Insights Success Recognition of Excellence in Devops 2018

www.insightssuccess.com JUNE 2018

Editorial Talk DevOps - Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops

Agri-Tech The Impressive Impact of Organic Networking

Insights Success Recognition of Excellence in

DevOps 2018

Jarrod Levitan CEO & Co-founder

Igniting Inď€ nite Potential for Growth & Innovation

DevOps: The Collaboration with Innite Possibilities

T

en years ago, the software development teams could be roughly divided into developers — people who knew how to write code, and operations. For those who still wonder — who on earth are those operations; they are administrators — system admins, network admins, database admins, and all other people who know the infrastructure.

Hence, the operations were inclined towards keeping things stable and sustainable to minimize the chance of software conflicts. While developers were mostly cared about new features, new versions, and bug fixes. The main problem with all the above was the lack of co-operation and communication, which most of times resulted in slow delivery of software.

DevOps is a methodology that bridged this gap. The unique concept created a new mindset of combining developers and operations to achieve a common goal in desired time. Leveraging some innovative approaches the DevOps professionals ensure the software quality and real-time support.

Infrastructure as code is an approach when servers can be configured automatically. The idea here is to imagine server infrastructure more like an abstract concept. It's easy enough as a lot of today’s servers are cloud-based. Next step is to simply describe the configuration of servers in a configuration file. As all the configurations are documented with the same code a company can configure any number of servers with an unmatched speed Microservice architecture is an approach in software development when the application is divided into loosely coupled parts. Imagine you have a modern social media messaging app with chats, stories, voice calls, bots and so on. All these can be developed like independent mini applications. This approach makes it easier to maintain, test, and reuse parts of the application.

Furthermore DevOps strives to automate the development process which is continued demand of modern insanely fast operating software development industry.

The deployment of DevOps entirely depends on the scale of the project. If your software has already reached several releases, and it’s essential for the company to start thinking about scale and competitiveness then DevOps is the best option for you.

Although it takes more time to set up DevOps environment from a scratch, for long term perspectives it is remarkably beneficial. Employing DevOps simply enable users receive new features and updates frequently. As the company receives new features and bug fixes more often it becomes easier for them to dominate the market. The system minimizes the chances of outrages. Even when the outrages do happen, everything can be fixed in a matter of minutes or with a single refresh.

If the concept is revolutionizing the software industry and transforming businesses with its emergence, it becomes prerequisite for business magazine like us to admire its presence and some of the facilitators.

Thus, in the issue of Insights Success Recognition of Excellence in DevOps 2018, we have enlisted some of the outstanding DevOps providers which have crafted several innovative solutions that created fruitful grounds of scalable growth for its clients.

Featuring as a cover story we have TriNimbus, a leading DevOps service provider and an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. With a focus on fostering education both internally and externally, TriNimbus hosts AWS User Groups across Canada bringing together members building the AWS community in nine cities.

The issue also features Apiumhub, the software development company, mainly offering services of mobile app development, web development & software architecture; Testim.io, a company which builds software that helps businesses automatically test their websites; PinnacleQM is a specialist in providing Quality Management Consultancy, Solutions and Services across the Full IT Delivery Life Cycle and Nordcloud which is a leader in public hyperscale cloud services inclusive of infrastructure and cloud native application, across Europe.

Also don't forget to flip through some of the insightful articles written by industry leaders and our inhouse editorial team.

Let's explore the DevOps capabilities, shall we?

Kedar Kulkarni

CONTENTS

Igniting Innite Potential for Growth & Innovation

08

Jarrod Levitan CEO & Co-founder

Articles 22

30

40

Editorial Talk

Editor’s pick

Agri-Tech

DevOps - Bridging the Gap between Dev and Ops

Software: As open Source or as Convenient Service

The Impressive Impact of Organic Networking

16 Leader’s Insights EnticingDevelopments: Moment Marketing Makes Its Mark on B2B Events in 2018

26 Expert’s Opinion DevOps Industry: Trends and Challenges

34 Tech Revolution Putting the Sec in DevOps with Automated Tools

44 Industry Info A Strategic Approach to Implementing Continuous Testing Across the Enterprise

20 Apiumhub: Redefining Innovation in Technology

28 Nordcloud: Delivering All-Inclusive Cloud Services across Europe

36 PinnacleQM: Delivering Revolutionary DevOps Solutions

38 Testim: The Ultimate AI Test Automation Platform

Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Executive Editors Assistant Editors Contributing Editors Visualiser Art & Design Director Associate Designer Co-designer

Pooja M. Bansal Anish Miller Abhishaj Sajeev Jenny Fernandes Kaustav roy Kedar kulkarni Bhushan kadam David King Amol Kamble Shubham Mahadik Poonam Mahajan

Art & Picture Editor Paul Belin Jayant Khanna Senior Sales Manager Passi D. Business Development Manager Peter Collins Marketing Manager John Matthew Business Development Executives Steve, Joe, Alan, Anup Sales Executives David, Kevin, Mark, Avdoot Technical Head Jacob Smile Technical Specialist Amar, Pratiksha Digital Marketing Manager Marry D’Souza Online Marketing Strategist Alina Sege, Shubham, Vaibhav K SME-SMO Executives Prashant Chevale, Uma Dhenge, Gemson, Irfan Research Analyst Chidiebere Moses Circulation Manager Robert, Tanaji Database Management Stella Andrew Technology Consultant David Stokes sales@insightssuccess.com

June, 2018 Corporate Ofces: Insights Success Media Tech LLC 555 Metro Place North, Suite 100, Dublin, OH 43017, United States Phone - (614)-602-1754 Email: info@insightssuccess.com For Subscription: www.insightssuccess.com

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Cover Story

Jarrod Levitan CEO & Co-founder

Igniting Innite Potential for Growth & Innovation

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‘

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Let your journey to the cloud begin with us.

ith the advent of new software engineering cultures such as DevOps, cloud usage is growing rapidly. Organizations are increasingly seeking to adopt the cloud to accelerate their business success. Although cloud tech and DevOps are independent, together they can be opted as vital ways through which companies can achieve their digital transformation goals.

Additionally, companies are also keen on focusing on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and identifying the opportunity for AWS and DevOps. A company named TriNimbus was established to fill this void.

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Pankaj is an active investor in Canadian, US, and Indian start-ups and private technology companies, and serves on the boards of a number of companies including Science World and British Columbia Technology Industry Association (BCTIA). Goran is a professional software engineer with close to 20 years of experience in building products and solutions in all major technologies and platforms for desktop, client-server, and web development.

All three of the torchbearers have ensured that TriNimbus didn’t have to start from scratch. They bootstrapped the company and TriNimbus was born in the cloud.

A Renowned Service Provider

Jarrod has been awarded the title of AWS Community Hero

by AWS, one of a selected group of people who have evangelized the cloud and AWS. Aligned with Jarrod’s ability to be ahead of the time, today TriNimbus is also focusing on new and emerging technologies such as Big Data and containers to deliver better business outcomes for clients.

TriNimbus is a leading DevOps service provider and an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. Its team’s core focus is on AWS and its surrounding ecosystem to support customers who are using the cloud to improve their technical environment and operations to improve business outcomes. The company combines its software engineering background with 24/7 operational support.

TriNimbus customers can successfully increase their agility and availability, tighten security, optimize performance, automate deployments, and manage costs. With a focus on fostering education both internally and externally, TriNimbus hosts AWS User Groups across Canada bringing together members building the AWS community in nine cities.

TriNimbus was born in the cloud, but it grew up in Canada, with coverage coast to coast in both of the country’s official languages, and a reach that extends across the globe. The team at TriNimbus is passionate about technology and cloud, and it comes through in everything it does.

A Luminary Leader and the Two Pillars Jarrod Levitan, the CEO, has always subscribed to two tenets when building a business: don’t push a rock up a hill and don’t start from scratch. He has been working in the technology industry for over 15 years. He is an experienced entrepreneur and enterprise application provider who applies technology through a practical business lens.

During the time of its inception, Jarrod identified the opportunity for TriNimbus to focus on AWS in Canada. As there were no partners in Canada that understood AWS, the opportunity for TriNimbus was huge and he had a big partner to lean on. It was essential to establish a great relationship with AWS to get TriNimbus off the ground.

