Today organizations use hybrid cloud in a number of ways – a relatively static environment allowing the ability to handle occasional spikes in capacity demand. More advanced uses involve dynamic automated workload management ensuring optimal application performance.
In both cases, change is a main threat to performance of applications running on the hybrid cloud infrastructure – change in application code, application and cloud stack configuration, application data, workload etc. As you move from static to dynamic cloud, the number of changes grow as increases to the level of automation required to deliver these changes is continuous.
Historically, a lot of attention was paid to automation of deployments and more generally, continuous delivery – including rollback and recovery steps. However, when performance suffers the question becomes “to where do I rollback in order to recover performance and determine what change caused a performance issue?”
Today IT Operations Analytics technology detecting the latest state of the hybrid cloud environments and tracking history of the introduced changes is essential to creating visibility into an otherwise black box of the cloud. However, getting all the data is not enough as there will be too much data to manually process.
An analytics engine automatically prioritizing detected changes, correlating them with delivery context and performance indicators, and analyzing history of the environment is required to identify a safe environment state, find issue root cause and predict if any of the changes will cause a performance issue in the future.
Sasha Gilenson is the Founder and CEO of Evolven Software.