DevOps Dozen 2021 – Community Awards Finalists

FINALISTS:

• 2021 DevSecOps Report – In the midst of a global pandemic and a new way of working, teams got serious about what matters most, creating what amounts to a new DevOps maturity model. Read this report from GitLab.
• 2021 State of DevOps Report – This year, over 2,650 IT, development and information security professionals took Puppet’s State Of DevOps survey, providing insight into the chasm between organizations with highly evolved DevOps practices and those whose DevOps evolution has plateaued.
• Modernizing Mainframe Development Tools Can Help Drive Greater ROI – BMC Software commissioned Forrester Consulting to evaluate the state of mainframe development tools at IT organizations, with the findings advocating for implementation of a mainframe DevOps approach.
• State of CD Report – The Continuous Delivery Foundation’s State of CD Report has clear and insightful relevant data that any organization could use to measure their own level of continuous delivery maturity.
• State of Feature Management Report – The report from LaunchDarkly outlines the results from a survey of over 450 DevOps professionals across the industry, including 203 LaunchDarkly clients.

FINALISTS:

• Cloud Tool Time – This webinar series aims to educate, innovate and engage with the fast-growing cloud development tools community.
• DevOps Series (DevOps for IBM Z Media Center) – This IBM-supported channel is designed for technical and business-related videos related to DevOps supported by IBM Z. The DevOps for IBM Z Media Center receives over 4,000 views per quarter.
• GrammaTech/Shift Left Academy – This series is designed to inspire and educate DevOps professionals. It features entertaining and informative interviews with well-known industry icons.
• QualiFYI Video Series – In this QualiFYI video series, Arta Shita interviews industry experts about DevOps, infrastructure, testing and all things software development.
• SAFe’s Continuous Delivery Pipeline – A four-part webinar series with DevOps experts Mark Rix (SAFe fellow) and Dan James (SPC, SAFe DevOps framework contributor). Mark and Dan go through the four dimensions of SAFe’s continuous delivery pipeline. Moderated by Daylon Walton.

FINALISTS:

• DevOps Radio – DevOps Radio, produced by CloudBees, is an interview-based podcast featuring special guests from the DevOps community. The series dives into everything surrounding what it takes to successfully develop and deploy software in today’s ever-changing environment.
• DevOps Sauna – The topics vary widely, just like the attendees. This podcast, produced by Eficode, does not focus on a specific role; guests have included a chief digital officer, R&D evangelists, data consultants and software engineers. The “Sauna” theme adds a novelty factor. In fact, the show produced an episode describing the similarities between a sauna and DevOps, just to make both of them a bit more approachable for public audiences.
• OpenObservability Talks – Logz.io produces this podcast designed to elevate the conversation around the power of open source technologies and to advance observability initiatives for DevOps professionals around the world.
• The Pipeline: All Things CD and DevOps – Produced by The Continuous Delivery Foundation, this is a series of interviews with industry experts, leaders and innovators. The Pipeline covers a range of topics that are centered around continuous delivery and DevOps.
• The POPcast – Hosted by Dan “Pop” Papandrea, the POPcast is an entertaining and informative podcast that dives into the people driving DevOps, from DevOps tools to technologies like Kubernetes. Each episode features a new distinguished guest.
• Z DevOps Talks – A podcast series sponsored by IBM with amazing stories shared by Z DevOps experts. They discuss topics like how IBM is embracing open source technologies, making the mainframe more accessible and designing new and better ways of developing and operating for the cloud-native and veteran community.

FINALISTS:

• A Beginner’s Guide to Observability – This book from Splunk provides down-to-earth, practitioner-focused guidance on what observability is and how to obtain it.
• Data Mesh: Delivering Data-Driven Value at Scale, by Zhamak Dehghani – This book dives into the shift from monolithic data architecture towards a modern data mesh. The first chapters were released in June 2021, and new chapters continue to release on a monthly cadence. The pre-release chapters have already been downloaded more than 6,000 times.
• Enterprise Bug Busting, by Rosalind Radcliffe – This book typifies the amazing body of work and thought leadership that Rosalind has provided to the DevOps community over the last decade.

FINALISTS:

