BrainBlog for LightStep (a ServiceNow company) by Jason English
Kubernetes was specifically built to support massive scale and rapid elasticity, but deploying it at scale can still present worrying challenges for development and operations teams.
We’ve seen a unique ‘potato chip’ pattern in Kubernetes adoption within enterprises, where once the first K8s clusters pop, they can’t stop. The initial success causes teams to quickly deploy two, then 20, then 200 clusters, then what seems like way-too-many headed for production.
Faced with this increasing complexity, can development and operations teams efficiently scale operations while keeping everything secure and working properly, without burning everyone out in the process?
There’s no good reason for anxiety about the need for scale and speed when so many other organizations have successfully reaped the benefits of automation and observability for cloud native delivery.
Dissolving the illusion of mastery
When any game-changing technology paradigm appears, the first instinct of a well-established software delivery organization is to take a measured approach and hold onto well-governed processes and tools they already have to mitigate risk.
Often, an ‘innovation team’ will experiment with new technologies and alternative use cases in relative isolation, while the rest of the business carries on as usual. This is natural for a space like cloud-native computing, where the rate of technology change outpaces the availability of documentation and learning.
While keeping existing platforms and delivery pipelines may defer some risk, it also defers the real transformation necessary for companies to thrive in a hypercompetitive market – not just for customers, but also in the hunt for development talent.
A new generation of “born in the cloud” developers and engineers are coming into the talent market every day, having never known the old ways of doing things. The ability to work in a modern cloud-native shop and participate in open source communities isn’t just a perk or hobby; it’s something the best talent will expect from an employer.
Growing operational awareness with limited resources
Even with the titans of technology taking this uncertain opportunity to lay off 10% or more of their workforces, there’s not going to be relief for most hiring managers anytime soon. The average medium-to-large sized company also had a 25% or more increase in new job requisitions for technical talent last year.
Since developers and engineers with cloud-native experience are in high demand or are starting their own ventures, organizations must upskill from within.
Cloud native asks developers to become operators who can understand details of how their code will interact with infrastructure in deployment as it scales. To an extent, it’s expecting them to become networking and security professionals as well.
Here’s where observability comes into the picture, culling data from clusters, pods, and serverless functions to provide teams with an X-ray view of the internal workings of microservices applications as they work in production.
Read the entire BrainBlog here.
