Author: Florian Pialoux

DevOps has been an integral part of software development for the last 15 years. The ‘shift left’ culture, as it is popularly known, is employed across various organizations as it introduced new technologies, automation, and people systems to help shorten the software development lifecycle and provide continuous delivery of high-quality software.

With the rise of Artificial Intelligence in recent years, the structure of how enterprises are delivering and consuming AI has changed drastically with the proliferation of open-source technology. MLOps is the logical reaction to the current difficulties enterprises face putting machine learning into production.

Kubernetes is the market leader when it comes to the orchestration of containerized applications. It allows you to manage containers in a multi-host environment, offering workload distribution and network handling. 

Furthermore, it provides a variety of features that are vital in the DevOps process, such as auto-scaling, auto-healing, and load balancing. These capabilities explain why Kubernetes is the go-to solution for most Software Engineers. 

The advent of the Internet has brought revolutionary changes in the IT world. One of the notable changes is that virtualization has advanced with the Internet to become an integral part of the IT infrastructure of modern organizations. As a result, companies are now relying on the virtual online entity housing data and services, commonly referred to as the cloud. The switch to the cloud was brought on by the exponential data growth in the last couple of decades. In fact, studies predict that by 2025, the cloud will be storing up to 100 zettabytes of data.

What Is the Cloud?

The cloud refers to a global network of remote servers, each with a unique function that are connected and work together as a unitary ecosystem. In simple terms, the cloud describes what we commonly know as the “internet.” This remote network of servers is designed to either store and manage data, run applications, or deliver content or a service such as streaming videos or accessing social media networks for anyone with an internet connection. 

Containerization is a modern practice used by software development teams as the DevOps culture continues to grow in popularity. Most of these environments benefit from the rich features provided by containerization, such as scalability, portability, and process isolation.

However, it is essential to consider "how secure" a software is before shipping it to your clients. When creating container images as your releases, the heavy use of third-party and outdated libraries means you risk introducing added vulnerabilities to the images you ship. As such, there is a need for a reliable way of scanning container images. This is where Trivy comes in handy.

Since Pixie's acquisition by New Relic in late 2020, there has been rapid growth in its features, scope, and vision. It does not end there. New Relic has an ambitious long-term roadmap for a Pixie that better supports third-party tools, plugins, and very large Kubernetes clusters. It is important to highlight that most older monitoring systems were considered inefficient due to their operational overhead. Taking this in the context of a cloud environment, where you're paying by the resources used, this can quickly become expensive.

Pixie offers monitoring, telemetry, metrics, and more with less than 5% CPU overhead and latency degradation during data collection. Extended platform usage with considerable workloads will maintain an average of 2% overhead, an excellent improvement over legacy systems.