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DevOps trends in APAC How APAC organisations are embracing DevOps to increase software quality
Page 1 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
E-guide: DevOps trends in APAC
Aaron Tan, Executive Editor, APAC
Across the APAC region, organisations have been ramping up on agile
development efforts to stay ahead of the competition and make use of
newer emerging technologies.
DevOps, in particular, has been gaining ground as a way to bring
together development and operations teams, thereby increasing
software quality and stability, and shortening time to market.
In this e-guide, read more about the state of DevOps in the region, how
organisations like Grab are embracing DevOps and what it takes to
become a DevOps engineer.
Next article
Page 2 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
Aaron Tan, Executive Editor, APAC
Asia-Pacific enterprises were at least three years behind their US counterparts in their
digital transformation efforts, but that is no longer the case, according to an industry
veteran in the region.
Speaking to Computer Weekly in an exclusive interview, Lionel Lim, vice-president and
managing director of Pivotal Asia-Pacific and Japan, said household names such as DBS
Bank, utility company SP Group and internet company Yahoo Japan have been making
concerted efforts to develop new applications for the cloud and build agile
development teams.
“Over the last two years, there has been a change in mindset around software
engineering culture,” he said. “The big boys that are being disrupted are fighting back.”
Lim said DBS Bank, for example, has been building cloud-based applications at scale,
while Yahoo Japan is adopting Pivotal’s methodology in software development and
deployment.
That methodology not only covers agile development approaches such as pair
programming, but also design and product management best practices, such as
developing personas and testing assumptions.
Page 3 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
“More enterprises now realise that to make a comeback, they need to become more
agile, speed up software development and organise their teams around software
products which get tested and improved right away,” said Lim, a former regional
president at CA Technologies and Sun Microsystems.
At the heart of agile software development is DevOps, which combines application
development and IT operations to push out software releases quickly. Some form of
automation is usually involved to speed up application testing and infrastructure
provisioning.
Charlie Dai, principal analyst at Forrester, said DevOps is gaining momentum across the
Asia-Pacific region, particularly in markets such as Japan, China, India, South Korea and
Singapore.
“However, they are at different stages of the journey – some are integrating various
DevOps tools, while others are embracing container platforms to modernise existing IT
assets, or focusing on the cultural and collaboration aspects of DevOps,” said Dai at
ConnectechAsia in June 2018.
Sabu Singh Bhatia, head of consumer and core engines architecture at DBS Bank, said
fostering a DevOps culture is critical in weaning developers off the old ways of building
software.
“DevOps is not so much about tooling, but about building a culture around what you
hope to achieve – a software development pipeline that is being automated and tested
Page 4 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
a lot to improve code quality,” said Bhatia. “That goes against the traditional waterfall
development cycle.”
However, Chang Sau Sheong, SP Group’s managing director for digital technology,
started the company’s DevOps journey on a clean sheet because, until two years ago,
he did not have a software development team.
“Although we now have a DevOps team, the idea of developers mixing with existing IT
operations teams was kind of strange to a lot of internal people,” said Chang. said, “But
since then, there has been rapid movement between what we were doing in the past
and today.”
According to a Research and Markets report, the Asia-Pacific DevOps market, led by
China, will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 20.2% between 2017 and 2023.
Next article
Page 5 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
APAC businesses turn to DevOps to improve app quality, security
Aaron Tan, Executive Editor, APAC
With the pressure to achieve greater business agility, more IT organisations in the Asia-
Pacific (APAC) region will look to DevOps as a way to ensure quality, security and
performance of their applications.
This is a prediction made by CA Technologies on the key trends in DevOps, which aims
to facilitate collaboration and communication between IT development and operations
teams.
To improve the quality of software, and with growing customer expectations of digital
experiences, more enterprises in the Asia-Pacific region will embrace continuous
testing, according to Richard Gerdis, vice-president of DevOps, Asia-Pacific and Japan,
CA Technologies.
“The only way to produce good, quality code is to test it rigorously, and, more
importantly, to test it throughout the DevOps lifecycle. Testing can no longer be the
job of quality assurance engineers alone; developers need to be able to test code and
make the test results available to operations,” he said.
Page 6 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
Over the past year, companies in the region have come under the spotlight for cyber
security breaches, which are likely to drive greater adoption of DevOps to improve IT
security.
In June 2016, Malaysia’s cyber security agency found that more than 2,000 servers in
the country had been compromised, with access to them sold through an underground
website.