This was made possible through the hard work and perseverance of Jarrod, Goran Kimovski, CTO and co-founder, Pankaj Agarwal, Executive Director and co-founder.

Streamlining Complexities TriNimbus understands the complexities that accompany cloud migrations, hence it offers services to help streamline the process and educate its clients on best practices. The company’s solutions and managed services accelerate the cloud-value journey taken by its clients and create outcomes that transform their business.

The wide range of its solutions include DevOps, Cloud Solution Architecture, Infrastructure Optimization, Automation, Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD), Security Assessments, Migration, Big Data, and Disaster Recovery.

TriNimbus also offers the next generation of managed services which are evolving and moving to work with applications and code. It includes DevSecOps, Cost Optimization, and DevOps Enablement.

As the customer environment is all about the code or infrastructure-as-code, TriNimbus assists its customers to automate some of their infrastructure, which sets them free to focus more on outcome based efforts.

A Prominent Outlook TriNimbus prides itself on every client success and is passionate about the transformations it sees in the businesses it works with. For every customer, from small businesses to government organizations to large enterprises, the company brings three pieces to the table: its expertise, its real-world experience, and technologies that transform its customers’ businesses.

born in the

Cloud Company and has a

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‘

‘

TriNimbus is a

cloud-first philosophy.

Together, these three pieces help TriNimbus to ignite the potential for innovation and growth for its customers, as they discover the possibilities in the cloud. Serving customers and making them successful for long term is at the core of the company’s processes. The team at TriNimbus is comprised of senior-level experts in software development with deep and extensive AWS expertise.

The company works hard to drive ROI for its customers and help them find ways to save resources and time while enhancing security and efficiencies. This facilitates their explosive and meaningful growth. TriNimbus has earned its reputation within the industry as a go-to resource for companies at every stage of the cloud journey.

Its capabilities touch every element and facet of cloud migration, from planning to optimization.

Strategic Capabilities TriNimbus has a unique depth of knowledge and real-world experience with transformative technologies. The company has a firm understanding of the challenges that come with migrating big data, including infrastructure provisioning, cluster management, performance, configuration management, and data durability with positive business outcomes for its customers. It is well versed in helping its clients to navigate services such as Amazon RDS, Amazon Elastic MapReduce, Amazon Data Pipeline, Amazon Kinesis, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon Redshift as well as Hadoop and other SQL or NoSQL databases. It also implements third party tools for deploying and managing solutions to automate deployments and implement DevOps processes for ongoing management.

TriNimbus is a specialist in mobilizing and implementing AWS and its ecosystem of security features. With the deep AWS security knowledge required to get companies set up properly, it offers an in-depth analysis and understanding of the applications and workloads required to run alongside existing company policies.

TriNimbus has successfully completed complex AWS architectures and implementations across multiple verticals.

It has also navigated the complexities of public-private partnerships, and has a strong working understanding of data residency. Its expertise in software engineering enables it to aid architects by deploying a serverless solution, and making recommendations on how to account for data ingestion, databases, and API gateways.

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Ignite infinite potential for

growth and innovation.

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The company builds containerized platforms and workflows using state of the art orchestration and runtime technologies. By doing so, it assists in the migration of existing VM-based build pipelines to container-based platforms.

projects, internal as well as external communications, etc.

But having a strong leadership team, honest communication, and a clear vision for growth helped the company to steer towards the success.

Steering Towards Success A Vision to Ascend New Heights In Canada, convincing some organizations, especially those in the public sector or large enterprises, to adopt the cloud is a challenging task. Hence, keeping pace with technology innovation and staying ahead of the curve with innovative new services and solutions is essential for every organization looking for a competitive edge. In TriNimbus’ perception, organizations should be more adaptable to change and be open to learn at breakneck speeds to better serve their own customers.

However, in the case of burgeoning companies, TriNimbus faced the typical challenges that come with rapid growth like resourcing, creating and setting up new systems around

According to Jarrod, “cloud technology is not yet a fully mature market. It has been observed that more companies are moving and adopting cloud technology each year.” This ultimately results in growth for TriNimbus, as the company brings on new clients and helps its current clients to achieve more with the Cloud.

TriNimbus will continue to innovate and reach for new heights to better serve its customers. It is incessantly striving to unveil new possibilities in the cloud to create unparalleled business outcomes and long-term success for its customers.

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Company Name

Management

Brief

Apiumhub apiumhub.com

Evgeny Predein Co-founder & CEO Christian Ciceri Co-founder & Software Architect

Apiumhub is the software development company, mainly offering services of mobile app development, web development & software architecture.

Edelman edelman.com

Richard Edelman President & CEO

Edelman is a global communications marketing firm that partners with the world’s leading businesses and organizations to evolve, promote and protect their brands and reputations.

Javier D’Ovidio Co-founder & Director of Operations

Edrans is an IT Service and Consulting provider based in Argentina delivering services to global audiences.

HATech hatech.io

Tabatha Wearing Co-founder & Customer Success Manager

HATech LLC is an AWS Consulting Partner, with specialist AWS certifications in Serverless Cloud Applications and DevOps.

Nordcloud nordcloud.com

Jan Kritz CEO

Nordcloud is a leader in public hyperscale cloud services inclusive of infrastructure and cloud native application, across Europe.

PinnacleQM pinnacleqm.com

Ian Charlton Co-founder & Director Gary Jenn Co-founder & Managing Director

PinnacleQM is a specialist in providing Quality Management Consultancy, Solutions and Services across the Full IT Delivery Life Cycle.

Spotinst spotinst.com

Amiram Shachar Founder & CEO

Spotinst’s Elastigroup Platform is a SaaS based EC2 management solution that delivers cloud efficiences never before achieved.

Testim testim.io

Oren Rubin Founder & CEO

Testim.io is a company which builds software that helps businesses automatically test their websites.

TriNimbus trinimbus.com

Jarrod Levitan CEO

TriNimbus is a leading DevOps service provider and an AWS Premier Consulting Partner.

Tripwire tripwire.com

Ray Lapena PR Manager

Tripwire, Inc. is a software company based in Portland, Oregon that develops, markets and sells information technology for security and compliance automation.

Edrans edrans.com

Leader’s Insights

Enticing Developments: Moment Marketing Makes Its Mark on B2B Events in 2018

Alon Alroy Co-founder

Bizzabo

16

June 2018

About the Author Alon Alroy is the Co-founder of Bizzabo, the world’s fastest growing event technology platform. Bizzabo is helping marketers and event organizers from leading brands to promote, manage and maximize their professional events, to create memorable and impactful experiences. Alon has built Bizzabo’s business operations from the ground up and is now spearheading its marketing and customer success teams. Alon began his career at the Israeli Air Force, where was served as a team commander for six years.

A

s the working world is inundated by technology and data, professionals are buried in a sea of email messaging, mobile messaging, advertising, social media, content, and more to stay connected with industry news and prospective clients. To cut through the noise, marketers have been shifting more and more dollars to investing in offline events.

One trend that is quickly evolving into a fully-fledged event marketing strategy is “Moment Marketing.”

Today, we now turn to our mobile devices to take immediate actions on the products and experiences we want. Google argues that we are not loyal to brands, but in fact to moments. A moment when we strongly want something has more weight than any type of influence brands try to exercise with traditional marketing campaigns.

Moment Marketing capitalizes on having just the right message at just the right moment. While it appears to be magically spontaneous, and sometimes it is, most often it’s planned by marketers well in advance. This “magic” and “spontaneity” yield great viral potential that drives activations and other desired actions among our audiences.

Here’s how moment marketing is shaping professional event planning this year: Making Events “Moment” Ready

Google first introduced micro-moments in 2015: “They’re the moments when we turn to a device — often a smartphone — to take action on whatever we need or want right now. These I-want-to- know, Iwant-to-go, I-want-to-buy and I-want-to-do moments are loaded with intent, context, and immediacy.”

June 2018

Executing on moment-ready events involves a great deal of agility and flexibility in your team: Ÿ

Take Advantage of ‘Today’ and ‘Tonight’ Searches: over the past two years, travel-related searches for “tonight” and “today” have grown over 150% on

17

mobile. Events happening at a destination today or tonight can appeal to these last-minute event seekers. Ÿ

The Art of Newsjacking and How It Can Grow Your Event: it’s all about getting noticed at the right time and context. Newsjacking is the perfect combination of a timely occurrence, a branded opportunity, and the right social media platform to get your event noticed. Be ready monitoring social media 24/7 and able to respond a concise message. Any delay in posting and the optimum moment may already have passed.

