Podcasts are popular ways for DevOps Leaders and Practitioners to keep current. This award recognizes the most educational, informative and inspirational DevOps video or audio podcast series – those with the most engaging and highest-quality content that keeps listeners coming back for more.

The Modern Mainframe – The Modern Mainframe shares the perspectives of executives, practitioners, DevOps evangelists, and industry analysts, covering current practices and future trends affecting mainframe tools, processes, and strategies. From AI-powered innovations to regulatory compliance, The Modern Mainframe offers fresh insights on DevOps topics across the mainframe, including application development, operations, database DevOps, and more.

Inside Platform Engineering video podcast – Inside Platform Engineering is a monthly video series that goes under the hood of platform engineering with practitioners worldwide. Hosted by Developer Advocate Matt Allford, each 30-45 minute conversation explores the trade-offs, hard-won lessons, and decisions behind building platforms. The series delivers practical insights on measuring success, driving adoption, navigating build versus buy, and understanding what separates good platforms from great ones.

Deploy on Friday podcast – “Deploy on Friday is a weekly podcast by Octopus Deploy that provides sharp and relevant coverage of DevOps, GitOps, Kubernetes, and CI/CD news. The show serves as a concise and insightful roundup of the week’s key developments in software delivery, automation, and deployment practices.

Each episode distils complex industry updates into clear, actionable insights. Deploy on Friday follows a focused, fast-paced format designed for busy DevOps professionals who want to stay informed.”

DevOps.com publishes multiple new articles every day. This award recognizes the best article from this year. Let us know so we can recognize the author.

Explanation First, Then Code Conversion: A Practical Guide to Mainframe Optimization by Mark Schettenhelm (June 27, 2025) – Mark Schettenhelm’s Explanation First, Then Code Conversion reframes mainframe modernization with practical, human-centered advice. Rather than chasing hype, it urges teams to use Generative AI for understanding and explaining existing code before conversion helping enterprises modernize smarter, not faster, while preserving the reliability of their core systems.

Five Powerful Ways AI Is Transforming the DevOps Playbook by Dinesh Chacko – I am nominating Dinesh’s article, “Five Powerful Ways AI Is Transforming the DevOps Playbook”, for Best DevOps.com Article of the Year. Unlike many articles about AI, Dinesh’s article is easy-to-read and provides actionable steps a manager can take to integrate the use of AI in DevOps processes. It makes valid points as to why AI should be adopted in DevOps, and the benefits that could be realized. It also provides guidance as to how to overcome challenges to AI adoption. Very practical!

Each year sees a number of well-crafted DevOps-related books. This category recognizes the most popular and best read of the year.

Docker and Kubernetes Security by Mohammad-Ali A’rabi – Docker and Kubernetes Security is a hands-on guide to securing modern containerized systems. Written by Docker Captain Mohammad-Ali A’rabi, it equips DevOps teams with practical tools to protect their supply chain, manage SBOMs and attestations, and defend against runtime threats in Kubernetes environments.

Progressive Delivery: Build the Right Thing for the Right People at the Right Time by James Governor, Kim Harrison, Heidi Waterhouse, Adam Zimman – Progressive Delivery takes the benefits of DevOps, and includes the user experience. How to not only deliver and maintain features, but make sure you’re delivering the right thing, at the right time, to the right person.

The Phoenix Project Graphic Novel: Volume 2 by Gene Kim and Mike Collins – Based on the bestselling novel The Phoenix Project, volume 2 of the graphic novel adaptation shows what happens when Bill and his team are pushed to the breaking point.

Intelligent Continuous Security by Marc Hornbeek – With AI in the hands of cybercriminals, traditional security controls and response mechanisms are swiftly moving toward obsolescence. Intelligent Continuous Security (ICS) helps organizations stay toe-to-toe with adversaries, replacing outmoded defenses with a cohesive strategy that unifies security across the entire software lifecycle. This book outlines the principles, strategies, and real-world implementations of ICS, including how to break down silos between DevSecOps and SecOps with AI.

The Cybernetic Enterprise by Romano Roth – The Cybernetic Enterprise by Romano Roth is a groundbreaking guide for leaders and practitioners navigating DevOps, AI, and enterprise transformation. With over 900 pages, 150+ visual models, and 55+ practices, it bridges strategy, culture, and technology. It equips organizations with a practical framework to become adaptive, future-ready, and human-centered in a rapidly evolving digital world.