• Broadcom – To support the company’s digital transformation initiatives, the Broadcom centralized tools team needed to be more responsive and reduce their turnaround time. Mission accomplished—with a 35% reduction in build failures and $200,000 in savings for one use case.
• FedEx – Faced with increased competition and a COVID-19-impacted economy, FedEx wanted to evolve their DevOps practices with less complex, more flexible and standardized processes to bring capabilities to market faster. In their transformation, FedEx reduced cycle time from four weeks to 20 minutes, increased speed for onboarding new teams and reduced risk through gated approvals, audit-compliant pipelines and evidence reporting.
• Garanti BBVA Technology – Garanti BBVA is in the Turkish banking sector. Their transformation has raised the speed, quality and agility of software development. They estimate a 25% increase in developer efficiency, alone. “We’ve dramatically accelerated development and testing phases and we encounter significantly fewer bugs as we modernize our continuous integration practice,” said unit manager Umut Arslan. BBVA’s digital transformation has also led to a nearly five-star user rating for their mobile banking application.
• Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) – Intelligent Growth Solutions (IGS) is in the vertical farming space. Leveraging modern technology in the farming space is a way to improve quality and quantity when it comes to harvest production. Vertical farms are particularly efficient as they need less space for higher yields and can also be designed to make full use of smart technology. For their digital transformation, IGS implemented low-code auto-remediation workflows in their Kubernetes environment using Puppet Relay. The use of low code has radically reduced the need for human service callouts after hours and improved overall efficiency by a very welcome 40%. By combining a low-code experience with powerful triggers and steps, IGS was able to create automation that anyone on their growing team can use.
• OneMain Financial – OneMain Financial is a financial services institution primarily focused on consumer loans and insurance with approximately 2.3 million customers. To enable their DevOps practice, OneMain Financial implemented tools that worked together to create a DevOps pipeline.
• TD Bank – TD Bank undertook a multimillion dollar, multi-year digital transformation project. Part of the project involved transforming the way DevOps works by fully automating CI/CD pipelines. ShiftLeft security was also introduced in the pipeline, making it TD Bank’s first DevSecOps initiative. They have eliminated manual efforts and cut waste in their offline security scans. A new, fully integrated end-to-end automated pipeline enabled all of this.

FINALISTS:

• cdCON 2021 – cdCon 2021 was the second annual CD Foundation flagship event. The event was a major success, growing 3x on registrations, sessions, sponsorships and co-located events compared to last year. The event generated 5,339 registrations and 2,911 attendees. The three co-located events included GitOps Summit, Spinnaker Summit and Jenkins Contributor Summit.
• DevOps World 2021 – This event is organized by CloudBees and caters to the full DevOps ecosystem. In 2021, DevOps World featured 129 speakers, including Steve Wozniak as a keynote. The conference offered 135 breakout sessions, lightning talks, panels, executive roundtables and workshops covering diverse DevOps topics. 18,000 people registered for the event, with 185 countries represented.
• GitLab Commit – During Virtual Commit 2021, attendees learned how to install modern DevOps practices at their organizations. They heard digital transformation stories from some of the most well-known companies and discovered how the GitLab DevOps platform can bring their teams to the next level.
• JFrog SwampUP 2021 – SwampUP 2021 was three full days dedicated to your DevOps journey. It offered training sessions, conference presentations and a tutorial and partner showcase. The conference offered many topics to choose from, including cloud-native, DevSecOps, enterprise DevOps and digital transformation.
• Open Mainframe Summit – The Open Mainframe Summit brings together leaders opening the platform to modern tools and practices. Keynotes from the Linux Foundation, CD Foundation, Broadcom and IBM set the stage for two days of thought leadership topics featuring DevOps enablement and adoption. With an open mainframe, DevOps extends across the entire IT landscape and this conference provided the content to demonstrate how.
• Puppetize Digital ’21 – Puppetize Digital provided a two-day, three-region platform for customers, partners, industry leaders and contributors within the Puppet community to share learnings around the latest trends in infrastructure operations, cloud computing, policy-as-code, security and scaling DevOps.
• The DEVOPS Conference 2021 – 10,000 DevOps professionals registered and over 6,500 attendees representing 117 countries joined this conference for two days of talks given by 60 speakers. The conference was hosted from Helsinki, Finland and combined two previous in-person events: CoDe-Conf and DEVOPS 2020. Speakers included: Patrick Debois, the “Father of DevOps”; Cheryl Hung, CNCF; Dr. William Scherlis, DARPA and practitioners from the LEGO Group, IBM and BMW.

FINALISTS:

• Ketch – Ketch is a fully open source project, providing an application delivery framework and supported by Shipa. Ketch makes it extremely easy for DevOps teams to deploy and manage applications on Kubernetes using a simple command line interface.
• Kyverno – A CNCF open source project, Kyverno is a policy engine natively designed for Kubernetes. With over seven million downloads, Kyverno policies are managed as Kubernetes resources and no new language is required to write policies.
• Open Policy Agent – Open Policy Agent (OPA) was founded by the Styra team and then donated to the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), where it has since graduated. OPA provides unified authorization across the cloud-native stack.
• Open Telemetry – OpenTelemetry is an incubating project within the CNCF. It is a collection of tools, APIs and SDKs used to instrument, generate, collect and export telemetry data (metrics, logs and traces) to help analyze software performance and behavior. More than 2,000 contributors and 300 companies contributed to the OpenTelemetry project in the past year, with more than 100,000 contributions.
• Prometheus –With millions of installations, Prometheus is the leading metrics observability tool in cloud-native and beyond. Alongside Kubernetes, it’s one of only two founding projects of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the second CNCF project to reach graduation status. Anyone working on or with cloud-native technologies and metrics is using Prometheus or the Open Standards it defined.
• Weave GitOps Core – The ongoing development of Weaveworks’ continuous delivery and continuous operations products continue to serve as a cornerstone in GitOps and DevOps best practices for Kubernetes.

