The growing influence of containers, microservices, and cloud-native computing is changing the way developers think about building and deploying applications. As a result, the need for a more flexible and dynamic approach to DevOps is increasing. This is where the role of languages comes into play.

In the past, DevOps teams were largely reliant on a limited set of languages, such as Bash and Python. However, as the complexity of applications has increased, so has the need for a wider range of languages. Today, DevOps teams are using a variety of languages, including Go, Rust, and Node.js, to build and manage their applications.

This change is being driven by several factors, including the need for higher performance, the need for greater flexibility, and the need for a more collaborative environment. Go, for example, is a high-performance language that is well-suited for building microservices. Rust is a memory-safe language that is becoming increasingly popular for writing systems software. And Node.js is a JavaScript runtime that is widely used for building web applications.

The use of a wider range of languages is also leading to a more collaborative environment. In the past, DevOps teams were often siloed, with developers working in one language and operations teams working in another. However, as the use of multiple languages has become more common, teams are finding that they need to work together more closely. This is leading to a more collaborative and productive environment.

The changing landscape of languages in DevOps is having a number of benefits. First, it is leading to the development of more innovative and scalable applications. Second, it is making it easier for teams to collaborate and work together. And third, it is leading to a more efficient and productive development process.

As the use of containers, microservices, and cloud-native computing continues to grow, it is likely that the role of languages in DevOps will continue to evolve. In the future, we can expect to see even more languages being used in a wider range of ways. This will continue to drive innovation and improve the way that applications are built and deployed.

PowerShell is a command-line shell and scripting language developed by Microsoft for managing and automating tasks in Windows operating systems. It provides a powerful and flexible environment for system administrators, developers, and IT professionals to interact with and manage Windows systems, services, and applications.

What are the top use cases of PowerShell?

Here are some of the top use cases of PowerShell:

• System administration: PowerShell is a powerful tool for system administrators. It can be used to automate a wide variety of tasks, such as managing users and groups, creating and managing files and folders, installing and uninstalling software, managing Windows services, and troubleshooting system problems.
• DevOps: PowerShell is also a popular tool for DevOps engineers. It can be used to automate the deployment and configuration of applications, as well as to manage infrastructure resources.
• Security: PowerShell can be used to automate security tasks, such as managing permissions, auditing user activity, and detecting and responding to security incidents.
• IT operations: PowerShell can be used to automate IT operations tasks, such as monitoring systems, managing backups, and provisioning resources.
• Development: PowerShell can be used to develop custom applications and scripts. It can also be used to automate tasks in other programming languages, such as C# and Java.

What are the features of PowerShell?

PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and scripting language. PowerShell is designed to help system administrators and power users automate the administration of Windows systems.

Here are some of the features of PowerShell:

• Powerful command-line shell: PowerShell provides a powerful command-line shell that can be used to interact with Windows systems. The command-line shell allows you to run commands, manage files and folders, and view system information.
• Scripting language: PowerShell is a scripting language that can be used to automate tasks. PowerShell scripts can be used to perform complex tasks that would be difficult or time-consuming to perform manually.
• Object-oriented: PowerShell is an object-oriented scripting language. This means that you can work with objects in PowerShell, such as files, folders, and processes.
• Built-in cmdlets: PowerShell comes with a number of built-in cmdlets that can be used to perform common tasks. These cmdlets can be used to manage users and groups, create and manage files and folders, install and uninstall software, and manage Windows services.
• Extensibility: PowerShell is extensible, which means that you can create your own cmdlets and modules. This allows you to automate tasks that are not supported by the built-in cmdlets.
• Cross-platform: PowerShell is cross-platform, which means that it can be used on Windows, macOS, and Linux. This makes it a valuable tool for system administrators who manage systems across multiple platforms.

What is the workflow of PowerShell?

The workflow of PowerShell refers to the sequence of steps that users follow to interact with the PowerShell environment, execute commands, and achieve their tasks.

The workflow of PowerShell is typically as follows:

• Start PowerShell: You can start PowerShell by typing Powershell in the Start menu or Run dialog box.
• Enter commands: You can enter commands at the PowerShell prompt. For example, to list all the files in the current directory, you would type ls.
• Use cmdlets: PowerShell comes with a number of built-in cmdlets that can be used to perform common tasks. For example, to create a new folder, you would use the New-Folder cmdlet.
• Create scripts: You can create PowerShell scripts to automate tasks. PowerShell scripts are text files that contain PowerShell commands.
• Run scripts: You can run PowerShell scripts by typing .\scriptname.ps1 at the PowerShell prompt.
• Get help: If you need help with a PowerShell command or cmdlet, you can type get-help at the PowerShell prompt.

How PowerShell Works & Architecture?

PowerShell is a task automation and configuration management framework from Microsoft, consisting of a command-line shell and scripting language. PowerShell is designed to help system administrators and power users automate the administration of Windows systems. PowerShell works by using a pipeline architecture. The pipeline is a way of passing data from one command to another. This allows you to chain together commands to perform complex tasks. For example, you could use the following commands to list all the files in the current directory that are larger than 1MB:

ls | Where-Object {$_.Length -gt 1MB}

The first command, ls, lists all the files in the current directory. The second command, Where-Object, filters the results of the first command to only include files that are larger than 1MB. The output of the second command is then displayed on the console. PowerShell also uses objects to represent data. This allows you to work with data in a more structured way. For example, the ls command returns a list of objects that represent files. Each object has properties, such as the file name, the file size, and the file creation date. You can use these properties to filter the results of the command or to perform other tasks.

PowerShell is a powerful tool that can be used to automate a wide variety of tasks on Windows systems. If you are a system administrator or power user, I recommend learning PowerShell.

Here are some additional details about the architecture of PowerShell:

• Pipeline: The pipeline is a way of passing data from one command to another. This allows you to chain together commands to perform complex tasks.
• Objects: PowerShell uses objects to represent data. This allows you to work with data in a more structured way.
• Cmdlets: PowerShell comes with a number of built-in cmdlets that can be used to perform common tasks.
• Modules: Modules are collections of cmdlets that are grouped together. Modules can be used to extend the functionality of PowerShell.
• Scripting language: PowerShell is a scripting language that can be used to automate tasks. PowerShell scripts can be used to perform complex tasks that would be difficult or time-consuming to perform manually.

How to Install and Configure PowerShell?

PowerShell is pre-installed on most modern versions of Windows. However, if you’re looking to install a specific version or PowerShell Core on other platforms, here’s how you can do it:

Installing PowerShell on Windows:

1. Windows PowerShell (Pre-installed):

Most recent versions of Windows come with Windows PowerShell pre-installed. You can access it by searching for “PowerShell” in the Start menu.

2. Windows PowerShell 7 (Upgrade):

Windows PowerShell 7 is the latest version and offers enhanced features. You can download and install it from the official PowerShell GitHub repository:

• Visit the PowerShell GitHub releases page: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases
• Download the installer for your platform (usually an MSI file for Windows).
• Run the installer and follow the on-screen instructions.

Installing PowerShell Core (Cross-Platform):

PowerShell Core is a cross-platform version of PowerShell that works on Windows, macOS, and Linux.

Download and Install PowerShell Core:

• Visit the PowerShell GitHub releases page: https://github.com/PowerShell/PowerShell/releases
• Download the installer for your platform (e.g., Windows, macOS, or Linux).
• Run the installer and follow the installation instructions.

Configuring PowerShell:

After installing PowerShell, you can configure it to suit your preferences and needs.

1. Execution Policy:

PowerShell has an execution policy that determines the level of security for script execution. You can set the execution policy using the following command in an elevated (Run as Administrator) PowerShell session:

Set-ExecutionPolicy

Replace with one of the available policies: Restricted, AllSigned, RemoteSigned, Unrestricted.

2. Profile Scripts:

PowerShell allows you to customize the startup behavior by using profile scripts. There are different profile scripts for different purposes:

• Current User Profile: $PROFILE is the path to your personal profile script.
• All Users Profile: $PROFILE.AllUsersCurrentHost is the path to the profile script that affects all users.
• Edit these files with a text editor to add customizations or aliases that you want to load at startup.

