Over the past three years, organisations have rapidly accelerated application development to meet the evolving needs of customers and employees. Technologists have embraced cloud-native technologies and low-code/no-code platforms to increase release velocity and build more dynamic applications.
But for DevOps teams, this accelerated shift is creating significant challenges. Managing availability and performance across modern application architectures is incredibly complex. IT teams are often overwhelmed by huge volumes of data from these highly dynamic environments, and they don’t always have the right tools or insights to manage this complexity.
DevOps teams must act decisively to ensure they can operate effectively and continue to progress their organisations’ cloud migration strategies. This will require cultural change—encompassing new processes, tools, and technologies—to optimise application performance in multi-cloud and hybrid environments and to prioritise actions based on business impact.
The Need for Unified Visibility
For the past three years, DevOps teams have had to adapt as organisations accelerated their digital transformation and increased their adoption of cloud-native technologies. Most have managed to strike a balance between supporting rapid release velocity and optimising application performance. This has been central to the ability of organisations to react quickly to changing market conditions and meet heightened customer expectations for seamless digital experiences.
As anybody who has worked with or alongside DevOps engineers can attest, the last few years have seen teams operating under intense pressure. Much of this pressure has been caused by the shift to cloud-native technologies, with teams having limited visibility and insights into multi-cloud and hybrid environments.
In many organisations, IT teams still rely on multiple, disparate monitoring tools. But traditional monitoring solutions are unable to cope with the dynamic nature of cloud-native environments. These highly distributed systems rely on thousands of containers, producing a massive volume of metrics, events, logs, and traces (MELT) every second. IT teams often lack a way to cut through this data noise when troubleshooting performance problems that span multi-cloud or hybrid environments. They lack unified visibility across what is increasingly a sprawling IT estate.
In response, technologists need visibility across the application level, into supporting digital services (such as Kubernetes), and into the underlying infrastructure-as-code (IaC) services (such as compute, server, and database) that they’re leveraging from their cloud providers. This is essential for DevOps engineers to understand how their applications are truly performing.
DevOps teams, therefore, require a platform that allows them to observe distributed cloud-native applications at scale; a solution that embraces open standards, particularly OpenTelemetry; and that leverages AIOps and business intelligence to speed up the identification and resolution of issues. Crucially, DevOps engineers need to be able to correlate IT performance data with business metrics to prioritise actions based on business outcomes.
The Solution: A Shift to DevSecOps
The shift to cloud-native technologies has exposed the need for greater collaboration within IT departments. Despite the progress delivered by DevOps methodologies, many organisations are still held back by siloed teams, processes, and data.
Significantly, the move to cloud-native highlights that security teams can no longer operate in a silo; security needs to be integrated into the application lifecycle from the beginning.
This is because organisations have seen a sudden expansion in their attack surfaces. Widespread adoption of multi-cloud and hybrid environments means application components are now running on a mix of platforms and on-premise databases, exposing visibility gaps and heightening the risk of a security event. The potential consequences are significant, impacting both the customer experience and the bottom line.
According to recent research from Cisco AppDynamics, only 24% of technologists claimed that collaboration between IT operations (ITOps) and security teams currently takes place on an ongoing basis. Many DevOps and security teams operate entirely in silos. Developers often don’t seek input from security colleagues because they fear it will slow release velocity. They only collaborate when a potential issue is identified—which is often too late to prevent it from impacting end users.
It is incumbent on DevOps teams to use their skills in team empowerment, communication, and collaboration to tackle this challenge and bring about closer alignment between development, operations, and security teams.
DevSecOps brings together ITOps and security operations (SecOps) teams to incorporate application security and compliance testing into every stage of the application lifecycle, from planning to shipping. By taking this approach, developers can embed robust security into every line of code, resulting in more secure applications and easier security management.
This helps avoid situations where security vulnerabilities are only addressed at the last minute before launch or identified after the application has already been released. By incorporating security testing from the outset, security teams can analyse and assess risks during the planning phases to lay the foundation for smooth development.
Rather than being resistant to this change, most DevOps engineers—76% according to the Cisco AppDynamics research—acknowledge that a DevSecOps approach is now essential for organisations to effectively protect against a multistage security attack.
Furthermore, on a personal level, DevOps engineers recognise that the move to DevSecOps provides them with the opportunity to expand their skills and become more well-rounded IT professionals. The pivot to DevSecOps is the natural progression from the incredible work they have been doing. It is the necessary evolution of the modern DevOps role.