And in October, Singapore telco StarHub was hit by a distributed denial of service
(DDoS) attack that was caused by compromised customer devices such as webcams.
“Security is likely to continue being an important topic this year, given the growing
intensity and sophistication of cyber threats,” said Gerdis. “In addition to speed and
quality, good code also needs to protect users against cyber malice, and organisations
from negative publicity and reputational damage,” he added.
For code to be safe, Gerdis said it must be deployed within a solid security
architecture. “Security validation should be viewed as a special case of testing, as the
requirements of security-related code testing are unique and dynamic, as well as
involve experts and constituencies not usually included in the DevOps process,” said
Gerdis.
Measuring the success of DevOps is also expected to be on the radar this year, without
which it can be difficult to improve IT operations.
Page 7 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
To that end, Gerdis said DevOps metrics can improve digital practices in many ways. He
noted that collective metrics can uncover bottlenecks in processes, while individual
metrics can pinpoint coaching needs and replicate good performance.
“With this variety of benefits, it is highly plausible that the industry will concur on a
common set of metrics this year,” he added.
Patrick Cher, an IT developer, told Computer Weekly that DevOps is definitely the focus
among enterprises this year. “It will help developers understand what they are doing
so it can lead to better quality and more secure code,” he said.
Next article
Page 8 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
DevOps platforms seen as key to enterprise evolution
Beth Pariseau, Senior News Writer
It's been 10 years since the first annual State of DevOps survey, but many enterprises
remain mired at a midpoint on their DevOps roadmap.
That was the finding of this year's survey report, created by Puppet, sponsored by a
consortium of IT vendors including ServiceNow, BMC, CircleCI, New Relic, Snyk and
Splunk, and released this week. The report was based on responses from 2,657 IT
decision makers globally, most in North America and Europe, and most hailing from
organizations with between 1,000 and 10,000 employees.
"Over the last decade-plus, we've seen DevOps move through all the stages of the
technology hype cycle ... Yet here we still are: researching, writing, and debating
DevOps," the report states. "Because even though DevOps is everywhere, it's rarely
done well at scale, particularly in the enterprise."
DevOps platforms get teams unstuck
Many enterprises have reached what the report described as a middle phase of
executing a DevOps roadmap: one in which organizational issues inhibit the ultimate
goal of fast application deployments and efficient feedback loops that create
Page 9 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
continuous improvement. For teams at the high end of this middle phase, these
blockers are entirely nontechnical, such as a failure to create sufficient feedback
mechanisms or unclear DevOps roles and responsibilities, according to the report.
That's where DevOps platforms come in, the report authors suggest. Teams of
platform engineers build such digital platforms for enterprises -- here, the report cites
a 2018 definition of the term digital platform by Evan Bottcher, head of engineering at
global software consultancy ThoughtWorks: "A foundation of self-service APIs, tools,
services, knowledge and support which are arranged as a compelling internal product."
Some enterprises refer to these internal digital platforms as "the paved road" for
developer teams -- not mandatory to use, but the easiest way to push code to
production. Platform engineers, sometimes called site reliability engineers, are
responsible for maintaining DevOps platforms as an internal product.
Achieving a product mentality and a mindset focused on providing services to
customers is also an important part of building a successful DevOps platform, the
report's authors said in a virtual roundtable discussion last week.
"You can give developers a set of things to assemble so that they can get on to the
differentiation of what matters," said Michael Stahnke, vice president of platform at
CI/CD vendor CircleCI. "We're basically making products for developers to move
faster."
Page 10 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
DevOps platform engineers as product owners
However, enterprises must avoid falling into counterproductive patterns of requiring
that developers must use centralized DevOps platforms at all times or letting an
enterprise architecture team removed from daily IT work dictate product decisions
without flexibility. DevOps platform engineers must actually market their platform
products to developers, and measure their products' quality using metrics such as net
promoter score rather than traditional infrastructure performance dataFew DevOps
Page 11 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
platform engineers have experience being product managers, the panelists
acknowledged.
"My generation of infrastructure engineers is dog-paddling to catch up, because in
order to be a modern software team you have to treat it like a product," said Charity
Majors, co-founder at observability vendor Honeycomb.io.
This aspect of the report resonated with Andy Domeier, senior director of technology
operations at SPS Commerce, a Minneapolis-based communications network for
supply chain and logistics businesses.
