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Category: News

New Relic Doubles Down on DevOps

New Relic today unfurled an extension of its monitoring platform specifically designed for DevOps teams tasked with managing complex IT environments.

Nadya Duke Boone, vice president of product management for New Relic, said New Relic One, available to existing customers at no additional cost, makes it possible for DevOps teams to now visualize all the data that exists across multiple New Relic accounts their organization has created in a single set of dashboards.

New Relic One also makes it possible to create an “entity” to track their relationships and dependencies to provide more context to the metrics surfaced by New Relic. That context is critical anytime a major incident occurs because these days so much of the revenue any organization generates is determined by the availability of their applications, said Duke Boone.

To achieve that goal, New Relic One provides Service Maps spanning entities; search and discovery tools based on universal tag filtering; dashboards through which queries can be launched using visual tools; an ability to more easily extend visualizations; and a new home page designed to make it easy to drill down into various dashboards.

Other capabilities included in New Relic One include Monitoring for the AWS Lambda serverless computing framework, a Kubernetes cluster explorer and distributed tracing global search.

New Relic also revealed today it plans to deliver both a log monitoring solution and AIOps offering within New Relic One by the end of the fiscal year. New Relic earlier this year acquired SignifAI to gain access to AIOps platform.

Duke Boone said all this is now possible because of the investments New Relic has made in developing a persistent store for monitoring platform, which she said represents a strategic initiative on the part of New Relic to expand the scope of the services and capabilities it provides.

Downtime in the age of digital business directly equates to lost revenues. Organizations that face that challenge typically are at the leading edge of adopting best DevOps practices. That challenge these organizations face today is they are drowning in complexity, a situation that likely will only worsen as organizations deploy cloud-native applications based on containers, she said, adding New Relic One not only serves to make it easier to manage all that complexity, it also makes it simpler for teams within an organization to share best DevOps practices.

Of course, one of the issues that restrains organizations from adopting DevOps practices in the first place is a reluctance to make IT environments any more complex than they already are. Organizations are demanding that IT organizations become agile enough to support a wide range of digital processes. The challenge they all typically face is the current reliance on highly structured processes that are intended to minimize potential errors. As well-intentioned as that might be, however, they often result in IT organizations being unable to adjust rapidly changing business requirements. The good news is as DevOps tools become more sophisticated, the skepticism of many IT professionals have toward DevOps will continue to quickly diminish.

— Mike Vizard

May 14, 2019
Nutanix Eases Development of IoT Apps

Nutanix, a vendor of hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, has released a new developer environment that allows developers to try and test IoT and AI apps in the cloud. Starting May 7, developers can sign up for a free 10-day trial of this experience.

The developer environment is built under Nutanix’s Xi IoT Platform and gives developers access to a rapid development environment for creating internet of things and artificial intelligence apps in the cloud. The Rapid Development Environment for IoT includes features such as Xi IoT Cloud Instance, Xi IoT Sensor App and Xi IoT App Library and supports the ability to easily deploy IoT software in the cloud or at the edge, according to the company. The environment has been tuned specifically for IoT and AI, eliminating many of the configuration chores developers had to perform using other cloud-based development environments, and enables single-click deployment via a management console.

For developers targeting production-edge environments, the new environment brings forth the ability to develop for the edge or for the cloud, bringing application portability into the development and testing process. By being able to use a common set of APIs, cloud and edge development becomes relatively seamless and deployment friction is vastly reduced, according to the company.

Beyond ensuring compatibility across platform services and APIs, the environment enables development and production environments to use the same components, so recoding is not needed as part of the transition from dev to ops. That helps to simplify lifecycle management as well as fit agile practices better into the dev process.

Nutanix also offers an extensive library of applications that can be used to ease development chores. The Xi IoT App Library offers individual components (message bus services, time series databases, etc.) and full solutions that developers can use to address various business problems.

Nutanix is framing the new delivery mechanism as a new experience to get more developers—from novice to advanced—creating AI and IoT scenarios.

— Frank Ohlhorst

May 10, 2019
Logz.io Unveils Azure Open Source ELK Monitoring Solution

Needless to say, DevOps as a practice is largely fueled by open source. The growth and popularity of open source tools such as Elasticsearch, Kubernetes and others are driven largely by the increased flexibility, innovation and familiarity of options. While this isn’t news for developers (65% of which are active open source contributors), leading cloud providers are taking notice, as they try to increase their appeal to DevOps engineers to finally win the cloud wars.

