UPDATED 12:43 EDT / NOVEMBER 05 2019

CLOUD

Q&A: As data stretches across multiple clouds, observability becomes more complex

Enterprises are housing data in various places as multicloud architectures becomes routine procedure. Top-notch observability, with the ability to trace and aggregate data across clouds, is necessary for organizations looking to solve problems before their clients even notice them. And yes, it’s as complex as it sounds. But LightStep Inc. is in lockstep with the trends to make sure it is tackling anything that may create a problem. 

“There’s a lot of different kinds of data, and not all data is equally valuable. So the way that you think about data that’s driving your revenue, that’s one thing, and the way that you’re thinking about debugging your application, that’s another thing,” said Daniel Spoonhower (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of LightStep, while sharing his personal thoughts on the multicloud industry. “I think you probably need more than one tool to handle that. It’s just not going to be cost-effective for you.”

Spoonhower spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the ESCAPE/19 event in New York City. They discussed observability, microservices, and what’s happening with multicloud in the industry (see the full interview with transcript here). (*Disclosure below.) Answers have been condensed for clarity.

Furrier: So much is going on in microservices; you can’t keep it straight these days. Take a minute to give an update on what’s going on with LightStep and why you’re here.

Spoonhower: I think what we’re really trying to see is it’s not just microservices; it’s different cloud vendors, different third-party vendors that are really adding to the complexity. That complexity really comes in the form of depth. I think people that are adopting microservices really feel it immediately. But for everyone else it’s a bit of a boiling frog situation; it comes on slowly. I think where LightStep fits in is offering a simple solution for observing those systems, for understanding what’s happening.

Furrier: How do you see the architecture of enterprises, whether small, medium, growing, either born in the cloud, or hybrid IT, hybrid dev or building their own stacks? How should they be thinking about architecting for multicloud?

Spoonhower: I think that’s one of the choices they have to make, and a lot of what I think they’re trying to do is really allow teams to work more independently. So, that might be that they can make their own choices about a cloud, about vendors. It might be that they make their own choices about languages, frameworks, things like that. As they do that, they’re building up this depth, and what that means is that there’s a heterogeneity to that system.

The problem there is that you’ve got the responsibility for the whole stack. You’ve got responsibility for everything from your service all the way down; those will all impact your performance. You’ve only got control over your service itself. Managing that tension is really where the pain comes in for a lot of developers.

Furrier: How should people think holistically about observability from a technical standpoint? 

Spoonhower: You’re going to need some logging, you’re going to need metrics, but you really need those things to be put in context. You need to understand how they’re affecting individual or segmented users, and so tracing is really the backbone of that context. It allows you to understand how a particular transaction passes through that system. If you don’t have that, you’re just going to get buried in this sea of data, whether that’s logs or metrics or whatever. Tracing is really the thing that allows you to understand what’s important to filter and aggregate.

Furrier: Give a plug for LightStep. Take a quick second to explain what you guys are looking for, what you do, and give an update. 

Spoonhower: So LightStep … simple observability for deep systems. Deep systems come about through things like microservices, but we have a lot of customers that are still working on a monolith or just stepping away from monolithic architecture. And observability means not just logs, not just metrics, but really providing that context through things like tracing that allow you to release faster, get those features out there, and at the same time reduce mean-time resolution, reduce mean-time-to-innocence. Really making sure that your teams are able to understand who’s at fault and who can fix the problems that you’re seeing in production.

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of ESCAPE/19. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for ESCAPE/19. Neither Slower.ai, the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.) 

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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