Using Moment Marketing During an Event Inflating fear of missing out (FOMO) to epic proportions for those attending and not attending the event will provide a more engaging experience: Ÿ

Social-Media-Worthy Moments: use props, interesting backdrops, special effects, confetti anything that will get your audience excited.

Ÿ

Feature Special Guests: create exclusive content by giving sneak peeks and previews from the backstage areas. Showing glimpses only accessible with VIP passes can capture the imagination of your guests.

Ÿ

Make Your Event Unforgettable: the most unforgettable moments are not always the biggest budget. One stand out moment from a corporate retreat was when the company C-suite was there to shake their hands and bid them farewell at the airport before their flight. It cost nothing and makes a big impression on each attendee, showing them how valuable they are to senior management.

After the Event, Leveraging Moment Marketing to Make Them Come Back Even after the event is over, Moment Marketing will keep your attendees loyal and eager to return for the next event: Ÿ

behavior is emerging as a trend in events too.

Impatience, immediate action, instant gratification, impulsiveness - behavior we can identify today.

Constant FOMO, combined with an ever-growing all you can eat buffet of desirable content are two of the main drivers of this behavior. Ÿ

The Art of Follow Up: you want the hype to continue after the event, and to keep conversations and positive feelings on a high. This can be a great opportunity for early ticket sales for next year’s event to generate some early cash flow based on attendee trust and excitement, even before the program and finer details have been released. Share a short highlights video capturing the best bits of the event, publish pictures of the speakers with key quotes from their presentations, and encourage attendees to share their best memories and learnings.

Conclusion Moment Marketing is challenging traditional marketing boundaries to move the attention directly into the moment when our prospective attendees will feel the need to attend, and capitalizes on the need and the drive to satisfy that need immediately. It uses offline experience to drive and trigger online interaction, and connects an audience to a brand as if they were all sitting together in the same room. Yet, to do it successfully, events must perfectly align the content and the context, and be ready with lightning quick reactions, which is not always an easy thing to do.

We are just at the beginning of the Moment Marketing revolution. As tech giants further integrate technology capable of instantly satisfying many of our needs and wants, creating impactful moments will become more and more important.

It’s time to explore and embrace this trend as you look towards the future of your events and marketing strategy going forward.

Take Advantage of Binge Attending: the new way to consume content is to binge. This is a familiar concept with TV shows and movies but the same

18

June 2018

PinnacleQM: Delivering Revolutionary DevOps Solutions

T

raditional software automation and integration in DevOps is overly time-consuming. The prolonged and expensive effort in creating & maintaining automation, constrains organizations. PinnacleQM eliminates these limitations to enable a bright and robust DevOps future for its clients.

PinnacleQM, a leader in Quality Management, Test Consultancy and Services, uses its significant international client delivery experience, and networks of specialists to transform the way change is delivered within organizations. PinnacleQM’s leading Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Automation, and industry recognized Agile solutions support any technology across all industries. Its envisions localized Quality Management teams scaled by technology and platforms that drive coverage and rapid release of IT change. PinnacleQM has enabled clients spanning various industries with collaborative solutions and DevOps delivery services focusing on quality outcomes and compelling cost savings.

Voyage for Progress PinnacleQM, was founded in February 2014 by Gary Jenn and Ian Charlton: two passionate Quality Management and Test Services professionals, each with over 28 years’ experience across international industries. Their visionary leadership created a dynamic business,

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specifically tailored for Agile and DevOps delivery models.

[Charlton, “Customers often blindly follow the crowd in perceived DevOps vision, tools and solutions available. In a race to embrace a DevOps journey, they often fail to understand significant changes required of their organizations. Following ill-informed views of DevOps, taking on significant technical automation coding debt (many times larger than the code used in the systems under test)”.]

PinnacleQM continues to focus upon putting its customers first, enabling efficient and scalable DevOps delivery services.

[Jenn, “PinnacleQM aims to be the best at what it does, satisfied clients DevOps journey needs using innovation and technology to scale and overachieve outcomes. We could offer delivery models using large delivery teams, typically found in the market today. But we choose to offer customers scalable value, innovation and collaborative solutions”.]

Innovative Services Enabling business and cultural shifts with a clear roadmap of the DevOps journey and Goals is a critical first step in business planning. PinnacleQM provides Strategy and Advisory services, utilizing leading industry experts from the US, Europe and

APAC. Its ‘inSight’ methodology delivers Assessment Services which provide comprehensive and independent views of a client’s software development life cycle. These methodologies define client transformation strategies and roadmaps for the desired vision at a pace suitable for each client.

Sustaining and efficiently scaling DevOps is the next focus, leveraging leading technologies and innovation to drive scale and capacity regardless of the system technology landscape.

PinnacleQM Delivery Services enable and support customers on their day-today delivery journeys. These include Agile and DevOps coaching and leadership to drive delivery outcomes via test automation services, and platforms as a service.

Overcoming Challenges Development-led Quality Management and Testing used to get changes into production quickly, but failures have a severe impact on quality, usability and end-user perception. PinnacleQM believes that the inclusion of business users and customer experience is more important to ensure the value of the change made, over how quickly the change can be made.

[Charlton, “We are seeing trends in high profile production outages and significant impacts to the end customer”. As ‘end customers’ we have

June 2018

to question the benefit of companies making change for changes sake?”]

[Jenn adds: “Change is only welcomed and valued by end users if there is tangible or at least a perceived improvement. For ‘end customers’ constant system updates often feels like a death from a thousand paper cuts”.]

PinnacleQM works with many DevOps teams, the continuous build and integration task has taken teams onto a path where open source and freeware tools are seen to be the only viable and cost-effective solution. Often, integration, support, configuration, and effort to code and maintain many of these products is more costly than mainstream vendor products.

PinnacleQM intends to continue to innovate to overcome these constraints and provides a more effective solution to the wider industries in which it serves.

Admirable Uniqueness PinnacleQM focuses upon driving DevOps efficiency with smarter automation and improved cross team collaboration overcoming the challenges of ‘me too DevOps’.

PinnacleQM’s Automation Services utilize leading AI and Machine Learning technologies that use natural language manual test scripts, that support any technology and any test type. Tests are uploaded and automatically executed by the AI automation platform.

PinnacleQM utilizes technology platforms to scale test execution capacity and can execute any number of tests within a defined 24/7 period making daily releases consisting of all test types an achievable outcome.

Beholding the Progressive Future PinnacleQM’s AI and Machine Learning solution ‘Enginuity’ is building its own test scripts for client migration projects, and the cognitive calculations engine is updating test data including all the calculations at June 2018

Gary Jenn Ian Charlton

Co-founder & Managing Director

Co-founder & Director

run-time. ‘Authorised’ is driving Acceptance Driven delivery and certification with automated execution and evidence capabilities for businessdriven change. PinnacleQM is extending its reach and support to the business by providing business process automation services using its ‘Aurora’ RPA service solution. Aurora, automates end-to-end business processes regardless of technology or interface.

With collaboration, transparency, and flexibility at the forefront of its DevOps solutions, PinnacleQM is already at the next generation of DevOps, shifting the balance of power from development and technical code, back to more collaborative, shared set of skills.

[Jenn, “Current models of development-focused delivery solutions do not enable collaboration, alienating business and non-technical teams.

They fail to provide transparency and clarity in coverage and impact of change. PinnacleQM aims to change and significantly improve these impediments”.]

Enabling customers to deliver more change, rapidly with condence, for less.

headquarters to the wider APAC region with new offices and customers.

PinnacleQM’s customers benefit by its motive of driving efficient, good quality outcomes that save the customers’ time, effort and cost. The company continues to bestow the Finance Sector, Transportation and Smarter Cities, Autonomous Vehicles along with Energy and Utilities with admirable Digital Transformation and DevOps services.

As a young and innovative company, PinnacleQM is pro-actively growing its partner ecosystem and client base.

Branching out from its Australian 21

Editorial Talk

Bridging the Gap between F

or centuries, humans have had a propensity to pit two or more teams with distinctive functionalities against each other – even when they are on the same team. This dynamic can be witnessed even in traditional business enterprises, between software developers and operational staffers.

The rivalry between Dev and Ops has been prevalent for decades causing one of the most prominent challenges for organizations to manage their IT capabilities. Overcoming from this rift and identifying each other as partners rather than rivals, can be crucial for a business to attain success.

But due to opposing priorities, a friction gets created when they are combined, making it even harder for dev and ops to communicate in an efficient manner.

Conflict between Development and Operations Although there isn’t any doubt concerning the various technical as well as business advantages that an organization can reap upon combining Dev and Ops, but they comprise of entirely unique goals, metrics, and approaches.

Development primarily lays focus on producing new systems and applications and ensures that customers get to use the same as fast as possible. On the contrary, operations look from a different aspect altogether; wherein they primarily focus on ensuring a speedy and bug-free stable system.

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Additionally, both dev and ops strive towards achieving a similar goal of making their customers feel happy and satisfied, yet they utilize completely contradicting approaches to reach that purpose. On one hand, development aspires to impress its customers with their new enhancements. Whereas on the other hand, the operational team wants its customer base to use a stable and tested system – free from bugs and operability inconveniences.

The Battle Scenario – Before and After the Advent of DevOps Before DevOps came onto the scene, both Development and Operations worked in an isolated manner. The only time they crossed-paths were during the release phase. The development team, already notified about the release date, intended to interject some new and additional features before the time of release. Whereas the operational team knew from beforehand whether the current release version had any new or additional features interjected. This way, before deploying the release to the customer’s site, the Ops team performed rigorous testing to be satisfied with its stability and operability and only then permitted its deployment.

The arrival of DevOps and its rise in adoption led to a paradigm shift from this culture. Developers now no longer need to wait for a release date to bring-forward new and enhanced features. Instead, they have the capability to release new features on a regular basis by using the concept

June 2018

of Continuous Integration and Delivery. This has prompted developers to emphasize that the operation team must manage this regular flow of new features imperatively before it gets deployed to the customer’s site. But this approach gave rise to a new problem, as Ops have to deal with a pipeline of releases at a regular interval due to this.

They now need to be extremely attentive and careful about the quality testing of the systems as the deployed builds on the customer site may or may not be entirely free from bugs.

The Resolution The most feasible and obvious solution to this opposing friction is the synchronization between Dev and Ops, popularly termed as DevOps. Coined by Patrick Debois, known as “the father of DevOps,” DevOps is an operational philosophy that helps to bridge the gap between Development and Operations by emphasizing upon integration, collaboration, and communication.

It is the most salient methodology through which an organization can check and assure a balance between development and quality. In order to reach an equilibrium point in this resolution, both Dev and Ops need to embrace the DevOps methodologies by modifying their outlook and their way of working, as follows: From the Operations Perspective Extensive monitoring of all running environments such as

June 2018

staging or production, so as to react and prevent any issues from cropping up and spreading, respectively.

Operations need to be much more flexible in their approach in accepting regular or frequent changes.

Operations should facilitate an effective and healthy collaboration with the Development team.

From the Development Perspective Ÿ Sound engagement needs to be performed to assess the quality metrics that Ops emphasizes on, to track customer production systems and quality. Ÿ Dev need to be more involved with the testing of their own code in the production phase instead of leaving out from the field after writing the system or application code. Ÿ Developers should facilitate an effective and healthy collaboration with the Operations team.

Hence, it can be safely exclaimed that both Dev and Ops team need to change substantially in their functioning and outlook to successfully adopt the DevOps methodology.

Adapting to DevOps culture is by no means a silver bullet, as it brings with itself a considerable amount of changes.

But upon successful communication between developers and operators, an organization will be able to reap significant advantages through the same. The battle between Dev and Ops may continue for years, but DevOps has the distinct capability to bridge the gap between the two.

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Expert’s Opinion

DevOps Industry: Trends and Challenges Dave Garcia VP of Engineering

TravelPerk

W

ith the rise of the Internet economy, the release cycle for Internet products has become a major issue.

What was once month or week-long cycles, is now days or hours.

It’s an ever changing market where customers shape products with their reviews and suggestions. The proliferation of the agile mindset means product teams need to be able to use tools and techniques to push changes to their systems in a near immediate time frame, while maintaining the quality.

This phenomenon is defined by some people as “painting a car while you drive 200 MPH in the wrong lane.”

That’s the kind of pressure today’s Internet companies are working with,

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but luckily the way systems are built and operated has also evolved.

Agile methodologies were key in unlocking a team’s performance to be able to cope with this changing environment, as opposed to the old fashioned waterfall methodologies which were more suited to static requirements.

When it comes to systems operations (which is now known as “DevOps”), a lot of new topics have appeared in the last few years, like cloud computing (I still remember when it was new), CI, CD, Blue Green / Canary deployment, Docker, Kubernetes and the list goes on.

All those tend to empower the developer, reducing the time and

differences from the developer’s box to production, removing all the inefficiencies the old ways of operating created by siloing responsibilities and not having endto-end ownership of the service.

Nowadays most efficient teams follow the “you build it, you run it” moto where developers own the full stack and operate it as a system instead of just writing code, reducing development cycles and consolidating ownership of the operations with the knowledge of the creators.

Here at Travelperk, we started with a simple CI (continuous integration) pipeline, deploying to a magical hosting platform with a manual process deploy.

June 2018

About the Author Dave Garcia, VP of Engineering at TravelPerk. He has resourceful experience of 11 years in creating solid and creative startup companies with small but versatile teams and with a very strong culture. Prior to TravelPerk he has been a Tribe Engineering Lead at Skyscanner and a CTO of a Fintech company that brought the real paperless instant credit to Spain, that is combining A.I., Big Data, Mathematical models and the best technology to build an awesome product.

That was simple and worked, but the problems that come with it force you to release less often, making more stressful releases as they include more changes. When something goes wrong, it’s harder to know what it is (“it works on my machine!”) and then during the CI phase (when you put it all together and test if it’s going to work or not) there aren’t as many things you can test: like lack of proper browser testing or versions of the database for composing different systems, allowing you to have an environment that is as close as possible to production.

We moved our CI to Code ship; it allows several containers to run parallel, taking less time and allows mimicking production by utilizing a hosted CI process – i.e. you pay somebody else to make sure your building process works, so you can concentrate on building your product.

Our production environment was moved to AWS where you have plenty of rock solid, internet scale services available to deploy your infrastructure – requiring higher domain knowledge (like some proficiency in EC2, RDS, etc.), but giving you more control and information about your systems.

June 2018

Also we moved to continuous deployment, meaning every time a developer creates a pull request, and after one gets approved by another developer, this code is built, tested and deployed without any human intervention. This may sound scary at the beginning, but it forces you to put the proper measures in place: proper testing, good metrics, automatic deployment and rollback mechanisms – and the best of all, it can be in front of customers in just a fraction of the time.

Last but not least, we moved to the end-to-end ownership model. Teams called “squads” (we share the Spotify model) own the full lifecycle of a set of services.

This means that they’re responsible for keeping the lights on, evolving the product and making sure everything works as expected.

All of this together, paired with the fact that we have an amazing group of professionals, made us capable of creating a multi-vertical, world-class Business Online Travel Agency, evolving it and operating it with a team of 20 engineers.

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Apiumhub: Redefining Innovation in Technology

T

he IT Industry is facing a lot of inefficiencies such as missing deadlines of projects, lagging quality of application development projects, outages, cost variance, etc.

Enterprises are looking for methodology that demands faster timeto-market and robust software quality.

This has emerged the need for DevOps, an approach that ensures quality and deliverables. It has resulted in increasing deployment activities, by reducing the barrier between development and operations. During this period, a software development company named Apiumhub entered into market to redefine innovation in technology.

Apiumhub has grown as a tech hub that brings together a community of developers, software architects, DevOps experts and digital partners. It provides enterprises with the best team to help them transform their idea into a powerful and scalable digital product.

Unique Assistances IT Market is an on-going process and Apiumhub always adapts to the technological market changes and client’s needs. At present its main services include software architecture,

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web development, mobile development and DevOps. Lately it has started receiving a lot of projects related to AI and chat bots. Powerful software architecture, focusing on scalability, cost reduction and high performances are the aspects that make it unique in the market. The company is expert in Domain Drive design (DDD), Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI), Docker and agile project management, as this is basically what it is known for.