Currently, AWS is the leading cloud provider. However, with Azure gaining more and more momentum, all three major cloud providers are scrambling to offer their customers the best open source options and empower them to use the tools they know and love in a manner that is convenient and native to their cloud environments.

Going Big on Open Source

Today, Logz.io and Microsoft Azure announced that our ELK-as-a-service will now be offered on Microsoft Azure. Logz.io offers an intelligent machine data analytics platform built on ELK and Grafana, two of the most popular open source monitoring and troubleshooting tools. Our platform enables engineers to easily deploy, run and scale ELK without the hassle and pain of maintaining and managing the stack themselves.

Now, with Logz.io for Azure, users can use open source ELK as a highly integrated experience in Azure. The new offering includes seamless integrations to various Azure services, out-of-the-box Azure dashboards, built-in alerting and crowdsourced machine learning capabilities.

The integration between Logz.io and Azure is not only significant in the context of the cloud wars, but in the culture of Microsoft itself. While the company was previously associated with a more proprietary structure, they have made tremendous strides in recent years toward empowering open source by opening its .NET framework and Azure SDK, as well as their acquisition of GitHub.

According to Julia Liuson, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s developer division: “At Microsoft, we see open source as a major driver of innovation within the engineering community. Since we strive to empower our customers and facilitate their success, it is important to us to meet them where they are by making it easy to access and use open source tools. Our partnership with Logz.io will strengthen Microsoft Azure ties with the developer community, enabling teams to easily build and monitor their products using ELK.”

AWS vs. Google Cloud

Microsoft’s investment in ELK comes just in time to provide an answer to its competitors, AWS and Google Cloud. Just two months ago, AWS announced Open Distro for Elasticsearch, which in their own words “is a value-added distribution of Elasticsearch that is 100% open source (Apache 2.0 license) and supported by AWS.” The new offering includes managed Elasticsearch and Kibana along with features such as built-in alerting, security and more. This was AWS’ most recent appeal to the engineering community, offering one of the most popular monitoring tools as a managed service on AWS.

Following this release, Google Cloud announced its own open source offering featuring integrations with leading companies such as Elastic, MongoDB, Confluent and more. According to Google, the purpose of these integrations was to “provide users with a seamless user experience and the ability to easily leverage these open-source technologies in Google’s cloud.”

Is Open Source the Future?

If what’s happening between cloud vendors is any indication of future trends in the engineering space, it seems imperative that all organizations targeting DevOps teams must consider how they’ll fuel open source and empower its vast user community. At Logz.io, we are proud to be part of this initiative.

Overall, it is great to see the strides large organizations are taking in furthering the interests of the developer community and enabling them to work using the tools, methodologies and strategies that best suit their workflows and ideals.

— Daniel Berman

May 7, 2019
With RHEL 8, Red Hat Adds More Automation to IT Ops

At the Red Hat Summit 2019 conference, Red Hat today announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 8, which includes among other things a Smart Management add-on designed to make it easier to manage RHEL 8 across hybrid cloud computing environments.

In addition, RHEL 8 includes Application Streams, a set of utilities for updating languages, frameworks and developer tools without impacting the core resources, as well as updating RHEL 7 to RHEL 8 in place.

RHEL 8 also adds Red Hat Enterprise Linux System Roles, which provides modules to automate complex tasks using the Ansible automation framework along with support for the Red Hat container toolkit and the general availability of the Red Hat Universal Base Image, a userspace image derived from RHEL that makes it easier to build Linux containers certified to run on RHEL.

Red Hat also revealed that Red Hat Insights, a set of predictive analytics tools, will be included with the RHEL 8 subscription and that RHEL 8 supports both the OpenSSL 1.1.1 and TLS 1.3 cryptographic standards.

Gunnar Hellekson, director for product management for Red Hat, said Red Hat is focusing on automating as many tasks as possible as part of an effort to make the life of IT operations teams simpler. As part of that effort, Hellekson said Red Hat is moving to lower the barrier to becoming a RHEL administrator by abstracting away many of the complexities historically associated with trying to manage Linux environments using a command line interface (CLI). Much of that focus will manifest themselves via ongoing enhancements to the Compose and Cockpit tools Red Hat provides for deploying and managing instances of RHEL, said Hellekson.

