Senior IT leaders, motivated by both the changing nature of our economy and more recently, the COVID pandemic, have decisively shifted their focus toward applications. The industry catchphrase for this shift, digital transformation, makes clear its dual nature: directed toward the digital future while at the same time acknowledging that the existing environment must be modernized—in other words, transformed. Tasked with enabling this new breed of applications are operations groups.

We at VMware Tanzu recently published our first-ever summary of the current state of observability. The main goal of our research was to uncover the key trends in observability adoption by hearing directly from IT practitioners, including DevOps teams, SREs, application architects, and their managers. We also wanted to understand what’s driving the popularity of observability and what the organizational impact of deploying observability is.

One of the new features that came with the latest update of vSphere with Tanzu was the ability to use TKG Extensions. This powerful framework allows simplified deployment and management of multiple open source projects that are backed by VMware support, including alerting with Prometheus, visualization with Grafana, ingress with Contour, and logging with Fluent Bit.

Security is hard to get right in a world of continuous delivery and containers. The increasingly diverse technology landscape and relentless speed of innovation afford us no time to step back and take stock of our risks, and even less time to perform remediation. In the past, we could perform point-in-time security audits, which was OK when our systems were mostly static, save a quarterly release. But that’s not the world we live in today.

While architectures and platforms like Kubernetes get a lot of attention in discussions about application modernization, we ignore the data layer at our own risk. How applications and users access data is a concern that gets more important by the day. It’s a trend we’ve seen playing out for a while, as technological concerns around latency and scalability have ceded ground to business-level concerns around compliance, security, and data privacy.