Industry executives and experts share their predictions for 2022.  Read them in this 14th annual VMblog.com series exclusive.

DevOps, Simplified and More Observable

By Austin Parker, Principal Developer Advocate at Lightstep

The forces set into motion by the global pandemic in 2020 continue to rage, mostly unabated, across our socio-technological landscape. If 2021 was our first bite at the apple of possibility, 2022 is going to be in large part defined by the second chances we get to adapt to the biggest disruption to how we live and work since the last massive disruption to how we live and work. Cheery, I know!

I believe that the most important change that we’re going to see is a renewed focus on tools and processes that allow for resilient, distributed, and high-performing teams. If we’ve learned anything from the past couple of years, it’s that our innate resilience as human beings isn’t necessarily matched by our resilience as organizations. Processes and people that were considered inviolate quickly discovered how new external conditions could dramatically affect their viability.

We’ve discovered the bounds of implicit knowledge, and felt the acute sting of failure too often as we realized our problem solving leaned heavily on the ability to tap someone on the shoulder. Consider the multiple systems failures we’ve seen in 2021 alone by companies like Amazon and Facebook, where failures were compounded by a newly-distributed workforce. Now, I’m not writing this to suggest it was the distributed workforce that was the problem, or that it contributed to the failures in the first place — failure (and DNS problems) happens. What we see, though, is that highly complex systems that are designed with the implicit assumption that we’re all in the same physical space together create an unnecessarily high operational burden when shifting to a more distributed workforce.

In simpler terms, you can distribute an application by running a bunch of copies of it on a bunch of servers, but without doing some work that application won’t be truly resilient.

So, where does that leave us for 2022?

• We’ll see a renewed focus on simplifying the complex. Kubernetes and its ilk are indeed eating the world in terms of container orchestration, but the operational care and feeding of cluster(s) requires too high of a burden. This simplification will spread beyond just k8s, however — the entire open source cloud-native landscape will begin this transition to provide more user-friendly and focused products.

• Our processes and teams will simplify, as well. This doesn’t necessarily mean ‘shrink’, but we’ll use more and more machines to enforce ‘the world as it should be’ to try and avoid catastrophic failures in our systems. More human-friendly configuration and scripting methods will gain favor, as we all collectively kick YAML into the dustbin of history.

• Finally, our organizations will simplify as well. Large enterprises will continue to grapple with the effects of a highly fluid labor market, and begin to turn towards greater independence for their teams and organizational structures. The ‘cloud native’ world will increasingly overlap with the ‘legacy’ world, with opportunities and risks for both sides.

I believe that a huge key to all of these will be observability — both of your software, and of your organization itself. It will become increasingly crucial for everyone in the organization to understand not just how small parts of the system are functioning, but to have a high-level grasp of where things are working, and where they aren’t working. The challenge of gathering and interpreting this observability data will be great, and require cooperation between every part of the business — engineers, designers, analysts, customer success, executives, and everyone in between.

2022 ultimately offers us an opportunity to work, and think, differently about the challenges that face us as humans trying to build more resilient software, and teams. It’s up to us to embrace the change that allows for us to overcome these challenges, or risk stagnation.

##

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Austin Parker is the Head of Developer Relations at Lightstep, and has been creating problems with computers for most of his life. He’s a maintainer of the OpenTelemetry project, the host of several podcasts, organizer of Deserted Island DevOps, infrequent Twitch streamer, conference speaker, and more.