A Combination of a Tech-gurus and Business Developers Evgeny Predein, CEO and Co-founder, and Christian Ciceri, Software Architect and Co-founder, are the pillars of Apiumhub. Altogether their achievement comprises of acquiring a team of leading developers and architects in Barcelona, efficient processes and project management, clients from all over the world, clear strategic vision for growth, network of experts in their field, segregated areas of responsibilities, and a profitable business.

Evgeny and Christian are responsible for different areas of the company. The company considers them as makers &

sellers, and dreamers & pragmatists, as they have a complementary set of skills that enhance their sustainable growth..

Christian is a tech guru and wellknown software architect, whereas Evgeny is a business development leader and an entrepreneur who led his vision to the market. They both have enormously contributed for the sustainable growth of the company.

Sharing the same vision and common objectives, they lead the team to a common goal and transmit the same culture they want to create in the company.

Unique Approach to Deliver Better Solutions The key attributes that differentiate Apiumhub in the market areŸ Focused attention to Software architecture so the platform is prepared for scaling Ÿ Innovation in process automation, so there is reduced waste of time on manual tasks Ÿ Efficiently functioning software loaded with a number of features Apiumhub has a proven process that works. It starts building software with a focus on the architecture, applying best practices, and TDD & CI. This

June 2018

enables it to be truly agile, deliver fast and iterate even faster. It is able to adapt to all sorts of changes and requirements from the client’s side.

Starting from the beginning of the development process, it always gives client the opportunity to test the platform.

Keeping the client in the center of the process, Apiumhub works with full transparency. Instead of focusing on delivering the highest amount of features, it rather guarantees to deliver working software with the most important features at the end of each sprint.

Unfortunately, there are not many companies that are specialized in software architecture and DevOps. Apiumhub has talents that are experts in their field and work for booming startups & leading international companies. Thus, the clients receive functioning software using latest technologies and methodologies.

Turning Obstacles into Accomplishments It all started with a small group of experts in software and user experience, joining forces and sharing the same vision, putting agile methodologies in the center of all processes. Over the years, the more experience Apiumhub has acquired working on design & development projects, the more it made sense to separate them.

A common error committed by many business owners is to try to do everything themselves. They often end up doing too much but not being experts in anything. Due to this, Apiumhub decided to focus on its core

June 2018

Christian Ciceri Evgeny Predein

Software Architect & Co-founder

CEO & Co-founder

services and launch a spinoff studio specialized in digital product’North’.

After doing some research, talking to clients and friends in the industry, the company realized that in order to offer the best solutions, it needs to create the network of experts in the digital industry with each one specialized in their own field.

Now considered a tech-focus, Apiumhub is more than just a software development company that unifies innovation, design & technology. It covers the whole cycle of digital product development by collaborating with different partner.

Striving to Make a Difference

We are a tech hub that reunites innovation, design & technology.

scalability problem in software development market. Additionally, it intends to develop its own software product that will make a difference in this world.

With an aim of becoming prominent in Spain, Apiumhub wants to be known for building proficient software. The company is planning to grow in terms of number of people and their professional level.

It is planning to open Apiumhub University to solve the talent

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Editor’s Pick

SOFTWARE:

As open Source or as Convenient Service

T

echnology is trying to overhaul the old school methodologies of business from a long time now. Technology has leaped a high jump in the past decade, providing humans with easy and fast ways of everyday tasks. After forming commune with smartphones, AI, and virtual reality, technology is now coming after the hardware. SaaS and cloud computing are the new waves of technology that are being used in small and mid-business to minimize the overall cost of the production. Cloud technologies like SaaS are threatening the world of old on-site and open source software alongside with their functionality. Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation refers SaaS to Service as a Software Substitute (SaaSS). According to him, the use of SaaS is a violation of the principles of free software.

Setting it up On-premise software installation can be a long tedious afternoon task. It requires the perfect hardware and software combination to work accurately. Open source software is generally free, but they pluck expenses from user’s pocket via additional packages which include design, extensions, plugins, and themes. For example, Wordpress is extremely helpful free website builder but requires additional costs in themes. Furthermore, the starting and running up a software requires the user to conversant with technical skills. The software requires certain hardware needs that are mandatory to be filled in order to use the software at its peak performance. The Internet is not required in most cases, but it is always required in order to update any software.

Software updates depend upon the software developers, whether they will fix the issues or bring new features and also whether the updates will be free or not. It should also be noted that the support for the software will definitely end in future.

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June 2018

SaaS on the other hand just requires a computer, internet connection and a subscription to a software service. This eliminates the need for maintaining high power computing machines to fulfill the requirements of the software. SaaS services are run on provider’s servers, hosted by the provider, managed by the provider, and updated by the provider. Such services eradicate the factors of technical knowledge and extensions/plugins comes together in a single package. These kinds of wide integration are pre-installed and provide smooth interaction with the user.

Functionality As SaaS is accessed by users via a browser, the service is licensed on a subscription basis, most commonly a monthly fee or an annual fee. As it is hosted from a remote location, it’s the provider’s responsibily of maintaining the hardware. Such services are future proof as the providers will take care of any upcoming needs. Updates are rolled out and installed without the user’s input, eliminating all the hassles related to updating. Additionally, security and performance standards are also met by the provider.

Open source software is created by people who are passionate about software programming. Not only they provide the executable file, they also provide its programming code. Users can modify the source as per their requirement and there are lots of openly available enhancements. Although, consumers must be aware of open source licensing terms and they must check it regularly as they as present in large numbers and gets updated with brevity. Open source provides the flexibility only if the consumer can spare the time, energy, and expertise.

Cost, control, and security For startups, a low number of users, and short-term deployment, SaaS can take the overall cost over the open source. However, if the users are more than twenty then the open source is the best cost-effective alternative. Open source requires large hardware to set up, a licensed operating system, facilities, support, and most important salaries for the personnel. In terms of control and security, open source offers the full control over the user data. In SaaS, the security is guaranteed by the provider and customers have to agree to service level agreements regarding backup and privacy. The conundrum arises when customers have to migrate data from one service to another. It gets difficult in migrating the data over the internet and sometimes, the data is held hostage when a customer tries to leave a provider and customers can be stuck with dead-end applications with no access to their data.

Organisations can’t entrust their data with third-party providers.

For small and mid business, SaaS is ready to go, but for organizations, if they can’t afford, can opt out for on-premise software. In the end, SaaS has to spend some time to fully acquire the attributes provided by on-premise software so it depends on the consumer how they want to move forward with their business.

June 2018

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Omnichannel Agent and Customer Engagement Solutions Simplify and personalize the customer experience, empower agents and achieve business success with one workspace for all channel interactions, application integrations, and CX reporting.

Tech Revolution

Putting the Sec in DevOps with Automated Tools

T

he pace of software development has kicked into high gear, with new versions being churned out at a breakneck pace. In hopes of shortening the development cycle, organizations are fast adopting the DevOps model which relies far more on automation, new practices, and of course continuous tools to help get the job done.

checks on the code and increasing visibility across teams for better efficiency.

The DevOps model was established to improve coordination between the development and production teams, making the process of getting new software out the door faster and smoother. The rapid release of new updates to applications like we see from companies such as Netflix and Facebook has done a great deal to improve the user experience, providing them with better products, and changing our expectations for how a top notch software house should perform.

There is now an understanding throughout the industry that securing the code should be a core business objective. This has led to DevOps’ evolution into the DevSecOps model that looks to integrate security practices into the DevOps tool chain.

One of the ways that teams working with DevOps have achieved these results stems from a significant amount of “shifting left” various

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While this shift to a more agile methodology has proved to have significant results in getting high quality releases out on tighter schedules, the question moving forward is how to keep the code secure?

Making this shift can be a scary endeavor for many organizations who had never quite succeeded in implementing security even before they moved to the faster DevOps model. Changing practices within your organization, while challenging, can actually help to overcome a number of important challenges, especially as they relate to prioritization.

Reducing Friction Between Development and Security Teams There is already a lot of friction between security teams and developers, with security doing their hardest to get an already stressed engineering staff to address vulnerabilities that they are unable to see as directly affecting their product, and therefore not really worthy of their time and attention.

