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Six common myths about Microsoft Azure

By Annie Button

You may be interested in moving your infrastructure to public cloud storage and services such as Microsoft Azure. This form of storage is becoming increasingly popular for its perceived ability to enhance efficiency and simplify your digital operation. Part of what has made Azure such a renowned option is the familiarity of the software – with a setup in common with other Microsoft products.But there is a great deal of misinformation on Microsoft Azure and this has led to the establishment of common half-truths or misapprehensions about the services. Whether you are interested in simple public cloud hosting or a more advanced personalized solution, Azure has the services to suit you.Here we take a look at six common myths about Microsoft Azure, examine the truths behind them – and why you should consider choosing Microsoft Azure.Myth 1: Azure is too complicated for my businessSome organizations are concerned that switching to Microsoft Azure would be too complicated and they lack the technical expertise to make it work. However, one of the major benefits of Azure is that if you are familiar with other Microsoft and Windows products you will find it actually relatively easy to use. The service has been designed to be suitable for businesses of all sizes, so there is no reason to assume you will be overwhelmed.Of course, not every company has the technical knowledge and it can leave owners worried that they will not feel in full control of their infrastructure. Thankfully, however, it is possible to work with specialists who can offer managed Azure hosting services. So, whether you need just a little help with Azure deployments or a fully managed package, there is something out there to suit your business.Myth 2: It’s a security riskWith rules and regulations such as the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) coming into force, it has never been more important to have powerful cybersecurity in place. This means that many businesses worry that their data is put at risk if they use services like Microsoft Azure. However, if this is a concern for you, it’s worth knowing that Azure holds the most comprehensive list of compliance certifications of any cloud provider.Microsoft is an industry leader in privacy protection with unique residency guarantees to protect data at all times. The system is designed to give customers complete confidence in their security. So ultimately you can have complete peace of mind that working with Azure can keep your business entirely secure and private. Source: Home SecurityMyth 3: The costs are prohibitiveIn some cases, businesses are put off the idea of switching to Microsoft Azure because they believe either that the cost of changing the infrastructure and working practice will be too high, or the actual ongoing costs are too expensive. Of course, it is natural to be want to be in complete control of finances but it can often be the case that businesses that are not willing to invest in infrastructure get overtaken by competitors who do.Clearly, this will depend on your business, but it should be noted that a switch to Azure can see excellent improvements in efficiency and productivity. Additionally, Azure is engaged in a pricing battle with other services - which ensure that the costs of bandwidth and storage are kept to a minimum.Myth 4: Efficiency is the only reason to switch to public cloud storageYes, there is no doubt that increased efficiency is a major benefit of using public cloud storage services with Microsoft Azure, but it is far from the only reason to consider making the change. One of the best reasons to choose public cloud storage is the increased innovation it allows – this might even top reason. It allows your developers to spend their time actually developing, rather than simply on the time-consuming maintenance and management. Azure actually handles many of the complex tasks for you, taking that burden away from developers and freeing them up. This could give them time to work on anything from machine learning or business-critical enhancements to your website. Myth 5: It’s incompatible with the open source software It is sometimes assumed that Azure is completely incompatible with popular open source software, which could make it difficult to implement alongside your existing infrastructure. If this was true it could make it potentially extremely challenging for those businesses that currently utilize open source software as it would mean not only changing over their system to Microsoft Azure but also changing many internal systems.Myth 6: Using the cloud effectively means ONLY using the cloudPerhaps you are concerned that if you make the move to Azure you are committing the whole of your business to the cloud. Some businesses do not fully understand how the cloud works and it can put them in a position where they never consider services such as Azure because they don’t think it would be appropriate for them. However, this does not need to be the case at all as Azure supports hybrid functionality, allowing you to keep on-premises infrastructure in place and simply work with Azure to offer additional capacity. The solutions can be completely bespoke and based around the needs of your company, so there is no reason to assume that you have to stick with a one-size-fits-all package. If you are still concerned about whether Microsoft Azure is right for you, it’s a good idea to speak to specialists, who have experience working with businesses like yours. Whether you would benefit from a hybrid system or hosting based entirely on the cloud, they will be able to advise you as to whether it is a good idea to make the switch.

