Introducing DevOpsCare Powered by Lens

Today at Mirantis we are excited to announce the launch of our newest offering, DevOpsCare powered by Lens. While our previous products and offerings have been mainly focused on operators, we recognize the needs of the "Dev" half of "DevOps", and DevOpsCare powered by Lens is designed specifically to address that challenge.

DevOpsCare: The Challenge

Modern IT teams are faced with the challenges of innovating faster to meet the dynamic needs of their business and outpacing their competition. These goals are largely accomplished by adopting a cloud native approach to building solutions. One of the most popular tools and a cornerstone in the cloud native arsenal of solutions is Kubernetes. Kubernetes provides IT teams the ability to deploy modern applications that are scalable, modular and secure across a fleet of clusters. It also makes it easy to automate deployment and operational tasks resulting in streamlined processes and costs. In theory, Kubernetes is the perfect solution.

Not exactly! Kubernetes is harder than you think. Despite the dramatic improvements realized in the deployment of applications by leveraging Kubernetes, there are various complexities and pitfalls that DevOps teams face as they start to scale up and evolve their infrastructure. Often referred to as Day 2 operations, this is the time between the initial deployment of clusters and securing, monitoring and running cloud native applications in production at scale. Day 2 challenges include wading through a plethora of complex technologies, including increased developer responsibility for not just coding but also supporting the applications in production, all of which significantly diminishes developer productivity. What's more, this challenge not only impacts the reliability of the end product, it also creates friction between the IT teams.

At this stage, it’s normal for teams to realize Kubernetes is not a silver bullet. While teams do see value in the initial phases of their Kubernetes experience with faster deployment, they're concerned with the entire application lifecycle. This is where teams start to face operational challenges, especially when it comes to monitoring, managing, securing and training. These are essential to realizing the agility and performance benefits Kubernetes has to offer. These challenges are common, and you are not alone!

It is more than just deployment

Cloud Native technology in general and Kubernetes specifically has a reputation for being complex to run and maintain containerized applications on. That is, while it is quite simple to create a Kubernetes development cluster and deploy a few applications on it, it is far more challenging to run and support applications at scale, and in a secure and optimized manner. The complexity and the plethora of choice in cloud native tooling and concepts often puts developer teams into analysis-paralysis mode, causing inordinate delays in providing value to the business.

Visibility and transparency to metrics

With the advent of microservices and distributed applications, it is not uncommon for an application to be made up of several dozen independent services, often built by different groups of application developers. Inevitably, when problems arise one of the key challenges in quickly identifying, troubleshooting and resolving them is a lack of a dependency graph.

The ease of scaling up of microservices and ephemeral processes (containers, or pods in Kubernetes speak) has resulted in a lot of chattiness across the network. A lack of visibility makes it harder to manage and track what's happening within the Kubernetes clusters and the applications hosted therein. Not having the ability to monitor the health of your cluster, applications and services adds layers of complexity, and becomes a roadblock in identifying critical performance issues, bottlenecks or undue network latencies.

Limited visibility into the Kubernetes environment also makes it difficult to collect metrics to measure KPI and detect the ROI from the Kubernetes investment. The struggle continues as the ability to meet Quality of Service (QoS) and Service Levels Agreements (SLAs) are inconsistent as the complexity continues to build. This issue becomes even more pronounced in a multi-tenant environment.

Security and Compliance

Cloud native applications, by their very nature, significantly increase security risk — or the perception of risk — and this is the single biggest barrier for the full realization of the benefits of cloud native technologies. Lack of appropriate cybersecurity skills have led to organizations struggling to balance security with increased agility brought by cloud native technologies.

Limited visibility into actionable, real-time threats within applications and their interactions with dependent services, compounded by poor analytics have become roadblocks to IT teams. This also puts businesses at risk for compliance violations like GDPR, PCI DSS, HIPAA etc and opens the door for outside breaches that can be devastatingly costly for them.

Automation

The heightened velocity and scale of cloud native applications demands increased automation in building, packaging, testing, deploying, promoting and scaling applications. As the development team matures, the frequency of deployment also increases, and so does the complexity of managing several automated CI/CD workflows. The CI/CD tooling also needs to be cloud native (not necessarily in the cloud) and very reliable; and the traditional CI/CD solutions would not work as well. Additionally, a culture of automated instrumentation is critical to enable critical use cases such as blue-green deployments, canary releases, A/B tests, GitOps, pipeline-as-code etc. The only way to bring about this change is through a combination of tools, processes, and cultural philosophies.

