Optimizing the performance

Our Future Systems research shows that to drive innovation and agility, 97 percent of Leaders adopt critical technologies such as microservice architectures, containers and Kubernetes that allow for decoupling compared to only 30 percent of Laggards. However, in order to harness the value of these technologies, a key part of any company’s cloud transformation requires rethinking how to operate. Historically, companies managed their data centers and networks separately from the data, applications and business services those data centers and networks supported. Today, this siloed approach is ineffective and perhaps even harmful. Consider how much more complicated technology landscapes are becoming. As a result of digital decoupling and the adoption of microservices, applications are evolving to more complex patterns and topologies, increasingly requiring more dynamic underlying compute, storage and networking infrastructure. Cloud native patterns and technologies are typically more ephemeral than traditional environments, where containers may last hours, minutes, or even seconds, compared to servers and virtual machines that may be in production for months or years. The extreme is serverless computing, where functions are spun up on demand to execute service and are torn down immediately upon completion. Not only are these environments more ephemeral, but they increasingly scale up and down more rapidly as Kubernetes controllers orchestrate their deployments. At the same time business users are far more focused on outcomes than the underlying applications, data and infrastructure that enable them. The boundaries between the services delivered to customers or the business, and the applications, data and infrastructure that deliver them are blurring. Consequently, it is critical to manage “services” and technologies more seamlessly. To effectively manage and optimize this increasingly complex landscape, enterprises need to rethink how they construct and operate new services to improve innovation and agility, enhance service levels, streamline operations and minimize costs while seamlessly managing the applications, cloud and infrastructure that deliver these services. We refer to this as “Build Different/Run Different.” To effectively operate in the New, there are four activities to focus on: