Building Blocks | May 2023

In this edition

• Need for modern DevOps to collaborate e.g. with compliance teams

• Can internal developer platforms play a role in reliability

• Impact of the increasing number of tools in DevOps

• Is coding going to become conversational?

Welcome to the May edition of Building Blocks. Read on as we dissect the best of trends, news, and opportunities in the DevOps and Platform Engineering space.

IN FOCUS

Breaking down silos: Role of DevOps in collaborating with compliance and beyond

While the modern DevOps engineer is more aware about the compliance requirements and standards required to build customer trust, often there are situations when work and compliance become competing priorities. In between the pressure of managing cost, customer requirements, and compliance, there are various challenges such as the evolution of compliance frameworks not keeping pace with technology and higher cloud costs.

NetDevOps takes learnings, methodologies and best practices from DevOps to apply them to networking. A network’s efficiency, reliability and availability increase when DevOps principles are applied to the field of network operations. According to 2022 Global Hybrid Cloud Trends report by Cisco, greater collaboration between CloudOps and NetOps teams has numerous benefits, including improved cloud security (45%), greater operational efficiency (41%), and enhanced cloud application performance (39%).  With the adoption of IAC and the abstraction of the traditional CI/ CD pipeline, the use of Network automation and orchestration will become simpler.

Compliance, networking and costs are topics which any DevOps engineering team will definitely look at but there is a growing trend of DevSecOps bringing vulnerabilities and incidents into a package catalogue. Internal Developer portal, owned by DevOps, can play a pivotal role in unifying incidents in one central place.

"It is through improving our ability to deliver software that organizations can deliver features faster, pivot when needed, respond to compliance and security changes, and take advantage of fast feedback to attract new customers and delight existing ones." - Forsgren PhD, Nicole

TOOLS

Flamingo: Don’t choose between Flux and ArgoCD

Flamingo is a drop-in extension for Argo CD including Flux as a subsystem. The tool allows one to make use of Flux’s benefits without migrating the entire Gitops setup to a new tool.

Keycloak: Ready-to-run IAM Service

Keycloak has been accepted as a CNCF incubating project. It is an Identity and Access Management (IAM) solution which allows centralized authentication and authorization to applications and APIs.

IN ACTION

Growing DevOps toolchain - improving or hampering Developer productivity?

GitLab’s latest survey of 5000+ CIOs and CISOs reveal some interesting insights including impact of security shifting left in the development lifecycle, AI/ ML becoming an increasingly important part of DevSecOps workflows especially testing, and toolchain management becoming an important hindrance to developer productivity.

Can AI chatbots fundamentally shift how DevOps is done today?

Automating repetitive tasks, providing real-time alerts, monitoring processes, and real-time insights and analytics for informed decision making are some of the ways AI chatbots are driving DevOps transformations. 

Conversational programming will democratize computing with its own inherent risks

Conversations in real-life need context and LLMs need them too. In order to follow instructions, LLMs can either launch background tasks and return the required output. It can analyze its own output and criticize it as well. Tasks which were previously considered as specialists but it might take longer to get consumer adoption than GPT systems are implying.

"Building ChatGPT Plugins, like so much involving Large Language Models, is both really easy and deceptively complicated." - Simon Willison, Founder of the Datasette open source project

BE THERE

CdCon+GitOpsCon Canada

CdCon + GitOpsCon will be held in Vancouver, Canada, on May 8th and 9th, 2023!.

LONG READ

Cloud CISO Perspectives: Early April 2023

Check out the Google Cloud blog to know more about the Google CyberSecurity Action Team and Perspectives on Security for the Board

MUST LISTEN

How to quickly recover from a Malicious Hack

Tune into this podcast and join Rob Zuber as he talks about the security breach that took place last year in December and how CircleCI responded to it.