devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Category: DevOps in the Cloud

  • Agile Sucks (Redux) | Plus: DevOps on Mars

    Agile Sucks (Redux) | Plus: DevOps on Mars

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Agile is bad, but “Wagile” is worse.
    Plus: This prod is even worse than yours. (more…)

  • Busting 5 Common Database Modernization Myths

    Busting 5 Common Database Modernization Myths

    Modernizing databases is one of the best ways to improve database and application performance. However, many companies are hesitant to make major changes, even if they could lead to better outcomes. Why? Because there are prevailing myths about how database modernization projects fail to deliver on expectations. Five myths, in particular, seem to hold leaders back from pursuing modernization opportunities. We cover each of these myths in detail below:

    • Myth One: There is little performance benefit to modernizing databases in the cloud
    • Myth Two: Cloud databases won’t reduce my IT costs
    • Myth Three: I’m better off leaving my data on-premises for security and availability reasons
    • Myth Four: There’s not much I can do in cloud databases that I can’t do on-premises
    • Myth Five: Commercial databases aren’t compatible with cloud databases

    Fortunately, we’ve debunked these database modernization myths and can speak to the incredible benefits of modernizing databases on the cloud. We’ll use Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, specifically, as an example here, as it is a commonly used option for boosting database performance and innovation.

    Myth: There is Little Performance Benefit to Modernization of  Databases in the Cloud

    Modern cloud computing technology has advanced tremendously in recent history. With this advancement comes loftier expectations around database performance. And the truth is commercial databases are falling behind.

    Commercial databases are less scalable overall. They can struggle with latency issues, especially when supporting modern applications. Plus, finding enough processing power can be a challenge. Companies are still dealing with chip and RAM shortages related to ongoing supply chain disruption.

    Cloud providers, on the other hand, haven’t suffered as much. They buy components in bulk and have an overwhelming amount of equipment, infrastructure and memory for running cloud databases. Who benefits from this accessibility? Companies that have traded their on-premises infrastructure and commercial databases for the cloud.

    One of the best features of cloud databases is their on-demand scalability. Organizations can easily scale with customer needs. In contrast, on-premises or private cloud solutions bind engineering teams to their hardware. These constraints don’t exist for cloud users.

    Companies on the cloud can choose from a wide variety of plug-and-play solutions to optimize performance across decoupled services (AKA microservices). These microservices can each have their own database engines that scale as needed.

    Myth: Cloud Databases Won’t Reduce my IT Costs

    The second myth that holds companies back is the belief that IT costs won’t come down in the cloud. Theoretically, on-premises and cloud databases could be equally costly, but this is unlikely in real-world scenarios when you consider all factors.

    With on-premises databases, companies pay in full whether they are buying direct or through a private cloud. They also typically have to buy licenses with fixed pricing. Even if organizations don’t use the maximum resources available to them, they are still on the hook for the full cost. AWS doesn’t operate this way.

    On AWS, organizations only pay for resources consumed if they choose to go the on-demand route. IT teams can otherwise select from different savings plans if they are willing to make minimum volume commitments. Compared to fixed-price contracts, these approaches ensure that costs scale more closely with processing power. This level of elasticity is essential for modern companies that want to deploy modern applications.

    Myth: I’m Better Off Leaving my Data On-Premises for Security and Availability

    Outside of performance and pricing concerns, some still think that commercial databases are better from a security and availability standpoint. Yet, the cloud wins out here, as well. Cloud databases minimize manual work related to:

    • Encrypting data at rest
    • Encrypting data in transit
    • Defining port allowances
    • Preparing for compliance audits

    This is crucial because manual work opens the door for human errors. On-premises databases put these tasks on IT’s shoulders and make administrators responsible for ensuring data integrity. There is no room for mistakes, which is scary when managing complex applications. The good news is that cloud databases alleviate this pressure.

