IT pros make smart monitoring, container automation DevOps plan priorities

Enterprises will embrace new technical advances in artificial intelligence and container orchestration in 2017 to push the continuous-deployment envelope. These mark uncharted territory for historically conservative enterprise IT departments, but forward-thinking technologists see the shift in attitudes as inevitable and imperative.

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"IT professionals should resolve to disrupt themselves before they are disrupted by an external entity," said Greg Arnette, CTO of Sonian Inc., an email archival and analytics cloud service provider in Waltham, Mass. "The rapid pace of change in IT -- fueled by cloud advancements, as well as new AI and machine learning frameworks -- means all technologists need to step up, increase innovation and not rest on past success."

Where AI meets IT ops will be in monitoring and incident resolution, and it could touch all aspects of the DevOps pipeline, such as continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) tools.

"It's not just, 'How do we set up your CI or CD system?' But, 'How do we then use all the information and knowledge that we have at hand, given the millions of builds going through the system, to help make your process better without necessarily requiring your effort?'" said Jim Rose, CEO at CircleCI, a continuous integration and continuous delivery software-as-a-service provider in San Francisco.

Rose said he views DevOps monitoring as analogous to road-mapping systems.

"Five to 10 years ago, we [in IT] had the equivalent of a paper atlas," Rose said. "What we have now is the equivalent of a junky GPS system." The goal in 2017 is to get to the Google Maps or Waze equivalent for IT monitoring, "where before you even end up in the traffic jam, it redirects you."

Users are eager to pursue this as part of a DevOps plan.

Sophisticated, AI-driven, malicious bots are poised to disrupt the status quo, and countermeasures need to be implemented.

"We'll be working to increase and extend our cloud security, automated remediation and heuristics-based inspection of performance, security and quality of service," said Alex Witherspoon, vice president of platform engineering at FlightStats Inc., a global data service company in the aviation space now owned by FlightGlobal and based in Portland, Ore.

A nuanced humanlike intelligence can go beyond existing automation to offer recommendations on much more complex observations than threshold-based alerting. This allows IT engineers to spend less time on simple issues, Witherspoon said.

IT security will also need a proactive DevSecOps plan in 2017, Arnette said.

"Sophisticated, AI-driven, malicious bots are poised to disrupt the status quo, and countermeasures need to be implemented," he warned.