Argo CD Best Practices book – Argo CD promises simple GitOps deployments, but production reality demands sophisticated operational strategies. “Argo CD Best Practices” book bridges this gap with tested frameworks for installation strategies, microservice dependency orchestration, deployment diffing, and ephemeral environments. This report transforms day-2 operational challenges into solved problems, from App-of-Apps patterns to automated PR reviews, ensuring organizations achieve sustainable GitOps beyond initial deployment.

DevEx as a Service – “DevOps teams are innovation engines, but maintaining their productivity at scale requires focusing on developer experience (DevEx). “”DevEx as a Service”” book provides a comprehensive framework for implementing Platform Engineering with DevEx as its north star.

In the book, the concept of DevEx as a Service (DEaaS0 is being introduced treating platform teams as internal startups dedicated to improving feedback loops, reducing cognitive load, and enabling flow state.”

Every community has those who standout as leaders in their field who spread the DevOps gospel everyday. This award recognizes the individual whose peers in the DevOps community recognize for outstanding leadership, knowledge and communication.

Imma Valls, Staff Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs – As a Developer Advocate at Grafana Labs, Imma Valls is helping redefine what community leadership looks like in DevOps. In 2025, she organized 20+ Cloud Native, DevOps, and Grafana events across Europe, served as an Observability Track Chair at KubeCon EU, and led outreach programs that bring Spanish-speaking and underrepresented voices into technical spaces. Through Women in APIs and her mentorship at Grafana, Imma helps engineers overcome fear, find their voice, and share their expertise.

Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Tianxiang Lu – Study Programme Director and Professor for Germany’s first master’s programmes in DevOps and Cloud Computing. With a 10-year industry background, Dr. Lu has delivered over 200 hours of innovative e-learning, including live demos and shortcasts. Specializing in MLOps, he actively engages students via IU’s innovative “CourseFeed” to keep them abreast of industry trends. As a keynote speaker at the CCX conference, he bridges academia and industry.

Kendall Nelson, Senior Upstream Developer Advocate at the OpenInfra Foundation – Kendall Nelson bridges open infrastructure, DevOps, and cloud communities by driving collaboration across OpenStack, Kubernetes, and Kata Containers. She leads the OpenInfra University Partnership Program and has mentored 150+ students and early-career engineers across five continents. Kendall has delivered 30+ talks championing inclusive upstream workflows to make open source contribution a global, sustainable practice.

Nathen Harvey, Developer Relations Engineer, DORA Lead at Google Cloud – A cornerstone of the DevOps community, Nathen Harvey leads the DORA research program and Community. In 2025, he continues to guide the industry with work like the “State of AI-Assisted Software Development” report. His approachable, insightful style makes complex topics accessible, fostering a vibrant space for practitioners to learn and grow. He is a dedicated evangelist committed to uplifting the entire DevOps ecosystem.

Eran Kinsbruner, VP of Product Marketing at Checkmarx – Eran kinsbruner is the VP of Product Marketing at Checkmarx who led throughout 2025 the Agentic AI transformation including the Agentic AI summit, the launch of the Agentic AI AppSec agent – Developer Assist which got featured in various leading analyst reports from Gartner, IDC, and Forrester, as well as on various media publications. Eran helped drive the awareness around the importance of security vulnerabilities prevention over remediation being the new normal in the era of offensive agents.

Mumshad Mannambeth, Founder and CEO of KodeKloud – Mumshad Mannambeth, is one of the most influential and most followed DevOps thought leaders in the world today. Driven by a mission to make DevOps education accessible and practical, he has transformed how professionals learn and apply DevOps practices. Through KodeKloud, Mumshad has empowered more than two million learners across 190+ countries, 1.6 million active Learners community to build real-world skills in cloud, DevOps, and automation.

Mike Milinkovich, Executive Director, Eclipse Foundation – Mike Milinkovich is a recognized industry leader and open source community champion. He has been involved in the software industry for over thirty years, doing everything from software engineering, to product management to IP licensing. He has been the Executive Director of the Eclipse Foundation since 2004. In that role he is responsible for supporting both the Eclipse open-source community and its commercial ecosystem.

