Argo Workflows: Get stuff done with Kubernetes.

Argo CD

Ant Financial

Spotify

Apple

Indeed

Thermo Fisher Scientific

KSAT

Snow Software

Hobsons

Lunar

Ricardo.ch

The New York Times

MHI Vestas Offshore Wind

EquityZen

Under Armour

Intuit

Nielsen

Zendesk

EverQuote

JD.com

PayIt

State Farm

Dailymotion

Meltwater

trivago

Zalando

Continuous Delivery, June 2020

Helm

Flux

CircleCI is a continuous integration and delivery platform for teams looking to shorten the distance between idea and delivery.

Circle CI

Kustomize

GitLab CE Mirror | Please open new issues in our issue tracker on GitLab.com

GitLab

Jenkins X provides automated CI+CD for Kubernetes with Preview Environments on Pull Requests using Tekton, Knative, Lighthouse, Skaffold and Helm

Jenkins X

Travis CI

jsonnet

Spinnaker is an open source, multi-cloud continuous delivery platform for releasing software changes with high velocity and confidence.

Spinnaker

GitHub Actions makes it easy to automate all your software workflows, now with world-class CI/CD. Build, test, and deploy your code right from GitHub. Make code reviews, branch management, and issue triaging work the way you want.

GitHub Actions

Jenkins

Tekton CD

Powerful Continuous Integration out of the box

Team City

Cheryl Hung

Director of Ecosystem at CNCF

Many end users had tried up to 10 options and settled on adopting 2-4. Several large enterprise
companies have built their own continuous delivery tools and open sourced components, including
LunarWay’s release-manager, Box’s kube-applier, and stackset-controller from Zalando. The public
cloud managed solutions on the CNCF landscape were not suggested by any of the end users, which
may reflect the options available a few years ago.

Publicly available solutions are combined with in-house tools

While Helm has not positioned itself as a Continuous Delivery tool (it’s the Kubernetes package
manager first), it’s widely used and adopted as a component in different CD scenarios.

Helm is more than packaging applications

Jenkins and its ecosystem tools (Jenkins X, Jenkins Blue Ocean) are widely evaluated and used.
However, several end users stated Jenkins is primarily used for existing deployments, while new
applications have migrated to other solutions. Hence end users who are choosing a new CD solution
should assess Jenkins alongside tools that support modern concepts such as GitOps (for example, Flux).

Jenkins is still broadly deployed, while cloud native-first options emerge.

Aurora

TicketMaster

Anova

Shopify

NetMatch

AuthKeys

Mastercard

Uswitch

Database Storage, November 2020

Redis is an in-memory database that persists on disk. The data model is key-value, but many different kind of values are supported: Strings, Lists, Sets, Sorted Sets, Hashes, Streams, HyperLogLogs, Bitmaps.

Redis

Free and Open, Distributed, RESTful Search Engine

Elasticsearch

Mirror of the official PostgreSQL GIT repository. Note that this is just a *mirror* - we don't work with pull requests on github. To contribute, please see https://wiki.postgresql.org/wiki/Submitting_a_Patch

PostgreSQL

MySQL

MongoDB

Kafka

Memcached

Cassandra

Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure.

Consul

BigQuery

MariaDB

CloudSQL

AWS DynamoDB

CockroachDB - the open source, cloud-native distributed SQL database.

CockroachDB

Vitess is a database clustering system for horizontal scaling of MySQL.