About 18 months ago, the company created a technical product owner (TPO) role
specifically to instill this product mentality, and to act as a kind of technical account
manager for DevOps teams after the company struggled with some aspects of
communication about the digital platform.
Initially, developers had to contact specific DevOps platform engineers to report
feedback, depending on the infrastructure component with which they were dealing.
That proved a blocker to communication between developer and platform teams, since
components such as API gateways can span multiple IT disciplines.
"We have a TPO that can be a single point of contact, so we've insulated the
development team from needing to know who to send their feedback to," Domeier
said.
Page 12 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
SPS filled this role from within its developer ranks, where a former lead developer who
wanted to get into a management role now oversees a small team of TPOs. This team
directs product lifecycle management for both customer-facing and internal-only
services.
SPS's experience highlights another key component of escaping the DevOps plateau
cited by the State of DevOps report -- upper management buy-in.
"That's validated in the idea that they were willing to fund this role at all," Domeier
said. "Before that, the managers of the different teams responsible for the platform
were doing that job ... a lot of it boils down to [prioritizing] developer experience."
From platforms to value streams
The State of DevOps report found that most of the teams it describes as highly evolved
-- those that ship code fastest and most frequently, with the tightest feedback loops
for developers -- make the heaviest use of internal platforms for their teams for
functions such as user and service-to-service authentication and container
orchestration.
The report does not cite Capital One as an example, but the financial services company
is widely considered a highly evolved technical organization. This year, the company
closed its last on-premises data center, and now bases all of its IT operations in the
cloud.
Page 13 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
The company maintains a platform of trusted APIs for partners called Capital One
DevExchange, but overall, has moved past centralizing specific IT functions into
thinking in terms of product domains, said Mindy Ferguson, managing vice president of
technology at Capital One.
"We're about as full-stack as it gets," Ferguson said. "But we define platform a little bit
differently."
Instead of separating DevOps platform and software development teams, Capital One's
engineers work on all aspects of applications and infrastructure, aligned around
business challenges such as fighting fraud, rather than technical areas of expertise,
Ferguson said.
This can be a hallmark of a highly evolved organization, according to the State of
DevOps report.
"Highly evolved teams tend to do a good job of limiting extraneous cognitive load on
delivery teams (through good practices, automation and support from other teams),
leaving more capacity to focus on the business needs," the report said.
At the highly evolved stage, according to the report, major challenges include dealing
with legacy applications and maintaining team members' skills as technology evolves.
While Capital One has dealt with the first challenge through its cloud migration, adding
more skilled technology employees is among the company's top goals for 2021.
Page 14 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
Capital One plans to hire 3,000 more technical employees before the year is out to
bolster artificial intelligence and machine learning efforts as well as expand its cloud
engineering teams, Ferguson said.
Despite industry talk of an IT skills shortage in recent years, Ferguson is confident that
Capital One can attract qualified candidates. The company has multiple technical
training programs for new employees, as well as an ongoing education program for all
staff called Tech College. It also has partnerships with colleges, universities and
industry associations such as Women Who Code to help it meet diversity and inclusion
goals.
However, the nature of work itself is in flux following a year of pandemic-related
upheavals, which will be an additional variable for Capital One to factor in as it expands
its hybrid workforce, Ferguson said.
"We do have an audacious goal," Ferguson said. "The challenge is less about the
number of people and more about how we continue to do the work that we're doing
today at scale ... opening up our culture, helping people see our mission, during a little
bit of a different time in this hybrid work situation."
Next article
Page 15 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
Aaron Tan, Executive Editor, APAC
For the most part, DevOps is about bringing development and operations teams
together to speed up application delivery to keep pace with the needs of a business. At
Grab, one of Southeast Asia’s technology unicorns, DevOps responsibilities are shared
across the whole organisation.
The company’s DevOps teams are primarily focused on enabling engineers to test and
deploy their code on their own instead of handing that responsibility off to a different
team.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Allwin Baby, a senior software engineer who is
part of a team that manages the DevOps lifecycle at Grab, offers a glimpse into the
DevOps practices at the company, how he became a DevOps engineer and the
challenges of the job.
What exactly is your job like on a typical 24-hour day – is it deskbound, or on shifts,
who might you be with, where might you be and what might you be doing?
Allwin Baby: I am part of the foundations servers and enablement team, which is one
of the teams that focuses on managing the DevOps lifecycle at Grab. There are five of
us in total, and we ensure our engineers can work efficiently and publish their work
safely.
