The OpsRamp Monitor: DevOps Distress, M&As, Coronavirus & Tech

Top Weekly Reads in IT I&O

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It’s Friday, and a holiday (of sorts) heading into a long weekend (for some). We’re going to start with something light, and then get a little heavier. If you like what you read here, please do share with your colleagues and pals!

Share the love...of work. You may not care for the Hallmark holiday of Valentine’s Day, but why not celebrate all sorts of love on this day? Let’s start with work, where great things can happen with the right attitude. We polled the good folks here at OpsRamp, to share what they love about their jobs:

	“What do I love most about my job? That's easy, I love helping technology leaders be successful and I love to win. At OpsRamp I get to do both!” --Kevin Thomas, Senior Account Executive.			“Feeling a sense of accomplishment when I'm up against a deadline and have one shot to get it right, and it turns out better than we could have imagined. Having a team that appreciates the work I do and always thanks me for the hard work at the end of the day.” --Srikanth Kothala, Manager of Interactive Design

	“I love the people at this company, and the opportunity we have to transform IT Ops.” --Jordan Sher, Senior Director of Corporate Marketing.			“To be part of an organization with a great purpose of simplifying operations with a modern and scalable SaaS-based IT Operations Management platform.” --Prasad Dronamraju, Solution Architect.

	“The best thing I love about my job is, whatever I design is the first thing that people see!” -- Namrata Sharma, Interactive Designer.			“I love the variety of challenges I am presented with on a daily basis.” -- Rachel Zakaria, Demand Gen Marketing Manager.

	I love my job because I no longer dread Mondays! --Aaditya Aravamudhan, Marketing Communications Lead			“I love the collaboration.” --Michael Del Castillo, Solutions Consultant.

	“I love having the opportunity to disrupt a traditional technology category with a completely new approach.” -- Darren Cunningham, VP of Marketing.

DevOps warts. We do DevOps here at OpsRamp and you probably do as well. But as with any major movement, there are notable problems. One is security. Infosecurity magazine reported that 12,000 Jenkins servers were recently exposed to denial of service (DoS) attacks. Enter DevSecOps, which is a fancy way of saying that DevOps people need to bake security into their software development processes.

Security Boulevard breaks down the security risks in DevOps, highlighting the many small changes being integrated all the time in builds, combined with the fact that security people are few in number and work too separately from developers. “The idea that security teams can run these tools themselves in production or hold up releases until they can conduct tests is impractical.” This DevOps.com article has some sharp ideas for how to do DevSecOps, including: “use the most recent versions of Docker images and scan them for vulnerabilities, and enable automated testing for security on your code dependencies and core.” It’s worth a read.

To round out the DevOps analysis, check out the 5 DevOps Myths in SD Times. In a nutshell, it’s not just Dev plus Ops: don’t forget about testing and security. It’s not all about tooling either, and merely hiring a DevOps Engineer won’t get everyone on board. In summary, DevOps is about wholesale change and we are still uncovering all the requirements to see tangible results from this new-ish way of developing products and releasing code.

Enterprise tech M&A slows down. The pace of software acquisitions by large companies declined during the last half of 2019, after a “six-year spending spree” in cloud, SaaS and AI categories, as reported in the Wall Street Journal. It’s anyone’s guess why, but global economic turbulence in the last several months likely plays a role here. The Journal, citing data from advisory firm Hampleton Partners, wrote that the full-year total of 1,289 deals was up from 1,241 in 2018 and 1,050 in 2017, and the value of H2 deals was $22 billion. “The most-sought after acquisition targets last year were companies developing tools for enterprise resource planning, office productivity and supply-chain management, among other applications, Hampleton Partners said.” [Side note: despite the prevalence of SaaS, which has re-energized a best-of-breed world in IT, big honkin’ ERP suites are still a category with force. Go figure!]

Coronavirus and tech. There are many unknowns yet about the coronavirus, but already the internet is blowing up with the potential economic fallout from this deadly virus. Bloomberg gives a peek at how the tech industry is at risk: “Just about every major piece of consumer electronics is made in China, from iPhones and gaming consoles to half the world’s liquid crystal display or LCD screens. The contagion has already shuttered plants across China for a week longer than anticipated after the Lunar New Year break -- a disruption that could get much worse if rolling quarantines and suspended rail and air links prevent the return of the millions of blue-collar laborers at the heart of electronics assembly.”

What happens to humans in the wake of these breakouts is obviously more important than the health of the consumer electronics industry, but the analogy to people working in IT and IT operations is clear. Unpredictable, disruptive change is a constant. The more we accept that reality, the more prepared we can be on any given day to roll with the punches and quickly adapt as conditions dictate.