One more blog topic stemming from our weekly office hours that we hold with the field team here at Shipa. In our last office hours, was asked a question about “what are the difference between DevOps Engineers and SREs?”. Both professions are emerging disciplines and cultures that continue to evolve and play an importance in technology organizations. I’ve been fortunate to have written and spoken about this before; though taking a fresh look at what the two domains try to accomplish.

To supervise the behavior of distributed applications and track the origin of service failures and downtime, developers often use traditional monitoring technologies and tools. However, this approach can fall short in its ability to measure the overall health of modern cloud-native architectures, which can span multiple hosting environments and encompass hundreds of microservices.

Explosive growth of web traffic and services is forcing organizations to modernize and optimize their infrastructures. Kubernetes is core to the strategy and modernization story, but it’s only one piece. As VMware engages with its customers, significant complexities and resource needs arise that are not always apparent in the planning stages of Kubernetes deployments. The complexity of even a single deployment can introduce delays and slow projects to a crawl.

In a perfect world, your Configuration Management Database (CMDB) acts as the single source of truth for all your IT device inventory and the relationships between those devices. However, maintaining accuracy is easier said than done. That’s because the traditional method for provisioning and maintaining a CMDB is complex, unwieldy, and outdated the second it's updated. To keep up with the needs of a modern CMDB, an automated discovery and dependency mapping (DDM) solution is a must.