    For instance, Amazon Aurora maintains six copies of data across three availability zones. The solution boasts 99.99%+ durability with <30-second instance failover. Similarly, Amazon DynamoDB guarantees a reliability of up to 99.999%. AWS’ managed databases also offer 256-bit encryption with SSL certifications and rotating access keys.

    Moreover, the cloud provider offers an identity and access management (IAM) solution that simplifies authentication and role assignments for users and resources. AWS also lets users set up security groups, which take away much of the complexity associated with protecting cloud-based infrastructure.

    Myth: There’s Not Much I Can Do in Cloud Databases That I Can’t Do On-Premises

    The fourth myth that keeps leaders from modernizing databases is the idea that they aren’t missing out on much by staying on-premises. But the truth is that commercial databases fall short in significant ways when trying to elevate legacy applications. Most are monolithic by design, which is antithetical to the agile nature of the cloud.

    Organizations that want to deliver modern applications must have modern back-end infrastructure. Today, this means leveraging microservices–and having different databases for different application functions. Taking this approach allows organizations to scale distinct parts of their applications separately according to demand.

    Myth: Commercial Databases Aren’t Compatible With Cloud Databases

    The final myth that slows database modernization progress is the notion that popular commercial databases, like Oracle and SQL server, aren’t compatible with cloud databases. This isn’t true. Amazon RDS, for example, lets users run their Oracle and Microsoft SQL server workloads in a fully managed database service. Amazon Aurora is also fully compatible with MySQL and PostgreSQL databases.

    For the most part, cloud databases allow companies to continue using familiar code, drivers, applications and tools without having to do much refactoring. And should leaders decide to migrate away from commercial solutions altogether, there are import and export tools that help accelerate the process.

    Conclusion

    To summarize, much of the conventional wisdom around keeping commercial databases is outdated. The cloud offers a much more compelling and exciting path. Cloud-native solutions enable companies to take database performance to the next level without any added complexity.

  • A Guide to Sustainable Application Modernization

    A Guide to Sustainable Application Modernization

    Sustainable development is a blueprint for societal growth that is applied around the world to balance the needs of the present while optimizing for the future. Sustainability consists of three pillars — economic, environmental and social — that must work together to meet this goal. The complexities of digital transformation and application modernization can benefit from applying a sustainability lens to this challenge that not only includes the technical benefits of cloud computing but, more broadly, the three P’s of sustainability: Profit, people and planet. Application modernization will benefit the business in measurable ways, but can also affect unexpected positive cultural and green initiative benefits.

    Sustainable Application Modernization: What is it?

    Sustainability initiatives have always had to take a holistic approach that combines human, ecological and economic health and vitality. Sustainable application modernization is no different in that business leaders are dealing with finite resources (budget, staff and time) that must be applied now to align with longer-term priorities and their associated consequences. The main goal of application modernization is to transform an enterprise’s monolithic applications into modern architectures that can more fully take advantage of cloud-native services such as containers, microservices, serverless and a range of DevOps methodologies. These technical capabilities lead to a number of high-value cloud benefits including scalability, elasticity and engineering agility. Too many modernization strategies and business plans stop there and this is a mistake. By undervaluing the sustainability benefits that include economic, environmental and people upsides, technology business leaders are not accounting for some of the most important benefits of modernization.

    Breaking down the modernization problem along the three pillars of sustainability helps define sustainable application modernization:

    • Economic sustainability: The business benefits of modernization must account for releasing more features and fixes more frequently, less downtime, lower technical debt and higher rates of innovation.

    • Environmental sustainability: A modern architecture is more resource efficient, scales at a much finer level than a monolith, and is able to take advantage of cloud data centers that offer the “greater efficiency of aggregated compute resources.” These cloud-native architectures enable more intelligent application orchestration and resource allocation usage based on demand, need, cost, seasonality and performance.

    • Social sustainability: Besides the ongoing challenge of recruiting and retaining talent for maintaining a monolith, the resulting development team structure is a direct reflection of the architecture itself and this is most often monolithic, too. A more domain-centric approach using modern technologies creates leaner, more focused team topologies that can also operate effectively in remote work structures.

