Carbon Relay Becomes StormForge to Meld Kubernetes App Tests With AIOps
Carbon Relay announced today during the online KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2020 conference that it has acquired StormForger, a provider of a performance testing service, and rechristened itself StormForge.
Company CEO Matt Provo says the provider of the artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps) platform for Kubernetes via this acquisition will be extending its reach into performance testing at a time when DevOps teams are taking more control over applications end to end.
Rather than waiting for performance testing results from a separate quality assurance team, Provo says developers are pursuing more iterative approaches to performance testing within the construct of a DevOps workflow.
StormForger created a performance testing-as-a-service platform through which repeatable, automated load tests can be created, run and managed as code. In combination with the Red Sky AIOps platform developed by Carbon Relay, the technology makes it easier to share test results in a way that optimizes the entire Kubernetes environment, Provo says.
While many IT teams have been wary of AIOps, Provo notes most DevOps teams are generally eager to automate as much of the IT operations and testing process as possible. The goal is to reduce the tendency IT teams have to overprovision IT infrastructure resources because they lack visibility into containerized applications running on Kubernetes clusters, he says.
At a time when IT organizations are under pressure to reduce costs as much as possible, an AIOps platform enables IT teams to manage their IT environments proactively rather than reactively.
Now that Kubernetes clusters are being deployed more widely in production environments, Provo says container application performance testing is becoming a higher priority. Many of those applications are at the core of digital business transformation initiatives that organizations are depending on to help them rebound in 2021, so the number of Kubernetes clusters that need to be managed will expand significantly as well, notes Provo. Before too long, IT teams may find it impossible to manage fleets of Kubernetes clusters across an extended enterprise without the aid of an AIOps platform.
Of course, StormForge will not be the only provider of an AIOps platform looking to automate the lifecycle management of those applications using machine learning algorithms. It may, however, have a significant head start on closing the loop between application performance testing and automating IT operations. Arguably, it’s now only a matter of time before an application’s test result automatically triggers an event such as a change to a setting on a Kubernetes cluster.
In the meantime, IT organizations that are intimidated by the complexity of Kubernetes today may want to keep an eye on what’s coming over the AIOps horizon. The days when DevOps teams are required to manually fine-tune every setting on Kubernetes clusters may be coming to a close, as machine learning algorithms dive deeper into IT infrastructure.