Vitess

Jackie Fong

Engineering Leader at Ticketmaster

Smaïne Kahlouch

DevOps Team Leader at Dailymotion

Mya Pitzeruse

Principal Engineer at Indeed

The newer technologies, like CockroachDB, TiDB, and Vitess, have not been widely studied by many of the companies that responded. CockroachDB and Vitess ended up in “Assess.” 
A few different factors drive organizations to take caution with their data, but the main reason is that it is difficult to manage. There is a lot of overhead involved when moving massive amounts – sometimes terabytes or petabytes – of data from one data storage technology to another. The benefits have to outweigh the costs for a move to make sense. Even when transitioning from legacy solutions to the cloud, some companies consider integrating the tools they already have in place.
Another factor may be that it is harder to hire developers with expertise in these newer technologies. All of the projects in “Assess” (CockroachDB, MariaDB, and Vitess) are API-compatible with the technologies in “Adopt,” so organizations can integrate elements without having to transition to a new tool.
Interestingly, etcd did not make it onto the radar. etcd usage is mostly driven by Kubernetes, as it’s the only supported backend. Companies rarely use etcd as a standalone choice for hosting their data, which means companies transitioning from legacy infrastructures are less likely to have experience with it.

Companies are cautious with their data and slow to adopt newer technologies.

We were surprised to see low adoption of cloud-managed services. This led us to realize that the use of managed database services can vary widely depending on the use case – where the application is deployed, the amount of data being stored, if a cloud provider is already being used. If a company has a large amount of data, for instance, there can be significant cost overhead to using a managed database solution.
The use of cloud-managed databases is likely impacted by whether or not a company is already using a particular cloud provider. For instance, if a company exclusively uses AWS for its other cloud services, chances are they will also be using related AWS database technologies. If they host on premises, they most likely won’t host just their databases in the cloud. 
In other instances, decisions may be driven by data security and protection. Companies working with more sensitive data are more likely to host databases in-house and may even be required to.
While we did ask about RDS, it didn’t end up in the final radar. We removed it as its usage was vague, and it was not clear what particular technology is being used. - headline: Keep an open mind!

Choosing a managed database service depends heavily on use cases.

We found that database storage is still an evolving space. Some projects have been around for quite a long time, which has likely driven up their adoption rate, especially considering usage in large companies. Many of these legacy technologies have a good reputation, given they are stable and proven to work. 
New cloud native projects are emerging, and many of these are better suited for new use cases. There are several new technologies with specialized use cases that did not make it into the radar; we did not see any graph databases, long-term storage for metrics, or serverless databases.
Ultimately, you have to choose the right technology for you, your team, and your organization. Does it make more sense to use a technology you can drop in and replace vs. burdening engineers with forcing something to fit? Is there a thriving community behind the open source project you are considering? Do your research and go with what makes sense, but don’t be afraid to try something new!

Keep an open mind!

Amazon CloudWatch is a monitoring and management service built for developers, system operators, site reliability engineers (SRE), and IT managers. CloudWatch provides you with data and actionable insights to monitor your applications, understand and respond to system-wide performance changes, optimize resource utilization, and get a unified view of operational health.

Cloudwatch

Sky Betting & Gaming

Babylon Health

OneCause

RStudio

Squarespace

Observability, September 2020

The Prometheus monitoring system and time series database.

Prometheus

The open and composable observability and data visualization platform. Visualize metrics, logs, and traces from multiple sources like Prometheus, Loki, Elasticsearch, InfluxDB, Postgres and many more. 

Grafana

Elastic

CNCF Jaeger, a Distributed Tracing Platform

Jaeger

OpenTelemetry

Highly available Prometheus setup with long term storage capabilities. A CNCF Incubating project.

Thanos

Datadog offers monitoring and analytics for cloud-based workflows.

Datadog

Evolving the Prometheus exposition format into a standard.

OpenMetrics

Splunk provides operational intelligence software that monitors, reports, and analyzes real-time machine data.

Splunk

LightStep's mission is to deliver confidence at scale for those who develop, operate, and rely upon today’s powerful software applications.

Lightstep

Statsd

Kiali project, observability for the Istio service mesh

Kiali

Sentry is cross-platform application monitoring, with a focus on error reporting.