    The broader benefits and impacts of effective application modernization align directly to metrics associated with elite performers in DevOps research reports that track four key performance categories: Frequency of application deployments, application feature lead time, change failure rates and time to recovery. This long-standing and annual research report from DevOps research and assessment (DORA) metrics also now reaches beyond the business and technical dimensions into the performance, culture, people, burnout and team impacts of these modern best practices.

    Application Modernization is Not Just an IT Problem

    Most application modernization projects never fully get off the ground because technology leaders look at modernization as just an IT problem. The business cases for these projects focus on technical benefits or simple cloud migration and lift-and-shift infrastructure cost improvements. A sustainable application development methodology opens up this calculus to the three dimensions of sustainability: Economic, environmental and social.

    Much as everyone from developing countries to the richest nations in the world view sustainability initiatives along these lines—balancing economic growth, environmental health and the vitality of their citizenship—application modernization projects can be a catalyst to major improvements that drive profit, maximize efficiency while improving company culture, retention and team growth.

    Sustainable Application Modernization: Three Steps to Get Started

    The enthusiasm for application modernization is high, but organizational precendent and a history of failed efforts stop most projects before they get started. These three steps can set you on a sustainable path going forward.

    • Start with a data-driven plan: A monolithic application architecture requires a quantitative understanding of the technical debt you are carrying at an architectural level; the move to a cloud-native architecture unlocks the business, environmental, and cultural benefits discussed above. Thus, it’s critical to assess your application estate from an architectural perspective to calculate the complexity and risk associated with your applications, prioritize which applications to modernize and extract ROI benefits related to the modernization effort.
    • Build a broad coalition across the pillars: A sustainable application modernization plan works across three pillars that span different roles, functions, and initiatives in an organization. This strategy creates both an opportunity and a need to recruit outside the technology team to the business and product owners that can validate and then promote the economic upside. Next, pull in green initiatives and corporate sustainability representation that can quantify and promote the environmental benefits further. Finally, HR, training and project management experts will understand and align with the people-side of modernization to create more agile, happier and efficient teams.
    • Create a continuous modernization culture: This approach is designed to maximize short-term benefits while optimizing for the future. It’s critical to look at this as an ongoing, continuous best practice that becomes ingrained at both a technical and cultural level. Most modernization strategies have resulted in one-off projects that, even if completed, may quickly devolve back to bloated monoliths due to a lack of cultural and organizational commitment to take these practices forward and iterate across all applications in the future.

    Sustainable application modernization methodologies can change the course of application development inside an organization and provide a catalyst toward a thriving future that pushes the technology forward and can maximize the value to the business, environment and company culture.

  • Overcoming Multi-Cloud Management Challenges

    Overcoming Multi-Cloud Management Challenges

    We’ve long talked about how the cloud is the future. But with the vast majority of corporate data now stored in the cloud, it’s clear that most businesses now realize this is a must-have in today’s increasingly demanding and agile business environment. 

    The cloud has been the backbone of the remote restructuring of the workplace over the last few years, enabling organizations to access data flows and critical workloads no matter where their employees are stationed. So much so that there’s been a dramatic rise in the number of enterprises deploying different service providers as part of a multi-cloud strategy. This enabled them to pursue greater agility and flexibility within a hybrid environment. 

    Recent research from Wanclouds found that most IT professionals use two or more cloud platforms today—and just under half (48%) said they used a mix of public and private clouds. However, the reality is that the more cloud environments your organization use, the more complex it becomes to both manage and secure them. Here are three multi-cloud management challenges impacting IT teams today and how they can overcome them.

    Maintaining Uptime in the Face of Rising Security Challenges

    Avoiding downtime has never been more important, nor has it been more challenging to achieve. Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and increasing the risk of natural disasters or power outages, leading to data loss. In fact, 65% of U.S. and UK IT decision-makers said their organization experienced at least one data loss incident last year, while 21% admit they experienced two data loss incidents.