3. Modules and Extensions:

PowerShell can be extended using modules and extensions. You can install additional modules using the Install-Module cmdlet. For example:

Install-Module <ModuleName>

4. PowerShell ISE (Integrated Scripting Environment):

If you’re using Windows PowerShell, you can access the Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) for a graphical scripting experience. Search for “PowerShell ISE” in the Start menu.

You know the real-time of a nowadays trends. What the innovation and enhances are occurring in the mainstream of IT infrastructure. Daily software technology complexes are engaging with so many handy tools. Every industry and business have their worth and priorities according to the needs and requirement of software delivery process. The whole process is running through the machine-generated data. Each and every hour for entities and firms has become impossible to live without any SaaS feature. A business or organization has thousands of servers. Each server generates data. The goal is to monitor large amounts of data being generated by thousands of servers. If you want to be a Splunk user specialist. So, you shall adopt the policies of some technical advances. You may be going with certain use- cases.

So, you can generate the ability to take a scale of your industry or organization. It manages the developers/testers for investigation/troubleshooting issues in the application/environment. It helps to support/operations teams for monitoring the production environment and the security team to monitor the system for possible attacks. So, Customers can capture the data related to business. Doing compliance and auditing PCI/SOX/HIPAA log review and retention requirements. If you are looking for a lead-generating IT software carrier. Suppose, you want to take dynamic support for your services. So, you can go with Splunk advanced power user. They have developed and indulged into deep dives knowledge and skills qualified in complex collecting, searching, analyzing, visualizing the machine-generated data and reporting commands, advanced use cases capabilities of real-time feedback, performance monitor, payment process, promotional support, and practices for various building dashboards.

What are the benefits of Splunk advanced power users?

If you want to be more advance and efficient in the manipulating functions of Splunk power users. If you have seen the outcomes of functionalities of the advanced power user. Let’s come to the points of software performances. What we observe is that sometimes it’s lagging and a few hours later we find it performs efficiently. After achieving work-flowing ideas, you know the behavior of software applications. Every software stuff comes with certain features and beneficial causes. So, there are some sorts of benefits such as:

• Maintain your scalability at any firm: It makes you sufficient and specific for upcoming data analysis situations. With daily practicing strength, it reaches you hike at any industry or firm.   
• Resolve data issues more efficient: It creates awareness in you for any threat attacks and efficiently, you can fix errors multiple times with deep impacts.
• Makes you extraordinary: Makes you prodigy to the other users and develops skills to solve any data issues with extraordinary mind concept.   
• Dynamic data handling: It gives you dynamic support for instantaneously multiple server-generated data with excess control and configuring.
• Multiple mind-controlling concepts: For the data-driven industry, it gives you multiple mindsets to maintain the steady flowing data and manages the data information with analyzing dashboards.  

Why we should learn Splunk advanced power users?

After getting the full ideas about Splunk advanced power users like what is it? What does it work? Benefits. Now, the real situation comes that software launches come in the IT industry or markets. You using it and test in software applications for knowing their performances. The real query comes all after is that why it is necessary or essential to learn? You know the data is everywhere and you can’t live or walk without a single inch of it. So, you can get command over the universal forwarder, heavy forwarder, indexer, cluster master, search head, and license master. One of the most valuable reasons is that some sorts of Splunk competitors are ready to adjacents such as logDNA, elastic search, sumo logic, and solar winds Loggly. You have all the purposes to choose these techniques and strategies to raise your growth. If you fulfill all responsibility with enthusiasm. The certification would make you eligible for the regular performing and managing task performances of Splunk power user behavior and it will reflect the healthy environment with the high scope of job opportunities in certain corporate industries or organizations.

How our Splunk advanced power user course/training would help?

Meeting with all learning stuff. I’m going to elaborate on the monarchy software system. These tutorials will make you intelligent and faster as a service and give you the specific mind mapping concept. The courses of this training program would empower you to move in the correct direction with an advanced learning path. These courses would help you to understand the Scenario-based examples and hands-on challenges that will enable you to create a substantial search, analytics, datasets, reports, alerts & dashboards. It will also introduce you to Splunk’s datasets features and axis interface.

After getting the learning stack. Let’s come to the point of certification. You know that every company or corporation. After the learning process makes you clarify in certain courses or degrees. So, this will makes you developer as developing dashboards based on customer requirements and experts in Splunk SPL, XML & UI configurable items with various career paths like Splunk admin, Splunk developer, combine package of Splunk admin & developer with expected average salary process and tremendous job options for future leads. This certification demonstrates the healthy performances and suitable environment of Splunk advanced power users and makes you eligible for exact performances in any IT firm or MNCs (multinational companies).

Related video:

After listening to all the series of Splunk workflow. From software building to deployment methods, these all software stuff manages by a developer. Without any typical thoughts, I will give you a simple ideology about Splunk’s developer. What do you think about the concept of Splunk developer? From my eyesight views, it is a professional about to perform certain functions like search and reports, charts and dashboards, alerts, or apps in fronts of the concept of Splunk development. With this brief package of software, it makes you expert and advances for the daily updates configure with this software tool. This helps you to create apps, parse the data application, and manages all the programming functions and the rest of the end-point.  

What are the benefits of Splunk Developer?

Without any query. From the above explanation. You get some brief schematic practices performs by the developer and also get some benefits to utilizing it as follows:

• The better understanding of your environment to drive.
• Decisions
• Search and visualize analyzing data (question focused data set)
• Automated reporting.

Why we should learn Splunk Developer?

This question gives you a well-known perception of why should learn the Splunk developer course? Generate more awareness regarding Splunk use-cases, performances, software monitoring, malfunctioning, application functionality, and the software deployment process. These packages are handled by the developer across the whole organization. Through the main context of the developer, it manages and visualizes the application workflow. Due to this reason, you can accommodate this course very precisely in your IT development process.

How our Splunk Developer Course/training would help?

Through this training course, it will teach you how to use the Splunk tool? And the systems function over Splunk. It is totally based on the concept of planning and visualization with the programming language python. If you learn then you may command over any user application data as statistics report, configures the data, modify the app programming, and keeps the user data secrets either can show it publicly, seeing events with delete or save option, and enhances the app programs through a visual editor. After completing this, you may get certification and this will show proof of the result. This will be much better stuff to get attached to this tutorial in future SaaS advances.

Related video:

Only 1 in 10 developers deploy software on demand, multiple times per day, according to the Cloud Delivery Foundation’s 2021 State of Continuous Delivery report.

Continuous delivery is a key part of how organizations deliver value to their customers, providing the ability to make small changes to software reliably and at any time, according to the report.

The study, completed by research firm SlashData from data collected from more than 19,000 developers, asked for information on lead time for changes, deployment frequency, time to restore services, and change fail rates.

Two-thirds of respondents indicated it takes at least a week for code to go from committed to successfully run in production. Only about 6 percent said they can move code from commit to production in under an hour.

The programming languages that rank highest for speed and stability in software delivery performance are the shell scripting languages (Bash and PowerShell), with Go/Golang and JavaScript being the next best choices. Interestingly, Ruby, Python and Java — three of the most popular languages based on Tiobe rankings, were poorest in terms of software delivery performance.

“Having access to new relevant data is critical to assessing and making the right decisions. By building this State of CD Report, we have produced an exclusive dashboard for use by our community that shows the current state of continuous delivery for deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to restore service, and more,” said Tracy Miranda, Continuous Delivery Foundation executive director. “Moving forward, we will publish this report annually in order to track the world’s capacity to deliver software with speed and security.”

Incentives are mismatched among SREs, SecOps, and application developers. These mismatches create challenges around how and what information is shared across siloed teams. This asymmetrical information creates a moral hazard where one team can shift deployment risk to another team, with no accountability back to the originating team. Risk shifting results in unstable applications, inefficient infrastructure, security issues and poor customer experience. All of that impacts your company’s bottom line.

Closing the Information Gap
Observability is positioned as a way to fix the information gap between these disparate groups. Observable systems allow users to ask questions about their behavior in an open-ended way, unlike more rigid monitoring systems. SREs and SecOps teams are already reaping benefits from observability, but mismatched incentives limit its effectiveness. Meeting the observability expectations of IT leaders requires pervasive instrumentation across applications, infrastructure and third-party software. Delivering that level of instrumentation has remained out of reach due to incentive mismatches, as well as human and infrastructure costs.