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1898

Six common myths about Microsoft Azure

by Annie Button
05 Dec 2018
7 mins read

You may be interested in moving your infrastructur... Read More

Why Stop Inventing New DevOps Combinations?

By Koen Vastmans

DevOps - What's in a name?The term DevOps is well known by now. It was initially introduced by Patrick Dubois a Belgian IT consultant who organized an agile oriented event in October 2009 and named it DevOpsDays, targeting not only developers but also systems administrators, managers, and toolsmiths from all over the world. After the conference, the conversations continued on Twitter with the hashtag #DevOps.If you want to know more about the origin of the DevOps, you can check the video given below which gives you a lot of background about the reason why Patrick Dubois initially started this DevOpsDays conference:DevOps and the rise of the combinations and derivatives With the increasing popularity of DevOps, more people start to give their definition of DevOps. The different definitions of DevOps that go around can differ, depending on what aspect(s) of DevOps you want to focus.In a previous article, I wrote about how to explain DevOps in 5 letters - CALMS or CALMR i.e CALMS framework for DevOpsSome other definitions tend to focus primarily on the automation aspect, omitting the Agile foundation. As a consequence, you get the first combination of DevOps, named BizDevOps or BusDevOps. There are different interpretations about what BizDevOps actually means. “BizDevOps, also known as DevOps 2.0, is an approach to software development that encourages developers, operations staff and business teams to work together so the organization can develop software more quickly, be more responsive to user demand and ultimately maximize revenue.”At the same time, it is the most disputable definition. This definition assumes that DevOps is mainly a technology-driven initiative that hardly involves business people. But as mentioned in my previous article, the foundation of DevOps is culture, which goes back to the agile principles. And we all know that agile without business is only symptomatic. So DevOps without business is as symptomatic as agile without business.According to the Dzone article, DevOps is focusing on a single application or system whereas BizDevOps is focusing on the entire enterprise with all its complex processes and the mixture of applications and systems that support these complex processes.According to this article, BizDevOps provides an answer to dealing with:OK, fair point, but these aspects could as well be tackled by defining proper value streams and Agile Release Trains to deal with all the links and dependencies between these systems and applications. I don't see the need to come up with a different term.I guess you understand by now that I am not a big fan of the BizDevOps term and the confusion it creates. But it can get worse. It was some likely clever tool vendors that came up with the term DevSecOps. And if it is not the tool vendors that invented it, at least they were so clever to jump on the wagon to support the need for more security awareness in DevOps.Nowadays, large tool vendors using of the term DevSecOps instead of DevOps.Here's my opinion on this: security should be an integral part of DevOps. It should be a part of the culture:Don't only think about what something functionally should do, but also what can go wrong (think Abuse or Misuse cases). It is also a part of the automation. All security related tests should be automated as much as possible. Think about scanning vulnerabilities in your own source code, vulnerabilities in external libraries that you use, scanning your container images for vulnerabilities, or even - up to some extent - automated penetration testing. It is also a part of Lean principles: when a security test in your build pipeline fails (e.g. scanning your source code discovers a critical vulnerability), you stop the line.So again, the is no reason why the term DevSecOps should exist at all.Now that we have business and security covered, we can go on and see who else could feel denied or at least ignored? Maybe DBA's? Or any other person involved in data management? Maybe, that is the reason why we also have DevDataOps nowadays.I could go on for a while like this. But you get the point by now: it is uselessMaybe the DAD is right!I recently got to read an interesting article on disciplined agile delivery, the information portal from Mark Lines and Scott Ambler of their Disciplined Agile Delivery, or short DAD. DAD is not - as they call it - an agile methodology, but a process selection framework. DAD is the kernel of a layered model, like an onion, that they call Disciplined Agile and that consists of the following layers:Let’s explore each aspect in Disciplined Agile Framework mentioned in the diagram.1. Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD)Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) aspect consists of initial modeling and planning, forming the team, securing funding, continuous architecture, continuous testing, continuous development, and governance all the way through the lifecycle. The Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework supports multiple delivery life cycles, basic/Agile lifecycle based on Scrum, a lean lifecycle based on Kanban, and a modern Agile lifecycle for continuous delivery. This aspect is responsible for addressing all the aspects of solution delivery.2. Disciplined DevOpsDisciplined DevOps streamlines the IT solution development and IT operations activities, and supports organization-IT activities, to benefit more effective outcomes to the organizations.3. Disciplined Agile IT (DAIT)DAIT aspect helps to understand how to apply Agile and Lean strategies to IT organizations. This aspect comprises of all IT-level activities such as enterprise architecture, data management, portfolio management, IT governance, and other capabilities.4.Disciplined Agile Enterprise (DAE)DAE can predict and respond quickly to the changes in the marketplace by facilitating a change through an organizational culture and structure. This aspect can be applied to organizations having the learning mindset in the mainstream business and underlying lean and agile processes to drive innovation.The second one, Disciplined DevOps principles deal exactly with what I mentioned before: the different derivatives and combinations of DevOps. They start by giving an answer to the question of why it is so difficult to come to a common definition of DevOps:Specialized IT practitionersMany IT professionals still tend to specialize, choose a focus, like DBA, enterprise architect, operations engineer, or whatever. Each discipline will focus on its own aspect of DevOps.Agilists are focused on continuous deliveryBecause of their focus on releasing daily or even several times a day, a lot of discussions deal with bringing new features faster and more frequently to production and not paying attention to all aspects of DevOpsOperations professionals are often frustratedSystems administrators are crunched between the push of the development teams to deliver faster and more frequently and the typical stringent service management processes they have to deal with, that are not yet adapted to the need for more frequent changesTool vendors have limited offeringsA fool with a tool is still a fool… DevOps tool vendors only focus on these DevOps-aspects that their tools coverService vendors have limited offeringsSimilarly to tool vendors, service vendors will only focus on these DevOps aspects that their services can currently coverTool vendors treat DevOps as a marketing buzzwordSurfing the waves of the hypes, vendors might be persuaded to rebrand their existing toolset to something DevOps-ish, because it sounds better in a sales pitch. Sounds like window dressing…The DevOps = Cloud visionApparently, some people think that implementing DevOps in your organization can only succeed if you move to a cloud-based platform. Although cloud-native development practices are a facilitator for implementing DevOps, it not a requirement. And moving to a cloud platform definitely isn’t a requirement.All these reasons make that person come up with DevOps combinations that give an answer to only part of the problem.Disciplined DevOps mentions the following visions:1. BizDevOpsBizDevOps is a basic DevOps vision that explicitly brings the customers into the picture. BizDevOps is also called BusDevOps. DevOps is not just for teams, but it can be potentially applicable to any team supporting an incremental delivery lifecycle. The BizDevOps workflow consists of Business Operations, activities of delivering of products and services to the organizations. BusDevOps seeks to streamline the entire value stream, not just the IT portion of it. Its workflow is depicted in the diagram below.2. DevSecOpsAnother common improvement over the basic DevOps vision is something called DevSecOps. The aim behind this vision is to ensure data security by getting the various security issues, adopting the latest security practices, and finding out and addressing the highest priority security gaps [DevSecOps]. This vision includes collaborative security engineers, exploit testing, real-time security monitoring, and building “rugged software” that has built-in security controls. The workflow of DevSecOps is shown in the figure. 3. DevDataOpsThe aim behind DevDataOps is to maintain a balance between the current needs of data management consists of providing timely and accurate information to the organization and DevOps to respond to the marketplace. Supporting data management activities include the definition, support, and evolution of data and information standards and guidelines; the creation, support, evolution, and operation of data sources of record within your organization; and the creation, support, evolution, and operation of data warehouse (DW)/business intelligence (BI) solutions. The following figure depicting the workflow of DevDataOps.Or should we just stick to the term DevOps?Even though the message of Scott Ambler and Mark Lines is perfectly reasonable, not everybody might the term Disciplined DevOps. It fits their framework like a glove: everything boils down to Disciplined. If you don’t want to be framed into the Disciplined Agile/DevOps framework (pun intended), you may as well stick to the term DevOps and make sure that you cover all the aspects, which include business, security, data, release management and support.

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Why Stop Inventing New DevOps Combinations?