From the developer’s point of view, their first priority is pushing out a product that performs its basic functions without crashing. Security for them is an added bonus, but more often just an extra pain that slows down their release schedule.

However, in a DevSecOps model that uses the right automated tools, security does not have to come at the expense of sticking to the timeline.

One of the tools that developers depend on for making their tight schedules are open source components. These components, which are written and maintained by the open source community and

June 2018

identify and alert on open source components with known vulnerabilities. To put it bluntly, they lacked the proper automated tools for the job.

Simply put, if a security team does not know which components they are using, and which ones are vulnerable, then they cannot direct their development team on what to patch or where.

Establishing Facts Based Prioritization Through Adoption of Automated Tools Visibility is key element of DevSecOps and is invaluable for communicating to developers why remediating certain vulnerabilities should be prioritized. This is where automation can cut the amount of friction of having a security team member sitting on the development crew.

Rami Sass CEO

WhiteSource Software

make up between 60-80% of the code base in modern applications, give developers the powerful features that they need for their products without forcing them to reinvent the wheel.

Unfortunately, developers do not have a practical way of manually keeping track of which open source components have known vulnerabilities before they add them to their products or monitoring said products post release when new vulnerabilities are reported. These oversights can have significant effects like we saw in the Equifax breach last September when hackers exploited a vulnerable version of Apache Struts 2 in the company’s web portal to steal the personally identifiable information belonging to over 145.9 million people.

The application security testing tools that they were using help protect their proprietary code were unable to catch this vulnerable component because only Software Composition Analysis (SCA) solutions are able to

June 2018

Using the right continuous, automated tools at the earliest, and even later stages of the DevOps tool chain can add improved visibility to the process and make the product’s code significantly more secure. Whether it is helping developers to choose the right components before they even make a pull request from open source repositories, using a selection tool like the Web Advisor to check if the component meets their organization’s policies for security, license compliance, and even quality, can help save time on remediations after the code has already been compiled.

Moreover, technology like WhiteSource’s Effective Usage Analysis can be a game changer for keeping code secure. According to our research into Java, 70% of vulnerable functionalities in open source components are not in fact effective, and therefore do not have a direct impact on their product. Practically, this means a 70% reduction in the scope of alerts that need to be addressed for remediation, making prioritization an easier task.

Automating this process of analyzing the open source components and presenting the data on a platform that is accessible for all participants of the DevSecOps tool chain to see can help to pass on the message of what is most important, providing evidence that remediations are really worth their time and effort.

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Nordcloud: Delivering All-Inclusive Cloud Services across Europe

C

loud computing, through the course of development of the software industry, has turned into a basic necessity for numerous organizations to function efficiently. It comes with a broad list of benefits that allow organizations to relish flexibility in their development and operations, and connections and communications, globally. Accessing the data stored on cloud is an effortless task as there are a surging number of web-enabled devices and applications that are partaking in this process efficiently.

The Conception of an Idea

Nordcloud is one such leader in public hyperscale cloud services inclusive of infrastructure and cloud native applications, across Europe. The company has completed more than 500 cloud deployments, delivering its enterprise customers high security, agility to meet business needs, scalability as well as overall costsavings.

Since 2011, the company has grown into a global leader of cloud services having its offices in Helsinki, Jyväskylä, Salo, Stockholm, Malmö, Oslo, Copenhagen, London, Munich, Amsterdam and Poznan.

With 300 cloud experts across Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, the organization offers a full range of cloud-integration services for companies across Europe.

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Nordcloud’s roots are placed in a software company that started in 2006.

Later in 2011, partly same founders ramped up a cloud infra focused company with a mission of helping organizations gain the maximum benefits the cloud has to offer. Today, the two companies have amalgamated into one brand, Nordcloud; present in eight countries in Europe, and aiming to initiate three more by the end of 2018.

hence believes that majority of the new innovations occur in that area.

He shares the vision of Nordcloud which is, ‘deliver cloud only with automated solutions and by global skilled talent pool.’ This vision caters well to the company’s customers’ demand of the public cloud.

“I’m excited to join the European cloud pioneer Nordcloud and work together with our world-class cloud experts and global partners to deploy cloud technologies that generate maximum value for our customers – without them having to consider the constraints of a legacy integrator,” says Kritz while sharing his insights on the company.

Innovative Zeniths

An Ambitious Leader Jan Kritz, the CEO of Nordcloud, has a long career in technology industry.

He began his journey with the company at the start of 2018. He displays his exuberance about the opportunities public cloud offers: general agility and the impact on the business. Jan sees the market adopting public cloud faster than before and

Nordcloud’s aim is to empower its customers to disrupt their industry.

“We go above and beyond in helping our customers maximizing the benefits of the public cloud. Leveraging the public cloud is the only way to truly transform and future-proof their business,” exerts Kritz. The organization works multi-cloud and is a preferred partner to its strategic

June 2018

hyperscale cloud partners; namely, AWS, Microsoft and Google, allowing it to deliver cutting-edge cloud-native solutions.

Nordcloud offers services and solutions that both optimize and accelerate business. The Business Optimization offerings are mainly IT infrastructure services for cloud foundation and IT transformation. The company envisions modernizing its customers’ IT by moving the infrastructure and applications to the public cloud, introducing maximum agility and flexibility for the business and creating the foundation for business innovation.

Meanwhile, the Business Acceleration offerings are about the cloud native applications and data driven business services. It allows innovative business processes in creating new insights for better decision making, quickly adapting to changing competition, leapfrogging the competition and building solutions that disrupt the industry.

Treading through Travails

Jan Kritz CEO

ramping up their cloud capability.

Kritz expresses, “companies at times, don’t have the needed competence in adequate numbers and there doesn’t seem to be enough at the market either, hence training is needed. We are training for Microsoft Azure and also for AWS which has very limited number of partners in the field.”

Market Distinction and Customer Gratification

Nordcloud has a prolonged list of opportunities for supporting its customers in their journey and allowing migration from Mode 1 applications/workloads to Mode 2 eventually.

Nordcloud offers full stack of cloud services to deliver public cloud experience. It has a multi-cloud approach and works with all major players in the cloud services industry.

It offers customers, a structured cloud journey to optimize and accelerate their business.

The organization’s target is to deliver high quality service experience for business units, like the best support for developers when deploying bus applications in Mode 2. It has built a Cloud Competence Center concept to train and develop further, the needed abilities and skills within an agile governance model. In this way Nordcloud has specialized in aiding its customers to help themselves by

The organization often refers to three key benefits of the cloud, viz. agility to meet business needs, the readyavailable platform services of public cloud e.g. IoT interfaces, Datalakes, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence and high security/low TCO cloud services. This extensive list of offerings makes Nordcloud stand out from its competitors.

June 2018

Nordcloud empowers its customers to disrupt their industry by leveraging the benets of the public cloud.

Envisioning a New Dawn of Triumphs Nordcloud is aiming to grow with double digits and expand geographically in Europe. It is working proximally with its hyperscale partners AWS, Microsoft as well as Google, and is constantly recruiting and investing in its people in terms on training and certifying as many experts as possible in order to ensure right and deep level of skills.

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Testim: The Ultimate AI Test Automation Platform

I

n today’s competitive environment, time to market and exceptional user experience is the key to growing your business.

Quick example: Visiting a branch out. Online banking - in. Banks that have yet to embrace digital methods of servicing their customers are lagging. However, providing compelling and bug-free user experiences is not easy. Quality assurance takes time while competition it breathing down your neck. Historically organizations had to trade off time-to-market, quality and cost. Not anymore. Continuously testing your product ensures that bugs are detected early in the development process, reducing cost and shortening time to triage and fix.

Many organizations achieve weekly, daily and even hourly releases with continuous testing. Doing so requires a stable test automation suite that your development team can trust.

Manual software testing is performed by a human sitting in front of a computer, carefully going through application screens, trying various usage and input combinations, comparing the results to the expected

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behavior, and recording the observations. While performing this exploration, there are tests that often need to be repeated during development cycles due to constant source code changes, multiple operating systems and versions, environments, integrations, and hardware configurations.