    But it is, perhaps, the security challenges that pose the biggest threat to IT departments and the developer teams they support. Since the onset of COVID-19, organizations have been targeted for cyberattacks far more often and have been infiltrated by cybercriminals much more quickly. According to McAfee, there were 3.1 million cloud-based cyberattacks in 2020 alone. Unsurprisingly, these attacks are fueling concern in IT circles. 88% of U.S. and UK decision-makers said they’re at least slightly worried—and 15% are apprehensive—about cloud workload security in 2022. 

    While multi-cloud environments enable developer flexibility, they also cause inherent configuration and visibility problems, and this is where cyberattackers can take advantage of weaknesses. The complexity of migrating data across different cloud platforms and operating systems can also lead to delays with patching. The key is often ensuring visibility across these platforms and maintaining interoperability. Security platforms for multi-cloud environments must be set up to share threat information across providers and platforms. If not, threats can easily be missed, or even if they are detected, the response across infrastructure will be too slow to minimize damage. 

    With businesses accelerating their goal of becoming 100% cloud-native in the next few years, a cloud-based disaster recovery strategy must also be embedded within their management plans. Without one, every business risks losing vital data and having their systems, operations or services shut down by natural and man-made disasters, security risks, hardware failures and power outages.

    Staying on Top of Hidden Charges

    Cloud spending has skyrocketed in the past two years, and all signs suggest that organizations will continue to allocate more of their IT budgets to the cloud over the years to come. But not every business has the same resources as, say, Apple, which reportedly spent over $30 million a month on Amazon’s cloud, according to a 2019 CNBC story. The reality for most IT teams is that they’re constantly battling hidden charges and unexpected cloud costs that threaten to blow up their entire IT budget. 

    In fact, in Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud report, respondents self-estimated that their organizations wasted just under a third (32%) of their cloud spend, up from 30% last year. Meanwhile, Wanclouds research found that 54% of British and American IT professionals say they have been hit with unexpected cloud costs in the past year.

    It’s a severe problem throwing IT teams for a loop from the migration stages of the multi-cloud plans right through to management and maintenance. Sure, cloud providers like Amazon provide basic tools for resource tracking and spend visibility. But truthfully, these features generally fall short of providing real-time and enterprise-wide insights on how to optimize costs.

    To eliminate the sticker shock of unanticipated cloud costs, organizations need to have a defined plan for cloud cost management. Again, company-wide visibility into their cloud platforms’ billing systems is imperative and a way to track spending across their multiple accounts. It’s vital for companies to properly tag the infrastructure for understanding costs and maintain up-to-date inventory of all the resources.

    Meeting Multi-Cloud Compliance Requirements

    Every cloud user must comply with specific regulatory standards following industry guidelines and local, national and international laws. Organizations in the health care space, for instance, must comply with HIPAA rules, which are essentially a set of national standards to protect sensitive patient health information from being disclosed without the patient’s consent or knowledge. Meanwhile, manufacturing IT teams must abide by stringent intellectual property security protocols and protocols for other sensitive data like PCI and PII. 

    Ensuring compliance across multiple cloud environments is necessary, but undoubtedly a challenge. This is especially true in today’s attack-filled security landscape, where internal threats can pose as much risk to data security as external attackers. (32% of the organizations surveyed by Varonis found incorrect access authorizations and privileges assigned to users). Not to mention compliance requirements are constantly changing, making it even more difficult for organizations to meet demands.  

    This is why every IT and security professional invested in the cloud needs a solution that lets them set up compliance policies against their cloud infrastructure, making it easy for them to ensure compliance requirements in the case of any unforeseen natural disasters or security incidents. We’ve seen the damage that just one data breach can have on a business—costing them millions of dollars in cleanup and leaving them with considerable damage to their reputation. It’s imperative that an organization’s entire multi-cloud strategy prioritizes compliance and the security of sensitive data. 

