Click here to close now.



Welcome!

Containers Expo Blog Authors: Sarah Patrick, AppDynamics Blog, Pat Romanski, Cynthia Dunlop, Plutora Blog

Related Topics: SAP HANA Cloud, Microservices Expo, Linux Containers, Containers Expo Blog, @CloudExpo, @DevOpsSummit

SAP HANA Cloud: Article

DevOps Resolutions for 2016 | @DevOpsSummit #DevOps #Microservices

DevOps isn’t just about engineering better processes. It’s also about cultural transformation.

At year-end, we often consider where we've fallen short over the last twelve months - and how we can do better over the next twelve. For IT leaders, DevOps is likely to be a primary concern for 2016. As application awesomeness becomes more important to the business, IT must get great code into production faster. DevOps success is thus imperative - especially if you're competing against digital-first market disrupters.

DevOps, though, isn't just about engineering better processes. It's also about cultural transformation. This reality makes some IT leaders uneasy, because excellence at operational management - rather than cultural leadership - got them where they are today.

But DevOps success requires cultural leadership. Without that leadership, people will work in 2016 the same way they worked in 2015.

KPIs are particularly useful tools for this cultural leadership, because they define goals and incentives. Here, then, are three key performance indicators (KPI) related New Year's resolutions to consider for 2016:

"I will unify my DevOps team KPIs"
KPIs for DevOps are well known: release frequency, number of software defects, MTTR for problems in production, etc. Unfortunately, many organizations still apply these KPIs in the context of a siloed "culture of blame." Developers get blamed for slow releases. Ops get blamed for extended outages.

DevOps requires the de-siloing of KPIs and collective responsibility for their fulfillment. Everybody has a stake in continuous delivery and in minimizing MTTR. Nobody gets to point their finger.

Cultural DevOps leadership is thus akin to coaching football. Coaches don't just incentivize receivers to run their routes well. They also disincentivize blaming the linebackers for a loss. IT leaders should do likewise.

"I will add cultural KPIs to my operational ones"
Management-by-objective is not management-by-what's-easy-to-measure. Yes, it's important to track obvious operational KPIs. But if your objective is cultural transformation, you need cultural KPIs too. Otherwise, you'll hit the wall with your operational KPIs - and never quite understand why.

Can you measure frequency of blame? Collaboration across skill silos? Trust? Of course you can. Those metrics may be grounded in subjective perceptions, but that doesn't make them any less real or relevant to your cultural mission.

"I will include myself in the ‘us-ness' of our KPIs"
An irony inherent in leading DevOps cultural transformation is that you can wind up blaming people for blaming people - and get frustrated about how "they" aren't becoming a "we."

Contemporary managers face this irony on many fronts as the drive for flatter organizations and the influx of Millennials redefine the workplace. Self-exclusion, though, is especially problematic for IT leaders attempting to re-make their organizations in order to fulfill the near-impossible demands of a globalized digital marketplace.

Yes, you need to get your developers and ops staff to do many things differently next year. New models of work, however, require new models of leadership. To change others, as the cliché goes, you must first change yourself.

And you can't change what you don't measure. That's why IT leaders should make self-examination a top resolution list for 2016.

More Stories By Aruna Ravichandran

Aruna Ravichandran is Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing, Application Performance Management and DevOps for CA Technologies. In this role, Aruna leads the Go to Market for CA’s Application Performance Management products and is also responsible for DevOps solution marketing.

Comments (0)

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.