Testim’s AI can learn from and with a manual software tester to create a functional automated testing solution that can execute predefined actions, compare the results to the expected behavior and report the success or failure of these tests to development teams. Once automated tests have been created, they can easily be repeated simultaneously and extended to perform tasks at scale that would be very difficult to do manually.

Automated software testing has long been considered critical, but is often thought to be too expensive or difficult for companies to implement.

Additionally as development methodologies, languages and programming techniques are constantly evolving, making it

challenging for manual testing to keep up. When you take into account the pressure from customer demand and market competition, balancing quality with fast release cycles is a daunting task.

Global engineering teams require a platform which can make testing autonomous and communication seamless allowing them to achieve their software quality goals. Testim is a world leader in software quality that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to automate mobile and web testing.

Testim’s AI learns from each test run, minimizing the time spent on test maintenance due to unstable tests.

Headquartered in San Francisco and with offices in the U.S. and Israel, Testim supports hundreds of companies delivering some of the most innovative and complex software used by millions of people every day.

Industry Challenges As software code is constantly changing, existing tests frequently break. Developers and QA end up

June 2018

spending a significant amount of time trying to figure out if the test broke or if it was a problem in the functionality in the software. Testim uses artificial Intelligence (AI) underneath the hood, which provides self-healing maintenance i.e., problems are detected by the AI and is automatically fixed without human intervention.

Many companies approached the challenge of QA automation by focusing on simplifying authoring using GUI-based play and record.

Testim uses AI to minimize the amount of maintenance it requires to create stable tests. It’s refreshing approach is focused on solving issues related to authoring, stability, reusability, extensibility, maintenance and reporting. It also provides features to ease the process of troubleshooting and CI/CD integration which are common challenges in test automation.

Gary Jenn Oren Rubin Ian Charlton & CEO Co-founderFounder & Director

in minutes. Testim’s customers benefit from the ability to increase test coverage quickly without having to add more resources and better visibility into the status and quality of their testing efforts. The end result is higher quality software, released faster with less risk. Testim customers have seen x10 increase in productivity at no additional cost, which means your development team can focus on developing new features faster than fixing bugs.

Powered by Artificial Intelligence A Resourceful Leader Testim provides a test automation platform that uses AI to speed the authoring, execution and maintenance of automated tests.

Testim’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) learns your application so even if your developers change the application, Testim’s AI learns the changes and adapts the tests accordingly. This leads to more stable tests. As a result, the authoring and execution of automated tests are much faster and results are more reliable. Also, this helps to solve the biggest bottleneck for CI/CD integration which is maintaining automated tests.

Customers can build their own tests

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Co-founder & Managing Director

Oren Rubin, Founder and CEO of Testim have 21 years’ experience in the software industry. Oren has developed test-related products for developers at IBM, Wix, Cadence, Applitools, and Testim.io.

In addition to being a busy entrepreneur, Oren is a community activist and the co-organizer of the Selenium-Israel meet-up and the Israeli Google Developer Group meet-up. He has been a professor at Technion University, and has even mentored at the Google Launchpad Accelerator. While describing Oren’s leadership, Testim’s President and COO, Shani Shoham says, “Many

We created customers Testim Enabling because automated to deliver moreWe testing is still difcult. want to make testing change, rapidly autonomous and with condence, painless, allowing for less.teams to software achieve their software quality goals.

investors have articulated the qualities of a great team and, more importantly, a great founder. It is difficult to define one until you meet one. Oren is that kind of founder. He has spent the past two decades living and breathing the problem which Testim is trying to solve. He experienced the challenges of agile transformation and built an amazing product based on his unique insights.”

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Agri-Tech

The

Impressive of

Impact

Organic Networking T

he main reason for the invention of website, Internet and technology devices that provides the platform for software to run and connect with each other is mainly to make networking of services, products and people possible. Technology leaders such as Cisco, Arista and Apple are dedicating their resources to provide various business enterprises and the masses the ability to communicate their values through technology mediums called as Networking.

The works and provisions of these organizations are very outstanding, and are believed to last for ages. This is because the growth of technology is not going out of style so soon, but rather it is believed to continue into the future.

Technology networking strategies is good, but to make it more effective there is the incessant need to incorporate organic strategies.

You may be asking what I mean by Organic Networking or Strategies. The organization that will survive in the market in the near future, considering the increasing rate of competition are the ones who take the necessary steps, to develop more human connection for their business, more than they do for machines such as provided by AI. The Factors to Consider for an Effective Organic Networking: Even as our age is encouraging more of technology strategies, if we must survive the future of it all, then we must connect more people, than we do for machines. As an

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June 2018

innovative networking solution provider, it is going to pay more, when you include human intelligence and physicality in your networking strategies over machines.

Imagine a day that the machines are going to have a serious breakdown, and the owner organization do not have the capable persons to ďŹ gure out the cause of the breakdown and possibly provide a feasible solution? What will be the fate of the organization? This means that, there will be a great loss of value and possibly a strike off the industry. I know you would never want that to happen. So, plan from now, to never pay for the loss in the future.

Balance Your People to machine Deployment.

Social Medias are for networking, Newspapers and various Medias are also for networking, but there are people behind the arc of this innovation. The more you incorporate AI and machine learning strategies, always remember the need for Control Engineers and those are human beings.

The most successful organizations identify the major importance of June 2018

people networking and how best to utilize human intelligence in their business quest.

For example; if you write an article and share it on a website, who do you expect to read your article; human beings or machines? It is obvious that the organic networking aspect of computing will never go out of style; else, there will be a day in the future that digital connection and values will be measured on the number of bots that read your articles and/or that paid for your services. So, remember to balance the rate of your people to machine deployment, by acknowledging the need of human networking over technology networking.

The Need for Organic Sense in Networking and the Future: Technology is the miracle of our age, ArtiďŹ cial Intelligence is a major molding factor of this development, IoT is the liberator from machine isolation by providing the platform to interconnect millions of them over the virtual platforms, but humans make these things possible.

Networking is an innovative concept with high proďŹ le technology terms. If one does not implore deep interest and concentration while exploring this realm, there may be a serious distortion of original motive of indulgence, and this can lead to serious breakdown of enterprise infrastructure. Sometimes, it maybe direct and other times, it will be indirect, but in all, it will always have an impact. The future of technology is very bright, and that is mainly dependent on how available we make the resources to help manage what we have today in the near future. For this to be possible, the networking solution providers must incorporate more of organic sense in their solutions and industry advancements.

Technology will advance, more machines will be connected, devices will be programmed to run independently, but in all these things, the humans in the network will still rule the universe. The more organic you make your networking strategies, the lesser the fear of a disastrous future for your organization.

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Industry Info

A STRATEGIC APPROACH TO IMPLEMENT

CONTINUOUS TESTING ACROSS THE ENTERPRISE

Shani Shoham President & COO Testim.io

A

s teams and enterprises grow, it becomes important to have scalable testing processes in place. In particular, it is vital to have continuous testing throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC).

Testing should start in parallel with development; right from the requirements phase and should continue all the way till application deployment and production monitoring phase. This aligns with the “Shift Left Paradigm.”

In the recent years with the need for organizations to deliver applications at a high velocity, to stay competitive in the industry; teams have also started implementing the “DevOps” approach to SDLC. This means, there is an extra need for implementing automation in every step of the software development and testing process.

The above being the case, how are we going to implement continuous testing across the enterprise? This five step guide offers a strategic approach to implementing a scalable, continuous testing process in such an environment.

1. What to test vs. what not to test: This can be a contentious issue. In the unit testing world, the growing wisdom is that you test everything.

EVERYTHING. And then, once you’ve tested everything inside the code, you test everything outside the code too.

And then you test the tests. Heck, you’re even supposed to test the requirements to ensure they’re complete.

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In reality, this is a bit of a Rumsfeld situation. Donald Rumsfeld, former US secretary of defense, has some spectacularly practical quotes about operational military strategy, and one of those quotes applies here: “You don’t go to war with the army you want, you go to war with the army you have.” In testing, this means you have to pick your battles and your tests. Sure, you’re plan has an endgoal of “EVERYTHING” in capital letters with ten underlines, but in reality, you’re going to have to pick your testing targets of opportunity, and the amount of those targets you can meet by ship date is “The army you have.”

