The disruption of industries through software
Marc Andreessen famously stated in 2011 that “software is eating the world”. The world runs on software defined businesses. These businesses realize that in order to be efficient and stay ahead of the competition they must innovate or they will die. Technology is no longer secondary to your business, but is now the actual business.
Nowadays there is an app for nearly everything and consumers have the expectation most processes are automated. Access to these apps is ubiquitously available — from the web and mobile. Every disruptive billion dollar company in the last decade has innovated through applications by fundamentally changing the market and user experience. Companies like Netflix, Uber, Square, Tesla, Nest, Instacart, and many others have capitalized on this new user experience and catering to their elevated expectations. The disruption stems from an improved user experience, and enabled through technology.
The evolution of application complexity
Gone are the days where applications were this simple:
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The reality nowadays is applications are extremely complex and distributed using several platforms. Most application architecture we come across utilize several languages such as Java, .NET, PHP, and Node.js. Operations becomes even more complex with virtualization and cloud environments, deploying to containers, and managing application made up of many microservices.
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It is not DevOps, it’s the next generation of Ops
Most people and companies abuse the term DevOps to no end. It is a bit embarrassing, but buzzwords flow rampant on an expo floor of a technology convention. The reality is quite simply that the operations tools engineers use to build and manage complex applications have evolved to match the complexity. I believe the operations complexity breaks down into a few main categories: infrastructure automation, configuration management, deployment automation, log management, performance management, and monitoring.
The evolution of the Ops problem
The modern operations reality is that the cloud is the standard platform, operations are automated through code, testing and quality assurance are automated through code, deployments are automated through code, and monitoring and instrumentation is critical to success.
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The DevOps Report from Puppet Labs surveyed the DevOps community and found some interesting results, most notably: “companies with high-performing IT organizations are twice as likely to exceed their profitability, market share and productivity goals.”
The report also found successful DevOps teams tended to share these characteristics:
- use continuous delivery to ensure consistent and stable deployments
- leverage version control not just for code, but infrastructure and configuration to track and manage all environments states
- automate testing to have confidence about the quality of every release
- invest in monitoring and logging to be proactive about problems
- correlate IT performance with organizational performance
Download the entire report from Puppet Labs
The enterprise catch up game
Most enterprises are not able to adopt cutting edge technology at a rapid pace so they are in a constant state of migration and catching up. Furthermore, their challenges are exacerbated when dealing with hybrid environments consisting of on-premise legacy systems combined with new public and private cloud environments. Larger, less flexible, legacy companies are just starting to invest in the latest generation of programming languages such as Scala, Node.js, and Go and nosql datastores like Cassandra and Redis.
Though enterprises may experience the challenges adapting to the latest operations trends, there are several tools out there which will help ease the transition. A good APM solution helps foster DevOps best practices and increase collaboration between the traditionally separated Dev and Ops teams.
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The post The future of Ops, part 1 written by Dustin Whittle appeared first on Application Performance Monitoring Blog from AppDynamics.