If your organisation is not allowing its developers to use container technologies, then you will very soon be in the minority, according to the latest analysis from DigitalOcean.

The company, in its latest quarterly Currents report assessing developer trends in cloud computing, found 49% of devs are now using containers in some form. Of that number, JavaScript (57%) was the most popular language used with them, ahead of Python (46%), PHP (36%), and Go (28%). Three in five (60%) said they were using containers...

We've all heard the exhortations from vendors and industry players alike - get into DevOps, containers and serverless for IT and application delivery before it's too late. But while the benefits are evident, companies are getting bogged down in troubleshooting and debugging software issues.

That's according to a new report from Scalyr. The study, which polled 155 software development practitioners, found that the majority (71%) are getting used to DevOps-type practices, pushing code into...

We live in an environment where everything is changing. Business requirements are changing. User demands are constantly in flux and always evolving. And our infrastructure is also continually changing. Frankly, the infrastructure has always been in a constant state of change, but in the past we pretended that we could get it to a point of stability — that we could reach a state of “done.” Once we finished setting up that totally stable infrastructure, then we could run everything on top with...

DevOps has been widely embraced by businesses under pressure to get competitively advantageous digital deliverables to market at the fastest possible cadence—especially given the reality of limited coder headcount and the need to rigorously avoid brand-toxic snafus in the customer experience. Artificial intelligence (AI), in stark contrast, is a potentially transformative digital discipline that is still very new to most enterprise IT organizations.

But while it’s certainly important that CIOs...

If you have Kubernetes skills then you will almost certainly be in demand from employers, as a new survey from CyberArk has found that IT jobs with the container orchestration tool in the title have soared year on year. But beware the security risks when getting involved.

According to the company, which has crunched data from IT Jobs Watch, roles involving Kubernetes have broken into the top 250 most popular IT vacancies, having been around the 1000 mark this time last year. The most likely job title for...

Those who attended or watched Cisco Live’s opening keynotes earlier this week – or indeed read our story on it – will have recognised the importance of Kubernetes to attendees with Google Cloud’s cameo being a particular highlight.

Now Microsoft is making waves of its own – with the general availability of its Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS).

The move will see...

Nowadays, it is increasingly easier to lose one’s self in dashboards, visualisation tools, nice graphics, and all sorts of button-like approaches to cloud computing. Since the last decade, UX work has improved tenfold; nevertheless, there is a side that usually goes unnoticed unless extremely necessary. That side belongs to application user interfaces (APIs).

An API constitutes a set of objects, methods and functions that allows the user to build scripts, or even big applications, to make certain things...

Many organizations are making the move to cloud-native platforms as their strategy for digital transformation. Cloud native allows companies to deliver fast-responding, user-friendly applications with greater agility. However, the architecture of the data in support of cloud-native transformation is often ignored in the hope that it will take care of itself.

With data becoming the information currency of every organization, how do you avoid the data mistakes commonly made during this cloud transformation...

They are two companies who have spent more time espousing the benefits of the mainframe than most – and now IBM and CA Technologies have forged a new partnership designed to make the technology more accessible in a cloud and DevOps landscape.

The collaboration will see new services being launched to help organisations develop, test, and monitor applications in the mainframe. The services will be available on IBM’s Cloud Managed Services on zSystems, otherwise known as zCloud.

Clients using zCloud...

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has announced the general availability of Amazon EKS, its managed Kubernetes service – putting it alongside rivals Microsoft and Google in this regard.

EKS, which was announced at AWS re:Invent back in November, is now operational in US East and US West regions, with further expansion happening ‘very soon’, according to the company.

The move puts AWS...

Everyone’s talking a good game when it comes to DevOps strategies – but automation is not as widespread in organisations as one might think.

That’s the key verdict from software management provider Puppet in its latest report. The report, State of DevOps Market Segmentation, aims to ‘reveal additional insights’ from the company’s most recent State of DevOps report, issued last year.

The 2017 analysis polled almost 3,200 technical professionals from organisations worldwide,...

Today, most companies are using continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) in one form or another – and this is of significance due to various reasons:

• It increases the quality of the code base and the testing of that code base
• It greatly increases team collaboration
• It reduces the time in which new features reach the production environment
• It reduces the number of bugs that in turn reach the production environment

Granted, these reasons apply if – and only if – CI/CD is applied with more than 70% correctness. Although there is no single perfect way of doing...

Can orchestration be considered a better alternative to provisioning and configuration management, especially in the case of cloud-native applications? We can look at this from a variety of angles; comparing against data centre-oriented solutions; differentiating orchestration of infrastructure (in the cloud and out of the cloud) versus containers (focusing mostly on cloud), as well as looking at best practices under different scenarios.

It’s worth noting here that this topic can span not only a...

As businesses of every size push forward with cloud projects in 2018, the demand for cloud skills is accelerating. Public cloud adoption is expected to climb significantly and the IDC predict spending will reach £197 billion in just three years.

But as cutting-edge technologies, like machine learning, continue to reshape the job market the skills gap looms large across the industry. With over 350,000 specialists needed to help fill cloud roles there’s clearly a massive opportunity for...

Verizon is moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its preferred public cloud provider – migrating more than 1,000 business critical applications and backend systems in the process.

The announcement, made by AWS, notes that Verizon first started working with the cloud infrastructure behemoth in 2015, with the latest wave of migrations ‘part of a corporate-wide initiative at Verizon to increase agility and reduce costs through the use of cloud computing.’ Among the migrations are a series of...

The AWS Summit, in London, has seen a few pieces of news emerge - including a new customer and new functionality - with machine learning at the heart of it.

The cloud infrastructure behemoth announced Ryanair will be going all-in, with the Irish-headquartered airline set to close 'the vast majority' of its data centres in the coming three years. This includes moving from Microsoft's SQL Server to Aurora, Amazon's MySQL and PostgreSQL-compatible relational database engine.

Ryanair said machine learning, from...

With KubeCon and CloudNativeCon taking place in Copenhagen this week, it is not surprising that a series of Kubernetes-based announcements has hit the wires over the past 24 hours – with Cisco, Red Hat and the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) taking top honours.

The CNCF, which maintains Kubernetes alongside other open source technologies, has announced the launch of a certified Kubernetes application developer (CKAD) examination, alongside a Kubernetes for...

“Software is eating the world”, claimed Marc Andreessen back in 2011; though it may have seemed like an exaggeration when his essay was published, so far he has been proved correct. Now that software exists across every industry, organisations that rely on information need to reimagine themselves as software companies to avoid falling behind competitors.

In today’s society, childhood favourite Blockbuster couldn’t stand...

In today’s world of Agile, we know that development teams must offer products and services to end users on their terms, on their choice of devices, and at their convenience - creating and differentiating features that work perfectly regardless of how much time they have to build and release the new software. At the end of the day, this combination of velocity and quality can be make or break for brands, but achieving it is no easy feat.

We believe that teams which are trying to mature their DevOps...

With the relentless 24/7 nature of the digital economy, many customers I talk to are under pressure to continually release and update their apps. Making this happen is a challenge in itself. But keeping those apps secure can be even more problematic – especially when security is left to the end of the development cycle.

That may seem an unlikely approach in today’s heightened IT security climate. But in my experience, it’s all too common. Under pressure to get their apps out fast, firms...