June 2018 Summaries

The concept of a "modern software company" encompasses both technology and culture, with companies employing cutting-edge technologies like cloud computing, containers, and serverless functions, as well as adopting best practices from DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering. Becoming modern isn't easy, as change is hard, but it's essential for quickly developing and evolving to meet customer expectations and needs. The concept of modernity is a spectrum, with companies ranging from legacy to modern, and there are no single indicators to measure how "modern" a company is. Factors such as infrastructure, deployment practices, architecture, monitoring, and cultural best practices can help place an organization on the modern software spectrum.

A modern software company is characterized by a blend of technology and culture, where organizations efficiently create, ship, and maintain software while quickly adapting to customer needs and expectations using cutting-edge tools and practices. These companies often utilize cloud-native solutions, microservices, container orchestration, and serverless functions, while embedding cultural practices such as DevOps and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) to enhance agility and innovation. The journey to becoming a modern software organization can be challenging, as it involves significant changes from traditional methods like Waterfall development to more agile and responsive frameworks. The concept of modernity in software companies is dynamic and exists on a spectrum, with no single indicator defining it entirely, as companies range from startups to established enterprises, each adopting various technologies and cultural practices at different levels. Embracing these elements not only helps companies keep pace with technological changes but also positions them ahead of their competition.

Kubernetes is an open source platform designed by Google engineers to automate container orchestration, including deployment, management, and scaling. It has grown steadily in momentum and continues to be a key technology in the rapidly growing world of cloud computing and DevOps. This article gathers 15 Kubernetes experts from various organizations, such as Netflix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and CoreOS, who are actively contributing to the ecosystem through their work on projects like CloudRTI, Google Kubernetes Compute Engine, and Tectonic. These individuals share their knowledge and expertise online through social media platforms like Twitter and GitHub, and offer training and courses on Kubernetes through platforms like Katacoda. The article also provides resources for getting started with Kubernetes, including official documentation, blog posts, and monitoring tools like New Relic's Kubernetes integration.

Kubernetes, an open-source platform initially developed by Google, is designed to automate container orchestration including deployment, management, and scaling, and its popularity continues to grow. The article highlights 15 influential experts in the Kubernetes community, each contributing unique insights and skills to the platform's development and adoption. These experts include engineers, advocates, and founders involved in various facets of Kubernetes, from consultancy and educational platforms to security and container runtime development. The piece suggests following these individuals online to enhance understanding and engagement with the Kubernetes ecosystem. The author, Jake Widman, notes that the views expressed are personal and not reflective of New Relic, while also advising readers to explore more about Kubernetes through resources and integrations provided by New Relic.

Artificial intelligence is already enhancing our lives in various ways, from catching spam to optimizing traffic flow, and its impact will continue to grow as more industries experiment with AI. Recent advancements in machine learning, such as Zero-Shot Visual Imitation and integer deep neural network training, demonstrate the progress being made in AI research. However, these advances also highlight the flaws in current approaches to AI, including a reproducibility crisis in the field. While machines are getting smarter, humans still hold the upper hand in many areas, and AI's influence on society is expected to be significant, particularly in influencing the economy. Researchers from MIT and The National Bureau of Economic Research suggest that while automation will continue to change the workforce, there won't be a widespread replacement of all human workers anytime soon. New Relic is already working towards integrating AI-driven technology into its digital performance monitoring platform, aiming to provide smart systems that can analyze data, detect anomalies, and make predictions, ultimately enhancing user efficiency.

Amid varied perceptions of artificial intelligence (AI) as either a threat or a utopian solution, a New Relic software engineer explores the practical ways AI currently enhances daily life, such as reducing email spam and improving traffic flow through smart systems. Insights from the International Conference for Learning Representations illustrate AI's progress and challenges, highlighting advancements like a robot learning tasks from a single demonstration and an autonomous bicycle, while also noting concerns about reproducibility in AI research. Despite AI's limited scope compared to human capabilities, its integration into industries, including digital performance monitoring, is significant, with potential applications in anomaly detection and data analysis. New Relic is advancing its AI capabilities to improve software monitoring, leveraging dynamic baseline alerting and error profiling to enhance efficiency and predictive accuracy for complex systems. The company is committed to evolving its platform through a data-driven approach and continuous customer feedback, aiming to create intelligent solutions that support user decision-making and efficiency.

