Industry Insights: The Importance of Observability in Cloud Native Platforms

Readers of this blog may have noticed a consistent theme over the last 8 years, cloud-native technology has begun slowly transforming virtualized data centers into containerized data centers. Given that flexibility and availability are key components of these platforms, monitoring tends to become an essential ingredient to ensure the health and availability of their applications and infrastructure.

Containers and Realtime Enterprises

Back in 2016, we had discussed how a company can become a realtime enterprise –

The Three Habits of Highly Effective Real Time Enterprises…

Containers and platforms like Kubernetes can help an enterprise become real-time and responsive in several ways. The fundamental capabilities that real-time computing offers include ingesting, processing data, and providing business insights in near-instantaneous timeframes.

Containers can help companies achieve this by providing a more efficient and flexible infrastructure for their applications. Here are some ways in which containers can help a company become more real-time:

1. Scalability: Containers can help a company become real-time by enabling it to scale its applications more easily. Containers are lightweight and can be spun up or down quickly, so it’s easy to add or remove capacity as needed. This means that a company can quickly and easily respond to changing demand and keep its applications running smoothly.
2. Faster deployment: Containers can also help a company become real-time by enabling it to deploy its applications more quickly. Containers can be built and deployed much faster than traditional virtual machines, which means that companies can get their applications up and running in a matter of minutes instead of hours or days.
3. Portability: Containers are also highly portable, meaning that they can be moved between different environments without requiring significant reconfiguration. This makes it easier for companies to deploy their applications in different locations and respond quickly to changing needs.
4. Resource efficiency: Containers are designed to be more resource-efficient than traditional virtual machines. They use fewer resources, which means that companies can run more applications on a single server and reduce their infrastructure costs. This can be particularly useful for real-time applications, which require a lot of processing power.
5. DevOps integration: Finally, containers can help a company become real-time by enabling it to integrate DevOps practices into the development process. Containers are designed to work with CI/CD, GitOps pipelines making it easier for companies to automate their workflows and respond quickly to changes in their applications.

Why Augment Containers with Monitoring?

So what are important reasons why customers should choose a monitoring strategy at the outset?

1. You want to detect and remediate issues before they become and cause business problems esp in complex distributed applications. Using logs and metrics, you can understand where the hotspots are. You want to monitor container performance and system health, detect errors, and reduce mean time to resolution with alerts.
2. You want to be able to scale the application correctly based on demand metrics
3. You want to optimize resource utilization, which is critical to be able to provision on demand and manage cost based on usage
4. You want to meet any and all business SLAs which guarantee uptime
5. You want to stay compliant with the regulation

Conclusion

Monitoring is a crucial part of cloud native platforms. It helps organizations detect issues early, optimize resource utilization, meet SLAs, and stay compliant with regulatory requirements. Without monitoring, it would be difficult to ensure that applications and infrastructure are healthy, available, and performing optimally.

We discussed Prometheus and open source monitoring in previous blogs https://www.vamsitalkstech.com/cloud/five-things-your-apm-platform-should-do-for-your-container-application-deployments/

The next blog will discuss pitfalls around open source monitoring and things that IT leaders need to consider when they choose and embark on a container monitoring strategy.

Featured Image by Pete Linforth from Pixabay