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Best of TechBeacon 2016: DevOps comes of age

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Jaikumar Vijayan Freelance writer
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With more organizations adopting DevOps practices, discussions around the benefits of continuous development are finally going away, replaced by questions on the availability of tools and best practices for implementing CD.  Several DevOps experts and practitioners in 2016 weighed in on the growing availability of DevOps tools and the lessons to be learned for organizations that have not only dipped their toes in the DevOps world but have achieved large-scale digital transformation.

Here are TechBeacon’s top 10 DevOps stories of 2016.

6 top open-source testing automation frameworks: How to choose

Several perfectly viable open source test automation frameworks are available, so why build your own? Tools like Serenity, RedwoodHQ, Sahi and Gauge can help make your test automation code reusable, maintainable and stable. Be sure to consider these open source frameworks and libraries before needlessly venturing out on your own. TestTalks' Joe Colantonio lists six of the best options.

One year using Kubernetes in production: Lessons learned

Containers and container orchestration tools are great for speeding application delivery and automating the deployment pipeline. But many organizations haven't quite bought into the production readiness of these technologies yet. Paul Bakker, software architect at Luminis Technologies, shares the lessons his organization learned, sometimes the hard way, from using the Kubernetes container cluster management tool in production for one year.

7 steps to choosing the right DevOps tools

There’s a lot to consider if you are planning on adopting DevOps practices in your organization. Automated provisioning, testing, building and deployment are just  a few of the moving parts to consider. For DevOps to work, you need to enable continuous feedback and have he capability to continuously log everything that’s moving back and forth across your development environment. Cloud computing guru David Linthicum draws up on his consulting practice experience to share tips on how to choose the right tools.

Going big with DevOps: How to scale for continuous delivery success

The best way to scale adoption of DevOps practices is to create “pockets of greatness” within your organization to demonstrate the value and the benefits of continuous delivery. Large-scale DevOps transformation doesn’t happen overnight. It takes the right team, the right architecture, and demonstrable success within the current environment. The Phoenix Project author and DevOps Enterprise Summit organizer Gene Kim describes the adoption patterns associated with successful DevOps transformations.

Back to waterfall: When agile and DevOps don't work well 

DevOps may be a game-changer within many organizations, but it is definitely not for everyone. Contrary to what some people might believe, there are situations where the waterfall approach to software development works better. Older systems, such as those based on ISAM and COBOL, and projects involving system design and planning, are arguably the worst fits for DevOps methods. David Linthicum explains why.

What we learned from 3 years of sciencing the crap out of DevOps

Improved stability and throughput are only two of the positive consequences of embracing DevOps principles. Data from an annual survey of DevOps practices that Puppet Labs has been conducting over the last three years shows that continuous delivery improves organizational performance and IT while making life better for technical teams. Nicole Forsgren, CEO and Chief Scientist of DevOps Research and Assessment, explains.

The best open-source DevOps security tools, and how to use them

Nearly 75% of companies will have adopted DevOps by the end of 2016. If your company is one of them, what are you doing about improving code security? Do you have a process for managing the software supply chain, and verifying the security of commonly used components and frameworks? What about vulnerability scanning? Have you automated that process? Robert Lemos rounds up tips on the processes and the tools that can help secure your DevOps environment.

Containers reality check: Why they're still not production-ready

So you’ve been playing with containers for some time now and figure you are ready to use it in a production environment? You might want to reconsider. Just because more organizations are adopting container faster than ever doesn’t mean that the technology is ready for prime time. There are several security, scalability and manageability issues that need to be addressed before containers can become fully mainstream, says 451 Group analyst Jay Lyman.

Containers 2.0: Why unikernels will rock the cloud

Cloud orchestration tools such as OpenStack and CloudStack have enabled organizations to more successfully harness benefits of cloud computing, including infrastructure flexibility and scalability. But little has changed with the nature of workloads in the cloud. They look exactly like the machine images in on-premise systems in traditional data centers. Open source evangelist Russell Pavlicek explains how Unikernels can improve cloud services agility by supporting the implementation of smaller, faster and more secure workloads.

43 free and open-source tools that put the Ops in DevOps

It’s not enough to only have build and developer tools if you want to deploy a full DevOps pipeline: You also need tools that let you create and administer the DevOps production environment. You need tools for configuration management, log management, deployment, monitoring, measurement, and environment management. Excelon Development's Matthew Heusser lists 43 open-source tools that can help you do all this and more, for free.

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