Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2023.  Read them in this 15th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

The Rise of eBPF

By Shahar Azulay, CEO and Co-Founder, groundcover

APM (Application Performance Monitoring) observability solutions have  been around for a decade, yet have become infeasible for many companies in need of  application monitoring today: they are hard to integrate, impossible to scale, and offer an expensive full-blown tracing system, or nothing at all. Estimated at over $50 billion, observability is one of the largest and fastest-growing markets in infrastructure software, with teams willing to allocate up to 10% of their IT spend to it. Giant companies have been leading the APM sector, yet due to growing data volumes and intricate technology stacks, the cost has risen and these solutions have become hard to integrate and demanding to maintain. The result is clear: over 70% of teams do not have an APM tier in place (DevOps Pulse 2022).

As we look ahead to the trends in store in 2023, we see a growing pain around the ability to adopt and maintain observability platforms. The slower-than-expected adoption of OpenTelemetry and the rise of eBPF frictionless instrumentation will cause a major shift in the industry towards solutions that offer immediate time-to-value. Companies will want to spend much less time and effort in integrating new observability solutions into their stack, and will be willing to for-go more to get there. Solutions that can't keep up with this new demand will be left behind, or will be forced to offer new product tiers that can compete in this new market.

Additionally, we will see a clear growing concern around the exploding costs of observability platforms. This is becoming a major problem for enterprises which are constantly on the hunt for alternatives. Adding to a year where reducing SaaS costs is already a major focus for most teams, we expect a lower tolerance for unexpected, volume-based pricing models and a turn to predictable and far more scalable offerings.

We will see teams taking a more active part in maintaining a reasonable budget across their entire stack as observability solutions start offering more than just performance monitoring and will also introduce features helping teams track their cost-effectiveness.

We expect organizations to shake the foundations of the traditional data-first observability paradigm. Teams will no longer be willing to store all available data and think later about how to utilize it, but will be willing to spend time, pre-thinking and compute resources to reduce their data volumes before it is utilized for observability insights.

We will see more work around reducing data volumes by creating more sophisticated collection mechanisms using edge-compute approaches. Alongside that, we see a growing number of vendors offering data pipelines that can help cut costs after the data was collected by using rule-based capturing logics and transforming raw data to metrics.

2023 is going to be the year of eBPF when it comes to monitoring. We will see more and more observability and security solutions that are based mostly on eBPF as their source of data. eBPF enables powerful advantages for observability applications by providing a faster, less resource-intensive and more holistic approach to gathering high-precision data.  We expect legacy observability players to heavily rely on eBPF as part of their stack, offering customers new frictionless application monitoring alternatives, alongside many new emerging players in the market that are eBPF-native from day-one and have a head start on the rest in the field.

This year we will also see Kubernetes reaching new heights of adoption, with many enterprises no longer talking about a migration to Kubernetes but already focused on improving their capabilities in Kubernetes and expanding their usage.  We will see the race for Kubernetes-native monitoring solutions continue. Legacy vendors will continue to expand their offerings to Kubernetes users to stop them from using 3rd party solutions that better cover their cloud-native stack.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Shahar Azulay, CEO of groundcover is a serial R&D leader. Shahar brings experience in the world of cybersecurity and machine learning having worked as a leader in companies such as Apple, DayTwo, and Cymotive Technologies. Shahar spent many years in the Cyber division at the Israeli Prime Minister's Office and holds three degrees in Physics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Technion Israel Institute of Technology as well as Tel Aviv University. Shahar strives to use technological learnings from this rich background and bring it to today's cloud native battlefield in the sharpest, most innovative form to make the world of dev a better place.