The main incentive for developers is shipping code quickly at a reasonable level of quality, meaning a low bug count. This contrasts with SREs, who are incentivized around uptime, performance and efficiency, while the incentives for SecOps teams are around risk reduction and breach mitigation.

Since SREs and SecOps teams don’t have insight into what developers have changed, it’s easy for performance or security problems to get thrown over the fence to operations. A fresh code push might only include minor changes and be harmless to existing operations. Or, it could replace large chunks of logic across the entire codebase, including adding calls to external and third-party applications. To the intrepid SRE and SecOps teams, one change looks like any other. They don’t get a peek behind the curtain because of the mismatched incentives. DevOps wants to deploy quickly. Waiting on approval from other teams slows down deployments, so comprehensive reviews don’t happen. This doesn’t mean DevOps teams are intentionally trying to sabotage partner teams. They’re simply acting in their own interests based on their incentives.

The challenge is that one party, the developers, has more information than other parties. That information asymmetry is what creates unbalanced risk sharing. Coping with information asymmetry has led to all kinds of new collaborative models, starting with DevOps and evolving into DevSecOps and other permutations like Biz DevSecOps.

True collaboration has been hard to come by. Early DevOps efforts are often successful, but scaling beyond five to seven teams is difficult because teams lack the breadth of experience in IT operations or the SRE capacity to staff multiple product teams. The change velocity DevOps teams can achieve is often far greater than SREs and SecOps can absorb, making information asymmetry worse.

If teams can’t maintain high levels of collaboration and communication, another option must be developed. Observability practices, like collecting all events, metrics, traces and logs, allow SREs and SecOps teams to interrogate applications about their behavior without knowing which questions they want to ask ahead of time. However, observability only works if applications, and the infrastructure they rely on, are instrumented. This creates another problem: who does the instrumentation?

The expectation is DevOps teams embed instrumentation into their code as part of the development process. While that’s a nice idea, there are four reasons this falls short. First, the quality of instrumentation varies. Many log statements are terse and only understandable by the developer that wrote them. The message “In function xyx123!” isn’t helpful to an SRE digging into a performance problem that cropped up in the latest release.

Second, instrumentation libraries vary by implementation, giving inconsistent results across language bindings. Open Telemetry is trying to improve this, but its progress is slow and still requires developers to do more work that, if we’re honest, doesn’t benefit them; it benefits SREs and SecOps. Now we’re back to those pesky mismatched incentives and information asymmetry problems again.

The third problem with instrumentation is the volume of data. Each instrumented application can produce terabytes of data each day. When you have robust instrumentation, the amount of data can be overwhelming, and extremely costly to analyze and store.

Lastly, instrumentation is isolated to the code your team wrote. That represents a fraction of the code you rely on. Vendor-provided services and APIs remain a black box, limiting your observability into those components.

Resolving information asymmetry across teams requires two things:

Pervasive, pluggable instrumentation capabilities for all code that doesn’t require developer involvement, and
An observability pipeline to filter, redact and enrich data, then route it to your analytics platform of choice.
Pervasive Instrumentation
Operations teams need instrumentation without having to go back to developers and beg them to add it to existing code. They need to turn it on and off as needed, and they need readily consumable data. They also need every piece of data they can get, including packet payloads, insight into encrypted data and so on. This goes well beyond what’s possible with today’s instrumentation options.

AppScope, a newly released open source project, is a new take on instrumentation. AppScope interposes itself between application threads and system libraries, tracking things like file system access, network and HTTP activity, as well as CPU and process activity. It also provides payload data, and because it sits between the application and encryption libraries, it also gives access to users’ cleartext data. Because it works with any Linux binary, SREs and operations teams can instrument anything, even code they didn’t write.

Observability Pipeline
The challenge with pervasive instrumentation is dealing with all the data generated by applications. Network, file system, and other system data can easily swamp destination APM and log analytics platforms, driving up licensing and infrastructure costs. While instrumentation data is vital to rebalancing risk sharing in organizations, you need a way to manage that data intelligently to get value out of it. This is where the observability pipeline comes in.

An observability pipeline sits between the sources of observability data and its target destinations. By acting as a strategic control point, the pipeline gives users control over how data is formatted, filtered, enriched, and redacted before it is routed to one or more destinations.

Observability pipelines help SREs and operations teams deal with the flood of instrumentation data by routing low value data to low-cost storage, like S3, while higher value information lands in APM and log analytics tools. Later, if you decide you need the data stored in S3 to add more context to your analysis, you can replay it back through the pipeline and enrich your data set.

Shifting business priorities are accelerating the pace of technology deployment across organizations, and teams are pressured to deliver faster. This faster pace of delivery pushes deployment risk to operations and security teams that lack visibility into changes developers have made across complex distributed systems. This information asymmetry also increases risk to the business as applications become less predictable and reliable over time.

Traditional methods of resolving the information mismatch haven’t worked because incentives across teams aren’t aligned. Adopting pervasive instrumentation and observability practices will give SREs and operations teams critical visibility into rapidly changing application and infrastructure environments, without disrupting the developer experience and process.

Cloud computing is an important part of the changing work landscape, but it is also affecting personal computer users as well. The positive changes that are offered by cloud computing cannot be overstated as we move into a nimble and responsive new reality with regard to software, hardware, and computation services.

Cloud computing is internet-based functionality for applications and programs that frees users from having to run the software and other programs on their local computer. Cloud computing makes it possible to share information readily between team members and locations and makes certain that teams of workers or multiple users in the same household all have access to necessary information and documents.

If you are ready to learn more about the benefits of cloud computing, read on for more information!

What is Cloud Computing?
We already discussed that cloud computing allows multiple users to access the same information from the same location without having to host applications and software on their local machines. You might be wondering how this is possible.

Cloud computing allows all of the storage that would normally be done on individual machines to be done remotely in the cloud. This means that all users and machines who have access to the data in the cloud will be able to get to this information and the services hosted in the cloud, no matter where they are located or what machine they are working on.

This offers powerful computing power and dynamic information sharing that cannot be done when individual users are all attempting to share local data across limited access points. Cloud computing also keeps data and software more secure in the case that a unique user’s computer is affected by malware or another cyber threat.

Main Benefits of Using Cloud Computing

1. Speed
Deployment and sharing of information happen at lightning speed with cloud computing on your side. There is no more agile way to apply changes to software and databases and cloud computing offers a uniformity in deployment that cannot be enjoyed with other kinds of data and asset management.

Cloud computing also offers unique access to testing new products and designs that are not available when you are trying to manage many unique assets that require the same changes to be made to their operating systems. Being able to test products and services before they are made available to the cloud is an ideal part of the use of cloud computing.

2. Automatic Updates
Continuous integration and continuous delivery are the biggest arguments for cloud computing that you can make. There is no better way to support the needs of your assets related to support, updates, and improvements.

The automatic nature of updates and support when using cloud computing means that your organization and your data will be far more secure and consistently managed than if you are trying to maintain unique machines that are running their own versions of applications and other software assets.

Developers also appreciate that cloud environment solutions also integrate with DevOps tools, making it much easier to detect issues in production processes.

3. Data Security
Data security is the leading concern of most businesses these days and data security is a major factor for personal use computers these days as well. Data security is increasingly difficult these days, especially with remote work requirements.

Cloud computing offers the ability to store your company or personal information securely and without the risk of a single machine affecting the entirety of your network. Granular permissions as well as role-based access can make it much more difficult for bad actors to get access to your network and your data.

Cloud computing comes with built-in encryption that is beyond the deployment skills of most unique users. This additional layer of improved cybersecurity can save you money on other security measures and you will have much better protection in the cloud than you would with numerous products deployed on unique machines in an attempt to protect each asset by itself.

4. Scalability
This benefit of cloud computing is a huge help when you are working with a large organization or a large number of unique machines and assets that need to have the same policies and access delivered to them. While you might not have hundreds of employees that you are trying to manage, there are many organizations that do have many hundreds of people who all need to have the same access and the same permissions.

Even in a smaller company, being able to scale your products and software solutions up and down as needed is a huge benefit of cloud computing. To make these changes, you will only have to update the cloud. Change processes that would take months without cloud computing can be handled in a day or less with access to a cloud-managed system.

