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...

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...

Interested in hearing industry leaders discuss subjects like this and sharing their experiences and use-cases? Attend the

Quantum computing promises much – but are organisations secure enough to make the most of it? According to a new report from the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), companies are aware of the risk of quantum computing but not yet ready to take action.

The alliance had previously put together the Quantum Safe Security Working Group (QSS WG) to assess the risks of the emerging technology. According to today’s report, which polled more than 100 CSA members with more than 90% working in either IT or...

The migration towards cloud computing in business has grown exponentially over the last 12 months, with new installation of public and private cloud network infrastructure becoming a key area of successful business operation.

Partnering this successful adoption of cloud technology is the positive development of both core and non-core careers in the sector, which in turn has led to an increased demand for skilled professionals and a boost in the number of available jobs.

We initially saw an increased demand...

A cryptocurrency is a digital asset designed to work as a medium of exchange that uses cryptography to secure its transactions, to control the creation of additional units, and to verify the transfer of assets. The quest to discover meaningful commercial applications for blockchain, beyond cryptography apps, has begun across the globe.

451 Research revealed that 28 percent of enterprises are now evaluating or using blockchain, although fewer than 3 percent have any production...

As we enter our second decade of its existence, the role of the public cloud is changing. Infrastructure as a service altered the way that virtualised resources are consumed, but what has emerged is far more powerful than allocating compute, storage, and networking on-demand.

The derivative services that the public cloud providers now offer include speech-to-text, sentiment analysis, and machine learning functionality that are constantly being improved. While it is often prudent to run an application on...

CircleCI, a San Francisco-based continuous integration and delivery platform provider whose customers include Facebook, Spotify and Sony, has announced the close of a $31 million (£22.5m) series C funding round.

The funding round was led by Top Tier Capital Partners, alongside Industry Ventures and Heavybit, joining existing investors Scale Venture Partners, Baseline Ventures, Harrison Metal, and DFJ Ventures.

The company helps organisations’ development teams automate the build, test and...

With AWS re:Invent done and dusted for another year, naturally the majority of coverage has focused on the initiatives coming out of Amazon’s headquarters. There were plenty of them too – more than 20 announcements in Andy Jassy’s keynote alone, with topics ranging from machine learning, databases, and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Yet plenty more news came from the event’s many...

Google has announced a price reduction for GPUs attached to on-demand Google Compute Engine virtual machines by up to 36%.

For US regions – Oregon and South Carolina – NVIDIA’s Tesla P100 GPU attached to a VM will cost $1.46 per hour, while the K80 GPU will set users back $0.45 per hour. The P100 and K80 GPUs are also available in Belgium and Taiwan

The company added that organisations such as Shazam and oilfield services provider Schlumberger were among those taking advantage of GPUs to...

Say hello to the Cloud Analytics Academy. The program, launched today by Snowflake Computing alongside Amazon Web Services (AWS), Looker, Talend and WhereScape, aims to help executives lead their organisations in data warehousing, BI, and more.

The curriculum is designed by Kent Graziano, Snowflake chief technical evangelist, with the partnering companies chipping in with their expertise.

There are three courses; the ‘executive fast track’ is the one-size-fits-all course with five sessions on key...