Page 16 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
It is, for the most part, deskbound. My day starts with a stand-up meeting at 10am
when we regroup and provide updates on tasks we are working on and share any
challenges we are facing so that other team members can lean in and support
whenever needed.
After which, we are very much left to work on various tasks on our own, which includes
fixing reported bugs, making sure our developer tools are up to date, developing and
testing new features for our infrastructure, improving availability or proactively fixing
potential bottlenecks, post-mortems for past incidences, and liaising with suppliers to
address issues, among other tasks. We’d end the day around 7pm.
We also have a rotational on-call schedule, where the person on call will be on standby
to address any customer issues or service disruptions that may occur. A shift lasts a
week, so we end up doing about a shift a month.
Was it a conscious decision or a serendipitous event that led you to a career as a
DevOps engineer at Grab?
Baby: A little bit of both. Prior to joining Grab, I had very limited experience in doing
DevOps or cloud infrastructure.
Back then, I was working at a startup and split my time between developing server
back-ends and doing a poor job trying to translate Sketch designs to web apps. I was
working in a very small team, which meant that there was no real need for a dedicated
DevOps team and hence fewer opportunities for me to learn about it.
Page 17 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
It was during my interview with Grab when I realised just how much I didn’t know. So
when the opportunity presented itself, I was happy to take it.
Did you pursue any specific education and personal training regime to give you an
edge in this career?
Baby: I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, and while that
helped, I didn’t feel it necessary to develop a career in DevOps.
What you do need is interest, and a drive to learn and be better. I used to participate in
a lot of hackathons as a student and that helped a lot to improve myself. A good
foundation in algorithms and data structures, familiarity with a programming language
such as Go, Ruby, Python, Java, an understanding of system design and practical
knowledge of Git and Linux – whatever I could not learn in university I was able to
learn online with some effort.
How is your DevOps team organised? Who are the members and what are their
responsibilities?
Baby: At Grab, DevOps responsibilities are shared across the whole organisation. We
are primarily focused on enabling engineers to test and deploy their code changes on
their own instead of handing that responsibility off to a different team.
When an engineer needs something created or changed, it has to go through several
stages from being built to being tested on a staging environment before it goes live.
Each of these stages has to be properly instrumented to collect data and detect
Page 18 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
anomalies. The DevOps team is responsible for providing the tools and systems
necessary to enable our engineers to do all of this.
To that end, our team is split into smaller teams focused on a specific part of the
DevOps lifecycle:
• The build automation team focuses on maintaining the first stage (continuous integration) and is responsible for policing the general quality of code on our mono repository.
• The test automation team focuses on the second stage and is responsible for building systems that perform engineer-specified end-to-end tests.
• The deployment automation team focuses on providing our engineers with ways to deploy their changes safely.
• The observability team focuses on providing tools and software necessary for metrics and logs collection.
• The frameworks team (internally called “flip”) is responsible for all the machinery and libraries used by our microservices to do what they need to do, including configuration management and inter-service communication.
• The foundations teams are responsible for the general health of our cloud infrastructure and certain services used across the organisation.
Are there any roles that are not usually seen as DevOps roles but are instrumental to
the success of DevOps teams?
Baby: Yes, definitely. DevOps is almost an independent service provider within the
company given the size of our operations, with our customers being the thousands of
Page 19 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
engineers working in various roles. We run campaigns and communicate changes and
new features to the engineering organisation to encourage them to experiment and
adopt them.
As such, our broader team includes members who audit our processes and operations
to make sure we have adequate documentation for all our services, as well as create
training materials for interested engineers to learn something new.
Most of the tools we build come with user interfaces, so we have a few front-end
engineers and user experience designers working in our organisation even though this
is not very common.
What are the skills required of a DevOps engineer? Could you elaborate in terms of
platform familiarity, programming/scripting languages, configuration, provisioning
and deployment, security, integration and communication?
Baby: I’d argue you’d need to have most of these listed skills to some degree.
Familiarity with your chosen cloud provider, supplier tools such as GitLab and the
ability to program scripts are mandatory to complete most tasks.
Programming skills are also important when you’re designing new internal tools to
make a process or workflow easier for your engineers. Other skills such as deployment
or configuration management are obviously crucial if you belong to the team
responsible for managing that for the whole company.
Page 20 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
And while we work in different teams focusing on a different part of the DevOps
lifecycle, they are all tightly coupled so we must constantly communicate and sync with
all the other teams to make sure that a pending change does not cause disruptions
further down the chain. We often conduct operational excellence meetings and
knowledge sharing sessions to keep each other on the same page.
