Collaboration, visibility, and transparency are critical pillars for DevSecOps workflows and modern application development. However, as organizations increasingly shift to cloud-native environments, away from monolithic code bases on servers or clusters of virtual machines, this becomes a much taller order for developers, security, and operations professionals.
Cloud-native architecture, while a flexible and cost-effective option, can make workflows more complex, as it involves more elements and moving parts to configure, protect, execute, and measure. In order to ensure maximum visibility and identify bottlenecks early on in the software development lifecycle, organizations have begun prioritizing and implementing observability within their DevSecOps workflows.
Defining observability
Traditional metrics monitoring is no longer enough in today’s software development landscape. Observability provides a new, scalable approach to gaining visibility into an organization’s infrastructure alongside the ongoing adoption of microservices and cloud-native technologies, and can be seamlessly integrated into existing DevSecOps processes and toolchains. Modern application development and deployment require observability protocols in place in order to reduce infrastructure costs and proactively identify and mitigate any vulnerabilities or flaws in code.
Observability provides a holistic view into an organization’s overall health incorporating data types like metrics, traces, logs, profiling, error tracking, real user monitoring, test reports, and network data. By collecting and analyzing a wide range of data types and events, organizations can uncover and benchmark key DevSecOps metrics, improve productivity, uncover key answers to questions, and identify unknown unknowns.
Implementing observability within DevSecOps
In modern application development, development, security, and operations teams share the responsibility of software development and delivery. And as organizations mature, DevSecOps methodologies extend past those teams and engage stakeholders in functions such as compliance, legal, finance, and other departments with a direct stake in value delivery. Observability provides teams with a more holistic view of development-driven value and results, and when incorporated within an existing DevSecOps platform, can remove siloes and better enable data sharing across an organization.
Organizations are increasingly seeking out data models that provide executive leadership insight into how technological investments and DevSecOps workflows are delivering value and driving business results across teams, rather than focusing solely on developmental efficiencies.
In order to achieve this, organizations should consider implementing a unified data store as part of their DevSecOps workflows, that supports observability data as well as data from the entire lifecycle. This gives teams visibility into every deployment, incident, and critical event, consolidates these insights, and drives continuous improvement across the entire software delivery workflow.
Additional benefits of observability include:
- Developers can add code early in the development lifecycle for events they want to observe.
- Teams can identify patterns over time, easily remove bottlenecks and improve efficiencies, and gain visibility into constraints to improve processes.
- Organizations can detect problems before customers do.
- DevSecOps teams can assign certain alerts to specific individuals or teams so ops teams won’t be burned out responding to general alerts.
- The inputs and metrics written through observability lay the foundation for AI and machine learning, a critical priority for organizations.
Enabling cloud adoption with observability
Cloud adoption isn’t just a flash in the pan – it’s here to stay. In fact, GitLab’s 2022 DevSecOps Survey found that security and cloud computing were the two biggest priorities for organizations – and that over half of operations professionals who were surveyed found they were managing the cloud most or all of the time.
The most consistent challenge in adopting cloud frameworks is the lack of visibility and transparency across this new, complex infrastructure. Although cloud-native technologies have been game-changers in their ability to offer organizations more flexibility and cost efficiency, it can be difficult to attain end-to-end visibility of software vulnerabilities, application performance, and quality assessments. These additional complexities make it challenging for teams across development, security, and operations to identify where and how they can enforce change early on in the development lifecycle.
Observability provides much-needed flexibility and actionable insights into the development lifecycle. When properly integrated into existing DevSecOps workflows, rather than treated as an afterthought, observability functionalities can help teams identify and fix problems, benchmark improvements, and measure real-time progress on a continuous basis. Observability and measurement across the entire DevSecOps workflow are critical to reducing risk and giving organizations greater control of their cloud-native environments.
The added complexity surrounding cloud adoption, along with the constantly evolving pressures to deploy faster, remain secure, and adhere to compliance requirements, are the challenging reality of the modern software development environment. Observability is a necessity, not an option, in order to ensure that organizations meet these new demands. By providing full transparency into multiple data sources, teams can better verify and observe production environments and lay the foundation to scale processes in the future.
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To learn more about the transformative nature of cloud native applications and open source software, join us at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2023, hosted by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which takes place from April 18-21.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Michael Friedrich Senior Developer Evangelist, GitLab
Michael Friedrich is a Senior Developer Evangelist at GitLab, focussing on Observability, SRE, Ops. He studied Hardware/Software Systems Engineering and moved into DNS and monitoring development at the University of Vienna and ACO.net. Michael maintained an OSS monitoring tool for 11 years before joining GitLab. He loves to educate everyone and regularly speaks at events and meetups. Michael co-founded the #EveryoneCanContribute cafe meetup group to learn cloud-native & DevSecOps. Michael created o11y.love as a learning platform for Observability, and shares technology trends and insights into day-2-ops, Chaos Engineering, eBPF, OpenTelemetry and AI/MLOps in his opsindev.news newsletter.