  • The Benefits of a Distributed Cloud

    The Benefits of a Distributed Cloud

    The way applications are created has changed dramatically in just a few short years. It’s now all about rapid assembly and integration; applications built using microservices and containerized. Containers and the cloud have certainly been the catalyst for this progress and will continue to be the infrastructure on which developers create new and innovative applications. 

    As workloads are moving to the cloud, however, more and more businesses are realizing they need a cloud that can be rapidly adapted to their specific needs. Computing environments may be a blend of server types: On-premises, bare metal, colocated and distributed across multiple continents. No single cloud architecture can offer consistently exceptional application performance for all users.  

    Between hybrid, on-premises, multi-cloud, colocated, centralized and distributed clouds, it can be hard to keep all the terminology straight. What are the differences between these cloud architectures? Why use one rather than the other? In this article, we’ll focus on just one of these: The distributed cloud. 

    What is a Distributed Cloud?

    As opposed to the large public cloud where all computing is done in a central location, a distributed cloud consists of a system of servers that are not all in the same place—even though they are managed through a single cloud provider. The servers in a distributed cloud can be actually anywhere in the world. This allows for computing to be done closer to the end user, which improves the user experience in a multitude of ways.

    What Are the Advantages of Using a Distributed Cloud?

    Below are six of the key benefits of using a distributed, rather than a centralized, cloud.

    One Size Does Not Fit All

    Computing environments may be a blend of server types: On-premises, bare-metal, colocated and distributed across multiple continents. Cloud providers need to offer flexibility to customize a cloud for their end users and their business needs.

    Data Regulation Compliance

    Many countries have specific compliance requirements for their citizens’ data and do not allow for personal/financial data to be hosted outside of their borders. Thus, having a distributed server within those countries alleviates that issue. 

    Reduced Latency

    In a distributed cloud model, servers can be placed in a wide array of locations, including in an edge cloud. When servers are placed closer to end users as opposed to in a centralized location, data does not need to travel as far to get back to the server. 

    Improved CDNs

    A distributed cloud can be used to deploy content delivery networks, or CDNs, to speed up content and service delivery. Heavy content (e.g. videos) can be stored and delivered by the distributed cloud closer to end users, which enhances the user experience.

    Network Resilience

    Network connectivity is always a worry for cloud providers. If their system goes down, none of the user’s workloads will run. In a distributed cloud system, however, the network is at a reduced risk of failure because if the system crashes, cloud services can reside in a local subnet.

    Location Flexibility

    A distributed cloud can always become more distributed. More locations can be added to the network, broadening the global compute zones available within that cloud. Companies that want to reach users in specific locations around the world can use a distributed cloud to reach them.

    Changing How People Think About Cloud Computing

    To address the demand for versatility, a new type of cloud has emerged: The unified distributed cloud (UDC), in which workloads can run in thousands of locations anywhere on earth. Such a cloud connects to existing infrastructure around the world via one API. Businesses can enjoy the benefit of running workloads in multiple locations without needing to maintain any of the distributed infrastructure. From a single UI, users pick an existing data center to send their workloads to and, within minutes, begin deploying. 

    A UDC transforms heterogeneous infrastructure into a homogeneous cloud computing platform, which can then be leveraged to support the delivery of cloud services in proximity to end users. It is designed to be interoperable with any private, hybrid cloud or multi-cloud architecture. As a result, enterprises can create an optimized cloud computing strategy, taking advantage of existing and available infrastructure in the location—or locations—of their choosing.  And because it sits on existing infrastructure, it doesn’t require any additional capital expenditure.

    As opposed to the traditional cloud model, the UDC can change the way people think about the public cloud. While the large public cloud providers benefit from economies of scale, a distributed cloud takes advantage of the economies of locality and distribution and thus has the flexibility to handle emerging location-dependent apps, such as the new wave of internet-of-things applications.

  • CloudNativeDay: WASM to Drive Next IT Epoch

    CloudNativeDay: WASM to Drive Next IT Epoch

    WebAssembly (WASM) is poised to drive the next era of development of cloud-native applications that can truly run anywhere.

