Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023. Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
What’s Next for Observability and DevOps?
By Ben Sigelman, General Manager of the Lightstep Business Unit for ServiceNow and co-founder of Lightstep
Observability and DevOps best practices are constantly evolving to keep pace with rapid technological change. Over the last year, the role of DevOps and Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) teams has become more important – and complicated – than ever, as more organizations accelerate cloud operations to build and run millions of new customer-facing applications and services. In 2022, we saw a significant shift towards unified cloud-native observability, as the idea of bringing logs, traces, and metrics together on a single platform became closer to reality. Through unified observability, organizations can innovate faster with greater precision and control. Armed with unified telemetry data, companies can deliver better outcomes across all their technology investments and realize the promise of digital transformation.
Looking to the year ahead, observability and DevOps will only rise in strategic importance, as organizations lean into holistic end-to-end observability solutions embedded across the enterprise and expand their DevOps loop to increase efficiency. Here are three major shifts I expect to see across observability and DevOps in 2023.
Extending unified observability beyond cloud-native workloads
As more organizations prioritize observability across all operations, observability practices will begin to expand beyond their current scope of cloud-native workloads and microservices. Over the next year, observability practices will start integrating legacy workload telemetry data in addition to enterprise business data and analytics so organizations can get a more holistic view of the systems and processes that power them.
Greater visibility into systems and processes unlocks new levels of efficiency – a number one priority for all organizations right now facing today’s tough economic climate. While making many legacy systems and processes fully observable can be costly, the benefits of increased visibility across platforms quickly outweigh the barriers. By extending unified observability beyond the cloud, DevOps and SRE teams can break down siloes, connecting disparate pieces of information from across the organization, ultimately fueling more effective and smarter decision-making that enhances experiences for employees and customers.
DevOps will become a business imperative
Facing continued economic slowdown, organizations today are being forced to do more with less across leaner teams. As a result, DevOps will transition from being a “nice to have” to a business imperative and play a larger role in observability, security, risk, and compliance.
In today’s climate, organizations that operate in the software development realm are under pressure to adhere to increasingly quick deployment schedules to create more value for end-users. Without DevOps, this would be nearly impossible. DevOps provides organizations with several benefits including better product delivery, more innovation, faster issue resolution, and reduced complexity – all of which are essential for organizations as they set ambitious software delivery goals.
Additionally, DevOps teams will need to adopt and refine their DevOps practices to compete with the speed of innovation and deliver value fast. This includes not just reducing cycle time and improving developer experience, but also bringing observability, security, risk, and compliance into their DevOps loop and making them “day zero” concerns. By doing so, DevOps teams will be able to protect their organizations from the inside out. Shifting these concerns left into the development cycle allows DevOps teams to address them before they occur, saving organizations valuable time and money as well as strengthening their security posture.
Unified observability will be the key to more intelligent, connected organizations
The importance of observability and DevOps will continue to grow in the coming year as organizations seek to drive greater efficiencies and capitalize on the benefits of digital transformation. We’ll likely see more and more legacy systems and processes become observable and, in parallel, see DevOps teams expand their roles and responsibilities. 2023 will be the year that unified observability unlocks the enterprise, allowing organizations to seamlessly connect insights and actions across all the tools, people, and processes involved in delivering digital customer experiences – so teams can innovate faster and with confidence.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ben Sigelman is the general manager of the Lightstep business unit for ServiceNow. His work and interests gravitate toward observability, especially where microservices, high transaction volumes, and large engineering organizations are involved.
Before joining ServiceNow, Ben served as co-founder and the CEO at Lightstep, co-creator of Dapper (Google’s distributed tracing system), and co-creator of the OpenTracing and OpenTelemetry projects (both part of the CNCF).
