Sumo Logic Combines Docker and Kubernetes Analytics
At the AWS re:Invent 2017 conference today, Sumo Logic unfurled an instance of its machine data analytics service that combines analysis of log data generated by Docker containers and the Kubernetes cluster they are deployed on.
Kalyan Ramanathan, vice president of product marketing for Sumo Logic, says the unified support of Docker and Kubernetes streamlines the data ingestion process for Sumo Logic’s machine data analytics service hosted on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Sumo Logic is moving now to unify Docker and Kubernetes analytics because usage of Docker has been growing rapidly, Ramanathan says. About 25 percent of Sumo Logic’s customers are running Docker containers, with about one-third of them also running Kubernetes.
Overall, Amazon EC2 container service use stands at 57 percent of the AWS base, with 35 percent also using Kubernetes, estimates Ramanathan.
Ramanathan says the rise of microservices brings additional pressure to IT operational analytics. A proliferation of dependencies across the enterprise being created by those microservices requires an ability to more granularly explore logs to discover anomalies that might indicate a performance problem or a security issue, says Ramanathan.
Microservices, however, represent only one element of the IT operations analytics puzzle. Because of that issue, Sumo Logic is making a case for employing a platform that provides analytics across a broad range of IT deployment scenarios. The challenge many organizations face is that the cost of storing all the data required to drive IT operations analytics is prohibitive. Because of that issue, Sumo Logic contends a cloud service based on AWS provides the least expensive means for storing data long term.
The relationship between IT operations and analytics is symbiotic. Microservices are driving more IT organizations to embrace DevOps. As part of that shift, it becomes incumbent upon the IT operations team to be able to resolve performance and security issues faster. In the absence of an IT operations analytics platform it’s not uncommon for IT operations teams to spend weeks looking for the root cause of an issue that winds up only taking a few minutes to fix. In addition, IT operations analytics is also being used more to optimize digital experiences that typically span multiple platforms.
Some research firms have forecasted that the market for IT operations analytics software and services will increase 38 percent on a compound annual basis through 2022. Naturally, competition across the category is already fierce, especially between proprietary platforms and open-source software components that can be combined to provide many of the same capabilities.
Regardless of the path chosen, IT is clearly becoming too complex to manage as applications become more distributed. Containers and Kubernetes will only exacerbate those challenges by making it much easier to create hybrid cloud computing environments. However, unless IT organizations have insights into how specific containerized services are running on various implementations of Kubernetes managing those hybrid clouds will not be especially unified. Instead, IT organizations will find themselves using multiple tools to manage multiple clouds that happen to share a common base of enabling technologies.