Red Hat is making it clear it wants to make RHEL much more accessible to a larger number of IT administrators, especially those that historically have favored a more graphical approach to managing operating system environments. At the same time, however, Red Hat is infusing more automation into RHEL 8 as part of an effort to make it easier to manage deployments at scale. That latter capability is crucial for DevOps teams that, for example, need to be able to update a development environment without waiting for an IT operations team to reconfigure and reboot an operating system. Via add-ons to the core RHEL platform, Red Hat is now starting to expand those automation capabilities across both on-premises and public cloud computing environments.

It’s unclear going forward how many instances of RHEL any one IT administrator might be able to manage on their own. Trying to determine that number might not even be worth the effort because advances in automation are now coming so rapidly that trying to determine that right number of IT administrators per environment is not possible to determine consistently. Instead, IT organizations should just assume that, thanks to automation enabled by machine learning algorithms and predictive analytics, the operating system environment is now flexible enough to scale up and down as needed.

— Mike Vizard

May 7, 2019
IT Operations: PagerDuty Unveils Hybrid ITSM Platform

PagerDuty today unveiled a framework intended to make it possible for organizations to bridge multiple styles of IT service management (ITSM) methodologies for IT operations.

Rachel Obstler, vice president of product for PagerDuty, said PagerDuty Solution for HybridOps provides a comprehensive incident management framework capable of spanning both ITIL and DevOps processes for IT operations.

PagerDuty Solution for HybridOps combines existing and new product capabilities such as Event Intelligence and Modern Incident Response with machine learning algorithms and bi-directional integrations the company has developed between its incident management software and more than 300 third-party products.

Those capabilities make it possible to facilitate real-time communications between platforms that tend to be favored by IT shops relying mainly on ITIL processes, such as ServiceNow, and DevOps teams that rely on Slack to communicate with one another, Obstler said.

Rather than forcing an entire IT organization to transition to single framework for IT operations, PagerDuty Solution for HybridOps allows organizations to selectively apply each model where and when they best see fit, she said.

The latest version of the ITIL framework goes a long way toward injecting some flexibility into what historically has been viewed as a rigid approach to managing IT. The ITIL framework is still a long way from being as agile as the various forms of DevOps that many organizations have adopted over the last several years to accelerate application development and deployment.

Obstler said PagerDuty is moving to bridge that divide by leveraging machine learning algorithms to group all the various alerts generated by all the tools in an IT environment. That capability not only reduces the amount of alert fatigue any IT operations group is likely to suffer, but it also makes it easier to identify the root cause of any IT incident, she noted.

One of the primary reasons DevOps has been adopted evenly in the enterprise is that IT operations teams are expected to be able to programmatically adapt IT infrastructure to meet the demands of developers. The number of IT operations that have those skills, however, is limited. In theory, IT operations teams without programming skills could rely on automated frameworks to achieve that goal. But that approach requires IT organizations to standardize on a single IT automation framework across compute, storage and networking services. The number of organizations that have been able to bridge all the islands of automation that have been adopted across all the services they deliver are few and far between. Put it altogether and it’s clear that both legacy and modern approaches to ITSM will need to coexist well through the next decade.

In the meantime, IT leaders might want to consider that old proverb about leading a horse to water. IT leaders can issue all the mandates they want. But when it comes time to accomplish a task, most IT professionals are naturally going to fall back on what they know. The challenge is to create ways to wean the IT operations staff off those legacy processes in a way that doesn’t necessarily result in everything grinding to a halt because nobody knows how to fix an issue that simply wouldn’t otherwise wait.

— Mike Vizard

May 6, 2019
With YAML Support, Puppet Dives Deeper Into DevOps

Puppet this week announced an update to Puppet Enterprise that adds additional DevOps capabilities, including integration with Bolt, an open source agentless task runner that Puppet employs to make IT automation more accessible to IT administrators.

Matt Waxman, vice president of products at Puppet, said adding integration with Bolt will make it easier to integrate DevOps processes that rely on YAML to deploy applications.

