June 2015 Summaries

The article highlights 10 enablers that help enterprise technology leaders successfully enable innovation in their organizations. These enablers include embracing SaaS to reduce costs and improve user experience, moving aggressively to DevOps to bridge the cultural gap between developers and operations, supporting early-stage startups to stay competitive, partnering with users to collaborate on configuration and integration issues, adopting a bimodal approach to IT that balances innovation and tradition, becoming a data-driven organization to make smarter decisions, embracing visibility to continuously monitor and analyze data, breaking down silos to facilitate cross-pollination of ideas, driving user adoption through effective marketing and internal organization promotion, and creating a culture that encourages risk-taking and rewards innovation. By adopting these enablers, organizations can move faster and more efficiently towards innovation, with the understanding that some failures are inevitable but provide valuable lessons for future improvement.

Enterprise technology leaders are increasingly driven by megatrends such as IT consumerization, big data, mobile and cloud advancements, and operational efficiency needs to foster innovation within their organizations. Key strategies include embracing SaaS to minimize investment risks, adopting DevOps for cultural transformation, and supporting early-stage startups for competitive advantage. Collaboration with users is encouraged, as is a bimodal IT approach that balances stability with innovation. Becoming data-driven, increasing visibility, breaking down silos, driving user adoption, and cultivating a high-trust culture are crucial for successful innovation. These approaches reflect a shift away from lengthy, risk-laden traditional IT projects towards agile, failure-tolerant methodologies that promote rapid learning and adaptation.

Containers have been used in a growing number of production environments as evidenced by over 300 New Relic customer accounts activating Docker monitoring beta with an aggregate of 40,000 to 60,000 containers daily and more than 2 million containers since the private beta program began. Data suggests that containers are being used for both medium lifespan servers (cattle) and net new application architectures using containers for periods of time far less than traditional virtual machines (servers as bacteria). The use cases vary widely among companies and unique software challenges, indicating that there is no one single solution to cater to the entire Docker market. The analysis highlights the importance of monitoring performance metrics specific to container usage, such as behavior of container types instead of traditional virtual machine metrics. As the technology continues to evolve, it will have significant implications for software development and monitoring.

Containers have become a significant focus in the tech industry, prompting New Relic to gather concrete data to understand their real-world application and development. With the introduction of Docker monitoring, New Relic has observed that containers are increasingly used in production environments, with over 300 customer accounts activating their monitoring beta and reporting millions of containers. The data reveals varied container lifespans, suggesting diverse uses from lightweight virtual machines to new application architectures with very short-lived containers. This diversity in usage highlights the need for distinct monitoring approaches tailored to specific container behaviors rather than traditional virtual machine monitoring. The evolving use of containers is anticipated to continue impacting software development and monitoring strategies, as New Relic's insights suggest a shift towards innovative application architectures facilitated by container technology.