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where everything is constantly changing in real-time. But with digital transformation projects and innovation initiatives continuing to run at break-neck speed, the heat is on for technologists to adapt and get the visibility and insight they need across these modern environments.
Key to cloud-native success Modern application architectures offer huge benefits for organisations in terms of improved speed to innovation, greater flexibility and improved reliability
GREGG OSTROWSKI Executive CTO, Cisco AppDynamics
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he rapid digital transformation over the past few years, arguably only accelerated by the Covid-19 pandemic, has led to the rapid adoption of cloud-native technologies such
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as microservices and Kubernetes in enterprises across the region. These modern application architectures offer huge benefits for organisations in terms of improved speed to innovation, greater flexibility and improved reliability. But IT teams in organisations across the UAE, and the world for that matter, are now finding themselves under immense pressure as they attempt to monitor and manage availability and performance across hugely complex cloudnative application architectures. In particular, they’re struggling to get visibility into applications and underlying infrastructure for large, managed Kubernetes environments running on public clouds. There is no doubt that staying on top of availability and performance is a far greater challenge in a software-defined, cloud environment,
AN ISSUE OF SCALABILITY Traditional approaches to application availability and performance were often based on physical infrastructure. A decade ago, for example, IT departments operated a fixed number of servers and network wires — they were dealing with constants and fixed dashboards for every layer of the IT stack. The advent of cloud computing added a new level of complexity and organisations found themselves continually scaling their use of IT, up and down, based on real-time business needs. While monitoring solutions have adapted to accommodate rising deployments of cloud alongside traditional on-premise environments, the reality is that most were not designed to efficiently handle the dynamic and highly volatile cloudnative environments that we increasingly see today. Therefore, the fundamental question is one of scale — these highly distributed systems rely on thousands of containers and spawn a massive volume of metrics, events, logs and traces (MELT) telemetry every second. And currently, most technologists simply don’t have a way to cut through this crippling data volume and noise when troubleshooting application availability and performance problems caused by infrastructurerelated issues that span across hybrid environments. THE CASE FOR CLOUD-NATIVE OBSERVABILITY As such, it is essential for technologists to implement a cloudnative observability solution, to