5. Cost Reduction
Cloud computing can save your organization a lot of money because you will only have to spend money on your cloud hosting and the software that you need to utilize for your processes and business needs. You will save lots of money on hardware, facilities, utilities, and a large IT staff to take care of your needs.

Cloud computing moves all of your IT needs into one kind of service that you pay a flat rate for in most cases. This can also help you prevent downtimes and other slowdowns that might affect your bottom line if you are not able to do business during an outage.

Cloud Computing is Incredibly Beneficial

Cloud computing is the way of the future, and more and more businesses are going to adopt it over the course of the next year or two. Even personal use often dictates cloud solutions for many different kinds of needs.

If you are ready to work on solutions for your business needs in relation to the storage, deployment, and security, cloud computing is the perfect answer to these needs. You will find that cloud computing solves many of your current struggles and leaves you room to grow and improve in any direction that you want.

When we talk about metrics in software delivery, a lot of developers think of execution metrics — things like throughput, delivery and number of deploys. But in reality, those metrics don’t motivate anyone — at least not without connecting them to a bigger picture.

I’ve worked in software for 23 years. I’m a three-time founder and four-time CTO, responsible for leading a 200+ member distributed engineering organization. I’m passionate about metrics because they can tell me a lot about where things are working and where they are not. On the other hand, there’s a risk that operating metrics become the focus, taking attention away from measures of business value.

Getting your developers to embrace metrics isn’t about hand-selecting specific metrics to track. It’s about disseminating the bigger picture and sharing measures of business impact that allow your team to see progress against those larger, shared goals.

When developers understand how their day-to-day work directly impacts the company’s goals and vision, they’re able to understand their impact, too, and will want to do better. When they want to do better, they want execution metrics to get them there.

Clarify Your Goals
If you want your developers to not only track their metrics but be excited to use them, there are a few things you need to do first:

Get clarity on the goals you’re trying to accomplish as a team and as an organization
Figure out how you’re executing against those goals
Find out what’s getting in the way
Developers shouldn’t be obsessing over execution metrics. Rather, you need them to understand what the company is trying to achieve. What is the outcome you’re aiming to deliver to customers and for the business overall?

If your developers have clarity on the company’s mission and vision, they understand how their work directly impacts the customer and the success of the organization, which is highly motivating.

Individual contributors will start asking for access to more information so they can diagnose their own problems and improve their work.

Are we spending too much time on technical investment? Does it feel like we have too many incidents, issues and escalations from customers? Are we far off on our estimates? By answering these questions, your team can determine which metrics to track.

Don’t Make These Mistakes
Using one metric to rule them all. A lot of engineering organizations try to rally entire departments around the same execution metrics. Velocity, or throughput, for example, is a great tool to expose other issues, but consistent velocity is not a guarantee of delivering business value. In fact, targeting consistent velocity is likely to result in tradeoffs you didn’t anticipate, like taking shortcuts to get things out the door.

Treating the metric as the goal. Meeting a metric shouldn’t be the goal; rather, metrics should be viewed as a way to ensure your team is meeting their goals. Organizing around business value is what really helps your team understand the purpose of their work. If you’re just rallying around how many times you can deploy per day, then sure, you can be an amazing software-deploying machine — but you might be deploying changes all day that have nothing to do with the actual goals of the business.

Being a blocker. Developers need autonomy and flexibility to do their jobs well. Give teams a high-level objective and let them determine which metrics they need to push, instead of giving everybody the same metrics and telling them to get better.

If engineers don’t have the autonomy to make their own decisions, then they’re going to feel like they’re just part of the machine. As engineers, and as humans, problem solving is what motivates us, along with the knowledge that our skills are contributing to a larger, shared goal.

A Team That Embraces Metrics: Putting it Into Practice
There are three channels that are essential to communicating business-value metrics to teams. At the company level, executives will introduce their high-level goals at all-hands meetings — where the company is trying to go this year, how you differentiate in the market — the things that really matter to a business.

One level down, during organizational or department meetings, is where to communicate how teams should think about the goals from a product and engineering perspective, while still thinking about them within that overall business context.

It’s also important that this is understood down through the management chain. An engineering manager should be able to explain to their team the overall business goals with local-level reinforcement and how it all ties together.

When you have that knowledge as a team, you know what you’re capable of executing because you understand what you’re trying to achieve for the company and the customer. That’s when developers start asking for more metrics because they want to understand how to get there faster.

If You’re Not Hitting Your Goals, You Should be Asking for the Data
The only real failure is not learning from failure. It should be okay to not hit your numbers. Set a bold target and push yourself, then learn something from your misses. Figure out what you didn’t understand, what got in your way and why.

Estimation is hard. Trying to plan work is hard. But if you know how much you were able to deliver last quarter, you can focus on getting something similar done this quarter instead of assuming this will be the one quarter where there are no interruptions, your initiatives will all be perfectly defined and nobody will get sick.

If you’re not hitting your business goals and you’re not looking at your historical data, then you’re missing your opportunity to improve.

Your Team Embraces Metrics. Now, How Do You Get Them Excited?
The first time I started using continuous deployment (CD), I was truly amazed at how quickly it allowed my team to put new functionality into the hands of our customers. We could instantly find out if they liked it, and if they didn’t, we would build another version tomorrow.

As an engineer, CD is a great way to feel more connected to your customers because you get to put something you built in front of them the same day you complete it. You also become interested in a different form of metrics: usage and adoption.

The connection between your work and the ultimate value to the user is much clearer when the feedback cycle is shorter. CD allows you to get that feedback from customers directly and really see the impact you have on them. That gets people excited.

There’s no Shortcut
You can try to drive an entire organization by execution metrics, but it simply won’t be fulfilling for anyone. If your team is aligned around what they’re trying to achieve, they will recognize the value of execution metrics and they will come looking for them.

There’s no shortcut.

If you start with the reason and you end with the numbers, you know you’re on the right track. You’ll know you’re getting there because you’ll see the numbers moving, your team will be excited by that, and they’ll be motivated to do even better.

What does low-code mean, and who is it really for?

Over the last few years, I’ve seen many articles associating “low-code” with “citizen developers” or with people who don’t have deep development skills. Users can arrange visual elements, or fill in forms with key information and publish the result as an application.

But tools for citizen developers are only one part of the low-code story. There is also a growing number of tools for professional developers, and I want to talk about those, too.

Both citizen developers and professional developers have a role to play in application development and automation projects, and low-code has something to offer both of them.

Low-code is Not a Market, it’s an Approach
Low-code does mean providing visual and graphical tools and simple frameworks that mask more complex coded operations, so the application designer does not have to directly touch the code that performs desired operations. These apps are naturally limited, as the resulting application can’t be highly customized if you can’t touch the code.

With these kinds of visual tools, anyone can create a simple application within the limits of the tool. But when we pull back and look at what is needed to create larger, more complex applications – ones that need to communicate with other enterprise systems, or need extensive customization, or cross organizational boundaries, or need to pay attention to governance requirements, for example – the visual-only approach is frequently insufficient. In complex cases, developer expertise is often needed, and developers have to get “under the hood” to tinker with code.

There is no “low-code market.” We are bringing tools to people who need them to develop specific projects. A comprehensive low-code approach to application development and automation means offering both visual programming and coding capability. For usability reasons, these tools are clearly separated and presented to the development team in a way that allows citizen developers to work on certain elements and developers to work on others, all on the same platform.

We know that it’s possible to serve professional developers with low-code, too. A low-code approach also includes drag-and-drop tools that developers can use – for example, to develop APIs, or to integrate the application with other systems, or to customize front-end interfaces. Of course, when code is required, developers should be able to use their own tools and frameworks and not be limited by low-code tools. Platforms that offer a hybrid approach are likely to be most useful to mixed-skills development teams.

The Hybrid Approach
Strictly low-code tools can serve simple automation use cases. More broadly, automation platforms offer a hybrid of low-code and coding capabilities for more complex automation use cases.

For critical enterprise applications, both business and developer inputs are usually needed. Having tools for both of them means not leaving anyone out.

