DevOps CNCF is a non-profit comprised of some 49 industry participants that have come together to drive development and adoption of cloud-native applications and services. The Cloud Native Computing Foundation is uniting such giants as Google, IBM, Intel and Cisco Systems to distill a collection of container technologies that end-user companies deem praiseworthy to reach its goal.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF intends its membership to represent end users (the CNCF website lists one end user, Goldman Sachs), cloud and container technologies, online and IT services, and academic institutions. The Technical Oversight Committee representative, weigh in on leading the DevOps transformation and instilling a DevOps culture in this two - part Q-and-A.
For DevOps Online Training or Corporate Training Contact info@virtualnuggets(dot)com
How is the CNCF specifically involved in leading the DevOps transformation by instilling the DevOps culture, in the industry or in member companies, for example?
We believe that at the heart of the DevOps culture is the need to reduce the friction and, indeed, the barriers between teams that build an application and the teams that run an application. Developers learn to think about an application as a living service that evolves continuously and rapidly to meet the evolving business needs. Operations is there to deliver the tools and environment needed for them to successfully drive their application.
Why do developers need an environment that is safe to change? What kind of change? Safe how?
Safe change has many potential meanings: The first kind of “safe” is about creating deterministic behavior in operations. Does the system handle a change correctly every time? If I make a change to two systems, will they have the same state? How about to 1,000 systems? It’s important to focus on creating strong determinism by removing the moving parts in a production deployment.
The second kind of “safe” is about being able to validate that a change is good not just in pre -production environments, but in the actual production environment with a simple and deterministic rollback. It is important to make it trivial to replicate environments, and offer a way to run a simple experiment in production (e.g. route 1 percent of my traffic to this new version) with the option to deterministically roll forward or backward without effort.
A third kind of “safe” is about being able to ensure that every change is deliberate. One of the problems we often see in production systems is “configuration drift” that isn’t driven through any kind of formal process. This should be addressed by creating a strongly declarative toolset that makes every change deliberate and trackable.
How do you recommend providing these things that developers need? How do you help provide them?
There are multiple issues like data, security governance and applications that need to be addressed. Additionally, companies want to deliver apps with high velocity. How do you solve all of this? A vendor-neutral organization that can harmonize emerging technologies is important for facilitating cloud-native. Given the large number of players in the marketplace with competing approaches, having an open source way to solve this is also important.
Cloud-native infrastructure enables self-service and “hands-off” operation, including provisioning, deployment, scaling, healing, discovery, monitoring and more, with relatively little marginal effort for specific applications. By supporting open source projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus that provide such functionality, the CNCF hopes to democratize high-velocity application delivery, which was previously achievable mainly by web-scale companies.
How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?
In a DevOps culture, operators are both partners and customers of the developers. Developers take responsibility for meeting operational requirements: security, availability, scalability, efficiency, actionable monitoring and logging output, reliability, necessary configurability, compatibility with the production environment, etc. Cloud-native infrastructure provides mechanisms developers-and-operators need to facilitate and capitalize on those capabilities.
The Cloud Native Computing Foundation CNCF intends its membership to represent end users (the CNCF website lists one end user, Goldman Sachs), cloud and container technologies, online and IT services, and academic institutions. The Technical Oversight Committee representative, weigh in on leading the DevOps transformation and instilling a DevOps culture in this two - part Q-and-A.
For DevOps Online Training or Corporate Training Contact info@virtualnuggets(dot)com
How is the CNCF specifically involved in leading the DevOps transformation by instilling the DevOps culture, in the industry or in member companies, for example?
We believe that at the heart of the DevOps culture is the need to reduce the friction and, indeed, the barriers between teams that build an application and the teams that run an application. Developers learn to think about an application as a living service that evolves continuously and rapidly to meet the evolving business needs. Operations is there to deliver the tools and environment needed for them to successfully drive their application.
Why do developers need an environment that is safe to change? What kind of change? Safe how?
Safe change has many potential meanings: The first kind of “safe” is about creating deterministic behavior in operations. Does the system handle a change correctly every time? If I make a change to two systems, will they have the same state? How about to 1,000 systems? It’s important to focus on creating strong determinism by removing the moving parts in a production deployment.
The second kind of “safe” is about being able to validate that a change is good not just in pre -production environments, but in the actual production environment with a simple and deterministic rollback. It is important to make it trivial to replicate environments, and offer a way to run a simple experiment in production (e.g. route 1 percent of my traffic to this new version) with the option to deterministically roll forward or backward without effort.
A third kind of “safe” is about being able to ensure that every change is deliberate. One of the problems we often see in production systems is “configuration drift” that isn’t driven through any kind of formal process. This should be addressed by creating a strongly declarative toolset that makes every change deliberate and trackable.
How do you recommend providing these things that developers need? How do you help provide them?
There are multiple issues like data, security governance and applications that need to be addressed. Additionally, companies want to deliver apps with high velocity. How do you solve all of this? A vendor-neutral organization that can harmonize emerging technologies is important for facilitating cloud-native. Given the large number of players in the marketplace with competing approaches, having an open source way to solve this is also important.
Cloud-native infrastructure enables self-service and “hands-off” operation, including provisioning, deployment, scaling, healing, discovery, monitoring and more, with relatively little marginal effort for specific applications. By supporting open source projects such as Kubernetes and Prometheus that provide such functionality, the CNCF hopes to democratize high-velocity application delivery, which was previously achievable mainly by web-scale companies.
How does this align with instilling a DevOps culture?
In a DevOps culture, operators are both partners and customers of the developers. Developers take responsibility for meeting operational requirements: security, availability, scalability, efficiency, actionable monitoring and logging output, reliability, necessary configurability, compatibility with the production environment, etc. Cloud-native infrastructure provides mechanisms developers-and-operators need to facilitate and capitalize on those capabilities.
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