Sentry

Jon Moter

Senior Principal Engineer at Zendesk

Kunal Parmar

Director of Software Development at Box

Marcin Suterski

Lead Engineer at The New York Times

Jason Tarasovic

Principal Engineer at PayIt

The three tools that received the most “Adopt” votes (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic) and the five tools that received the most total votes (Prometheus, Grafana, Elastic, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry) are all open source. 
It was interesting to see that companies have adopted and maintained these open source systems and been able to scale them to large enough deployments with in-house investments. As it requires at least a small team to deploy, maintain, and scale these open source systems, companies seem to think this tradeoff is worth it compared to using SaaS providers. 
At the same time, there doesn’t seem to be a clear delineation between companies running open source tooling and those adopting an observability SaaS platform in terms of size or engineering capabilities. Open standards such as OpenMetrics and OpenTelemetry are being adopted regardless of whether companies are using open source or SaaS solutions. Plus, some of the companies that ultimately adopted SaaS platforms did go through the process of evaluating and prototyping self-managed platforms before deciding against it. Perhaps the conclusion to draw is that a quick pace of new technologies require new observability techniques, which in turn require almost constant evaluation and adoption of new tools.

The most commonly adopted tools are open source.

Many companies are using multiple tools: Half of the companies are using 5 or more tools, and a third of them had experience with 10+ tools. 
Observability inherently requires looking at the data from different views to try to answer questions. Different tools have strengths in different techniques and integrations, which may be the reason why end users end up with multiple tools. Once adopted, it may be difficult to switch from one set of tools to another or to even consolidate. For most end users, observability is not their core business, so the investment needed to switch tools is often not easily funded. This may be a large reason why there are so many "Adopt" votes in this radar.
Anecdotally, companies are constantly experimenting with and introducing new tools, looking for better ways to observe things. With the advent of cloud native technologies like Kubernetes, different tools are needed for monitoring. For example, Nagios was really popular five years ago, but not as relevant now for users who need to monitor Kubernetes workloads.

There’s no consolidation in the observability space.

Two-thirds of the respondents are using these two tools in conjunction. This comes as no surprise, but the high correlation is still interesting to note. Momentum behind both projects, coupled with little competition, could have helped them gain such a high rate of adoption. Plus, there are many tutorials and installers that make it easy to use them together. There’s minimal resistance to using them hand-in-hand.

All Radars

Database Storage, November 2020

Observability, September 2020

Continuous Delivery, June 2020

Technologies Overview

Argo CD	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Aurora	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
AWS DynamoDB	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
BigQuery	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
Cassandra	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
Circle CI	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Trial
CloudSQL	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
Cloudwatch	Observability, September 2020Trial
CockroachDB	Database Storage, November 2020Assess
Consul	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
Datadog	Observability, September 2020Adopt
Elastic	Observability, September 2020Adopt
Elasticsearch	Database Storage, November 2020Adopt
Flux	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Adopt
GitHub Actions	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
GitLab	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Trial
Grafana	Observability, September 2020Adopt
Helm	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Adopt
Jaeger	Observability, September 2020Trial
Jenkins	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Jenkins X	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
jsonnet	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Kafka	Database Storage, November 2020Adopt
Kiali	Observability, September 2020Assess
Kustomize	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Trial
Lightstep	Observability, September 2020Trial
MariaDB	Database Storage, November 2020Assess
Memcached	Database Storage, November 2020Adopt
MongoDB	Database Storage, November 2020Trial
MySQL	Database Storage, November 2020Adopt
OpenMetrics	Observability, September 2020Adopt
OpenTelemetry	Observability, September 2020Assess
PostgreSQL	Database Storage, November 2020Adopt
Prometheus	Observability, September 2020Adopt
Redis	Database Storage, November 2020Adopt
Sentry	Observability, September 2020Trial
Spinnaker	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Splunk	Observability, September 2020Trial
Statsd	Observability, September 2020Trial
Team City	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Tekton CD	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Thanos	Observability, September 2020Assess
Travis CI	Continuous Delivery, June 2020Assess
Vitess	Database Storage, November 2020Assess