Kavita has over 19 years of experience in leading Enterprise Sales, Alliances, Strategy & Planning for core technology & e-Commerce companies, and currently manages India Business and Operations including R&D, Support, Sales & Marketing, and Finance & Operations at JFrog.

1. How is DevOps as an industry doing in India and where do you think the industry is heading towards?
Increased complexity in software development due to new technologies such as containerization, micro services and others has brought attention to software delivery processes that were earlier managed without tools. However, in today’s ‘app world’ in order to meet the ever-changing demands of the customer, it’s become super important for businesses to look at continuous, secure and seamless delivery of software using DevOps tools. India is at the fore front of this adoption. From leading private banks to ecommerce, we see customers across the spectrum adopting DevOps and demanding more in terms of sophisticated tools that help them manage their DevOps processes end to end.

2. How has the pandemic affected the industry? What are some of the challenges and opportunities that will exist even after the pandemic?
The pandemic has brought more opportunity than challenges specific to DevOps. The lockdown has severely impacted almost all businesses forcing the tech teams to innovate, reduce costs and push themselves to become more relevant in the changing environment. All these have worked as a trigger for organizations to think

about developing and releasing software much faster than before and automate more than ever. DevOps is a very collaborative process involving developers and operations teams to come together, and with remote work kicking in, we are seeing more and more teams relying on tools to make this happen. This will only continue to grow in the future.

3. How do you see the changing landscape of software development and operations for larger companies?
DevOps in itself is going through a transformation where companies are re-inventing their own processes with the help of tools available in the market. Having said that, in DevOps automation SecOps and CI/CD are definitely emerging as big areas of opportunity where we see large companies investing and adopting it. Our recent release last month is CI/CD Pipelines that is a declarative, modern tool for containers + legacy apps. It automates code to production with advanced capabilities for cloud native apps.

4. The culture of DevOps has largely been non-existing among the traditional companies barring a few sectors like IT or new age platform, cloud-native companies. How will this change? Is the change visible?
It’s true that DevOps originally started in more progressive or new age companies. However, with the increased complexity in code and the availability of multiple tools and packages, it has now become the need of the hour to invest in DevOps if you are a vertical company using technology. Today our biggest customers are Banks, Automotive, Airlines and manufacturing where business depends a lot on technology.

5. What are the key skills required to be a DevOps engineer?
Apart from coding and scripting skills, it is important to have a good knowledge and understanding of various infrastructure automation tools such as Python, Bash, Node, Shell, Ruby and others. Familiarity with popular tools such as Docker, Puppet, Chef, Jenkins and more is also vital in the role. A good DevOps engineer is also someone who understands the CI/CD processes and tools that helps with integration and creating cohesive delivery pipelines.