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November 5, 2024

Watch out! Sharks at KubeCon

By Yotam Yemini, CEO, Causely

Based on my LinkedIn news feed, it must be that time of year when thousands of open source enthusiasts congregate to talk tech at various parties, dinners, and other networking events surrounding KubeCon. In fact, we’re hosting a couple of our own: You can register here for our happy hour or here for our dinner.

And if you pay attention, you might start to notice some buzz building around one event in particular. Word on the KubeStreet is this will be one of those IYKYK type things, so I’m here to help you get in the know (cue Jaws music 🦈 🎶).

First, we need to set a bit of a foundation about the evolution of DevOps and what’s missing from the Observability market.

The beginning of DevOps

Patrick Debois, a tech consultant based in Belgium, is often cited with popularizing the term DevOps. This is because, in 2009, he organized the first DevOpsDays conference. However, the truth is the roots of DevOps extend further back.

Earlier that same year, John Allspaw and Paul Hammond’s influential talk at the Velocity Conference, 10+ Deploys per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr highlighted the importance of collaboration between development and operations to enable frequent, reliable deployments.

We can go back even further though, as the groundwork for DevOps was already being laid in 2001. Back then, The Agile Manifesto championed collaboration and iterative development, which are principles that would later shape the DevOps ethos. Meanwhile, tools like Puppet, Chef, and Jenkins were gaining traction in the oughts, helping bridge the gap between development and operations teams.

These influences helped shape what is commonly known as DevOps, which is a movement that champions collaboration, cultural transformation, and tooling integration to achieve high-frequency, reliable software delivery.

Then came Observability

As part of this movement, engineering teams started to adopt microservices architecture as a software development method of breaking applications down into small, independent services that interact with each other to perform the job of the application. This method became popular because of the speed and ease that it adds to the software development process.

On the other hand, a microservices approach makes it exponentially more difficult to diagnose, remediate, and prevent application performance problems. The growing popularity of DevOps practices and microservices architecture paved the way for advancements in monitoring and its evolution into what many know today as observability.

As DevOps led teams to release faster and decompose applications into microservices, traditional monitoring – which relies on static alerts based on isolated metrics – could no longer keep up with the resulting complexity. Observability tries to address this gap by offering a more holistic view to help engineers pinpoint issues, understand dependencies, and continuously improve system performance.

Companies large and small appreciate how observability tools provide their engineering teams with a single pane of glass, nifty dashboards, and helpful data correlation features, but the more discerning engineers have matured to view this market of tools as being more like a single glass of pain.

Cool, so what does this have to do with sharks?

Suppose I told you that ice cream consumption and shark attacks were correlated. From this you might infer that sharks love sugar. Of course, you’ve probably heard this example used before to help make the point that correlation does not equal causation. It’s certainly useful to understand that two metrics are temporally correlated, but it’s misleading that observability vendors claim this to be root cause analysis, and in some scenarios it can hurt more than it helps.

At Causely, we value the observability market and believe it’s provided a good start for engineers who want to reduce MTTD and MTTR. The more discerning engineers are coming to realize they will only reach the next frontier of autonomous service reliability if they start to look at the problem from a different, top-down perspective.

We’ll be happy to tell you more about this if you’re lucky enough to find the shark at the show next week. Here’s a hint: she’ll be holding something sweet. 🍨 🥞

Additional information about our presence at KubeCon is here.

 

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