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4611

Why Stop Inventing New DevOps Combinations?

by Koen Vastmans
03 Dec 2018
6 mins read

DevOps - What's in a name?The term DevOps is well ... Read More

A Complete Guide to DevOps

By MD Zaid Imam

1.History of DevOps First time pitched in Toronto Conference in 2008 by Patrick Debois and Andrew Shafer. He proposed that there is a better approach can be adopted to resolve the conflicts we have with dev and operation time so far. This again took a boom when 2 flickr employee delivered a seminar that how they are able to place 10+ deployment in a day. They came up with a proven model which can resolve the conflicts of Dev and operation having component build, test and deploy this should be an integrated development and operations process.2.Definition of DevOpsDevOps is a practice culture having a union of people, process, and tools which enables faster delivery. This culture helps to automate the process and narrow down the gaps between development and IT. DevOps is a kind of abstract impression that focuses on key principles like Speed, Rapid Delivery, Scalability, Security, Collaboration & Monitoring etc. A definition mentioned in Gartner “DevOps represents a change in IT culture, focusing on rapid IT service delivery through the adoption of agile, lean practices in the context of a system-oriented approach. DevOps emphasizes people (and culture) and seeks to improve collaboration between operations and development teams. DevOps implementations utilize technology— especially automation tools that can leverage an increasingly programmable and dynamic infrastructure from a life cycle perspective.”3.How DevOps Works with a toolchain?4.Benefits of DevOpsAdding some benefits which we can see after adopting DevOps :a) Horizontal and vertical growth: When I’m using “Horizontal and Vertical Growth” I’m keeping customer satisfaction on X, Business on Y2 and time on Y axis. Now the question is how it helps to populate growth in 2 axes, and my answer will be the quick turnaround time for minor and major issues. Once we adopt DevOps we scale and build in such fashion that in less time the graph shows a rapid jump.b) Scalability & Quality: If a business starts reaching to more user we start looking to increase infrastructure and bandwidth. But in other hands, it starts popping up a question whether we are scaling our infra in right way and also if a lots people are pushing changes (Your code commits/builds) are having the same or great quality we have earlier. Both of the questions are somehow now reserved by the DevOps team. If your business pitch that we might be going to hit 2000+ client and they will be having billion of traffic and we are ready to handle, DevOps take this responsibility and says yes can scale infra at any point of time. And if the same time internal release team says I want to deliver 10 feature in next 10 days independently, DevOps says quality can be maintained.c) Agility & Velocity: They key param of adopting DevOps is to improve the velocity of product development. DevOps enables Agility and if both are in sync we can easily observe the velocity. The expectation of end users are always high and at the same time, the deliverable time span is short. To achieve this we have to ensure that we are able to our rollout new features to customers at much higher frequencies otherwise your competitors may win the marketd) Improving ROI of Data: Having DevOps in an organization ensures that we can design a decent ROI from data at an early stage more quickly. If we will do a raw survey now Software industry is playing with data and have control over there a team should have an end to end control on data. And if we define DevOps it will help a team to crunch data in various ways by automating small jobs. Automation we can segregate and justify data and this helps to populate either in Dashboard or can present offline to a customer.5.How DevOps enables CI/CD (Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery)When we say “continuous” it doesn’t translate that “always running” but of course “always ready to run”.Continuous integration is nothing but the development philosophy and practices that drive teams to check-in code to version control system as often as possible. So keeping your build clean and QA ready developer's changes need to be validated by running automated tests against the build that could be a Junit, iTest. The goal of CI is to place a consistent and automated way to build and test applications which results in a better collaboration between teams, and eventually a better-quality product.Continuous Delivery is an adjunct of CI which enables a facility to make sure that we can release new changes to your customers quickly in a sustainable way. Typical CD involves below steps:Pull code from version control system like bitbucket and execute build.Execute any required infrastructure steps command line/script to stand up or tear down cloud infrastructure.Move to build to right compute environment Able to handle all the configuration generation process.Pushing application components to their appropriate services, such as web servers, API services, and database services.Executing