    Liam Randall, CEO of Cosmonic, a provider of a platform for building and deploying WASM applications, told attendees at a virtual CloudNativeDay event that WASM will be at the core of a new IT epoch that will enable organizations to more quickly build highly portable applications that are not tied to any IT infrastructure platform and more secure.

    WASM, at its core, is a portable binary instruction format for building software that describes a memory-safe, sandboxed execution environment. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) drove the development of WASM as part of an effort to create a common format for browsers executing JavaScript code. Wasm is now being extended beyond browsers and JavaScript to enable developers to create a set of universal binaries that could work on any platform without modification.

    That approach replaces the current predominant method for building software that relies on the aggregation of software components that tend to lack distinct boundaries between them. One of the issues of that approach is that it becomes relatively simple for malware to infect all the components of an application.

    The Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) is now trying to advance the adoption of a Cosmonic’s WASM runtime that makes it possible to run WASM applications on any platform versus being constricted to building applications that can only run, for example, on Windows or Linux.

    That level of portability will prove crucial as more organizations look to drive application deployments on a wide range of edge computing platforms, noted Randall.

    It may be some time before WASM becomes the preferred artifact for building applications, but it’s clear the walls that have separated one IT platform from another are finally starting to crumble. Once applications become much more portable, the longstanding goal of writing an application once and then deploying it anywhere may finally be achieved. That’s not only critical in terms of overall application developer productivity, it has major implications in terms of streamlining the management of DevOps workflows as it becomes easier to both initially deploy applications and continuously update them.

    In the meantime, as organizations continue to review their application development practices to better secure software supply chains, it’s become clearer that legacy approaches to building applications are fundamentally flawed. Rather than attempting to reengineer processes to encourage developers to better secure applications, it may be more effective to change the way applications are built. After all, considering all the processes required to secure legacy approaches to application development, it may be cheaper and easier to adopt a new app development method.

    The challenge, of course, is, as always, taking that first initial step away from the inertia of legacy application development approaches.

  • Tech Workers Struggle With Hybrid IT Complexity

    Tech Workers Struggle With Hybrid IT Complexity

    Confidence levels among IT workers have plummeted as tech teams’ jobs have become more complex. The reasons behind IT worker angst are unprecedented, signaling a shift paralleling other post-pandemic industries. Running applications across cloud and on-premises infrastructure, hybrid office environments with distributed workforces and the accelerated adoption of new and automated technologies have all contributed to increased IT complexity.

    In our recently-released SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2022—Getting IT Right: Managing Hybrid IT Complexity, we examined the current state of IT along with areas of opportunity for technology professionals who must manage this increased complexity as hybrid IT accelerates. “The continued shift to hybrid IT drives increased levels of IT management complexity, but tech pros feel a lack of confidence in how to best manage it,” according to the report.

    Manage Hybrid IT Complexity

    Solutions are necessary, as the research shows only 8% of tech pros surveyed for the IT trends report feel “extremely confident” in their ability to manage increasingly complex networks. More than half of the tech pros interviewed said their organization manages hybrid IT complexity by training staff and adopting IT monitoring/management tools. However, budgeting, time constraints and hybrid work environments exacerbate this challenge. These responses point to a need for intervention and assessment, as IT professionals’ work is more business-critical now than ever. Strong IT infrastructure is necessary for fundamental processes across all industries and business environments.

    Half Lack Visibility

    According to a report by market intelligence firm IDC, as more mission-critical workloads move to connected cloud architectures spanning public, private, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, enterprises recognize the need to invest in the tools which will help them ensure consistent policies and performance, despite budget and observability implementation issues. The SolarWinds IT Trends report revealed nearly half of respondents lack visibility into the majority of their organization’s apps and infrastructure.

    Indeed, visibility is increasingly becoming the clear answer for tech pros charged with managing greater levels of complexity in these diverse and distributed environments. To develop their teams and business for long-term success, organizations must set aside time and resources to upskill and train tech pros to help them properly implement observability strategies and manage hybrid IT realities more effectively.