Romano Roth, Global Chief of Cybernetic Transformation at Zuhlke – Romano is a long-standing DevOps champion across Europe at Zuhlke. He is a highly respected pillar in the DevOps community of Switzerland also. Romano is co-lead of DevOps Zurich, one of the best organised and largest technical communities in Switzerland (3000+ members). He is president of DevOpsDays Zurich, arguably the most successful annual DevOps gathering in Switzerland. He lectures at Luzern University. He is a community mentor. And recently he published a book, The Cybernetic Enterprise.

Brian Fox, CTO and Co-Founder of Sonatype, Governing Board Member for the Open Source Security Foundation, Governing Board Member for the Fintech Open Source Foundation – Brian Fox, CTO and co-founder of Sonatype, is a Governing Board Member for the Open Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF), a Governing Board Member for the Fintech Open Source Foundation (FINOS), a member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore Cyber and Technology Resilience Experts (CTREX) Panel, a member of the Apache Software Foundation and former Chair of the Apache Maven project.

Mihir Vora, Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, CDF Ambassador, and Published Author – Mihir Vora is a Senior Distinguished Engineer at Capital One, a CDF Ambassador, and the published author of Intent-Based Engineering. He shares end-user, tool-agnostic CI/CD practices at DevOps World, IEEE, and LeadDev/StaffPlus; mentors through VCU and NASA’s Conrad Challenge; and contributes to CDFoundation work streams, CDEvents and interoperability specification development helping teams improve developer experience, safety, and delivery speed across the community.

An organization’s leadership plays a critical role in shepherding its team through innovation and change.This award recognizes a strong DevOps leader who guides their team through the challenges of developing and implementing DevOps strategies, policies, culture and practices to improve software development and delivery.

Debashis Bhattacharyya, Practice Lead , Technology Consultant, Opus Technologies – Debashis Bhattacharyya is a visionary DevSecOps leader driving enterprise transformation through innovation, security, and automation. He is an Author and Technical Reviewer of many white papers, books and blogs. He implemented DORA-based maturity models, performance gates, and secure pipelines. His initiatives reduced toolchain costs by 32%, improved lead time by 22%, and boosted productivity by 12%. A thought leader and mentor, he continues to shape the future of AI-infused DevSecOps globally.

Radhakrishnan Krishna Kripa, Lead DevOps Engineer at Ansys – Radhakrishnan Krishna Kripa, the Lead DevOps Engineer at Ansys, has led a global transformation in enterprise DevOps. She has modernized legacy pipelines, guided cloud migration, and scaled CI/CD systems for mission-critical platforms. As a published author, mentor, and advocate for diversity, Kripa drives innovation and promotes inclusive leadership. Her efforts have improved software delivery reliability by 60%, all while empowering the next generation of technologists.

Venkata Rao Kondepati, Manager of Data Architecture & Engineering at Ascentt – Venkata Kondepati is a seasoned technology leader with over 20 years of expertise in enterprise DevOps, cloud, and data transformations. His role as Manager of Data Architecture & Engineering at Ascentt, along with his previous position as Director of Software Engineering at S&P Global, demonstrates his ability to lead global teams in modernizing legacy systems and implementing CI/CD and AIOps practices, achieving 99.9% uptime. Venkata advocates for automation and AI-driven operations.

Sadiq Abubakar, Software Engineer and Founder, GldCart – Sadiq Abubakar is a visionary software engineer and the founder of GldCart. He has successfully led DevOps-driven digital transformation initiatives in both startups and enterprise projects. By implementing continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines and utilizing cloud-native automation, he has accelerated software delivery, enhanced system resilience, and fostered a culture of innovation. This has positioned him as an emerging leader in the field of enterprise DevOps.

Romano Roth, Global Chief of Cybernetic Transformation at Zuhlke – Romano Roth, Global Chief of Cybernetic Transformation at Zuhlke, is a visionary DevOps and platform engineering leader. He drives enterprise-wide transformation by combining platform strategy, AI-augmented engineering, and culture change. With clear leadership, innovation, and communication, he empowers global teams and inspires organizations to adopt sustainable, future-ready DevOps practices at scale.