Available this month via a Puppet Enterprise 2019.1 update, Bolt provides an agentless approach to automation that enables IT teams to execute existing commands and scripts written in any language within the context of an IT automation framework that is designed to be accessible to the average IT administrator, Waxman said.

At the same time, Puppet is providing the ability to set up pipelines for deploying automation code directly from within Puppet Enterprise. Rather than having to set up a separate continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) platform, Puppet is embedding the capability it acquired from its purchase of Distelli in 2017. In doing so, Puppet is making it possible to accelerate deployment of automation software in a way that doesn’t require every change to be approved by a master Puppet administrator. Default pipelines guide organizations new to continuous delivery practices through setting up their first pipeline in less than 30 minutes.

Puppet is also including an Impact Analysis capability that enables teams to assess the impact of a proposed Puppet code change before it is deployed.

One of the issues that has held back adoption of DevOps practices has been the simple fact that most IT administrators have limited programming skills. By making available an IT automation framework that provides the ability to manipulate YAML files at a higher level of abstraction, it should become easier of organizations to incorporate IT administrators into any set of DevOps process they care to define, Waxman said.

Puppet via this upgrade is also extending the reach of the agentless Bolt framework to include support for network devices running Cisco NX-OS and Cisco IOS, as well as firewalls from Palo Alto Networks. As network operations continues to be more integrated with DevOps processes, IT organizations increasingly need to be able to apply workflows across compute, storage and networking platforms, Waxman said.

The challenge many IT organizations now face in terms of achieving that goal is each provider of a platform creates their own automation framework, which winds up creating islands of automation across the enterprise. Longer term, Waxman said that, in addition to invoking the application programming interfaces (APIs) that many platforms already expose, Puppet will be working toward integrating domain-specific automation frameworks with its cross-platform framework.

Overall, Waxman said Puppet remains committed to providing a mix of agentless and agent-based approaches to IT automation based on the nature of the IT tasks that need to be automated. It will be up to each IT organization to determine when to employ one of those options. But regardless of the path chosen, Puppet is clearly trying to make its core automation platform a lot more accessible to everyone in IT.

— Mike Vizard

May 3, 2019
Wavefront Provides Map for Microservices

VMware announced it is adding a service mapping capability to the Wavefront 3D Observability platform it provides with the Wavefront by VMware monitoring tools.

Stela Udovicic, senior director of product marketing for Wavefront, said Wavefront Service Maps will make it easier for IT organizations to visualize what will soon be thousands of microservices running highly distributed computing environments, including those based on containers running on Docker Engine, connected via service meshes such as Istio or spanning proxy servers such as Envoy.

Capabilities provided by Wavefront Service Maps include packaged visualization of request flows with a map of service dependencies, built-in tracking of health metrics and view into individual traces to pinpoint performance bottlenecks.

Accessed as a set of software-as-a-service (Saas) applications, Wavefront by VMware relies on an agentless approach to monitoring that supports all the major public clouds along with providing integrations with platforms such as Kubernetes, GitHub, Slack, PagerDuty, Kafka and Pivotal Application Service.

Udovicic said by making it easier to visually identify and troubleshoot microservices, IT organizations should be able to accelerate their transition to modern cloud-native applications. Building and deploying a single application based on microservices is complicated enough. Trying to support hundreds of those applications is simply too daunting without the ability to visualize all the interdependencies between those services. Troubleshooting any issue then becomes easier because Wavefront Service Maps is designed to enable DevOps teams to drill down to the traces being employed to monitor the application, she said.

Earlier this year, Wavefront added support for distributed tracing and machine learning algorithms that also make it easier to identify anomalies within a microservices-based application.

In terms of adoption of cloud-native applications, Udovicic said there are basically two classes. The first are early adopters who are already highly committed to developing cloud-native applications. The bulk of the enterprise IT community, however, is still in the early stages of building and deploying these types of applications, said Udovicic.

There’s naturally a high correlation between organizations that have adopted cloud-native application development using microservices aggressively and those that have implemented best DevOps practices. In fact, one of the benefits of a visualization tool is that it makes it easier to bring new members on to those teams. Rather than having to piece together what is occurring in the environment, a new member of a DevOps team can visually inspect each microservice they might be responsible for managing.

