Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As technology evolves in the enterprise, oftentimes the processes and tools used to manage it must also evolve. The increased adoption of Kubernetes has become a major inflection point for those of us in the monitoring and management side of the IT operations world. What has worked for decades (traditional infrastructure monitoring) has to be adjusted to the complexity and ephemeral nature of modern distributed systems where Kubernetes has a prime role.

Kubernetes is essential to modern application development and runtime. As a powerful container orchestration platform, its benefits include improved scalability, portability, and automation, all of which contribute to more resilient applications and cost savings. More and more organizations are adopting Kubernetes to develop applications that can scale, recover from failures, and quickly adapt to changing business requirements.

OpenStack is no doubt a wonderful and successful piece of software. It allows you to create your own cloud infrastructure, and thanks to its open-source nature, it’s free to use for everyone. But as with many giant software projects, all that power comes with a challenge: it is reasonably complex to install and configure.

The Docker project was initiated by dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company that created Docker to run their internal infrastructure. Slowly, Docker became more successful than any of their other products, so dotCloud rebranded as Docker Inc. Docker provides easy-to-use tooling and grew into an entire ecosystem for container management.

Technology is a fast-moving commodity. Trends, thoughts, techniques, and tools evolve rapidly in the software technology space. This rapid change is particularly felt in the software the engineers in the cloud-native space make use of to build, deploy, and operate their applications. One particular area where we see rapid evolution in the past few years/months is Observability.

We've seen a tremendous transition in the architecture of our systems over the years, from basic, linear systems to increasingly sophisticated, non-linear systems. We've moved away from monolithic programs, where a single person could comprehend the entire operation of a system, and toward a distributed world dominated by a microservices design.