Low-code tools will continue to become more mainstream. Low-code is not a fad or a passing trend, but a quiet revolution that will see greater incorporation into more business tools.

As automation platforms and other low-code tools mature, a greater number of people are getting used to working with them. Developers are less hesitant about incorporating non-developers into their teams, as everyone gains a better understanding of the benefits of these platforms.

The younger generations entering the workplace today are digital natives. They are fearless about diving into technology and working hands-on. So, these low-code tools are ready for them, and they are ready to put them to work.

Low-code is breaking down technical barriers to work in the automation space, making smooth collaboration between business and development easier.

Low-Code Can Be a Double-Edged Sword
Automation and development teams are also becoming more aware of vulnerabilities and compliance issues as citizen developers roll up their sleeves and join the technical team.

Low-code tools are a double-edged sword. They facilitate teamwork, but issues with security and data governance may not be top-of-mind for non-developers. If you have a big team working on automation and/or application development and delivery, the need to build in governance becomes even more important.

Using a shared platform will help manage and mitigate these issues with security and governance. This will become even easier as the platform tools evolve and mature, so DevOps teams can use them to help mitigate some of these issues.

Does Low-Code Have a Place in DevOps?
We are definitely seeing the impact of low-code on development environments and DevOps. Remember, low-code started with small applications, and while DevOps-style teamwork and workflows may not be needed there, as the use of low-code platforms becomes the norm for critical enterprise projects, DevOps will be a necessary part of the mix. This is where low-code is having a more obvious impact; Agile methodologies using low code platforms for iteration, for continuous improvement and for continuous delivery. These applications aren’t one-and-done. They need to be maintained, improved and delivered, again and again.

A survey of 521 attendees at a recent online Future of Salesforce DevOps Summit event hosted by Gearset, a provider of a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform for Salesforce developers, found just under half (47%) of respondents now release software at least multiple times a week, with another 29% releasing software weekly or biweekly.

More than half of respondents (52%) also noted they now can deploy software in less than an hour.

Gearset CEO Kevin Boyle said the survey suggested the level of DevOps maturity among developers building applications on top of the Salesforce software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform is increasing rapidly. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many organizations embraced SaaS platforms to accelerate their digital business transformation initiatives rather than building entire applications from scratch.

However, the biggest benefit cited by survey respondents was not the ability to release applications faster, but rather the improvements to application quality (77%), followed by increased productivity (69%) and enhanced collaboration (46%). Other benefits cited included reduced complexity thanks to automation; increased agility; more reliable releases and time and cost savings.

Overall, the survey identifies source code control, CI/CD, unit testing, change monitoring and backups of metadata and data as being the most widely implemented DevOps capabilities that have been adopted. Over the next 12 months, capabilities that will see the most increased adoption among survey respondents include CI/CD, static code analysis and sandbox seeding with data.

Survey respondents said their top obstacles to adoption of DevOps are ramp-up time, followed by difficulties adopting source control and a perceived steep learning curve. For many organizations that have adopted Salesforce, the intimidation factor when it comes to adopting DevOps best practices is still fairly high, Boyle noted.

Most recently, Gearset added a free training platform, dubbed DevOps Launchpad, that employs gamification techniques to make DevOps more accessible to developers. Topics covered include version control fundamentals, Git branching strategies and Salesforce backups.

Gearset counts McKesson, Zillow, Traction on Demand, Intercom, Accenture, IBM and Johnson & Johnson among its customers. It’s not clear to what degree appreciation for DevOps has risen among smaller companies. However, as the number of custom applications deployed as extensions to the Salesforce platform increases, it is apparent that manual processes for building and deploying applications will not scale. The Salesforce platform itself is uniquely constructed using a set of objects and tables that generally lead organizations to adopt a DevOps platform built for that environment. However, it is possible to build and deploy applications using a DevOps platform designed for building and deploying applications that might need to span multiple platforms. Those applications would be integrated with the Salesforce platform at an application programming interface (API) level.

Regardless of how custom applications are built and deployed, it’s clear Salesforce platforms are becoming more widely used in enterprise IT environments. Each DevOps team will need to determine how best to integrate those platforms within the context of their overall DevOps strategy.

During its Satellite India event held on Friday, GitHub announced that it was launching three new programs for students, developers and startups at the code hosting and collaboration platform’s two-day virtual event.

GitHub COO Erica Brescia said that the first program is aimed at developers in the country called the GitHub Open Source Grants program, which will offer ₹1 crore in grants to open-source ‘extremely valuable’ projects that set the bar high for innovation in the country and further the goal of increasing contributions to open-source software around the globe, the company stated.

In a country where software developers are constantly updating themselves and eager to put their skills to good use and contribute to open source projects, GitHub says that last year, the number of students that participated in its GitHub Campus program increased by a whopping 142 percent. Meanwhile, its Student Developer Pack saw over one lakh signups and over a hundred colleges in India adopted the company’s campus offering.

The company will now offer GitHub Externships in the country, to give students a chance to interface with companies in the country by facilitating fellowship programs so they can gain skills and the ability to succeed in an enterprise environment. This will benefit students joining companies fresh out of college who want to know more about the organisations they want to work for in the future.

During a discussion held after the event, GitHub India’s country head Maneesh Sharma explained that the company’s partnerships with colleges and higher educational institutions would help students who wanted to get started with open-source technology software, through summer programs. Sharma also said that the company had seen contributions from Indian users in projects including but not limited to — machine learning, data warehousing, development of Android and other operating systems and much more.

The third program launched by GitHub on Friday was actually an extension of its successful Github Accelerate program that was launched last year and saw almost 200 startups (including AirMeet, Kawa Space, and ClearQuote) sign up for the pilot program. The company is now extending GitHub Accelerate to startup accelerators, incubators and more venture partners – which means the program’s eligibility has now been widened to accommodate over a thousand new startups this year.

Brescia also stated that over 1.8 million new developers from the country had joined GitHub over the past year, which brings the number of developers on the platform from India up to 5.8 million. But the platform’s metrics have shown an uptick in other areas too — contributions from Indian users on GitHub rose by 75 percent over the past year as opposed to 40 percent for the rest of the world, the company stated.

This announcement follows GitHub’s recent partnership with National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) as part of the latter’s FutureSkills program, which is working towards upskilling the current IT workforce, with a goal of two million from the current workforce and another two million from those fresh out of college. GitHub says this will bring the Student Developer Pack and the Campus Program to teachers, institutes and students, that are affiliated with NASSCOM, while those startups who are part of NASSCOM’s incubator initiatives will also be able to access the GitHub Accelerate program.

The company has also dubbed India the fastest growing country on the platform in terms of contributions made to open source projects, after one million developers from the country created their first repository on the platform. While the company is yet to touch the 6 million mark in terms of Indian developers on the platform, it said that it expects the number to rise to 10 million by 2023.

Technologists might do any number of things with their spare time, but as GitHub’s latest State of the Octoverse report makes clear, many of them choose to spend their nights and weekends working on open-source projects.

GitHub’s administrators, having analyzed millions of repositories for the report, suggest that enterprise-related developer activity drops on weekends and holidays (just as you’d expect), replaced by a surge of activity related to open-source development. Of course, GitHub suggests that employers encourage their developers’ urge to contribute to whatever projects they might find interesting: “Organizations should examine policies around external work and technology to ensure they allow time to engage with learning programs and that moonlighting policies allow for external projects.”

With technologists stuck at home during the COVID-19 pandemic, engagement with open source has increased—GitHub notes that open-source project creation has risen by 25 percent since April (year over year). For technologists, starting and participating in open-source projects confers another benefit: The chance to collaborate and make connections with others who share similar interests. Building out your network is an invaluable part of growing your career (and perhaps finding your next gig), and contributing to repositories allows you to do that even if you’re stuck at home.

After the pandemic ends, GitHub assumes that “remote and hybrid environments are likely to be the norm” as teams return to the office. It asks employers to provide “flexible solutions” so that developers can create schedules that make work sustainable; if the long months of remote work have taught the tech industry anything, it’s that workloads and schedules can quickly expand unless there’s a conscious, concerted effort to balance out work and life.

