By Jason English
We can plausibly say the enterprise development market turned the tide on cloud-native development in 2020, as most net-new software and serious overhaul projects started moving toward microservices architectures, with Kubernetes as the preferred platform.
According to the 2020 DevOps Pulse survey of more than a thousand DevOps practitioners from mostly mid-to-large sized development and IT Ops shops, 56% of respondents store more than half their infrastructure in the cloud, while 42% store 75% or more.
Open source software is underpinning this sea change. Kubernetes itself floats upon open source contributions, while further promoting a wide community exploration of even more innovative cloud-native projects and open source tools for container delivery, orchestration, storage, and security.
And on the crest of this tidal shift? Observability, which goes beyond monitoring to provide clarity into the inner workings of the software.
With so much business riding on software, the global market demand for observability is exploding with multi-million-dollar venture investments and multi-billion-dollar vendor acquisitions (and valuations). While there are market leaders doing very well selling commercial observability software, that’s only a small fraction of the action in the cloud-native realm.
Instances of installed open source monitoring and observability tools in production may outnumber the instances of all vendor solutions by 10 times or more. Why?
