and debate, with success on both sides. Purist teams cut out operations with the “you build it, you run it” attitude. Other companies like Google have dedicated operations specialist teams of SREs. While the SRE reporting structure is isolated, SRE jobs are very integrated with that of development teams. It’s easy to imagine the purist approach, subsuming security and networking into DevOps practices, but only if we assume the presence of cloud infrastructure and services as a platform. Even then, there is still substantiation for the SRE.

Layers below, however, somebody still needs to build the foundations of the cloud IaaS and data center hardware. As they say, “Even serverless computing, is not actually serverless.”

Underpinning the clouds are data centers. And then there’s transport, IoT, mobile or other secure networks to and between clouds. In these areas, it’s obvious there is a niche for our two trusty sidekicks, DevSecOps and DevNetOps, to shake up ops culture and principles. These two heroes can rescue software-defined and physical infrastructure from the clutches of so many anti-pattern evils, like maintenance windows and change controls (ahem, it’s called a “commit”).

We may not require rapid experimentation in our infrastructure, but we would warmly welcome automated deployments, automated updates, failure and attack testing drills, and intent-driven continuous response. They will boost resiliency and optimization for the business and peace of mind for the builders.

Teams operating security, networks, and especially clouds, need to honor and elevate DevSecOps and DevNetOps, so that on the journey now afoot, our teams and our new heroes may realize their potential.

This article was originally published on September 26 at DevOps.com https://devops.com/devsecops-devnetops-new-heroes-devops-saga/

Good Habits to Make the Multi-Cloud Work For You – Part 2 of 2

This article was originally published on September 12 at Data Center Knowledge http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/industry-perspectives/good-habits-make-multi-cloud-work-you-part-2

In my previous article, I talked about the state of infatuation with hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Would you be surprised that in the stresses and mania surrounding IT cloud strategy, some folks fixate more on the playing field than the game itself? You probably already know that you’ve got to get your head in the game in this unforgiving age, and a winning strategy for digitally speeding and feeding the business across the multi-cloud is not: taste the rainbow; it’s choosing and consuming cloud wisely.

Too bad that how you do so isn’t obvious, and as if it wasn’t difficult enough to anticipate technology turns ahead, there are so many captivating cloud services that might lead you down treacherous roads to traps and debt. But there are also well-known tactics emerging that you can model to ready and steady your organization for change and success. Like most, if your journey has already begun, you’re picking these up along the way and adjusting your habits as you go.

You know how bad habits are easy to form and hard to live with? Similarly, it’s very easy to jump into multi-cloud or unwittingly let it happen to you. At this precipice, the warning signs and early stories of cloud lock-in, overwhelming multiple-cloud context switches, runaway expenses, and situational blindness, are hopefully enough to grab your attention. Multi-cloud is inevitable; these fatalities are not.

A multi-cloud platform is a powerful environment, and it requires proper preparation so you can control it, instead of it controlling you. With that, here are four of the best preparations I’ve seen, like good habits that are hard to form, but easy to live with.

1. Unify Your Toolchain

In the eternal deluge and disruption of new tech tooling and systems, remember those good old-fashioned IT values of standardization and consolidation? Don’t throw those babies out with the ITIL bathwater.

As you embrace cloud and bimodal IT with new and improved tools, you might lessen the reins on your traditional values, using public cloud and building private cloud infrastructure alongside your physical and virtualized data centers. In loosening the reins or spinning out agile side projects, just watch out for the trap of hasty developers rolling their own stack or going stackless/serverless, only to get caught in a web of proprietary cloud services.

Don’t rush an obstinate knee-jerk to block this neither. Think of a unified toolchain effort as one with the developers to rationalize a base devops pipeline, cluster, and middleware stack, that could serve 80 percent of projects.

• Your tools need to work on any cloud infrastructure, and if they can work with your legacy infrastructure, even better.
• Freeing yourself from lock-in of cluster and pipeline orchestration tools and infrastructure-as-code lifecycle management: keep them untethered from any specific underlying IaaS, with portable shims like Terraform.
• While you don’t want to throttle developers back from using services outside of your stack – they’ll go around you anyway – encourage managed open-source-based services. Then incorporate such services into your middleware toolchain as it matures. Tools like Helm, make it easier to manage services yourself, more than ever before.