Therefore, it is critical to prioritize what to test along the way. The top of that list should be (and in this order): Ÿ Your critical paths. Ÿ How your business makes money? Ÿ How your users use the application? Ÿ How your application services are advertised? Ÿ What has been a problem in the past?

With this list in hand, you can begin your prioritization.

Your critical path and your business logic should be

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intimately tied together, and the tests for one should likely bleed into the other. Obviously, that’s not always going to be the case, but if that is not the case, you may not be thinking about these paths properly. Your line of business, and the flow of money through your system should generally be considered the most important aspects of your system, and the most sensitive. If that’s not the case, you’re likely in need of a different set of tips and tricks: something more holistic and architecture related.

For the line of business and the flow of revenue, your tests need to be comprehensive, include all regressions, and possibly even include the experimental and more technically challenging tests. These also need to include end-to-end tests of functionality, ensuring the flow of system data can be fully tracked from beginning to end, from revenue generation to bank deposit.

As the core business logic and data flow are vital to your business and cannot go down, this will also be an intense area of focus for your pipelines and continuous integration and deployment infrastructure. You’re going to want to test that pipeline, as well: are your sign-offs in place, do pull requests trigger change alerts and have processes that ensure only fully tested code is going to production.

With those basics in place, the obvious next step is testing the user’s lines of ingress and egress. Do the users’ paths through your systems resolve properly and in a timely fashion? This is your functional testing stage, and your interface testing period. Selenium and other such UI and browser tools fall in here, and can make your testers life very difficult. Maintaining a huge battery of UI tests, as the UI changes over time, can become a full-time process.

This is why the tests at this stage of the game need to be automated and self-healing, if possible. As your application evolves over time, so do the tests that are needed to ensure its stability. This is the real meat of your day-to-day testing work, and likely where most of the labor should be located.

By the time you’re working full steam on the user layer, your underlying testing regimen for the core business logic also needs to be firmly in place and stable, as tracing bugs back down the stack from UI will become the norm, and having those lower level tests in place allows you to rule out the lower levels quicker when bugs pop up.

testing at the network services layer allow you to sanity check the traffic going between your applications, and to be further sure of just where a bug is coming from.

Finally, within these layers, you’ll want to prioritize any bits that have been troublesome in the past. This is fairly obvious logic, but it’s surprising how many teams can get caught up in the religion of test driven development and view problem children as regular students in the classroom of development. If you’re testing everything, the logic goes, you’re going to cover those problem areas, anyway.

But the truth is that those problem areas likely need the extra care and feeding only your developers and testing team can give them just after an issue has risen, while the parts of the system they were working on are still in front of their mind. Taking the time after fixing a problem to add extra tests just to be sure you never regress can save your developers from having to relearn those systems later, when everything is on fire.

2. Learn the 10 Rules for Writing Automated Tests From Devops.com, we get an excellent list of 10 tips for writing automated tests, but we’ll summarize them here: Ÿ Prioritize Ÿ Reduce, Recycle, Reuse Ÿ Create Structured, Single-Purpose Tests Ÿ Tests’ Initial State Should Always be Consistent Ÿ Compose Complex Tests from Simple Steps Ÿ Add Validation in Turnover Points Ÿ No Sleep to Improve Stability (Sleep is the root of all evil in tests) Ÿ Use a Minimum of Two Levels of Abstraction Ÿ Reduce the Occurrences of Conditions Ÿ Write Independent and Isolated Tests You can dive deeper into each of these in the Devops.com article, where there is specific, prescriptive advice on each tip.

Moving up the stack, the next place your tests need to solidify is around your application services and their advertising systems. Your registries, repositories, and service mesh/discovery platforms are your switching stations, internally, allowing your digital trains to run on time, and when things go wrong in this layer it can be infuriating to untangle the mess of network traffic, XML, and HTTP that combine to obfuscate the data here. Solid

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3. Solidify the Process, Firm up Lines of Communication Having clearly defined lines of responsibility and communication are key to successful testing. First, you need to make it absolutely obvious to all of your team members which people are to write which tests. Is a developer writing this because its a unit test, or is a Q/A person writing it because it is a UI test? Who maintains this test over time? Who tests the tests? Who is responsible for running the test?

These may sound like obvious questions, but there is usually a grey area somewhere between the two, and it’s easy for older tests to fall into the abyss when their original authors have left the company. You’ll want clear lines all the way around each test, too: who submits changes to the tests, who is responsible for updating frameworks and libraries used? Who writes the issues in the ticketing systems? Who closes bugs?

Generally, this will come down to a choice between developers and testers, each with their own benefits and drawbacks. Having developers handle the writing of tests, for example, allows for faster feedback and generally better quality tests. It also results in developer ownership of quality. Having developers write tests, however, can eat up the precious time they need to ship a new feature. It also doesn’t help that developers generally don’t want to write tests, and can be hard to motivate to do so.

Using QA to write tests means your testers can fully implement test-driven-development, as they bring tests to bear on code as the source is being pushed through the pipelines. This does lengthen the feedback loop, however, and requires extremely well controlled lines of communication between developers and testers.

4. Infrastructure: It’s all about the Technologies Developing your testing regimen is definitely about process, but if you’re processes and pipelines are too rigid, you won’t be able to accommodate new technologies. And new technologies are the lifeblood of good testing.

A good QA team needs good tools to aid their overall testing effort. That means Jenkins for building out pipelines for builds and tests, CI/CD tools for tracking the metadata around each step of the process, and internal tools for developers to ensure they’ve got proper code coverage. Whether that’s TestNG, JUnit, or any other unit testing tool, the important thing here is standardizing on something that works, not necessarily picking one specific thing.

Every build and test process is going to be different, but there are some very fundamental rules to follow when working with testing technologies that will help bring about success. First, the initial state of any staging or testing environment will need to be the same every time they are used. Variation leads to uncertainty, and uncertainty is the last thing you need in testing.

Once everything is setup to run automatically, optimizations are in order. Your first take on a pipeline for build and test will likely include many areas where optimizations can take hold, from the included files, to the scrubbed data and to the network systems involved.

Finally, your testing environments and tools will function at their best when they are multi-tenant. You don’t want entire systems monopolized by single tests or single users. That’s inefficient, and wastes precious CPU cycles. Your goal should be to adopt technology which

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allows your build and test cycles to go as fast as possible, thus lowering the time it takes for your developers to get feedback.

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TEST PLANNING

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DOCUMENTATION

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DEVOPS & AGILE

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT

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CUSTOMER SUPPORT

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REPORTING

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AUTOMATION & CI

testing manager. Repurposing existing workers into testers can work in the short term, but long term, you’ve got to have the right people with the right skillsets to implement a fast, reliable, and automated testing process.

5. Testing Skillsets: The People Matter Everyone wants their developers to handle more testing, and no devops person wants to be caught up as the

Shani Shoham is the President and COO for Testim.io, an up and coming test automation platform that uses machine learning to create self-healing stable tests. Prior to Testim, Shani managed business development for Perfecto Mobile, helping 2000 enterprises optimize their customers cloud base digital experiences.

Shani is a serial entrepreneur that has brought six companies to market. He is an alumnus of the Stanford Graduate School of Business as well as the Technion.

Devops as a practice has blurred the lines between developers and operations folks, but testing still requires a special set of talents that aren’t necessarily in the developer or operations toolbox. And yet, a good tester is generally a mix of operator and developer. That is to say, a good QA worker will be able to manage large numbers of systems in an automated fashion, and maintain the code behind tests themselves.

This is not a job that can be given to a developer or an operator, sadly, as the work requires both skillsets, and the additional skills around testing as a discipline. Don’t short-shrift your testing team. Instead, embrace it. Setup a testing center of excellence in your company, where any development team can bring their applications and consult on proper test batteries.

If you do have to repurpose existing developers or operations people into testers, bring them into the center of excellence as a team, where the multiple skills can blend into a single entity that behaves as a model for proper test and QA for the whole company.

QA is the perfect way to build a center for excellence, as the skills and work testers perform can be reapplied to other projects. Rather than requiring this center of excellence to test everyone’s applications, they can act as a sort of special operations team that can descend on a project, bring it into a CI/CD testing regimen, and teach the existing developers how to properly instrument, unit test, and integrate their applications.

Done right, such a center can help to spread those specialized testing skills to other teams, and to the grey area between developers and operations, so popularized by Devops.

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