It may be a while before DevOps processes become the dominant default method for managing IT. But as DevOps tools become easier to use, the number of DevOps practitioners should increase steadily. Arguably, one of the reasons DevOps adoption is not as far along as it might be is that the learning curve is still too steep. But as visualization capabilities gets added to the analytics frameworks baked into those tools, it’s now only a matter of time before the number of IT professionals that might be intimidated by DevOps processes starts to decline steadily.

— Mike Vizard

May 1, 2019
Dell Technologies Drives Automation Deeper into Platforms

Dell Technologies this week launched a series of initiatives intended to provide IT organizations with multiple deployment options for Dell EMC appliances and servers, including forthcoming managed service offering through which Dell will manage private cloud platforms based on VMware software on behalf of customers.

Announced at the Dell Technologies World 2019 conference, Dell EMC also unveiled a new appliance series and revealed an alliance with Microsoft under which its VMware arm will make available cloud software on the Microsoft Azure cloud, in addition to existing support for Amazon Web Services (AWS), IBM Cloud and servers deployed on-premises.

Jon Siegal, vice president for product marketing for converged platforms and solutions at Dell EMC, said Dell EMC plans to make it easier for IT organizations to consume IT infrastructure in an on-premises IT environment as a service or continue to use their capital budgets to acquire servers and appliances.

To advance that latter approach, Dell EMC is launching VxFlex, a set of appliances that include an operating system that enable compute, storage and networking separately. In contrast, the existing VxRail series of appliances are optimized for VMware and assume compute, storage and networking will be scaled in tandem, said Siegal. Dell EMC is also now unifying a set of hyperconverged appliances and converged infrastructure servers under a common VxFlex brand, and Siegal said in the future those offerings will be extended to add support for Kubernetes alongside platforms from vendors other than VMware.

At the same time, Dell EMC is previewing a VxRail Analytical Consulting Engine (ACE) that will be embedded in VxRail HCI system software that Dell EMC provides in its appliances optimized for VMware. That analytics engine employs machine learning algorithms to maximize application performance, while also providing self-optimization recommendations and capacity forecasts.

The Dell Technologies Data Center-as-a-Service offering, meanwhile, is scheduled to be generally available in the second half. It marks the first time Dell has launched a managed service under its own brand. VMware, however, has been providing managed services for the past year. The Dell Technologies Data Center-as-a-Service offering extends that concept to include Dell EMC VxRail appliances.

Automation is clearly at the heart of the evolving Dell Technologies strategy. The challenge organizations that have embraced DevOps will face is aligning their processes with the automation frameworks Dell Technologies is embedding in both VMware and the underlying infrastructure on which VMware gets deployed. To address that issue, Dell Technologies over time will bundle frameworks such as the open source distribution of the Pivotal platform-as-a-service (PaaS) environment from Pivotal Software, an arm of Dell Technologies, on its platforms, Siegal said.

These moves signal Dell Technologies is trying to fulfill a promise to make it as easy to manage IT infrastructure deployed in an on-premises IT environment as it is to manage on a public cloud. There’s obviously still a gap. But as Dell Technologies starts to make IT infrastructure available as a service, it may one day become challenging for DevOps teams to tell where any one cloud happens to be running at any given moment.

— Mike Vizard

April 30, 2019
VMware Drops Managed Cloud Onto Dell EMC Appliances

At the Dell Technologies World conference, VMware today announced it will make available an instance of its managed cloud platform on appliances from Dell EMC in the second half of this year.

VMware Cloud for Dell EMC is a turnkey platform that combines VMware compute, storage and networking software in a single offering managed and updated by VMware on behalf of its customers. It is similar to VMware Cloud for AWS, a managed service that VMware provides for Amazon Web Services, said Wei Wang, director of product marketing for VMware.

VMware Cloud for Dell EMC represents the first commercial instance of Project Dimension, an initiative launched last year that promised to make available a software-defined data center (SDDC) as a managed service for on-premises IT environments in an effort to “ruthlessly automate IT.” In addition to supporting VxRail appliances from Dell EMC, VMware plans to make available instances of Project Dimension on other platforms, Wang said.