Or as the Octoverse report puts it: “Our analysis on work timing and work volume shows that developers benefit from flexibility that allows them to do their work by spreading it out. “

As we close in on 2021, and you consider updating your résumé and other materials for the new year (whether or not you’re actually looking for a new opportunity), highlighting your participation in open-source projects can boost your appeal to employers. Not only does contributing to projects show that you have the technical chops necessary for whatever position you want; it also highlights how your passion for technology extends beyond the workplace. When a developer uses their free time to contribute to a project they feel passionate about, they’re not just having fun—they’re also boosting their career.

Australia’s contact tracing mobile app, COVIDSafe, is getting a new Bluetooth protocol which the government says will improve the detection of close contacts through “unparalleled app-level Bluetooth performance”.

But the new protocol, known as Herald, relies on a bluetooth mode that other countries are not using, according to local software developers, reigniting criticism of the troubled app.

Herald is a VMware backed open source project that began in July. The code was open sourced in September. But the projects ties to VMware – the company involved in the UK government’s original but eventually discarded contact tracing app – created some confusion this week when the Australian government made its announcement.

The UK government experienced difficulty picking up contacts involving locked iPhones when it used VMware’s protocol earlier this year. Ultimately the Uk instead went with an Apple and Google framework that uses Bluetooth beacons.

VMware says the Herald protocol is in no way related to the protocol it initially developed for the UK app.

Last Thursday VMware publicly released the code behind Herald on Github, to help “further adopters of Herald in the healthcare space and beyond”.

By Monday, the Australian government was touting its adoption of Herald as a world first and claimed Google and Apple have been involved in its implementation, even as the tech giants offer their own exposure notification framework for contact tracing – an approach Australia’s app does not utilise.

“Australia’s technology capability and contact tracing systems are world-leading and we will be the first country in the world to adopt the Herald Bluetooth protocol, which has been shown to significantly improve our capability through the COVIDSafe App,’ said Minister for Government Services Stuart Robert in a statement.

Which-50 has asked the DTA to confirm when it began work on incorporating Herald but a response was not provided.

Developer Doubts
Geoffrey Hunt, a software engineer who has followed the development of the COVIDSafe app and has been highly critical of the DTA’s approach, says the decision to implement Herald will continue to hinder contact tracers and health workers.

In a video posted to Twitter on Monday, Hunt challenged the Australian government’s claims about Herald and criticised its reluctance to use the Google and Apple framework – a long-standing complaint of COVIDSafe critics.

Even with the Herald update, Hunt says, the DTA is still tying COVIDSafe to a less effective “pairing” form of Bluetooth exchange, which means problems around device connectivity will persist across platforms and in situations where many people are present like at sports stadiums.

“It’s really sad,” Hunt says in the video. “At the core of it, our medical professionals deserve tools that work.”

According to Hunt, the government’s claims of a world-first use of Herald don’t hold much water either. “We will be the first country to move to the Herald system because other countries rejected it. The UK government rejected Herald because it doesn’t work.”

The DTA tweeted Monday that the Herald protocol it is adopting is not the same as the one dumped by the UK. VMware also says the protocols are different.

A Herald protocol based app will still face challenges in detecting iPhones in some scenarios, Hunt says, and simply will not work when the app is not active. The Apple and Google alternative, however, works well across ecosystems and apps do not necessarily need to be running. Although an official government contact tracing app is required to use the framework.

“Why are we moving to technology that doesn’t work when it’s in the background to another technology where it still doesn’t work in the background?” Hunt asks in the video.

“That’s bullshit. Our medical professionals deserve technology that works.”

Several other prominent developers and cryptographers have expressed similar doubts this week online about the efficacy of Herald, as well as frustration they have again not been consulted on the changes.

Vanessa Teague, an ANU Associate Professor, and cryptographer, tweeted, “Lots of us have spent months and months fixing #COVIDSafe and trying to engage the DTA in a rational discussion of future options, but nobody who had helped was even told about this before the AFR [story announcing the Herald update].

“I share both Geoffrey Huntley’s technical assessment and his feelings.”

The DTA says the Australian tech community will be given a chance to provide feedback on the new source code (iOS and Android) before the update that will bring Herald to COVIDSafe.

New And Improved
The DTA says its testing shows the Herald protocol will be able to log at least 80 per cent of close contacts when two people have the app, regardless of the operating system or whether the app is running in the background or foreground; or if the devices are locked or unlocked.

The current COVIDSafe app, which does not yet incorporate Herald, struggles to detect contacts when iPhones are involved and one or more of them are locked. In a scenario where two iPhones using COVIDSafe are locked, for example, up to half the contacts will be missed.

The Australian Cyber Security Centre has been involved in testing to ensure the update meets the same security requirements of the previous versions, according to the DTA.

COVIDSafe has been downloaded over seven million times this year and led to a handful of additional contacts being traced than would have otherwise occurred without it. The DTA refuses to share information on actual usage of the app, citing strict privacy protections that prevent it from accessing the data.

In 2018, Microsoft made one of its priciest acquisitions ever, spending $7.5 billion on code-sharing site GitHub. It wasn’t the cleanest fit. GitHub is used by over 50 million developers who tend to be outspoken, including when it comes to things they dislike about Microsoft.

The deal continues to pose unexpected challenges, like a recent spat with the Recording Industry Association of America. In October, the RIAA asked GitHub to take down youtube-dl, a piece of open-source software that enables people to download videos from YouTube and other online services.

The software disappeared from the internet, and users objected.

One GitHub user, on the site, described the incident as “a shame for GitHub” and said “that Microsoft acquisition was really a mistake.” Another called for Microsoft to resign from the RIAA, an organization that consists primarily of record labels and musicians. The removal by GitHub so angered yet another user that the person responded by posting part of GitHub’s own proprietary software on the area of the site where digital copyright takedown requests are reported.

The code was adjusted by the person who maintained the project so that it was no longer in violation of the RIAA. The company then brought youtube-dl back online and announced a new process for handling similar claims.

Like fellow tech giants Amazon, Apple and Google, Microsoft faces all sorts of challenges related to its bigness, whether from its many rivals, millions of customers, profit-hungry investors or politicians concerned about competition. GitHub, as a storehouse of open-source projects and a virtual lifeline for programmers, creates tension of a different sort.

Some problems GitHub can solve by adhering to the demands of protesting users. Others are more sensitive, like the company’s work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

GitHub has refused to cut ties with ICE, leading employees to resign after the agency renewed its contract to use GitHub software. Key GitHub users published an open letter late last year insisting that GitHub end the contract, citing the agency’s separation of children from their parents and other activities. Hundreds of GitHub’s own workers signed an internal petition to have GitHub stop work with ICE last year, too, said two former employees who were not authorized to talk about internal affairs.

GitHub did not respond to a request for comment.

In addressing the ICE issue, GitHub expressed opposition to family separation. The company said it doesn’t have a services agreement with the agency, provides no consulting work and “has no visibility into how this software is being used, other than presumably for software development and version control.”

Microsoft has faced criticism, separate from GitHub, for its work providing cloud services to ICE, even though the company said in 2018 that it was “dismayed” by the practice of family separation.

For GitHub, the latest incident involving the video downloading tool has provided an opportunity for users to reignite the ICE controversy. Former GitHub engineer Zach Holman responded to an explanation provided by Nat Friedman, the company’s CEO, by bringing up the past incident.

Friedman’s tweets often receive replies to the effect of “Drop ICE.”

“The whole thing permeates everything they do now,” said Holman, who left GitHub in 2015 and now invests in start-ups. He said the easiest resolution would be to end the contract, which Friedman has described as “not financially material for our company.”

Earlier this year, GitHub was among the technology companies that showed support for the Black community following the killing in May of George Floyd while in police custody, and the nationwide protests that ensued.

A few GitHub users suggested that the company could rename part of its service so that “master,” a racially sensitive word, could be retired. The term referred to the primary area where developers store their code.

GitHub announced a plan to do exactly that one week later, changing the name to “main.” Even with good intentions, the company welcomed a fresh batch of comments about the ICE contract.

Holman summed it up this way: “How do I reconcile your position with ICE and what you’re saying about support for diversity in tech?”

