Cloud is out of sight. In so many senses, cloud computing remains an out-of-view computing entity designed to provide us with technology services from an unseen power source from the public cloud datacenter. Even for on-premises cloud deployments where users could go and see the blinking lights that zip up and down the company server rack if they really wanted to, most of us typically can’t assess one iota of insight into the status and state of any given cloud service.
This is why cloud observability is almost an industry in and of itself.
While observability specialist vendors are many and varied – usual suspects in this space include Dynatrace, Datadog, New Relic, Grafana, Splunk, Honeycomb and Elastic – and the major cloud service provider hyperscalers all have their own observability services, there’s plenty of scope for infrastructure vendors to also provide this essential function as part of what they do.
Crucial For Cloud-Native
Observability is crucial for critical uptime, cost management and enhancing security within cloud-native environments. This is why open source enterprise infrastructure services and operating system company Suse has now come forward with an early access offering for its Suse Cloud Observability technology. This is a fully managed cloud-native observability platform designed specifically for Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters.
As a quick aide-mémoire, Rancher was acquired by Suse back in 2020 and works as an open source multi-cluster orchestration tool for IT systems operations teams to deploy, manage and secure enterprise-level Kubernetes, the massively popular open source cloud container orchestration technology that is fast becoming a self-perpetuating environment for so-called platform engineering to flourish as a new software application development paradigm of its own.
Suse Rancher is said to “unite Kubernetes clusters” with centralized authentication and access control, enterprise security, auditing, backups, upgrades, observability and alerts. Software engineers can use it to deploy and secure Kubernetes clusters consistently through a user interface or (for the hard coding cognoscenti) through a command line interface.
Outside The Observable Universe
If at this point you’re asking, wait a moment… we humans created cloud computing, the techies know what’s in the box (in terms of which cloud service they’re tapping into and drawing computing juice from) and the business knows what enterprise applications and data services it is running on cloud. Whereabouts in that (admittedly oversimplified) scenario did we manage to lose sight of the observable universe? A lot of it comes down to the fact that traditionally, organizations need multiple tools to manage the full observability process from data ingestion to dashboard creation and the onward need to integrate these observability tools into the operational IT fabric of the business.
Suse claims to have thought about this reality and so has designed Suse Cloud Observability to simplify this process by providing a solution for Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters, enabling what is claims is faster issue resolution and more efficient resource management. It provides multi-cloud visibility with dependency maps to visualize clusters across multiple clouds. Enterprises can use the platform to monitor mission-critical workloads in Rancher-managed Kubernetes clusters across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud and detect issues in real-time.
“In line with SUSE’s core value of openness, we’re excited to provide powerful observability features to facilitate innovation, collaboration, and accessibility in the Rancher Community,” said Andreas Prins, vice president of observability at Suse. “We’re proud to introduce Suse Cloud Observability to empower our community with an easy entry point to observability with out-of-the-box features. This solution simplifies operations for complex, distributed environments.”
A Holistic View Of Cloud
Benefits of Suse Cloud Observability include insights into Kubernetes environments powered by OpenTelemetry (an observability framework and toolkit designed to create and manage telemetry data including software application traces, metrics and logs) and out-of-the-box dashboards that offer an holistic view of an entire cloud software stack. It’s quick to deploy with out-of-the-box pre-configured policies and it can be scaled up as needed with transparent, usage-based pricing.
Aligned with its open-source ethos, Suse says it is actively working to contribute observability capabilities to the open source community.
Looking ahead (perhaps to the end of the decade, but more likely a full decade on from now), we may find ourselves at a point where observability becomes a functionality, rather than a platform and toolset of its own. It’s fanciful thinking and in all likelihood, it may never happen at all. Can you imagine AI becoming nothing more than a function, just as spellcheck is now in your word processor, or as speech recognition is becoming after so many deep enhancements now being made in natural language understanding? No, you can’t. Which is why we’ll probably be talking about observability for a long time to come.
At least Suse is tackling this issue from an open platform perspective, from an integration perspective and from a point of view that spans from the operating system level, through tiers of middleware and networking… and all the way upwards to the user interface level. It may be enough to make the observability purists green with envy.