Pricing for the managed service initially will be based on a flat monthly subscription, but Wang said VMware plans to provide a metered option that will enable customers to pay for VMware Cloud for Dell EMC on a pure consumption basis.

In the meantime, VMware Cloud for Dell EMC, coupled with VMware Cloud for AWS, will provide IT organizations with a consistent control plane across a hybrid cloud computing environment based on vSphere, vSAN and NSX software that virtualizes compute, storage and networking, noted Wang. VMware is already managing infrastructure running more than 25 million workloads on AWS, a number that is expected to increase substantially as it rolls out instances on Project Dimension on additional public clouds including Microsoft Azure and on-premises IT environments.

By opting to rely on VMware to manage IT infrastructure, organizations should be able to shift more of their own internal IT resources toward developing and deploying more applications. The VMware approach also potentially reduces the scope of the operational challenge many organizations now face when trying to manage virtual compute, storage and networking software in tandem.

The challenge those organizations will face is implementing a set of best DevOps practices that match the cadence of the updates being made to the IT environment by VMware. It’s not clear to what degree organizations will want to relinquish operational control over IT infrastructure to VMware. Historically, roughly a quarter of all IT is consumed as a managed service usually provided by an IT services firm, but as vendors such as VMware begin to offer those managed services, the number of organizations that might switch to the model may increase.

Many organizations already rely on cloud service providers such as AWS to manage infrastructure on their behalf. This latest offering essentially extends that same concept to on-premises IT environments.

The degree to which organizations will save money by relying on a managed service is going to be difficult to quantify. In some cases, relying on a managed service might prove more expensive, while in other cases the savings on IT administrators alone might pay for the service. Whatever the path chosen, the number of workloads that will running on IT infrastructure managed by vendors such as VMware will increase sharply in the months and years ahead.

— Mike Vizard

April 29, 2019
Mirantis Adds Modeling Tool to Configure Private Cloud

At the Open Infrastructure Summit conference, Mirantis today unfurled a software-as-a-service (SaaS) application through which IT administrators can employ modeling tools to configure private clouds based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes.

Boris Renski, chief marketing officer for Mirantis, said rather than having to manually configure a private cloud for an on-premises IT environment using YAML files, the Model Designer for Mirantis Private Cloud enables IT administrators to configure a private cloud using modeling tools they access via a graphical interface (GUI). The Model Designer is scheduled for general availabilility in May.

That approach then makes it feasible for IT administrators with little to no programming expertise to quickly spin up private clouds within the context of a DevOps environment using a set of declarative tools, added Renksi.

Those tools also enable IT administrators to specify the degree of configurability they require. A basic configurability level automatically populates most of the cluster settings to a default set of pretested values. The most advanced “ultraviolence” configurability setting enables IT administrators to adjust virtually every aspect of their on-premises cloud. The resulting configuration models are then fed into DriveTrain, which is the automation framework that Mirantis provides within Mirantis Private Cloud.

Renski said requiring IT administrators to master all the nuances associated with managing YAML files to stand up a private cloud is one of things holding back adoption of both on-premises private clouds and the best DevOps practices that should be relied to mange them. Most organizations that want to make the transition to DevOps clearly want to be able to manage infrastructure as code in much the same way public cloud service providers do today. The challenge is, the learning curve associated with achieving that goal is simply too high for the average IT administrator, he said, adding a modeling tool made available as SaaS application will make it possible for even mere IT mortals to easily spin up a private cloud within an on-premises IT environment.

Both OpenStack and Kubernetes suffer to varying degrees from often being too complex for the average IT organization to set up. Because of those complexity issues, adoption of both platforms often is limited to IT organizations that have advanced IT skills. But as the deployment processes surrounding both platforms become more automated, it’s probable the number of organizations adopting either platform will increase. At the same, IT organizations that do embrace either platform more likely will spin up more instances once they no longer have to rely on a cumbersome manual set of processes.

Of course, setting up a private cloud based on either OpenStack or Kubernetes is only the beginning of the IT challenge. Once all those private clouds are deployed, IT organizations need to acquire the tools and expertise required to manage them on an ongoing basis. In fact, one of the things IT organizations should consider in the age of the private cloud is the level of integration of the tools from vendors they intend to rely on to set up and then manage a private cloud.

— Mike Vizard

April 29, 2019