    Effectiveness Lost Off-Site

    But some aspects of the remote revolution, including training IT workers for increasingly complex network management, brainstorming sessions, providing sensitive feedback and onboarding new employees, lose their effectiveness when done off-site. For those who’ve made the switch to teleworking, most have found more work-life balance but less connection with co-workers or consistent support from leadership, according to a Pew Research Center study.

    Software company Culdesac announced it’s moving workers online and closing its San Francisco offices. Over 14,000 Google workers worldwide moved to a new office or went fully remote during the pandemic. Other companies, like Microsoft, have said employees who want to work more than 50% of the time remotely must have their schedules approved by their managers.

    Things are quickly shifting as we enter the era of post-pandemic IT infrastructure existence.

    Standards for Automated Network Management

    Solutions are growing in availability. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), an international community of network designers, operators, vendors and researchers, is working on standards for automated network management, which aim to improve and make the management of networks more efficient as they continue to increase in size and complexity.

    While organizations also lack insight into their network’s impact on ROI due to increased hybrid IT complexity, looking forward, they must re-examine their investments from the past few years. Part of this requires companies to have visibility into their IT environments to understand what’s working and not working.

    Economic Growth for Those Willing to Adapt

    Technological change could bring about economic growth and opportunity, but only for those willing to adapt. IT infrastructure is so much deeper than most businesses understand, and as the existing data confirms (and most experts in the field agree), investing in IT infrastructure is necessary. A business’ network—and its speed and security—can be the difference between satisfied or frustrated employees and customers.

    As hybrid IT acceleration has increased network complexity and lowered tech pros’ network management confidence, these post-pandemic problems are a chance for organizations to evolve. “The healthy thing to do is to look ahead, accept the reality, and start getting ready for the transition,” said Chirag Shah, an associate professor at the University of Washington Information School. “So instead of feeling the anxiety and being defensive, think of this as an opportunity for advancement.”

  • Cloud-Native: It’s One Thing

    Cloud-Native: It’s One Thing

    This Wednesday, August 10, 2022, starting at 9:00 a.m. ET, Techstrong Group is hosting an awesome virtual conference: CloudNativeDay. I am sure most of you already know a lot about the many cloud-native solutions out there; are familiar with the great work the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) does and that you have Kubernetes clusters running in your environments. But for me, at first, the interest and enthusiasm people showed for anything and everything cloud-native defied my understanding.

    We do about one virtual conference a month here at Techstrong Group. That may sound like a lot, but when you divide it up among topics in DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud-native and digital transformation and then further segment who in an organization is targeted by those events, it doesn’t give us a lot of room to dive as deeply into some topics as we would like. We pick the topics of our virtual events carefully and we depend on feedback from you, our audience, to guide us.

    Tim Hockin, Principal Software Engineer: Kubernetes, GKE, Anthos at Google

    This is the fourth year we are producing a cloud-native virtual event, so the topic has obviously resonated with many of you. But it wasn’t until this past year that I had the “Eureka!” moment and realized why.  You see, to discover the reason why cloud-native was so popular, I looked in the usual spots: Software, applications and solutions. I felt confident that Kubernetes’ popularity was one of the reasons cloud-native was so popular. Over the last 24 months, observability burst on the scene. Maybe that was driving the continued popularity of cloud-native. Heck, the CNCF has over 40 projects; perhaps the sheer quantity is what makes cloud-native so popular. But none of that felt exactly right—yes, all of these things drive cloud-native’s popularity. But they aren’t the key driver.

    Once again this year, I had the pleasure of recording a fireside chat with Tim Hockin. If you don’t know him, Tim is a principal software engineer at Google and an original member of the team that brought Kubernetes out from Borg (if you don’t know Borg, then you need to learn some cloud-native history). This is the fourth year we have Tim keynoting this virtual conference, and chatting with him is always a highlight of the event for me.