So far, what has been the biggest challenge you have ever faced in your job?
Baby: My biggest challenge was adapting to the sheer scale at which Grab Engineering
operates, which was obviously very different from my previous experience in a startup.
The engineering challenges faced here are very different.
For example, soon after I joined, one of the biggest challenges we faced was that our
Git remote repository was silently dropping commits every now and then. An engineer
would develop some feature, get it reviewed, then merge that to the trunk, and a
couple of hours later there would be no evidence of that change ever being merged.
After a long and arduous investigation, we discovered the root cause of the problem to
be a tiny bug in the Linux kernel. Our numerous engineers update the remote so
frequently that the Git remote inadvertently lost track of certain commits when
updating the branch. But we do get to learn from these issues, and it helps us deal with
these sorts of issues better.
Next article
Page 21 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy is simplifying DevOps
Aaron Tan, Executive Editor, APAC
DevOps is often touted as a way to speed up development and deployment of software
but realising its full potential can be elusive. For one thing, while many software teams
can set up a continuous integration (CI) server rather easily, they struggle to achieve
full continuous deployment (CD), often the hardest part of many software delivery
pipelines.
Brisbane-based startup Octopus Deploy was formed in 2011 to tackle that challenge.
After years of strong organic growth and profitability, it recently secured $172.5m in
venture funding to grow and scale its business, with an eye on the enterprise market.
In an interview with Computer Weekly, Derek Campbell, senior solutions architect at
Octopus and one of the company’s earliest employees, talks up the DevOps challenges
that software teams are facing today and how Octopus is being used by enterprises to
address those challenges.
Tell me more about Octopus Deploy and the problems it’s trying to solve.
Campbell: Octopus Deploy is a deployment automation tool that simplifies software
deployments. It started as a .Net deployment tool developed by our founder and CEO,
Paul Stovell, when he was working in Readify where he found that everyone had the
Page 22 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
same problems with complex deployments. For example, when I was working in
operations, there was some separation of duties. The developer stood over my
shoulder and told me what to do if a DLL (dynamic link library) fails or to take things
out of load balancers.
What Octopus does is to automate all of that in your CI/CD pipeline and make it more
repeatable and reliable. Our deployment process is the same for development and pre-
production so when you get to production, you have a much higher guarantee that
something is going to work. The more often you release and deploy, the more robust
your deployment process.
More importantly, it takes that complex technical and people challenge – because
development, operations, project management and databases administrators are all
involved – and simplifies it through a user interface which you can use to manage your
deployment and DevOps strategy.
What’s your pitch to DevOps engineers who might already be using other
deployment automation tools?
Campbell: Over the years, Octopus has grown organically and spread through word of
mouth. I was on a project that was implementing DevOps and CI/CD at the time and
one of my friends pointed me to the tool. Everyone here is or has been an engineer of
some sorts, so we know how to solve problems for DevOps teams.
Page 23 of 36
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DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
The key thing when we talk to decision-makers about Octopus is repeatability, where
you only need to define your deployment process once, whereas for other platforms,
the process is slightly different for development, testing, and pre-production. That
doesn’t inspire the same confidence.
Also, one of the key things we have is dashboards, which you can use to see exactly
what fails. If you look at other products, dashboarding isn’t really in place. When you
want to see all your projects, sometimes you’ve got that single view, which is good for
some people, but when you’re looking at thousands of projects, you’d want to have a
dashboard. That brings value for not just developers, but operations as well.
One of the key problems that we see with technology is that it enters your personal
life, and you can use Octopus to get some of that time back. I’m not saying you’ll get all
of it back, but you will definitely get some of that time back through scheduled
deployments and Runbooks that automatically switches over to disaster recovery, for
example.
Would you say that the flexibility of the platform is one of Octopus’s key value
propositions, since DevOps practices differ across organisations?
Campbell: DevOps can mean different things to different people. But ultimately, it
about breaking down silos and solving people problems. You’re absolutely spot on
about the flexibility. As we’ve grown, the tool has become much more flexible, and it
does so much more. One of our key features is multi-tenancy that enables people to
use Octopus at massive scale. Let’s say you have SaaS [software-as-a-service] product
Page 24 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
and you’re rolling that out to 1,000 customers. Normally, you’d have to configure
1,000 environments, but with Octopus, you configure once and attach the tenant to
the project. If you scale that up to four environments per customer, then you could
manage 4,000 environments through a single deployment process.
