Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Say you’re looking for a smart product to detect anomalies in your organization’s IT environment. A sales rep drops by and shows you all kinds of great artificial intelligence (AI) features with fancy-sounding algorithms. It sounds very impressive and seems like there is a lot of very valuable AI in the product. But, in fact, the opposite is true. This is a manual AI product wrapped in a deceiving jacket. Let me tell you more.

Worldwide end-user spending on public cloud services is forecast to grow 18.4% in 2021, with the cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market in 2024, up from 9.1% in 2020, according to Gartner. Enterprises are, therefore, rightly concerned about controlling their public cloud costs—to ensure they’re getting all the value they’re paying for.

Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) is the preferred way to run Kubernetes on Google Cloud as it removes the operational overhead of managing the control plane. Earlier today, Google Cloud announced the general availability of GKE Autopilot, which manages your cluster’s entire infrastructure—both the control plane and worker nodes—so that you can spend more time building your applications.

Security is paramount in today's digital world. Bad actors can use sensitive data to wreak havoc across thousands of machines in minutes if organizations do not have a solid cybersecurity strategy. Compliance requirements and regulations are increasingly calling for key management and strong encryption as part of a business's cybersecurity strategy. These are no longer optional but mandatory security requirements as DevOps also gains in popularity for agile development and application deployment.

Your continuous integration (CI) pipelines are at the core of the change management process for your applications. When set up correctly, the CI pipeline can automate many manual tasks to ensure that your application and the environments it runs in are consistent and repeatable. This pipeline can be an integral part of your security strategy if you use it to scan applications, containers, and infrastructure configuration for vulnerabilities.

Bringing a new tool into an organization is no small task. Adopting a CI/CD tool, or any other tool should follow a period of research, analysis and alignment within your organization. In my last post, I explained how the precursor to any successful tool adoption is about people: alignment on purpose, getting some “before” metrics to support your assessment, and setting expectations appropriately.