@ThingsExpo Stories
Learn how IoT, cloud, social networks and last but not least, humans, can be integrated into a seamless integration of cooperative organisms both cybernetic and biological. This has been enabled by recent advances in IoT device capabilities, messaging frameworks, presence and collaboration services, where devices can share information and make independent and human assisted decisions based upon social status from other entities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Michael Heydt, founder of Seamless Thingies, discussed and demonstrateed how devices and humans can be integrated from a simple cluste...
The Internet of Things is in the early stages of mainstream deployment but it promises to unlock value and rapidly transform how organizations manage, operationalize, and monetize their assets. IoT is a complex structure of hardware, sensors, applications, analytics and devices that need to be able to communicate geographically and across all functions. Once the data is collected from numerous endpoints, the challenge then becomes converting it into actionable insight.
Consumer IoT applications provide data about the user that just doesn’t exist in traditional PC or mobile web applications. This rich data, or “context,” enables the highly personalized consumer experiences that characterize many consumer IoT apps. This same data is also providing brands with unprecedented insight into how their connected products are being used, while, at the same time, powering highly targeted engagement and marketing opportunities. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Nathan Treloar, President and COO of Bebaio, explored examples of brands transforming their businesses by tappi...
Contrary to mainstream media attention, the multiple possibilities of how consumer IoT will transform our everyday lives aren’t the only angle of this headline-gaining trend. There’s a huge opportunity for “industrial IoT” and “Smart Cities” to impact the world in the same capacity – especially during critical situations. For example, a community water dam that needs to release water can leverage embedded critical communications logic to alert the appropriate individuals, on the right device, as soon as they are needed to take action.
"What is the next step in the evolution of IoT systems? The answer is data, information, which is a radical shift from assets, from things to input for decision making," stated Michael Minkevich, VP of Technology Services at Luxoft, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Organizations already struggle with the simple collection of data resulting from the proliferation of IoT, lacking the right infrastructure to manage it. They can't only rely on the cloud to collect and utilize this data because many applications still require dedicated infrastructure for security, redundancy, performance, etc. In his session at 17th Cloud Expo, Emil Sayegh, CEO of Codero Hosting, discussed how in order to resolve the inherent issues, companies need to combine dedicated and cloud solutions through hybrid hosting – a sustainable solution for the data required to manage IoT de...
"As a technology provider we believe that business comes first and customers should start thinking that technology is something that helps them to enable new business models," stated Ermanno Bonifazi, Founder and CEO of Solgenia, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Manufacturing connected IoT versions of traditional products requires more than multiple deep technology skills. It also requires a shift in mindset, to realize that connected, sensor-enabled “things” act more like services than what we usually think of as products. In his session at @ThingsExpo, David Friedman, CEO and co-founder of Ayla Networks, discussed how when sensors start generating detailed real-world data about products and how they’re being used, smart manufacturers can use the data to create additional revenue streams, such as improved warranties or premium features. Or slash ma...
Developing software for the Internet of Things (IoT) comes with its own set of challenges. Security, privacy, and unified standards are a few key issues. In addition, each IoT product is comprised of (at least) three separate application components: the software embedded in the device, the backend service, and the mobile application for the end user’s controls. Each component is developed by a different team, using different technologies and practices, and deployed to a different stack/target – this makes the integration of these separate pipelines and the coordination of software updates for ...
"IoT is really hitting its stride. The adoption rates are increasing and Vitria is in a good position to help people deliver on the value of IoT," explained Mike Houston, Marketing & Product Marketing Professional at Vitria Technology, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"Storage is growing. All of IDC's estimates say that unstructured data is now 80% of the world's data. We provide storage systems that can actually deal with that scale of data - software-defined storage systems," stated Paul Turner, Chief Product and Marketing Officer at Cloudian, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"We're seeing a lot of activity in IoT in the healthcare space - a lot of new devices coming in. We are seeing a huge demand in building smart offices, smart infrastructures, smart cloud applications," explained Shrikant Pattathil, President of Harbinger Systems, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"The problem with IoT today is that people aren't looking to buy IoT, what they're really trying to do is buy a business outcome or trying to figure out ways to improve the business outcome. It just so happens that IoT may be the technology that can help do that," stated Dave McCarthy, Director of Products at Bsquare Corporation, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
Electric power utilities face relentless pressure on their financial performance, and reducing distribution grid losses is one of the last untapped opportunities to meet their business goals. Combining IoT-enabled sensors and cloud-based data analytics, utilities now are able to find, quantify and reduce losses faster – and with a smaller IT footprint. Solutions exist using Internet-enabled sensors deployed temporarily at strategic locations within the distribution grid to measure actual line loads.
With the exponential growth of network traffic slowing down data transmission, companies are looking for solutions. Recently, a solution has emerged that can help improve your data speed with data centers on the edge. These micro data center solutions can simplify the lives of many data center owners and operators because they are self-contained, secure computing environments, assembled in a factory and shipped in one enclosure which includes all the necessary power, cooling, security, and management tools. Their flexibility opens up a wave of new applications, made possible through reduced la...
WebRTC services have already permeated corporate communications in the form of videoconferencing solutions. However, WebRTC has the potential of going beyond and catalyzing a new class of services providing more than calls with capabilities such as mass-scale real-time media broadcasting, enriched and augmented video, person-to-machine and machine-to-machine communications. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Luis Lopez, CEO of Kurento, introduced the technologies required for implementing these ideas and some early experiments performed in the Kurento open source software community in areas such...
"At Sensorberg we are providing a cloud-based beacon management platform and this allows you to control the various beacons that you have in your fleet as well as design various campaigns and triggers which the beacons will initiate," explained Daniel Gillard, Business Development Manager at Sensorberg GmbH, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
"IoT is going to be a huge industry with a lot of value for end users, for industries, for consumers, for manufacturers. How can we use cloud to effectively manage IoT applications," stated Ian Khan, Innovation & Marketing Manager at Solgeniakhela, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at @ThingsExpo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.
There are so many tools and techniques for data analytics that even for a data scientist the choices, possible systems, and even the types of data can be daunting. In his session at @ThingsExpo, Chris Harrold, Global CTO for Big Data Solutions for EMC Corporation, showed how to perform a simple, but meaningful analysis of social sentiment data using freely available tools that take only minutes to download and install. Participants received the download information, scripts, and complete end-to-end walkthrough of the analysis from start to finish, and were also given the practical knowledge ...
"We announced CryptoScript, it's a new way of programming a hardware security module, which technically requires standard APIs and very specific knowledge. With CryptoScript we hope to change that a bit," explained Johannes Lintzen, Vice President of Sales at Utimaco, in this SYS-CON.tv interview at 17th Cloud Expo, held November 3-5, 2015, at the Santa Clara Convention Center in Santa Clara, CA.