Are there any interesting use cases or deployments that people typically wouldn’t
think of when they’re using your platform?
Campbell: We see a lot of people use it for geographical apps that take advantage of
multi-tenancy. We’ve also seen configurations on point-of-sale systems at a large chain
in the US with more than 85,000 stores. That’s generally not what we expected, but
the release of the new Arm64 processors used by internet of things devices makes it
possible.
Do these tend to be microservices-based deployments, for some of these use cases?
Campbell: Yes, we see microservices a lot, as part of a bigger technology trend. But we
also see people deploying to virtual machines using .Net. Everyone’s doing DevOps but
there’s also still a massive requirement for people who still have servers on premise.
Can you talk about how Octopus is helping to address the security related aspects of
DevSecOps?
Campbell: On the security side, you normally do things like penetration testing. With
Octopus, you can kick off things like your security tests. So, for instance in the past, I
used a penetration and testing tool, and I was able to continue using that.
Page 25 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
You can also deploy things like certificates and call application programming interfaces
[APIs] to do all sorts of security-related things. DevSecOps is definitely something you
can do with Octopus. It’s not necessarily something that is built in yet, because there
are so many aspects of security. It’s about securing the application as it is about
traversing networking and those sorts of stuff.
Could you talk about Octopus’s international footprint?
Campbell: I was one of the first few employees outside Australia and we also had a
support engineer in Argentina. We’ve grown aggressively and in the past three and a
half years, we’ve hired people in the US and UK, and we’ve just brought on a New
Zealand office. We have 80 people at the start of the year, and we’re now at 150. We
will continue to grow a lot and we have aggressive hiring plans.
How did the Octopus name come about?
Campbell: When you think about an octopus, it’s really a visual representation of what
goes on in DevOps. You’re the person doing the deployment, you’re the head of the
octopus, and what you’re doing is to touch different aspects of DevOps. That was how
Paul came up with it.
Next article
Page 26 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
APAC career guide: How to become a DevOps engineer
Aaron Tan, Executive Editor, APAC
As a software engineer at Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech),
Ryan Goh would wonder what was wrong whenever deployments of his code hit a
snag.
He started getting into the nuts and bolts of continuous integration and continuous
delivery (CI/CD), an approach in DevOps for software delivery where code is produced
and tested in short continual cycles, to figure out why something had gone wrong.
For example, when the time it took to test his code became longer, Goh started
tinkering with the CI/CD pipeline to speed things up. Meanwhile, he was still writing
code, although he soon found himself spending more time on DevOps and expanding
his knowledge of the practice through books and conferences.
“I didn’t mind the additional work because I found DevOps interesting, and whatever I
did in the pipeline benefited not just me but the entire team as well,” says Goh, who is
now a DevOps engineer and spends most of his time improving CI/CD pipelines.
Across the Asia-Pacific region, DevOps engineers are in demand as organisations ramp
up on agile development efforts to stay ahead of the competition and make use of
newer emerging technologies and technology frameworks.
Page 27 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
In Australia alone, the number of DevOps jobs is set to grow by 23.4% over the next
five years, according to data from the government’s labour market information portal.
Korn Ferry’s Global talent crunch study has also revealed that the Asia-Pacific economy
could face an acute talent shortage of two million technology, media and
telecommunications workers by 2030.
These are indicative of the need to further nurture and grow the region’s pool of
DevOps talents, and that can be done through collaborations and cross-sector skills
sharing, says Pierluigi Cau, director of solutions engineering at GitHub Asia-Pacific.
What is DevOps?
DevOps has established itself as a common practice in the software development
industry for some time. Yet it means different things to different people. Ultimately,
DevOps is about enabling people to collaborate across roles, in order to deliver
software quickly, safely and reliably.
For organisations, DevOps brings together development and operations, providing
value by increasing software quality and stability, and shortening time to market. For
developers, it is about how the work is done.
DevOps engineers typically come from a software engineering background, whether
through formal education or self-taught. Those who are organised and structured will
do best in heavy coding-focused roles.
Page 28 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
Although the benefits of DevOps are clear, the barrier to its adoption lies in the
appetite of organisations to harness the practice to become more competitive, says
Adrian Smolski, manager for customer experience and solutions architecture at GitLab
Asia-Pacific and Japan.
