THE DOPPLER

For those of us in the tech sector, jet travel is part of the deal. It can be time consuming and mind numbing. Everybody seems to have a few tricks up their sleeves to make their own trips more manageable. Some share tips with their friends. CTP’s own Robert Christiansen, a Doppler podcast co-host, goes a step farther: He’s interviewed dozens of travelers and packed years’ worth of insights into a book he’s calling “The Zen of High-Performance Travel.” Our panelists chat about some of Robert’s travel do’s and don’ts, as well as our own. Like this one: Do you know which cluster of seats is the most likely to have an empty seat next to them? Answer: The aisle and window seats in the exit row in the middle of the plane. (The row’s middle seat doesn’t recline, and who wants to sit there?) We talk about things like storing an extra flight bag in your vehicle, keeping your cool during delays, getting dropped off at “Arrivals” when you’re leaving during busy times, and always making sure to pack those food supplements. Things to consider when you’re spending time in the puffy kind of clouds.

DevOps has come a long way in the past decade. In a report released more than a year ago, Forrester declared that the practice had reached “escape velocity,” with more than half of all enterprises implementing and expanding DevOps processes. But, according to some in the field, gaps still exist between the dev and the ops sides of most organizations. We talk with Brad about why the two sides remain at odds and how companies are struggling to create a delivery infrastructure that balances agility and control. We discuss how people – not tools – remain the biggest obstacles to companies’ drives to achieve DevOps “nirvana.” We also cover a wide range of other topics – including IT teams’ propensity to force tools to perform tasks they’re not cut out for and young professionals from outside of computer science spending more time learning to code.

Over the past 10 years, the power structure has shifted inside IT organizations. Maintaining the infrastructure used to be the top priority, so infrastructure teams tended to control more resources and command more respect than their counterparts overseeing applications. Today, that equation has flipped. Businesses need to move faster, so they’ve elevated application teams to star status. We discuss the implications of this power shift. Instead of reacting, app teams now are dictating the requirements of organizational initiatives – choosing resources, deciding which platforms they want to use. This has forced organizations to approach security differently and get used to technologies like containers. We also talk about mistakes organizations make when it comes to cloud security – including relying too much on the cloud vendor and forcing an on-premise security tool do the same thing in the cloud. Finally, we explore some guiding principles organizations use to help development and security teams work better together – to show how security isn’t the enemy of progress.

Software developers are a prideful group. They like to create things, figure out their own short cuts and come up with new ways to innovate on the fly. But sometimes, developers’ inner creativity can be the biggest thing holding them back. There are still times when relying on tried and tested tools can help get a project done more quickly and more efficiently. We discuss how developers can optimize their own work by identifying a few key value-adds and admitting that, for many other tasks like observability and log-ins, outside vendors have better tools to get the job done. Shawn sums it up by saying we need to admit that “we’re entering the golden age of the SaaS product.” We also talk about microservices – how The New York Times has committed to the practice in a big way, and how many in the organization are confused about how they work. Finally, we explore the challenges of having to comply with a long list of regulations in a multi-cloud environment and Shawn’s observation that, after the introduction of containers, we’re “still waiting for the next game changer.”

Microservices have become a popular software development technique in recent years. Breaking down applications into distinct sets of loosely coupled smaller services helps organizations port workloads from cloud to cloud and get better utilization out of the resources they’re paying for. But there are challenges associated with the practice, starting with security. Microservices can make security much more costly – if you’re not careful. We discuss why microservices put such a heavy load on verifications of credentials and make it harder to manage access to specific services. We go through some solutions companies can pursue to mitigate the impact of having to verify identities for so many tiny jobs. One way is to shift to security tokens that have fixed or limited lifetimes. We also talk about tasks organizations continue to struggle with as they ramp up their cloud projects. Some aren’t going “cloud native” enough, sticking with on-premises resources rather than leveraging the cloud services that are available. Others are taking too long to embrace automation. Finally, our panel shares some thoughts about tech trends people might talk about in the coming year – everything from more strategic use of AI and ML to GDPR enforcements that push enterprises to pay closer attention to privacy rules.