FINALISTS:

• Shlomi Ben Haim – Shlomi is the co-founder and CEO of JFrog. He brings over 20 years of experience in building profitable, high-growth IT companies. He has led JFrog—along with his two other co-founders—from a startup to a privately-held, global DevOps company with 1,000 employees and a valuation of over $3.4 billion.
• JT Giri –JT is the founder and CEO of two DevOps companies, nOps (a leading cloud management tool) and nClouds (an MSP that is also an AWS Premier Consulting Partner). nOps is growing 1,000+ percent, is close to closing a Series “A” round and has some transformational events coming in the future. nClouds was named the 10th fastest-growing IT solution provider in North America (235%) and ranked the number 24 MSP. Both organizations have earned NPS scores in the 90s.
• Edith Harbaugh – Edith Harbaugh is the CEO and co-founder of LaunchDarkly, the leading feature management platform enabling developers to innovate faster while reducing the risk of disruptions, bugs and outages. Read this article from Business Insider about Edith.
• Tim Hinrichs – Tim Hinrichs is a co-founder of the Open Policy Agent (OPA) project and CTO of Styra. The project is part of the CNCF and has reached graduated status, becoming the de-facto standard for authorization. Prior to OPA, Tim co-founded the OpenStack Congress project. Tim has spent the last 18 years developing declarative languages for different domains such as cloud computing, software-defined networking, configuration management, web security and access control.
• Rob Hirschfield – Rob is the founder and CEO of RackN and the creator of The2030.cloud podcast. This initiative includes a weekly DevOps lunch-and-learn, a weekly conversation on the future of the cloud, quarterly events and his podcast. Rob has served on communities from the Linux Foundation, OpenStack Foundation and Kubernetes and he is currently focusing his efforts on advancing DevOps.
• Idit Levine – Idit is the founder and CEO at Solo.io. She is a former CTO for the cloud management division at EMC and a member of its global CTO office, where she focused on management and orchestration (M&O) over the entire stack, microservices, cloud-native apps and platforms-as-a-service.
• Sid Sijbrandij – Sid Sijbrandij is the co-founder, chief executive officer and board chair at GitLab, the DevOps platform. GitLab is a platform delivered as a single application with one user interface, data store and security embedded within the DevOps life cycle.

FINALISTS:

• DevOps Nights – This is a free event that was held throughout Latin America in a virtual and recurring way for at least four months. Its goal was to provide an overview and explain different ways to implement a DevOps methodology. You can watch the workshops in the presentation’s YouTube Channel.
• Our Journey to The Open, Modern Mainframe – Broadcom’s VP of engineering and architecture, Hayden Lindsey, describes his team’s DevOps adoption journey. In doing so, he inspires others to maximize the value of DevOps for their teams, regardless of the platform in use.
• Rethinking the SDLC/Revolution Model – The software development life cycle has been in use since the 1960s and has remained basically the same since then. Yet the ecosystem in which we develop software today is radically different. We work in systems that are distributed, decoupled, complex and can no longer be captured in an archaic model. The revolution model of the SDLC captures the multi-threaded, non-sequential nature of modern software development. This talk introduces the new model.
• The Value of DevOps Transformation in the Digital Enterprise – Lloyds Banking Group was the 2020 Best DevOps Industry Implementation winner. In February, Mark Howell, Lloyds, spoke with Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM, at the Open Mainframe Virtual Summit, presented by DevOps.com, about what they did to change the culture, process and tools to implement DevOps for enterprise systems.

FINALISTS:

• Make Metrics Matter: Measure What’s Important – This article by Anders Wallgren explores how organizations rely heavily on metrics, especially in today’s increasingly data-driven world, to evaluate their processes on a particular task, initiative or resource allocation. While nearly every business uses some form of metrics, they are particularly important in DevOps teams whose very function is tied to concepts like collaboration and continuous improvement.
• Measuring Value Streams by Analyzing Flow Metrics – This article by Jeff Keyes details the importance of and value added by flow metrics. Flow metrics give organizations visibility into production at a macro level so that they can make more effective decisions. Readers will learn that by analyzing flow metrics they can achieve optimal efficiency in workflows with end-to-end visibility.
• Using IBM ADDI and VTP to Enhance Observability in Mainframe Development – This article by Bob Reselman talks about using the leading edge technology of IBM ADDI and VTP to enhance observability in mainframe development. The importance of the article becomes clear as hundreds of IBM Z customers are migrating to new versions of COBOL and must test these changes and observe their effects on performance.