If you’re a lean IT shop, let’s face it, following this to the letter may take you away from getting to market ASAP. Maybe you’re a startup or in that mode? You don’t just want, but need, to focus on developing your core competitive technology, not a portable multi-cloud toolchain.

How do you balance moving fast, employing low-hanging SaaP, with the concern of vendor and architectural lock-in?

If a tool is a competitive differentiator, then you should probably build it. Otherwise, remember there are a lot of open-source tools that are glued together with reference implementations of other open-source tools: large projects like Kubernetes and Spinnaker are easy to adopt with a bunch of pre-canned sensible defaults. Another option is to choose managed open-source services, that are more easily insourced later or offered by multiple cloud vendors.

Finally, software design is probably the most important and challenging factor of all. Architecting for scale is obvious, but flexibility enables business agility; so consider not only today’s lock-in, but also getting locked out of a competitive advantage tomorrow. Assembling API-driven (capital ‘S’) Services from micro-services is a well-established pattern to do this, and I’d recommend software alchemists investigate evolutionary architecture from ThoughtWorks for more wisdom.

2. Connect Your Clouds

 Connection was a given in the world of hybrid cloud. That still holds true. However, cloud bursting, the most bombastic of all use cases for hybrid cloud, is the least common. Multiple clouds need to be connected together for many more realistic and common use cases:   

• Imagine pipeline automation that includes environments or steps split across clouds. Dev/test can happen anywhere, but you may have higher requirements for staging/production.
• Secure data replication for warehousing or distributed applications, and backups for disaster recovery and avoidance.
• Split application tiers, where there are different non-functional requirements for the various application tiers like sovereignty, security, scale, performance, etc. that must be met in various geographies or optimized with split economics. Some applications may be split because of functional requirements too because certain clouds have unique advantages that others can’t reproduce.

Such cloud interconnections demand higher security than using the internet, and often clouds simply require a secure connection back to your enterprise staff or users. Beyond security, unique routing and legacy layer-2 unicast or even multicast connectivity could be an application requirement. While there are cloud-vendor tools for basic security and networking, you can also search for your own software-defined and virtualized security and networking solutions that are agnostic to any cloud infrastructure, unifying this toolchain too and incorporating it into your infrastructure-as-code policies.

3. Harmonize, Unify and Simplify Policy

If you have software deployed or scaled across multiple cloud locations, the configuration, monitoring and automatic-response systems may get unwieldly unless you seek to elevate your orchestration across clouds. Of course, there are cloud management platforms for this. With or without them, you can also do some multi-cloud management with your own centrally harmonized configurations and management as code. A further step might unify configuration and management with global controllers, but with the track record of humans causing most errors, be careful with your blast radius for a fat-finger typo.

Another trend in provisioning models and APIs is abstraction, which can be at many levels like multi-cloud orchestration, individual stack, pipeline or application. By making things more intuitive and concise for humans and leaving the execution to your software machinery and machine learning, you’re likely to improve the lives of your operators, your applications and your application users.

4. Hold Up Before You Speed Up

Cloud will move you faster, and if that’s not enough cause for care, even with no IT strategy, you’ll still end up with multi-cloud in no time: multiple owners, vendors, regions, and availability zones. The increased danger is that multi-cloud can multiply messes and mistakes. Preparation in building a platform is key, and like many things that take a bit of time upfront, it’s worth the effort in the long run.

Consciousness to hold up isolated quick gains as short-term one-offs, that generally beget debt down the road, is the critical gambit that will return long-term payouts in adaptability and speed atop a united multi-cloud platform.

IT leaders know that digital transformation is a journey, not a destination. With continuous learning, the first of all healthy continuous IT practices, mastering the tactics and good habits for structuring your multi-cloud platform and using the ins and outs of devops atop it, can be fun and rewarding. It allows safe acceleration and agility for IT, and it’s essential to sustainably advance the speeds and smarts of your business.