It all comes down to empowerment

Cloud native architecture can be very complex and difficult to communicate and understand, especially so with the amount of choice available. Having a foundational understanding of cloud native patterns and kubernetes operational, development and security concepts is critical for the journey of digital transformation.

At the same time, a lack of familiarity with Kubernetes basics can lead to a lack of confidence and an increase in costly mistakes. Incorporating modern methodologies such as DevOps can be a good start, but when done superficially, it only extends silos between teams and creates unnecessary friction. Without the development of appropriate skills, additional burden is placed on developers and operators who then face burnout and frustration.

DevOpsCare: Addressing that challenge

DevOpsCare leverages the award winning Lens Kubernetes IDE and vendor agnostic cloud native technologies, providing teams a unified view and control of their Kubernetes implementations anywhere. It gives you the ease of mind of knowing that you will have complete control over monitoring, managing and securing your clusters.

The unlocked value of DevOpsCare includes:

• Accelerated developer productivity to innovate faster.
• Increased agility and more frequent software releases.
• Enablement in cloud native technologies through world class training.
• Reduced friction through proactive and real-time alerts.
• Actionable metrics and continuous improvement in speed, stability, security and cost of scaling cloud-native applications.

What do you get with DevOpsCare?

With DevOpsCare, you will be able to unlock real value starting from the first week. DevOpsCare and Lens are easy to set up and work across diverse infrastructures, so DevOpsCare can be leveraged on ANY Kubernetes platform, anywhere. Lens Spaces and Lens Extensions further augment Lens to facilitate your DevOps teams to enable them to fully control, secure and monitor all cloud native resources, providing valuable insights so you can make well-informed decisions in a timely manner. Regardless of whether you are just embarking on your cloud native journey or you are a kubernetes veteran, DevOpsCare is designed to help you realize the full advantage of a secure cloud native operating model to drive business outcomes. It provides:

An improved Developer experience

• Elimination of Kubernetes complexity. No more need for YAML and kubectl (unless you really want it).
• Access to an isolated and fully functional kubernetes environment on which developers can experiment and run their applications.
• A rapid feedback loop via integrated CI/CD and GitOps tooling to ship applications faster with fewer defects.
• The ability to share clusters with others to swiftly resolve blocking application issues.

Enhanced Security with greater visibility

• Industry grade, open source security tools to audit resources for vulnerabilities.
• Insights and recommendations to remediate security issues and adhere to regulatory compliance.
• Guidance for secure image selection.

Logging, Monitoring and Alerting

• Continuous monitoring and real-time alerting based on Prometheus and AlertManager.
• Complete observability through a wide range of Grafana dashboards.
• Log aggregation and querying to correlate and resolve application issues.

Training

• Access to world class training materials to enable DevOps teams in cloud native technologies.

Capacity and Cost Optimization

• Capacity analysis and recommendations to optimize resource utilization.
• Visibility into resource cost metrics.

Strategy and Insurance of Support

• Access to professional analysts to help identify gaps and blockers that are limiting growth, with access to automated or ad-hoc help.
• Mapping of measurable growth objectives to develop a high-level plan.

Why is DevOpsCare different?

While DevOpsCare is a first of its kind offering to address the blocking complexity of cloud native architecture, it is completely independent and agnostic of the Kubernetes distribution and the platform on which it is deployed. It has been designed from the ground up to work in the cloud, hybrid, multi-cloud, on-premises or private cloud environments, and can be deployed over both proprietary and open source, vanilla kubernetes implementations. Everything in DevOpsCare is metric and outcome based, with the intent to make it easy to measure the value it unlocks to the development teams. It is packaged to facilitate ease of purchase with flexible pricing and no lock-ins or contracts.

Getting started is easy, and your onboarding process is seamless. You will have visibility into your clusters within days, and with metrics at your fingertips, you can make data-driven decisions and fully understand your Kubernetes investment. You'll also have security alerts and policy enforcement so you can detect issues before they arise.

Most of all, you can accelerate your knowledge with access to cloud native and Kubernetes experts through training in a format that is designed to meet your needs. Our experts will be on standby to provide you with guidance, troubleshooting help or even to just bounce ideas off with respect to architectural design, selection of tools and best practice recommendations.

So what are you waiting for? Contact us to see how DevOpsCare powered by Lens can take your cloud native development efforts to the next level.