Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022. Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.
SRE Tools Will Start Speaking the Language of Developers
By Itiel Shwartz, CTO and co-founder of Komodor
We’ve been talking about the rise of the developer since Marc Andreessen exclaimed “software is eating the world” more than a decade ago. Since then, we’ve seen the explosion of open source, cloud technologies, and digital transformation – placing developers at the heart of businesses with an online presence.
Shift-left is essential to digital transformation as developers are expected to own their own code and move fast. Culturally, we’ve seen more and more organizations embrace movements like DevOps and agile over the past year.
But the fact remains that tooling is behind the culture. To date, if there’s a major incident that needs rapid response, developers often feel powerless because they don’t have a connection to SRE tools that are heavily infrastructure-oriented.
If you take most cloud tools built for DevOps today — say Datadog or New Relic — they are excellent at providing a high-level overview of the health of your systems. But is this really what developers care about or need when an issue arises?
The truth is that developers are primarily focused on the code they wrote and perhaps a few of the services or dependencies that application touches. So, when there’s a problem that needs troubleshooting, and your developers are being asked to open up dashboards and monitoring systems, it becomes overwhelming and is disconnected from the realities of his/her day-to-day work.
That’s why progressive organizations are investing even more in shift-left operations. Observability, for example, has been a massive trend within DevOps and SRE over the past few years…
But in 2022 we’ll see the rise of understandability.
To explain what I mean by this term, one needs to look at things from the developer’s perspective. Right now, it’s highly inefficient for devs to dig through a bunch of charts and dashboards, neither of which provides a way for them to simply understand the thing they need to do in order to troubleshoot efficiently at the application level. Another way of putting it is that observability tools are creating data & information overload.
In response to this, we’ll see in 2022 a new generation of tools that have the specific goal to give developers more autonomy to further support the shift-left cultural transformation.
The rise of infrastructure as code, GitOps, and solutions that work directly in the IDE are great examples of tools meeting the developer where they already are. The more we can do this, the better — after all, everything from reliability to security improves the further left it shifts.
Three Ways to Improve Tooling for Developers
1) Evolve beyond observability & monitoring to understandability: Traditional monitoring and observability tools are great and we use them at Komodor. But, to enable developers to maximize their understanding and use of these solutions we need to see more solutions that will focus on strengthening the connection between deployments and code impact to existing monitoring systems. After all, developers live within the application and code they wrote – by showing the correlation of a code change to the graphs for example, developers will gain an easier understanding of what happened in their code and how to troubleshoot more efficiently.
2) Build context-rich notifications: Slack is great – but it’s also noisy and oftentimes lacks context. The more developers have to dig for information and context switch, the less productive they are. Therefore the solution is straight-forward – notifications that get sent to places like Slack and Email must have the relevant context which will enable faster action & ease of use.
3) Tailor existing tools to developer needs: There is no doubt that we’ll see more and more solutions in 2022 that will try to cater for both audiences – dev and ops. But, in the meantime, leveraging your existing tech stack is an equally good alternative – as long as you know how to maximize its potential use with your developers. The key is to look at your existing solutions with the dev’s perspective & mentality in mind – for example, build dashboards exclusively for your development teams that include the relevant context that they can understand and leverage in order to troubleshoot efficiently.
The importance of the developers for businesses across all industries is undeniable and something that’s been talked about for over a decade. DevOps has been essential for making sure developers can do their job more efficiently and products can come to market faster, but there’s still work to be done in what’s known as the “shift-left” movement. To truly shift left, we need to empower developers more than bog them down with extra data and complex dashboards that are often ignored. Instead, DevOps tools need to evolve to speak the language of developers.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Itiel Shwartz is the CTO and co-founder of Komodor, a startup building the next-gen troubleshooting platform for Kubernetes. Itiel worked at eBay, Forter, and Rookout, where he was the first developer. Itiel is a backend and infra developer turned ‘DevOps’, an avid public speaker who loves talking about infrastructure, Kubernetes, Python observability, and the evolution of R&D culture.
