Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

Management Challenges for DevOps Adoption within UK SMEs

The DevOps phenomenon is gathering pace as more UK organisations seek to leverage the benefits it can potentially bring to software engineering functions. However substantial organisational change is inherent to adopting DevOps, especially where there are prior and established methods. As part of a wider piece of doctoral research investigating the management challenges of DevOps adoption, we present early findings of a six month qualitative diary study following the adoption of DevOps within a UK based SME with over 200 employees. We find that within our case study organisation, the DevOps approach is being adopted for the development of a new system used both internally and by customers. DevOps, conceptually, appears to be generally well regarded, but in reality is proving difficult to fully adopt. This difficulty is down to a combination of necessity in maintaining a legacy system, lack of senior management buy-in, managerial structure and resistance. Additionally, we are finding evidence of job crafting, especially with the software developers. Taken together, we put forward the argument that DevOps is an interdisciplinary topic which would greatly benefit from further management and potentially psychology oriented research attention

A systematic literature review on DevOps capabilities and areas

Businesses today need to respond to customer needs at an unprecedented speed. Driven by this need for speed, many companies are rushing to the DevOps movement. DevOps, the combination of Development and Operations, is a new way of thinking in the software engineering domain that recently received much attention. Since DevOps has recently been introduced as a new term and novel concept, no common understanding of what it means has yet been achieved. Therefore, the definitions of DevOps often are only partly relevant to the concept. This research presents a systematic literature review to identify the determining factors contributing to the implementation of DevOps, including the main capabilities and areas with which it evolves.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

A maturity model for DevOps

Nowadays, businesses aim to respond to customer needs at unprecedented speed. Thus, many companies are rushing to the DevOps movement. DevOps is the combination of Development and Operations and a new way of thinking in the software engineering domain. However, no common understanding of what it means has yet been achieved. Also, no adoption models or fine-grained maturity models to assist DevOps maturation and implementation were identified. Therefore, this research attempt to fill these gaps. A systematic literature review is performed to identify the determining factors contributing to the implementation of DevOps, including the main capabilities and areas with which it evolves. Then, two sets of interviews with DevOps experts were performed and their experience used to build the DevOps Maturity Model. The DevOps maturity model was then developed grounded on scientific and professional viewpoints. Once developed the Maturity Model was demonstrated in a real organisation.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

HPC Cloud for Scientific and Business Applications: Taxonomy, Vision, and Research Challenges

High Performance Computing (HPC) clouds are becoming an alternative to on-premise clusters for executing scientific applications and business analytics services. Most research efforts in HPC cloud aim to understand the cost-benefit of moving resource-intensive applications from on-premise environments to public cloud platforms. Industry trends show hybrid environments are the natural path to get the best of the on-premise and cloud resources---steady (and sensitive) workloads can run on on-premise resources and peak demand can leverage remote resources in a pay-as-you-go manner. Nevertheless, there are plenty of questions to be answered in HPC cloud, which range from how to extract the best performance of an unknown underlying platform to what services are essential to make its usage easier. Moreover, the discussion on the right pricing and contractual models to fit small and large users is relevant for the sustainability of HPC clouds. This paper brings a survey and taxonomy of efforts in HPC cloud and a vision on what we believe is ahead of us, including a set of research challenges that, once tackled, can help advance businesses and scientific discoveries. This becomes particularly relevant due to the fast increasing wave of new HPC applications coming from big data and artificial intelligence.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, Published in ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR

Maturity model for DevOps

Businesses today need to respond to customer needs at unprecedented speed. Driven by this need for speed, many companies are rushing to the DevOps movement. DevOps, the combination of Development and Operations, is a new way of thinking in the software engineering domain that recently received much attention. Since DevOps has recently been introduced as a new term and novel concept, no common understanding of what it means has yet been achieved. Therefore, the definitions of DevOps often are only a part relevant to the concept. When further observing DevOps, it could be seen as a movement, but is still young and not yet formally defined. Also, no adoption models or fine-grained maturity models showing what to consider to adopt DevOps and how to mature it were identified. As a consequence, this research attempted to fill these gaps and consequently brought forward a Systematic Literature Review to identify the determining factors contributing to the implementation of DevOps, including the main capabilities and areas with which it evolves. This resulted in a list of practices per area and capability that was used in the interviews with DevOps practitioners that, with their experience, contributed to define the maturity of those DevOps practices. This combination of factors was used to construct a DevOps maturity model showing the areas and capabilities to be taken into account in the adoption and maturation of DevOps.Hoje em dia, as empresas precisam de responder às necessidades dos clientes a uma velocidade sem precedentes. Impulsionadas por esta necessidade de velocidade, muitas empresas apressam-se para o movimento DevOps. O DevOps, a combinação de Desenvolvimento e Operações, é uma nova maneira de pensar no domínio da engenharia de software que recentemente recebeu muita atenção. Desde que o DevOps foi introduzido como um novo termo e um novo conceito, ainda não foi alcançado um entendimento comum do que significa. Portanto, as definições do DevOps geralmente são apenas uma parte relevante para o conceito. Ao observar o DevOps, o fenómeno aborda questões culturais e técnicas para obter uma produção mais rápida de software, tem um âmbito amplo e pode ser visto como um movimento, mas ainda é jovem e ainda não está formalmente definido. Além disso, não foram identificados modelos de adoção ou modelos de maturidade refinados que mostrem o que considerar para adotar o DevOps e como fazê-lo crescer. Como consequência, esta pesquisa tentou preencher essas lacunas e, consequentemente, apresentou uma Revisão sistemática da literatura para identificar os fatores determinantes que contribuem para a implementação de DevOps, incluindo os principais recursos e áreas com os quais ele evolui. Isto resultou numa lista de práticas por área e por capacidade, que foi utilizado como base nas entrevistas realizadas com peritos em DevOps que, com a sua experiência, ajudaram a atribuir níveis de maturidade a cada prática. Esta combinação de fatores foi usada para construir um modelo de maturidade de DevOps mostrando as áreas e as capacidades a serem levados em consideração na sua adoção e maturação