Looking at the shift to DevOps
The shift to microservices has, in turn, led to a shift in how development teams are organized. Instead of a single large team managing a monolithic application, many teams each manage their own microservices. In traditional software development, a software development team would normally hand off the software once it was deemed complete. The handoff would be to an operations team, who would deploy the software and operate it in a production environment. As the number of services and teams grew, organizations found themselves growing their operations teams to unmanageable sizes, and quite often, those teams were still unable to keep up with the demands of the changing software.
This, in turn, led to an explosion of development teams that began the transition from the traditional development and operations organization toward the use of new hybrid DevOps teams. Using the DevOps approach, development teams write, test, build, package, deploy, and operate the code they develop. This ownership of the code through all stages of its life cycle empowers many developers and organizations to accelerate their feature development. This approach, of course, comes with different challenges:
- Increased dependencies across development teams mean it's possible that no one has a full picture of the entire application.
- Keeping track of changes across an organization can be difficult. This makes the answer to the "what caused this outage?" question more challenging to find.
Individual teams must become familiar with many more tools. This can lead to too much focus on the tools themselves, rather than on their purpose. The quick adoption of DevOps creates a new problem. Without the right amount of visibility across the systems managed by an organization, teams are struggling to identify the root causes of issues encountered. This can lead to longer and more frequent outages, severely impacting the health and happiness of people across organizations. Let's look at how the methods of observing systems have evolved to adapt to this changing landscape.