Kumar Singirikonda, Director of DevOps Engineering, Toyota – Ekambar Kumar Singirikonda is a visionary DevOps leader driving enterprise-wide transformation through automation, reliability, and innovation. As Director of DevOps Engineering at Toyota, he leads 150+ global engineers, achieving 60% faster provisioning, 90% MTTR reduction, and $1.2M annual savings. His leadership in building resilient, AI-driven DevOps platforms defines him as a true Enterprise DevOps Leader of the Year.

Mihir Vora – Senior Distinguished Engineer leading Capital One’s enterprise CI/CD transformation ( paved paths with policy-as-code and shift-left guardrails) that raised reliability and developer experience at scale. A published voice on Intent-Based Engineering, Mihir turns end-user lessons into repeatable practices and shares them with the community (PlatformCon talk; CDF Ambassador; LeadDev webinar). He supports standards efforts (CDEvents/interoperability) and mentors the next generation via university.

Ongoing research in the application of DevOps tracks trends and provides standards that organizations can use to measure themselves. This award recognizes industry research, reporting and analysis that has significantly and positively impacted the DevOps community.

4th Annual Observability Survey by Grafana Labs – The Grafana Labs Observability Survey is the industry’s most comprehensive community-driven snapshot of observability. With 1,200+ responses worldwide last year, it highlighted key trends in tool sprawl, OSS adoption, costs, and AI. Promoted across multiple channels and cited widely, the survey reinforces Grafana Labs’ role as a trusted voice shaping the future of observability.

2025 DORA report: State of AI-assisted Software Development by Google Cloud – Building on its legacy as the gold standard for DevOps research, the 2025 DORA report tackles AI’s impact on software development. Based on nearly 5,000 responses, it provides the critical insight that “AI is an amplifier.” The report introduces the DORA AI Capabilities Model a new standard identifying 7 practices that unlock AI’s potential. This framework allows organizations to track trends and measure themselves, providing data-driven guidance to navigate the industry’s biggest shift.

Software Supply Chain State of the Union 2025 by JFrog – JFrog’s Software Supply Chain State of the Union delivers unparalleled insight into evolving DevOps risks, grounded in real usage data, security research, and third-party polling. It surfaces emerging threats especially in the AI era and equips the industry with clear, actionable trends. This kind of rigor, relevance, and foresight makes it an essential benchmark and deserving winner in DevOps research.

State of Observability 2025 Report by Splunk – Splunk’s State of Observability 2025 report is the industry’s most comprehensive benchmark on how DevOps teams transform telemetry into business outcomes. Based on insights from nearly 1,900 global practitioners, it provides new insights into observability’s role in driving revenue, resilience, and innovation in the AI era. This annual study equips professionals with actionable, evidence-based insights for building reliable, sustainable digital ecosystems.

Open Source Malware Index Q3 2025: High-Severity Attacks Surge by Sonatype – As part of Sonatype’s ongoing mission to equip organizations with the most up-to-date information on open source security threats, Sonatype’s threat research team compiles quarterly data and insights in the form of Malware Index Reports, which dive into how the open source malware space is evolving, including notable malicious packages and trends.

The Platforming Engineering Pulse Report by Octopus Deploy – The Platform Engineering Pulse Report reveals how organizations successfully implement Platform Engineering today. This research focuses on what drives adoption, which features deliver value, and how teams measure success. Key insights: 63% of platforms succeed through mandatory adoption, high performers track more metrics, and maturity requires 3+ years. This evidence-based benchmark cuts through theory to provide practical insights for successful platform adoption and organizational maturity.

The State of GitOps Report by Octopus Deploy – The State of GitOps Report is the first comprehensive study of real-world GitOps practices, providing essential benchmarks that drive measurable performance improvements. This research increased accessibility for GitOps excellence across organizations of all sizes, establishing industry standards that continue to guide the community forward.

Events and conferences are an important part of IT life. This category includes both in-person and virtual events. Which DevOps event stands out from the others and delivers the best content, speakers and attendee experience?

DevOps for GenAI Hackathon Series – The goal of this DevOps for GenAI ‘Hackathon’ is for DevOps and Platform Engineering professionals to learn what problems their peers are facing when trying to use and deploy Generative AI solutions, and to collaborate together to come up with ideas, best practices and even open source project that they can use in their own environment. Examples of problems include keeping training data and models secure, enabling data and model deployment within the constraints of corporate data governance.

