Guest: Dotan Horovits (LinkedIn)
Company: Logz.io (Twitter)

In this episode of TFiR: T3M, Swapnil Bhartiya sits down with Dotan Horovits, Principal Developer Advocate at Logz.io, to talk about the company and to share his insights on the current trends in the market, particularly in the DevOps and platform engineering space.

Is DevOps dead?

• It is not dead. Horovits views platform engineering as an evolution of DevOps. DevOps is the combination of tools and practices that enable the release of software all the way to production. In a way, platform engineering is the productization of these tools and practices, and then packaging them into reusable services that can be used across the organization’s business units and product teams.

What does Logz.io do?

Logz.io is a company in the DevOps and observability space, taking the best-of-breed open-source tools for monitoring and observability, such as Prometheus, OpenSearch, OpenTelemetry, and Jaeger, and provide them as one, unified managed platform built for scale.

• Its Open 360 platform provides a 360-degree view of the infrastructure and the applications across logs, metrics, tracing, even security.
• Companies can keep on using the open source that they know and love, without the hassle of running and managing it.
• Platform engineering team can consolidate ways to see the infrastructure and application and then make it available for the different teams (product, infrastructure, DevOps, etc.) across the board.
• Teams get to keep their practices, their open source, their QL query language, etc. and still do that in a consolidated unified manner.

Define developer experience.

• It is everything that developers do to take ownership of the application, from coding all the way to production and beyond. In order to be effective, they need to understand what goes on there. That’s where the platform engineering team comes into play. It sits closely with product engineering and understands the processes, constraints, tools, methodologies, compliance requirements, and then finds the best ways to facilitate these for the developers in the organization.

Current market trends:

• The number of companies leaning towards open source is significant. The OpenTelemetry project, which aims to unify the different observability signals, logs, metrics, traces, and even newer signals (e.g., continuous profiling) is now the second most active project in the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), after Kubernetes itself.
• Vendors selling proprietary agents have started shifting to support OpenTelemetry in one way or the other.
• Larger organizations that need to scale out these deployments are beginning to find it burdensome. Handling Elasticsearch or OpenSearch, cluster at scale, and managing the indexing and sharding require a lot of manpower and headcount. They’re looking for ways to consolidate, to outsource and to make it more cost efficient.

This summary was written by Camille Gregory.