Progress announced a partnership with Software Improvement Group (SIG), an independent technology and advisory firm for software quality, security and improvement, to help ensure the long-term maintainability and modernization of business-critical applications built on the Progress® OpenEdge® platform.
In my previous blog, Two APM Takeaways from Velocity Santa Clara 2014, I talked about fragmentation of solutions as a major trend in the APM space. Most vendors are providing a singular solution for some part of performance management, but yet, very few are able to provide a unified solution. In this post I want to extend this discussion to focus on what this means for DevOps.
I believe the lack of solution unification is an epidemic in the tech industry. Something that particularly stands out is that while more and more organizations are beginning to adopt the DevOps model by embracing continuous integration and collaboration, when it comes to the APM market serving these folks, some fundamental ideals of DevOps are thrown out the window — namely, the efficiency and collaboration aspects.
The Fragmentation of Tools is the Fragmentation of Teams
In the ever expanding vortex of value propositions and fragmented solutions that make up the APM market today, simplicity is getting lost. Everyone is so busy fighting to get or stay in the picture that they forget to take a step back to look at the big picture, and realize that all we are doing is collectively building an incomplete solution model. If it feels as though you are trying to integrate solutions that never were meant to integrate in the first place, it's because they weren't. And if the tools are disconnected, the teams that use them are much more likely to be disconnected as well. Or at least, not as connected as they could be.
When something breaks or a bug makes it into production, development and operations like to play hot potato with the blame — until everyone eventually tires and points their fingers at whichever one of their tools is most suspect for having failed them this time. However, the issue is often not the tool's fault either — the fault is shared by the assembly of tools that are collectively failing to support and encourage developers and operations to work together and collaborate.
Wait, Isn't DevOps About Efficiency?
It's natural to fix something after it breaks, but we are often not as good as we want to be at setting up prevention mechanisms to stop the issues from ever happening in the first place — perhaps if this weren't the case, APM vendors would have been building unified solutions from day one. This leads to businesses buying new tools for each part of a larger mission in order to alleviate some previous mishap and prevent it from happening again. The worst part is that by doing so you often can end up creating a much larger problem for yourself in the long term, as a result of opting for the quick fix in order to step around a small one in the short term.
Businesses are using an arsenal of tools that integrate (or don't integrate) with each other in attempt to assemble a complete APM solution. And then you have a whole other assorted toolbox for things like code review, functional testing, API testing and load testing for maintaining quality and superior user experience while continuously delivering applications. While these different solutions may be used by different functions, they are still all part of a single process. The more these silos are broken down in the future the more fluent and efficient that process will be.
Unified APM = DevOps
Perhaps the best approach is not about finding and filling the gaps with more and more tools as problems arise, and instead starting from square one with a single, unified platform for DevOps — one which fully supports collaboration between dev and ops, and enables ultimate efficiency by eliminating the need for added complexity and integrations.
The idea of eliminating the amount of time and energy spent evaluating, integrating and implementing all of these different tools makes the idea of unification worthwhile in itself, but of course this would only be the tip of the iceberg in terms of value.
In order to fully embrace the culture of DevOps and continuous integration, the tools that teams use need to support their fundamental principles and not dangle one leg over the fence. The days of patching a different piece of software onto every different part of the process are numbered.
Denis Goodwin is Director of Product Management, APM, AlertSite UXM, SmartBear Software.
Industry News
Solace announced a new version of its Solace Event Portal solution that gives organizations with Apache Kafka deployments better visibility into, and control over, their Kafka event streams, brokers and associated assets.
Reply launched a proprietary framework for generative AI-based software development, KICODE Reply.
Harness announced the industry-wide Engineering Excellence Collective™, an engineering leadership community.
Harness announced four new product modules on the Harness platform.
Sylabs announced the release of SingularityCE 4.0.
Timescale announced the launch of Timescale Vector, enabling developers to build production AI applications at scale with PostgreSQL.
Check Point® Software Technologies Ltd. has been recognized as a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Zero Trust Platform Providers, Q3 2023 report.
Red Hat and Oracle announced the expansion of their alliance to offer customers a greater choice in deploying applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). As part of the expanded collaboration, Red Hat OpenShift, the industry’s leading hybrid cloud application platform powered by Kubernetes for architecting, building, and deploying cloud-native applications, will be supported and certified to run on OCI.
Harness announced the availability of Gitness™, a freely available, fully open source Git platform that brings a new era of collaboration, speed, security, and intelligence to software development.
Oracle announced new application development capabilities to enable developers to rapidly build and deploy applications on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI).
Sonar announced zero-configuration, automatic analysis for programming languages C and C++ within SonarCloud.
DataStax announced a new JSON API for Astra DB – the database-as-a-service built on the open source Apache Cassandra® – delivering on one of the most highly requested user features, and providing a seamless experience for Javascript developers building AI applications.
Mirantis launched Lens AppIQ, available directly in Lens Desktop and as (Software as a Service) SaaS.