Redis Labs announced the new fully integrated tiers of Redis Enterprise on Microsoft Azure Cache for Redis are available now in public preview. The new Redis Enterprise tiers bring advanced functionality to Azure Cache, benefiting Azure-based customers like BioCatch, who are already leveraging Redis Enterprise for improved developer productivity and enhanced operational resiliency with their applications.

The new Enterprise tiers offer developers expanded use cases to leverage the performance of Redis, security, and an attractive total cost of ownership. Additionally, the Enterprise tiers are natively integrated with Azure portal and billing systems, allowing Azure customers to consume Redis Enterprise like any other Azure Cache tier and using their existing commit to Azure.

“Today’s release of Redis Enterprise on Azure Cache on Redis gives developers an exciting preview of the applications they will be able to build using this service,” said Yiftach Shoolman, Co-Founder and CTO at Redis Labs. “Through our joint development with Microsoft, we’ve created a truly unique, native managed service that will enable enterprises in building real-time applications over the Redis Enterprise tiers. We’re most excited to already see our joint customers expand their Redis use cases through modules, achieving better service-level agreements with Azure Multi-AZ deployments and extremely attractive total cost of ownership with Redis on Flash, and only expect this to grow among Azure developers in the public preview.”

“The public preview of Redis Enterprise on Azure Cache for Redis is an exciting milestone for our collaboration with Redis Labs, and our commitment to offer customers choice and flexibility,” said Julia Liuson, Corporate Vice President, Developer Division at Microsoft. “We’re pleased customers have already seen the benefits of this unique integration which is designed to give their applications unbeatable responsiveness and scale, while maintaining mission-critical uptime and reliability.”

“We have trusted Redis Enterprise for years and are excited to see the extended collaboration between Redis Labs and Microsoft to deliver an Azure service that will further our developers’ productivity,” said Tamir Amram, Operations Group Lead at BioCatch. “We’re leveraging Redis on Flash to store the terabytes of data we flow through Redis per day which provides significant infrastructure cost savings, in addition to the guaranteed availability and performance SLAs of Redis Enterprise.”

A new AI Expert Roadmap developed by German software company AMAI is garnering keen interest from aspiring AI professionals around the world. The project presents a series of clear and easy-to-follow charts “demonstrating the paths that you can take and the technologies that you would want to adopt in order to become a data scientist, machine learning or AI expert.”

AI’s ever-expanding role in our everyday lives has more and more people and enterprises seeking efficient ways to learn AI basics and gain insights on industry trends. The AI Expert Roadmap is designed to do just that. The project was originally created as a training guide for AMAI employees in the tech-rich city of Karlsruhe. It proved so useful that they released it on GitHub last week, where it has already received over 3,500 stars.

This interactive roadmap is user-friendly and can be customized. The content listed in each sub-module can be linked to a designated website, and learners can easily find definitions and expanded content for each term via Wikipedia or other sources. The AMAI team says the roadmap will be automatically updated as new research appears.

The roadmap aims to not only provide learners with an overall concept of artificial intelligence but also to guide their exploration and studies in different areas of the field. The developers do not encourage simply targeting the most advanced or “hip and trendy” technologies. In scientific research, they stress, one needs to know which tool is best for a given task, and so users are advised to “grow some understanding of why one tool would better suited for some cases than the other.”

Paths include data science, machine learning, deep learning, and data engineering. Each lists essential resources such as papers with code, version control, semantic versioning, changelogs, etc. The developers advise beginners to start with data science basics to acquire a foundation and then transition to machine learning and deep learning or data engineering.

Google Project Zero, the Google security team that finds bugs in all popular software, has disclosed what it classes a high-severity flaw on GitHub after the code-hosting site asked for a double extension on the normal 90-day disclosure deadline.

The bug in GitHub’s Actions feature – a developer workflow automation tool – has become one of the rare vulnerabilities that wasn’t properly fixed before Google Project Zero’s (GPZ) standard 90-day deadline expired. Over 95.8% of flaws are fixed within the deadline, according to Google’s hackers.

GPZ is known to be generally strict with its 90-day deadline, but it appears GitHub was a little lax in its responses as the deadline approached after Google gave it every chance to fix the bug.

As detailed in a disclosure timeline by GPZ’s Felix Wilhelm, the Google security team reported the issue to GitHub’s security on July 21 and a disclosure date was set for October 18.

According to Wilhelm, Actions’ workflow commands are “highly vulnerable to injection attacks”.

“As the runner process parses every line printed to STDOUT looking for workflow commands, every GitHub action that prints untrusted content as part of its execution is vulnerable. In most cases, the ability to set arbitrary environment variables results in remote code execution as soon as another workflow is executed,” wrote Wilhelm.

“I’ve spent some time looking at popular GitHub repositories and almost any project with somewhat complex GitHub actions is vulnerable to this bug class.”

GitHub issued an advisory on October 1 and deprecated the vulnerable commands, but argued that what Wilhelm had found was in fact a “moderate security vulnerability”. GitHub assigned the bug the tracking identifier CVE-2020-15228.

On October 12, GPZ contacted GitHub and proactively offered it a 14-day grace period if GitHub wanted more time to disable the vulnerable commands, according to Wilhelm.

GitHub then took up the offer of a grace period, and per Wilhelm, it hoped to disable the vulnerable commands after October 19. GPZ then set the new disclosure date to November 2.

Then on October 28, GPZ alerted GitHub that the deadline was expiring the following week but got no response.

Due to lack of official response from GitHub, Project Zero contacted informal GitHub contacts who said “the issue is considered fixed and that [GPZ] are clear to go public on 2020-11-02 as planned”, explained Wilhelm.

But then a day before deadline, GitHub gave its official response and requested a further two days to notify customers of a fix at a future date.

“GitHub responds and mentions that they won’t be disabling the vulnerable commands by 2020-11-02. They request an additional 48 hours, not to fix the issue, but to notify customers and determine a ‘hard date’ at some point in the future,” wrote Wilhelm.

So GPZ on Monday proceeded to disclose the bug it reported because it can’t, as per its policy, offer an extension beyond the 104 days – 90 days plus 14 days’ grace.

Halloween is upon us, and while much of the world is focused on scary creatures like ghosts, ghouls, or werewolves, DevSecOps teams have a few scary creatures of their own to deal with.

From the Dracula-like developer stuck in a world from centuries ago who is thwarting the creation of secure apps, to the DevOps ghosts that downplay the importance of app vulnerabilities, it’s important for DevSecOps teams to understand the threats that may be lurking in their own teams.

First off, there are the Dracula-like developers who are stuck centuries in the past. According to Dennis Hurst, founder of Saltworks Security, these developers exist out of a desire not to change the way they write code. “We run into this a lot, of ‘we’ve always built an application this way, why do I need to security test it?’ And they’re not sort of realizing that these applications are now on the internet, they’re public facing, or they’re connected to things that are on the internet, or they’re running in a cloud infrastructure so it’s no longer a nice sort of happy data center,” said Hurst.

According to Hurst, the way for teams to overcome these Dracula-like team members is to have clear leadership. “Without strong leadership, team members feel free to keep doing what they have always done, which stifles innovation,” he said.

Another scary member of the DevSecOps team to look out for are DevOps ghosts, in other words, shadow IT. According to Hurst, these are the people that believe “they can just magically go around all of IT and go straight to the cloud. The applications are there, sort of like ghosts, you hear them rattling around and you know that they’re there but you don’t actually see them, nobody knows about them, they’re kind of – maybe they’ll be there. We see this a lot in security where we find applications running on the internet that no one knew about.”

Hurst added that this isn’t a rare occurrence; it’s actually fairly common, especially with more employees working from home. People go home and take their laptops with them, so how do you secure that?

“A lot of companies have jumped to the cloud for some parts of their business because of COVID, maybe they couldn’t get to the data center,” said Hurst. “So it’s just easier for people to get in their mind that ‘oh, I can just stand this application up in the cloud and when this is all over with we’ll figure out how to get it back in-house.’ We’re definitely seeing it more. We’re seeing more people going to the cloud, maybe using a corporate credit card to open the accounts even, so it’s not even a corporate owned account even, it’s just somebody’s personal credit card that they use to stand up a website somewhere, we see that more than we would like.”