any steps required to restarts services or call service endpoints that are needed for new code pushes.Executing continuous tests and rollback environments if tests fail.Providing log data and alerts on the state of the delivery. Below there is a table which will help us better to understand what we need to put an effort and what we will gain if we enable CI/CD in place:Practice testEffort RequiredGainContinuous integrationa) Need to prepare automated your team willneed to write automated tests for each new feature, improvement or bug fixb)You need a continuous integration server that can monitor the main repository and run the tests automatically for every new commits pushed.c)Developers need to merge their changes as often as possible, at least once a day.a) Will give control on regressions which can be captured in early stage of automated testing.b)Less context switching as developers are alerted as soon as they break the build and can work on fixing it before they move to another task.c)Building the release is easy as all integration issue have beer solved early.d)Testing costs are reduced drastically- your Cl server can rur hundreds of tests in the matter 0 seconds.e)Your QA team spend less time testing and can focus or significant improvement to the quality culture.Continuous Deliverya)You need a strong foundation in continuousintegration and your test suite needs to cover enough of your codebase.b)Deployments need to be automated. The tigger is still manual but once a deployment is started there shouldn't be a need for human intervention.c)Your team will most likely need to embrace feature flags so that incomplete feature do not affect customer in production.a)The complexity of deploying software has been taken away your team doesn't have to spend days preparing for a release anymore.b)You can release more often thus accelerating the feedback loop with your customer.C)There is much less pressure on decisions for small changes hence encouraging iterating faster.Sample Flow of CI /CD plan (Please update image from your end):- 6. Devops Tools Version:Build: Jenkins: Jenkins is an open source automation server which is used to automate the software build, and deliver or deploy the build. It can be installed through native system packages, Docker, or even run standalone by any machine with a Java Runtime Environment (JRE) installed. In short, Jenkins enables continuous integration which helps to accelerate the development. There are ample of plugins available which enables integration for Various DevOps stages. For example Git, Maven 2 project, Amazon EC2, HTML publisher etc.Alert: Pingdom: Pingdom is a platform which enables monitoring to check the availability, performance, transaction monitoring (website hyperlink) and incident collection of your websites, servers or web applications. Beauty is if you are using collaboration tool like slack or flock you can just integrate by using the webhook (Pretty much simple no code required)you can easily get notified at any time. Pingdom also provides API so you can have your customized dashboard (Recently started) and the documentation is having enough details and self-explanatory. Image copyright Pingdom - D-3Nagios: It’s an Open Source Monitoring Tool to monitor the computer network. We can monitor server, applications, incident manager etc and you can certainly configure email, SMS, Slack notifications and phone calls even. Nagios is licensed under GNU GPLv2. Listing some major components which can be monitored with Nagios:Once we install Nagios we get a dashboard to monitor network services like SMTP, HTTP, SNMP, FTP, SSH, POP, etc and can view current network status, problem history, log files, notifications that have been triggered by the system, etc.We can monitor Servers resources like disk drives, memory, processor, server load usage, system logs, etc. Image copyright stack driver- D-4Stackdriver: Stackdriver is again a Monitoring tool to get the visibility of performance, uptime, and overall health for cloud-powered applications. Stackdriver monitoring collects events and metadata from Google Cloud Platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Stackdriver consumes data and generates insights via dashboards, charts, and alerts. And for alerting we can integrate to collaboration tools like Slack, PagerDuty, HipChat, Campfire, and more. Image copyright stack driver- D-2Adding one sample log where we can see what all parameter it collects and also i have just separated them in the fashion which will help us to understand what all it logs it actually collects:Log InformationUser Details and Authorization InfoRequest Type and Caller IPResource and Operation DetailsTimeStamp and Status Details{ insertId: logName: operation: { first: id: producer: }protoPayload: { @type: authenticationInfo: { principalEmail: } authorizationInfo: [ 0: { granted: permission: } ]methodName: request: { @type: }requestMetadata: {callerIp:callerSuppliedUserAgent: }resourceName:response: {@type: Id: insertTime: name: operationType: progress: selfLink: status: targetId: targetLink: user: zone: } serviceName: }receiveTimestamp: resource: { labels: { instance_id: project_id: zone: } type: } severity: