As technology evolves in the enterprise, oftentimes the processes and tools used to manage it must also evolve. The increased adoption of Kubernetes has become a major inflection point for those of us in the monitoring and management side of the IT operations world. What has worked for decades (traditional infrastructure monitoring) has to be adjusted to the complexity and ephemeral nature of modern distributed systems where Kubernetes has a prime role.

Kubernetes is essential to modern application development and runtime. As a powerful container orchestration platform, its benefits include improved scalability, portability, and automation, all of which contribute to more resilient applications and cost savings. More and more organizations are adopting Kubernetes to develop applications that can scale, recover from failures, and quickly adapt to changing business requirements.

OpenStack is no doubt a wonderful and successful piece of software. It allows you to create your own cloud infrastructure, and thanks to its open-source nature, it’s free to use for everyone. But as with many giant software projects, all that power comes with a challenge: it is reasonably complex to install and configure.

The Docker project was initiated by dotCloud, a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) company that created Docker to run their internal infrastructure. Slowly, Docker became more successful than any of their other products, so dotCloud rebranded as Docker Inc. Docker provides easy-to-use tooling and grew into an entire ecosystem for container management.

While cloud native architecture offers many benefits when it comes to application modernization, some challenges remain for customers. However, VMware Tanzu for Kubernetes Operations on Dell VxRail can improve application resiliency and the performance needed to quickly and securely build, deploy, and manage your multi-cloud environment.

The way to solve Kubernetes complexity is with tools. Ironically, this also creates a lot of complexity because there are many options for each type of tool and, thus, an unfathomable number of combinations. Each stack of tools first requires unique integrations, and then there's ongoing work to keep all those tools integrated and working together. It's no wonder, then, that we've seen a strong willingness for organizations to spend money on Kubernetes tools.

Technology is a fast-moving commodity. Trends, thoughts, techniques, and tools evolve rapidly in the software technology space. This rapid change is particularly felt in the software the engineers in the cloud-native space make use of to build, deploy, and operate their applications. One particular area where we see rapid evolution in the past few years/months is Observability.