IaCConf – IaCConf is the first community conference dedicated to Infrastructure-as-Code. The inaugural, free virtual event (May 15, 2025) drew 2,800+ registrations, 1,300+ live attendees, and ~1,000 companies, earning an NPS of 75, which is considered “world-class” and a sign of exceptional attendee satisfaction and loyalty. Sessions spanned hands-on workshops to advanced IaC strategy, with recordings available on-demand.

GrafanaCON 2025 – GrafanaCON 2025, May 68 in Seattle, is the flagship open source observability conference. It features keynotes, product announcements, and deep dives on Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki, Mimir, and Tempo. Attendees can join hands-on workshops, Birds of a Feather meetups, and community sessions. Fun highlights include the Science Fair, the Golden Grot Awards for dashboard creativity, and a lively opening party at the Museum of Pop Culture.

swampUP – swampUP, JFrog’s annual DevOps, DevSecOps, and MLOps user conference, unites developers, security experts, data scientists, and IT leaders to share strategies for building trust, traceability, and transparency in the era of intelligent software. The 2025 event featured technology visionaries from GitHub, NVIDIA, ServiceNow, Sonar, and more, exploring the opportunities, challenges, and risks of delivering software in the AI age.

DevOpsDays Zurich 2025 – DevOpsDays Zurich is one of Europe’s most impactful DevOps community events. Entirely volunteer-driven, it blends high-quality talks, open spaces, and vibrant community engagement in an inclusive atmosphere. Featuring practitioners, thought leaders, and enterprises, it shares cutting-edge knowledge on DevOps, Platform Engineering, and AI practices while fostering lasting connections across the Swiss and international tech community.

cdCon – “cdCon is the annual event by the Continuous Delivery Foundation that brings together technology teams, enterprise leadership, and open source communities to drive the future of software delivery. cdCon 2025 was part of the June 23-25 Open Source Summit North America held in Denver, Colorado, USA. Continuous delivery and interoperability between software systems was a key theme this year. Open source supply chain security continued as another key theme.”

SHIPPED25 – SHIPPED is Octopus Deploy’s flagship DevOps event focused on accelerating modern software delivery. It brings together practitioners and leaders for deep, actionable sessions on automation, CI/CD, GitOps, and Kubernetes deployments delivered with clarity and energy in a concise, high-impact virtual format.

Open source software is an important part of every organization’s set of development assets promoting innovation, velocity, quality and efficiency. This award recognizes the open source project that delivers the greatest value through a community of people who work on and with the open source technology and support each other.

DevOps for GenAI Hackathon – Winning projects – “Their project featured real-time dashboards, intelligent alerting, and open-source contributions. Curious to know what we did together: DevOps for Gen AI Hackathon Ottawa.

OpenRewrite – OpenRewrite is a deterministic, open-source refactoring ecosystem maintained by Moderne, offering free automated source-code remediation, modernization, and transformation across large codebases. Using expert recipes for migrations, security fixes, and standards enforcement, it enables accurate code changes in minutes instead of months of manual work. When paired with Moderne’s platform, it supports multi-repo, full-stack impact analysis and code-wide transformations.

Grafana 12 – Grafana 12 redefines open source observability for DevOps teams. With innovations like dashboards as code, Git Sync, dynamic dashboards, SQL Expressions, and no-code Drilldown apps, Grafana 12 empowers teams to visualize, automate, and correlate data from any source.

Theia AI – Theia AI is an open source framework that gives tool builders full control over how AI is integrated into their tool products. It empowers developers to manage every aspect of AI capabilities, from selecting the most suitable Large Language Model (LLM) whether it’s cloud-based, self-hosted, or fully local to orchestrating the entire prompt engineering flow, defining agentic behaviours, and determining which data and knowledge sources are used.

Leading enterprises are integrating the use of AI within their DevOps practices at an incredible pace. This award recognizes the organization that has applied AI in the most interesting and productive way to accelerate and improve various aspects of software delivery, leading to increased efficiency, higher quality, and faster time-to-market.

AI Agents in DevOps by LPL Financial – The Rise of an AI Workforce in CI/CD Pipelines