“It requires a broader change and, from our interactions with customers in the region,
we have seen more progressive, large organisations embarking on long journeys to
tailor and build DevOps practices to meet specific development needs,” says Smolski.
Such organisations may optimise the number of people they recruit and turn to
automation to ensure consistency across projects, enabling seamless management of
processes and faster creation of new projects, he adds.
“With the demands for speed today, the older, disjointed toolchains developed for
siloed roles are no longer optimal for continuous delivery and shipping code,” he says.
The DevOps DNA
Abhijit Pendyal, director for solutions consulting at PagerDuty Asia-Pacific and Japan,
says a DevOps engineer is not only a problem-solver but is also naturally curious.
“DevOps is a mindset to solve problems,” says Pendyal. “It’s less about the specific
tools you know or the certificates you have, as it is the way you approach problem-
solving. You could be an expert in one technical stack but still not be attractive to a
company that uses an entirely different stack.”
Page 29 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
That said, although varying paths can converge to enable someone to become a
DevOps engineer, the multidisciplinary nature of the practice means it is best to build
on top of existing technical skills.
“If you have existing expertise in systems administration, you may want to work on
upskilling on application development,” says Pendyal. “If you’re proficient in quality
assurance, you may want to learn the basics of infrastructure design, and how
applications are deployed and monitored.”
A senior DevOps engineer with 10 to 15 years’ experience should have most technical
skills, such as a deep understanding of DevOps tools, managing infrastructure in the
cloud, writing code and checking automation tests. Broadly, common DevOps
capabilities include:
• Platform familiarity: While the days of worrying about infrastructure systems and servers are over, most engineers should be familiar with infrastructure automation tools (Kubernetes) and experience working with virtual machines (VMs) and pods.
• Programming/scripting languages: Most engineers would require familiarity with at least one or two programming languages. Given the variety of languages out there, organisations tend to be very targeted in hiring for specific languages, such as Java, Go, C and Python. Diego Lo Giudice, vice-president and principal analyst for application development and delivery at Forrester, says besides coding languages, DevOps engineers should also learn about agile development, because organisations are starting to organise their
Page 30 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
infrastructure as products, each with its own product owner, in order to be more nimble.
• Operations: These would be things like configuration management, provisioning and deployment, which are automated and require programming skills. “Provisioning and deployment is definitely an important skill, but you need to think about that in a self-service way,” says Giudice. “You are provisioning it as self-service and you do it through infrastructure-as-code.”
• Security: Some organisations and technology companies have used the term DevSecOps to emphasise the security aspects of DevOps – although security should already be baked into DevOps processes. A study by Micro Focus found that among Asia-Pacific organisations, DevOps teams are still primarily responsible for application security testing, followed by security teams. The most common security tools currently in use are software composition analysis (24%), followed by interactive application security testing (19%) and static application security testing (18%).
• Integration: This involves integrating different pipelines, through which development teams deploy different features that come together in an application release, which makes release automation and continuous delivery more important than integration, says Giudice.
• Communication and team management: GitLab’s 2020 DevSecOps survey revealed a consensus among developers, security professionals, operations team members and testers that collaboration and communication are the most important skills for a DevOps professional.
DevOps engineers benefit from asynchronous communication, where projects move
forward without the need for additional stakeholders to be available, but at the same
time have total visibility of project stages.
Page 31 of 36
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DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
Regardless of whether they have a monolithic or cloud-native coding approach,
asynchronous workflows allow teams to achieve maximum efficiency and release
codes more rapidly while maintaining quality and security.
Getting started through to certifications
Those who are new to DevOps can turn to online learning resources available from
Udemy, Udacity or YouTube.
PagerDuty’s Pendyal says that in this DIY approach, aspiring DevOps engineers can
start small with a “hello world” application that they can run locally on their computer
before pushing it to a public cloud through which it can be scaled, monitored and
logged.
GitLab’s Smolski recommends DevOps engineers to consider certifications in the cloud
infrastructure space, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google or Microsoft Azure
certifications that recognise the technical skills and expertise of candidates to
provision, operate and manage distributed applications and systems on dedicated
cloud platforms.
As one of the hottest DevOps platform tools, Kubernetes also has a tremendous
number of certifications that are currently in high demand. The Certified Kubernetes
Application Developer certification, for example, covers the design, build, exposure
and configuration of cloud-native applications for Kubernetes.
Page 32 of 36
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DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
Pendyal notes that many DevOps engineers typically start with AWS because it has the
biggest market share, noting that the AWS Solution Architect Associate or the
Developer Associate certification programmes can serve as good introductions to key
cloud capabilities.