timestamp: }Monitoring: Grafana: It is an open source visualization tool and can be used on top of different data stores like InfluxDB,Elasticsearch and Logz.io.We can create comprehensive charts with smart axis formats (such as lines and points) as a result of Grafana’s fast, client-side rendering — even over long ranges of time — that uses Flot as a default option. We can get the 3 different level of access, watcher, Editor and Admin, even we can enable G-Auth for having good access control. A detail information guide can be found here. Image copyright stack driver- D-5ELK:ELK:Elasticsearch: It's an open source realtime distributed, RESTful search and analytics engine. It collects unstructured data and stores in a cultivated format which is optimized and available for language based search. The beauty of Elastic is scalability, speed, document-oriented, schema-free. It scales horizontally to handle kajillions of events per second, while automatically managing how indices and queries are distributed across the cluster for smooth operations.Logstash: Logstash is used to gather logging messages, convert them into JSON documents and store them in an ElasticSearch cluster.Kibana:reOptimize.io: Once we run ample of servers we usually end up with burning good amount not intentionally but of course because of not have a clear visualization. At reoptimize helps thereby providing a detailed insight about the cloud expense the integration can be done with 3-4 simple steps but before that you might need to look into the request which can be accessed here. Just a heads up that they only need a read access for all these and permission docs can be found here . Image copyright reOptimizeD-6 7 DevOps vs AgileDevopsAgileDevOps culture can be enabled in the software industry to deliver reliable build.Agile is a generic culture which can be deployed in any departmentThe key focus area is to have involvement at the end to end processAgile helps management team to push the frequent releaseEnables quality build with rapid deliveryKeep team aware of frequent changes for any release and featureAgile sprints work within the immediate future, A sprint lifecycle varies between 7-30 days.DevOps don’t have such scheduled matrix, they work to avoid such unscheduled disruptions.Team size also differs, in Agile wee can minimal resource can be one as well.DevOps works on collaboration and bridge a big set of the team. 8 What are a DevOps engineer & roles and responsibilities of it? Don’t want to be specific but I should say when they build or code they keep the business logic in mind. DevOps engineer should also seek for why this but why not this. They add value when they communicate infra which help business to scale. DevOps team should have control on data matrix collection which could be business driven and the automation pipeline would be Dev driven. As current demand of the cloud is on the pick they should also have a control over the scalability. DevOps engineer are expert collaborators and also they are often known as a mentor for a software developer as they help them to build a scalable architecture. At the same time, they join IT and security team to ensure that there is enough work has been done to push quality code and to avoid data breach. 9 DevOps engineer salary As per the current market, trend salary doesn’t seem to be a bar for right candidate. The basic expectation from companies are, the candidate should be a good learner and at the same time, he or she should be able to implement that expertise to resolve the real-time problem. And for cracking good no’s you must have the ability to build an automated pipeline of DevOpsCountryAverage salaryExpUS$51,640-$133,3780-5 YEARSIndia$4,144-$21,184UK$73,367-$96,845SV$41,000-$210,000 Above table is a kind of current trending no’s which we recently heard from candidates, companies and also the analytical firms who all participate in this (Hiring Firms). Nowadays there is we can see there is a demand for DevOps engineer in almost every organization. And also I must say Startup always beat MNC in salary though they also beat in work, which I believe it is always a good sign to see a growth in your skill and no’s.DevOps Useful LinkWhat is DevOps? (Credit- Sam Guckenheimer- Azure)Introduction to CI/CD (Credit- Justin Ellingwood- Digital Ocean)How to autoscale : GCP (Credit: RK Kuppala - Searce)Opensource Tool for DevOps (Credit: Tomer Levy - Logz.io)DevOps success story (Credit: Ben Putano - Stackify )Netflix Load Balancing system (Credit:Netfllix)DevOps by vmware (Credit: VmWare)

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A Complete Guide to DevOps

by MD Zaid Imam
30 Nov 2018
9 mins read

1.History of DevOps First time pitched in Toronto... Read More

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Six common myths about Microsoft Azure

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Why Stop Inventing New DevOps Combinations?

By Koen Vastmans

A Complete Guide to DevOps

By MD Zaid Imam

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Six common myths about Microsoft Azure

By Annie Button

Why Stop Inventing New DevOps Combinations?

By Koen Vastmans

A Complete Guide to DevOps

By MD Zaid Imam