Multi-cloud is A Reality, Not A Strategy - Part 1 of 2

This article was originally posted on August 25th, 2017 on Data Center Knowledge at http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/08/25/multi-cloud-reality-not-strategy-part-1/

So you’re doing cloud, and there is no sign of slowing down. Maybe your IT strategies are measured, maybe you’re following the wisdom of the crowd, maybe you’re under the gun, you’re impetuous or you’re oblivious. Maybe all of the above apply. In any case, like all businesses, you’ve realized the future belongs to the fast and that cloud is the vehicle for your newly dubbed software-defined enterprise: a definition carrying onerous, what I call, “daft pressures” for harder, better, faster, stronger IT.

You may as well be solving the climate-change crisis because to have a fighting chance today, it feels like you have to do everything all at once.

Enduring such exploding forces and pressures, most crapulent enterprises simultaneously devour cloud, left, right and center; the name for said zeitgeist: multi-cloud. If you’ve not kept abreast, overwhelming evidence – like years of the State of the Cloud Report and other analyst research – show that multi-cloud is the present direction for most enterprises. But the name “multi-cloud” would suggest that using multiple clouds is all there is to it. Thus, in the time it takes to read this article, any technocrat can have their own multi-cloud. It sounds too easy, and as they say, “when life looks like Easy Street, danger is at the door.”

Apparition du Jour

While some cloud pundits forecasting the future of IT infrastructure will shift from hybrid cloud to multi-cloud or go round and round in sanctimonious circles, those who are perceptive have realized that multi-cloud pretense is merely a catch-all moniker, rather than an IT pattern to model. As with many terms washed over too much, “multi-cloud” has quickly washed out. It’s delusional as a strategy, and isn’t particularly useful, other than as le mot du jour to attract attention. How’s that for hypocrisy?

Just like you wouldn’t last on only one food, it’s obvious that you choose multiple options at the cloud buffet. How you choose and how you consume is what will make the difference to if you perish, survive or thrive. Choosing and consuming wisely and with discipline is a strategy.

Is the Strategy Hybrid Cloud?

Whether you want to renew your vows to hybrid cloud or divorce that term, somewhere along the way, it got confused with bimodal, hybrid IT and ops. Nonetheless, removing the public-plus-private qualification, there was real value in the model to unite multiple clouds for one purpose. It’s precisely that aspect that would also add civility to the barbarism of blatantly pursuing multi-cloud. However, precipitating hybrid clouds for a single application with, say, the firecracker whiz-bang of the lofty cloud bursting use case, is really a distraction. The greater goal of using hybrid or multiple clouds should be as a unified, elastic IT infrastructure platform, exploiting the best of many environments.

Opportunities for Ops

Whether public or private, true clouds (which are far from every data center—even those well virtualized) ubiquitously offer elastic, API-controllable and observable infrastructure atop which devops can flourish to enable the speeds and feeds of your business. An obvious opportunity and challenge for IT operations professionals is in building true cloud infrastructure, but if that’s not in the cards for your enterprise, there is still even greater opportunity in managing and executing the strategy for the wisdom and discipline in choosing and consuming cloud.

In the new generation of IT, ops discipline doesn’t mean being the “no” person, it means shaping the path for developers, with developers. This is where devops teaches us that new fun exists to engineer, integrate and operate things. It’s just that they are stacks, pipelines and services, not servers. Of course, to ride this elevator up, traditional infrastructure and operations pros need to elevate their skills, practicing devops kung-fu across the multi-cloud and possibly applying it in building private clouds too.

Imagine what would happen if we exalted our trite multi-cloud environment with strategies and tactics to master it? We can indeed extract the most value from each cloud of choice, avoid cloud lock-in, and ensure evolvability, but you probably wouldn’t be surprised to learn that there are also shortcuts with new technical debt spirals lurking ahead.

To secure the multi-cloud as a platform serving us, and not the other way around, some care, commitment, time and work is needed toward forming the right skills, habits, and using or building tooling, services, and middleware. There is indeed a maturing shared map leading to portability, efficiency, situational awareness and orchestration. In my next article, we’ll examine some of the journey and important strategies to use the multi-cloud for speed with sustainability. Stay tuned.

This article was originally posted on August 25th, 2017 on Data Center Knowledge at http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2017/08/25/multi-cloud-reality-not-strategy-part-1/