    Tim said something in our conversation this year that finally made it click for me. Suddenly, I had found it. The “one thing”, in the immortal words of Curly from the movie City Slickers.

     

    You see, the secret to cloud-native isn’t how great and powerful Kubernetes is; it’s not what observability or service mesh or any of those great cloud-native or CNCF-developed software tools can do for you. Cloud-native is a state of mind. As much as it is about software, it is also a state of mind. Cloud-native is about building powerful, applications at scale using the entire ecosystem that was created as a result of that state of mind.

    Sound a little too zen for you? Well, I hope to change that thinking. You do not want to miss my conversation with Tim Hockin that kicks off our show this year. We’ll discuss the belief and help you understand why cloud-native is a state of mind. And, while you’re listening, Tim and I also talk about what is new in fleet and multi-cluster Kubernetes.

    The entire virtual event program is chock full of great sessions. Head over to the event site and see for yourself. Panel discussions, speakers, demos. Great exhibitor booths you can visit and ask questions. Games, prizes, a DJ, a mixologist and more. We can’t wait to see you there!

    And if you remember anything from the event, let it be this one thing: Cloud-native is a state of mind.

  • Learn Something New Every (Cloud-Native) Day

    Learn Something New Every (Cloud-Native) Day

    Being the new guy at Techstrong Group, the first couple of weeks was spent trying to find things. Like the bathroom when I’m at HQ in Boca Raton or the login to the SurveyMonkey account so I could check on the status of our various in-flight research projects. 

    I also realize I have to learn the vernacular, especially around DevOps and this cloud-native stuff. To be clear, I’ve been researching DevOps and how to integrate security into the process (yes, DevSecOps) for a while. But this cloud-native terminology is something I need to learn more about.

    You’re probably a bit confused about why I’m perplexed by the term ‘cloud-native.’ My work in cloud security for the past 10 years gave me some opinions about vernacular. When I say “cloud-native,” I’m typically referring to the native services you use in your cloud provider. Like AWS Fargate or Azure Container Registry. Those services are “native to the cloud (provider).” 

    But I’m realizing that native cloud services are only a portion of the larger cloud-native revolution. Like DevOps, cloud-native is a state of mind, not a service you buy from a cloud provider. It’s about openness. It’s about portability. It’s about agility. It’s also humbling as I realize I have a lot more to learn.

    That’s why I’m looking forward to our CloudNativeDay event on August 10, 2022. I get an opportunity to dig in and learn about some topics germane to my new coverage areas. For instance, the session on cloud-native challenges in traditional enterprises caught my eye. I’ve been involved in born-in-the-cloud companies, so we didn’t have any installed base to consider. But how would you embrace new and disruptive technology when your company has extensive legacy infrastructure? I can’t wait to hear about those more traditional enterprises’ opinions and experiences.

    Observability is also high on my list of things to learn more about. I’ve been working with customers on advanced security monitoring strategies for decades, but looking at the application layer and associated infrastructure is a different animal. I suspect there will be some technical similarities (collect data, analyze data, alert on data, etc.), but the use cases are fundamentally different. 

    I’m also excited for the last keynote of the day. However, I’m a little biased since it involves an excellent conversation Mitch Ashley and I had with Donald Lutz of Taos (an IBM company), where we dug into some of the enterprise migration challenges he’s seen in the field. 

    They say that when you’re young, you know everything. But as you get older, you realize you don’t know anything. I’m definitely in the latter camp, which is why I’m not going to squander a great opportunity to learn—and neither should you. Register and check out the event. I’ll see you there.

  • Recession! DevOps Hiring Freeze | Data Centers Suck (Power) | Intel to ‘be’ Wi-Fi 7

    Recession! DevOps Hiring Freeze | Data Centers Suck (Power) | Intel to ‘be’ Wi-Fi 7

    Welcome to The Long View—where we peruse the news of the week and strip it to the essentials. Let’s work out what really matters.

    This week: Engineer jobs are being cut, cloud infrastructure is using too much energy, and Intel’s 802.11be silicon is alive. (more…)