Hurst believes that using monitoring systems is one of the biggest ways to protect against shadow IT. He explained that there are services that monitor the internet looking for properties that point back to or are linked to the company’s IT infrastructure. A big downside is that there isn’t really a proactive way of preventing someone from spinning up a service on their own. “Anyone can go out and stand up a website, but you can monitor to see when it happens. The faster you can address it, the easier it is to manage,” said Hurst. “So if a website is stood up for a day, it’s pretty easy to take that down or get them to move it. If it’s there for 6 months or a year, doing business, it becomes much stickier and challenging to get pulled out because you’re taking business offline.”

GitHub has recently rolled out code scanning to help developers detect and prevent vulnerabilities from popping up in their open source and enterprise code.

Code scanning, which was released from beta to general availability in early October, aims to automate security directly into the developer workflow, furthering ‘security by design’ approach to applications and coding.

GitHub adds that more than half of breaches are caused by vulnerabilities in application code – and many of these vulnerabilities are recurring patterns.

Since GitHub introduced code scanning capabilities in May, users have scanned more than 12,000 repositories upwards of 1.4 million times. These scans uncovered more than 20,000 security issues, many of which related to RCE and XSS issues.
In the last 30 days, users fixed 72% of reported security errors that were identified in their pull requests.

CodeQL is a code analysis engine that contains more than 2000 queries created by users and GitHub itself. CodeQL is also what powers the code scanning tool.

The company also states that it has received 132 community contributions towards CodeQL’s open sourced query set.

According to GitHub, code scanning integrates with GitHub Actions or CI/CD to improve flexibility.

“It scans code as it’s created and surfaces actionable security reviews within pull requests and other GitHub experiences you use every day, automating security as a part of your workflow. This helps ensure vulnerabilities never make it to production in the first place,” the company states.

The company also states that it has partnered with more than 12 open source and commercial security vendors to allow developers to run CodeQL and solutions for SAST, container scanning, and infrastructure as code validation side-by-side in GitHub’s native code scanning experience.

“Built on the open SARIF standard, code scanning is extensible so you can include open source and commercial static application security testing (SAST) solutions within the same GitHub-native experience you love. You can integrate third-party scanning engines to view results from all your security tools in a single interface and also export multiple scan results through a single API.”

“For those interested in helping to secure the open source ecosystem, we also invite you to contribute to the growing list of CodeQL queries and become part of our growing security community.”

The company will release more information about extensibility capabilities and partner ecosystem soon.

Public repositories can use GitHub’s code scanner for free. Private repositories can use GitHub’s code scanner through the GitHub Enterprise through Advanced Security.

What Is Web Monitoring Software?

Web monitoring software tracks the availability, performance, and behavior of websites, web applications, APIs, and mobile applications. It gives operations and development teams visibility into how their services are performing in real time, helps identify regressions after deployments, and surfaces infrastructure-level issues before they reach end users.

Modern platforms in this category have evolved well beyond simple uptime checks. They now encompass full-stack observability, application performance monitoring (APM), infrastructure monitoring, distributed tracing, log aggregation, and real-user monitoring (RUM).

Major Vendors in the Web Monitoring Space

Several well-established vendors dominate this market. Each has a distinct approach, pricing model, and area of strength. Understanding the differences helps teams make informed procurement and architecture decisions.

LogicMonitor

LogicMonitor is a SaaS-based infrastructure and network monitoring platform aimed primarily at managed service providers (MSPs) and enterprise IT operations. It offers agentless monitoring for on-premises and cloud infrastructure, with a strong focus on automated device discovery and alerting. It integrates with common DevOps toolchains and ITSM platforms.

AppDynamics

AppDynamics, now part of Cisco, is an APM and business observability platform. It provides deep code-level visibility into application performance and correlates technical metrics with business outcomes (such as transaction revenue or conversion rates). AppDynamics is widely used in large enterprise environments running Java, .NET, Node.js, and other supported runtimes.

New Relic

New Relic offers a broad observability platform covering APM, infrastructure monitoring, distributed tracing, browser monitoring, and synthetic testing. It has transitioned to a consumption-based pricing model and positions itself as an all-in-one observability tool for teams of all sizes, from startups to enterprises.

Dynatrace

Dynatrace differentiates itself with AI-assisted root cause analysis through its Davis AI engine. It automatically discovers and maps dependencies across cloud-native environments, containers, and microservices. Dynatrace is particularly strong in Kubernetes and cloud-native observability, and is frequently chosen by enterprises undergoing digital transformation.

SolarWinds

SolarWinds offers a wide portfolio of IT management and monitoring tools, including network performance monitoring, server and application monitoring, and web performance monitoring. It is well-known in network operations and IT operations center (ITOC) environments. SolarWinds products are available both as on-premises installations and SaaS offerings.

SmartBear

SmartBear is focused primarily on API quality and testing tooling, including AlertSite for web and API monitoring. It is widely used by QA engineers and developers who need to combine functional testing with performance and availability monitoring across web services and APIs.

Deployment Models

Web monitoring platforms are typically delivered through one of the following deployment models, each with trade-offs in terms of setup complexity, data residency, and total cost of ownership:

• SaaS-based: The vendor hosts and manages the monitoring infrastructure. Teams instrument their applications with agents or SDKs and data is sent to the vendor’s cloud. This model minimizes operational overhead and enables rapid onboarding. LogicMonitor, New Relic, and Dynatrace all offer fully SaaS-delivered options.
• Website and application monitoring: Covers synthetic monitoring (scripted transactions from external probes), real-user monitoring (RUM from actual browser sessions), and uptime checks. Suitable for public-facing properties where external availability and user experience are the primary concern.
• Mobile app monitoring: Extends observability to iOS and Android applications through mobile SDKs that capture crash reports, network request performance, and user interaction traces.

Key Use Cases and End-User Segments

The buyers and users of web monitoring software generally fall into two broad categories:

Enterprise IT

Large organizations use monitoring platforms to maintain service-level agreements (SLAs), support ITIL-aligned change and incident management, and provide visibility across hybrid or multi-cloud environments. Compliance requirements, role-based access control, and integrations with ITSM tools like ServiceNow or PagerDuty are common procurement requirements in this segment.

Developers and Operations Teams

DevOps and SRE teams use monitoring software as a core part of their continuous delivery pipelines. Key requirements include CI/CD integration, deployment markers, anomaly detection, and the ability to correlate code changes with performance regressions. Developers increasingly want self-serve access to observability data without routing requests through a central ops team.

Choosing the Right Platform: What to Evaluate

When evaluating web monitoring software for your organization, consider the following factors:

• Coverage: Does the platform cover your full stack—infrastructure, application, browser, mobile, and third-party APIs?
• Instrumentation overhead: How much effort is required to instrument services, and what is the performance impact of agents or SDKs?
• Pricing model: Per-host, per-user, consumption-based, or flat-fee pricing each suits different team sizes and usage patterns.
• Alerting and on-call integration: Does the platform integrate with your existing incident management tools (PagerDuty, Opsgenie, Slack)?
• AI and automation: Some platforms (notably Dynatrace and AppDynamics) offer automated root cause analysis, which can reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) in complex microservices environments.
• Data retention and compliance: For regulated industries, check where data is stored, how long it is retained, and what export or audit capabilities are available.
• Open standards support: Platforms that support OpenTelemetry allow teams to avoid vendor lock-in and reuse instrumentation across different backends.

Regional Adoption Trends

Demand for web monitoring software is global, with adoption driven by digital transformation initiatives, cloud migration, and the proliferation of e-commerce and SaaS businesses. North America and Europe have historically had the highest concentrations of enterprise monitoring deployments, while Asia-Pacific is a fast-growing region driven by expanding cloud infrastructure investment and a growing base of software-intensive businesses.

Summary

Web monitoring software is no longer a niche tool—it is a critical part of how engineering and operations teams deliver reliable digital services. Whether you are evaluating full-stack APM platforms like Dynatrace or AppDynamics, infrastructure-focused tools like LogicMonitor and SolarWinds, or developer-centric observability platforms like New Relic, aligning your choice with your team’s workflows, technology stack, and compliance requirements will deliver the most value. As the space continues to evolve toward AI-assisted observability and OpenTelemetry-based standardization, the platforms that offer flexibility alongside depth of insight will be the ones best positioned for long-term adoption.