Intellyx BrainBlog by Jason English for New Relic, in Diginomica.com
Just like a steaming fast pizza delivery, observability is heating up modern software delivery. If you were responsible for creating e-commerce applications at a firm like Domino’s Pizza UK, you might look back on the last 20 years with sentimentality about the relative simplicity of testing and monitoring software. Sure, customers still expected a hot pizza delivered within 30 minutes, but there used to be more phone calls and human processes involved in processing and fulfilling orders atop a relatively static tech stack.
Today, when fast-moving events create high-volume spikes in demand, 80-90% of Domino’s pizza orders happen through their website or an app. High performance pressures are driving the modernization of their applications onto elastic cloud infrastructure and microservices, while a pandemic forces DevOps teams out of the office and into remote collaboration.
The old methods of pre-production testing and post-release monitoring we knew from our three-tier architecture days could no longer keep up with such demands. Instrumenting a custom agent for every service or container created prohibitive labor, licensing and data costs, as well as slower releases and a production performance hit. As Bill Staples, chief product officer of New Relic, explains –
When I started talking with companies about observability, I immediately heard that the economic barriers of complexity were really getting in the way from them embracing it everywhere. They had to pick and choose what they instrumented, and what tools they used.
There are scale, cost and personnel barriers to making observability a standard practice for enterprise DevOps teams – but 2021 is shaping up to be the year they all fall away.
Read the entire story on Diginomica.com here >
© 2020, Intellyx, LLC. Intellyx retains editorial control over the content of this article. At the time of publishing, New Relic is an Intellyx customer. Image credit: @ESB Professional – Shutterstock (in Diginomica.com)