“It’s typically advantageous to attain certifications since leadership within
organisations seems keen on wanting tech talent with certified skills,” he says, citing an
AWS-commissioned study which found that 97% of IT decision-makers in organisations
that employ AWS certified staff said such professionals had helped them to become
more competitive.
DevOps as a team sport
DevOps engineers are not the only members of DevOps teams, which are organised
differently based on an organisation’s needs.
Depending on their specific requirements, organisations may decide to have a
dedicated DevOps team, bridging the gap between development and operations, says
GitHub’s Cau. Or they could assign a DevOps engineer to each development team, so a
dedicated expert can guide the team on implementing best practices for faster and
more reliable results.
A third approach, says Cau, is having one team for specific subsets of features, such as
for a larger application, for which each member is responsible in terms of development
Page 33 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
and operations. Although, in this instance, the team shares the overall responsibilities,
individuals can support by driving different features that match their interests or
background.
There could also be site reliability engineering (SRE) teams that help promote the
DevOps culture. Under a true DevOps model, development and operations teams are
no longer siloed. “In some cases, quality assurance and security teams may also
become more tightly integrated with development and operations throughout the
application lifecycle,” says Pendyal.
Not to be neglected are roles instrumental to the success of DevOps teams, which will
differ depending on the industry, says Cau.
“A DevOps engineer needs to be in communication with stakeholders, understand the
processes and business goals,” he says. “These roles might include director of security,
project manager for an application, or a customer, to name a few.”
DevOps career path
According to Pendyal, there is no typical career path for DevOps engineers – it is more
about the kind of problems they can solve.
“A DevOps engineer at one company might be unqualified to be a DevOps engineer
elsewhere,” he says. “You can start in systems administration or operations and work
your way to DevOps or go from back-end developer to pick up more operations skills.
Page 34 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
“Current demands show a need to break away from the siloing of skills and embrace
being a generalist with broader skillsets. For example, web developers may be
expected to know a bit of both front end and back end. Engineers might be called upon
for general problem solving, architecture, and high-level thinking about the entire
application, instead of working on a single component.”
GitLab, however, has an engineering career track that offers a full path of opportunity.
The availability of senior engineering roles starting at staff engineer level is governed
by the company’s individual contributor gearing ratio policy.
According to Smolski, there are scenarios in which a position must become available
before a promotion can occur. On the engineering track, there must be a position of
need to be promoted from a senior engineer to either a staff engineer or an
engineering manager, depending on an employee’s chosen path.
“Most important is the fork between purely technical work and managing teams,” he
says. “It’s important that engineering managers self-select into that track and don’t
feel pressured. We believe that management is a craft like any other and requires
dedication. We also believe that everyone deserves a manager who is passionate
about their craft.
“Once someone reaches a senior-level role and wants to progress, they will need to
decide whether they want to remain purely technical or pursue managing technical
teams. Their manager can provide opportunities to try tasks from both tracks if they
Page 35 of 36
In this e-guide
DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
wish. Staff-level roles and engineering manager roles are equivalent in terms of base
compensation and prestige.”
What it takes to succeed
A DevOps career can be highly rewarding, as long as you are open and willing to learn
new things. Smolski says there is a need for DevOps engineers to embrace flexibility
and make changes, in order to optimise development for their organisations.
“Successful DevOps engineers are curious and will remain curious to get educated to
make things better, faster and more secure,” he says. “They will constantly keep up
with tech trends and advancements, all in order to bring and articulate value for the
organisation.”
To GovTech’s Goh, that means keeping up with his coding skills despite spending more
time on DevOps. “It’s important that I can still read the code or else I will not know
how to improve the process,” he says. “And if I’m doing production support, not
knowing how the code works would not help me in debugging.”
GitHub’s Cau points out that although skills are important, so too are the mindset of
shared ownership, the ability to dynamically automate and the ability to receive rapid
feedback. That way, developers and operations teams can quickly understand the
impact of their changes throughout the software lifecycle, make decisions together,
and implement changes based on shared data.
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DevOps gathers pace in APAC
APAC businesses turn to DevOps
to improve app quality, security
DevOps platforms seen as key to
enterprise evolution
Inside Grab’s DevOps practices
How Australia’s Octopus Deploy
is simplifying DevOps
APAC career guide: How to
become a DevOps engineer
E-guide
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