Two Ways Incident Responders Can Make Sense of Kubernetes
Managing and monitoring Kubernetes (K8s) ecosystems can be a complex and challenging task without the right processes in place. Yet it’s something teams will increasingly be asked to do. Gartner predicts that by 2028, 95% of global organizations will be running containerized applications in production, significantly up from fewer than 50% in 2023.
The flexibility offered by K8s provides a powerful platform for organizations to meet the needs of many types of applications. Flexibility, however, breeds complexity, and K8s environments are not immune from increasing complexity as environments encompass more of an organization’s workload.
As Kubernetes expands in popularity, it is important that teams put in place tools and processes to help them manage K8s environments. This will involve ensuring service ownership is in place, as well as process automation to reduce the requirement for first responders from untangling and understanding complex K8s applications and environments.
Here are two ways first responders can better manage K8s.
Excuse Me Sir, Is This Your K8s Application?
First, it’s important that organizations adopt a service ownership approach. Given the complexity of K8s environments, outages and slowdowns will unfortunately become inevitable.
But incident response teams cannot be expected to understand complex K8s applications or services. They need subject-matter experts to help them navigate this complexity when an incident strikes.
Service ownership ensures those closest to K8s applications and environments are responsible for them throughout the life cycle. It embeds a “you code it, your own it” mindset that empowers developers and engineers to take responsibility for applications and services in production, rather than incident responders who are less knowledgeable about specific applications or services.
The benefits are clear. It creates a far better experience for customers because it puts developers much closer to them and makes developers able to see the impact of their work. Owning your own code also puts in place an automatic quality control loop, where it is always clear who is responsible for what. Additionally, clear ownership means fewer people need to be drafted in to troubleshoot, and because the service owner acts as first responder, it can significantly reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
But there is a cultural shift to navigate here. To drive ownership, you’ll also need organizational buy-in supported by senior managers and a robust change management program. Ultimately, service ownership is the perfect remedy for incident responders expected to address issues with K8s environments.
One-Stop Shop for Diagnostics
The second piece of effective K8s management is ensuring process automation is in place so that responders need only hit a button to run diagnostics for any K8s-related issues that may be affecting performance.
When dealing with an incident, the last thing responders need is to try and untangle complexity to understand what issues or problems may be affecting K8s applications or services. Many responders have a working knowledge of their organization’s IT environment but lack the specific technical expertise to really understand every single issue that could be affecting K8s uptime.
This typically means they need to call in engineers to help to run diagnostics, identify root cause and remediate incidents.
But this takes time. When an incident strikes, 85% of the duration is spent in diagnosis, involving at least four engineers. These engineers are then manually repeating the same diagnostic steps for multiple incidents, such as running health checks or monitoring CPU and memory caches. Every escalation to senior engineers represents lost focus on innovation time, which this averages 25% of their time.
With process automation, diagnostics and remediation can be triggered automatically. Incident responders get access to a push-button library of defined diagnostic and remediation actions. This means they can trigger repetitive tasks, such as server restarts or clearing memory caches, and eliminate the need to have engineers do this for them. By enabling incident responders with automation, they can handle more of the incidents that occur in K8s environments and only involve K8s engineers and experts when absolutely necessary. This results in shorter resolution times and fewer disruptive escalations.
Demystifying the Complex
When it comes to managing complex K8s applications and environments, it’s important that teams have the right processes in place to enable quick remediation. Service ownership and process automation are critical to enabling responders to effectively manage incidents and reduce the time spent on manual tasks and escalation.
Providing one-button, low-code/no-code solutions give teams the tools to run diagnostics, apply fixes and escalate to subject-matter experts as needed. But to enable this, teams need a platform that allows them to manage the full incident life cycle. This operations cloud needs to be able to help teams identify signals in the noise and find critical issues. It can then be used to mobilize the right people at the right time to solve problems, by augmenting teams with automated processes that enhance responders’ ability to triage, diagnose and resolve incidents.
Adopting this essential infrastructure for critical work, especially for teams managing complex K8s applications and environments, can help responders take action on urgent incidents, resolve them faster, reduce IT support costs and eliminate interruptions. This means your organization can resolve unplanned, unstructured, time-sensitive and high-impact issues quickly — and minimize the impact on revenue and reputation.