Monitoring Docker containers is crucial for optimizing resource utilization, enhancing performance, and ensuring reliability in containerized applications. To achieve this, teams need a method that is optimized for monitoring applications even in containerized environments. The recommended tools include New Relic's infrastructure monitoring tool, which provides comprehensive insights into the performance and health of IT infrastructure. Additionally, other Docker monitoring tools like cAdvisor, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Fluentd, Sysdig, Aqua Security, Twistlock, Weave Scope, and Telegraf can be used to track metrics such as CPU, memory, and storage usage, monitor logs and events, and detect new containers. It's essential to choose a tool that has extensive coverage of metrics, log formats, and events, strategic correlation of metrics, detection of new containers, and custom metric collection capabilities. New Relic Infrastructure is an ideal tool for monitoring Docker containers in Kubernetes environments, providing real-time visibility into container resource utilization, performance, and health.

Container technology, exemplified by Docker and Kubernetes, has revolutionized the testing and deployment of applications, enabling scalability and cost-efficiency but also introducing new complexities and challenges. Effective monitoring of containerized environments is essential for optimizing performance, ensuring reliability, and delivering high-quality software experiences, regardless of the underlying infrastructure. The blog post highlights the importance of an application-centric approach to monitoring in containerized settings, extending insights to the entire Docker/Kubernetes infrastructure. It discusses various tools and strategies for monitoring, emphasizing the capabilities of New Relic's infrastructure monitoring tool, which provides detailed insights into container performance, resource utilization, and system health. Additionally, the post outlines how New Relic can help track metrics, detect issues, and facilitate proactive management in dynamic environments, ensuring applications remain reliable and performant.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (EKS) is now generally available with complete monitoring support from New Relic, providing customers with a managed service to run Kubernetes without needing to install or operate their own clusters. EKS alleviates the time-consuming process of manually updating clusters, allowing customers to launch and run Kubernetes with ease. The New Relic Kubernetes integration collects metrics for nodes, namespaces, deployments, replicasets, pods, and containers, providing total visibility, alerting, and dashboards for all Kubernetes entities. This allows customers to monitor their EKS environment, detect performance issues, and track the health of their cluster across any platform. With EKS's hybrid compatibility, customers can move seamlessly between AWS, on-premise data centers, and other public clouds, ensuring complete visibility into each environment.

Amazon Elastic Container Service for Kubernetes (Amazon EKS) is now generally available, offering a managed solution for deploying Kubernetes on AWS without the need for users to manage their own clusters, thus simplifying processes like upgrades and high-availability management. New Relic provides comprehensive monitoring support for EKS, allowing for detailed visibility at various levels such as nodes, pods, and containers, which is crucial due to the ephemeral nature of Kubernetes workflows. This integration aids in tracking performance issues and ensures seamless operation across different environments, whether they are on AWS, on-premise, or in hybrid cloud settings. The New Relic Kubernetes integration, available in public beta for New Relic Infrastructure Pro customers, supports monitoring across a wide range of platforms, facilitating efficient cloud migration and infrastructure management.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is a critical function in many companies, and it was invented at Google by Benjamin Treynor Sloss to ensure the health of production systems at scale. SREs are in demand, with opportunities available in tech companies and legacy enterprises, and they are considered one of the most promising jobs in tech by LinkedIn. SRE is seen as the purest form of DevOps, focusing on greater reliability with less manual intervention as a system scales. To achieve this goal, SREs rely on automation to increase the reliability of everything they touch without slowing down software shipping. Successful SREs have to think big, considering how their work affects the larger infrastructure and making decisions that impact multiple systems and teams. They use service level objectives (SLOs) to track reliability and make adjustments to meet company strategy and prioritize efforts. The role of SRE is expanding into more companies, with different organizations defining it in unique ways, from tech giants like Google to smaller companies like New Relic.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is increasingly prevalent across various industries, with its origins attributed to Benjamin Treynor Sloss at Google, where it was developed to ensure the health of large-scale production systems. SRE is often seen as a pure form of DevOps, focusing on maximizing system reliability through automation and minimizing manual interventions, aligning with the dual axes of scaling workloads and managing complexity. The role is in high demand, with a growing number of job opportunities as companies recognize the value of SREs in enhancing system resilience. SREs are tasked with thinking strategically about potential risks and impacts on infrastructure, using service level objectives (SLOs) to track and adjust reliability goals. The scope and responsibilities of SREs vary across organizations, with larger tech companies focusing on integrating software engineering into operations, while smaller firms emphasize reliability improvements and technical complexity reduction. New Relic's ebook on SRE provides insights into these dynamics, offering thought leadership, best practices, and real-world examples for those interested in the discipline.