Glasnostic Helps Enterprises Find Balance

As companies transform into digital enterprises, services are being deployed in higher numbers and at an accelerating rate in order to support the constantly evolving needs of the business. Even though these independent services often number in the hundreds and even thousands, they must all work together as a single ecosystem without interruption. Tobias Kunze, the CEO and founder of Glasnostic, likens this challenge to that of air traffic controllers, who must ensure that thousands of individual planes can use their airspace in a safe and efficient manner. In this sense, Glasnostic’s solution acts as a cloud traffic controller that ensures the stability, availability and security of dynamic microservice ecosystems.

Kunze describes the organic combining of new and existing applications in an enterprise as a “service landscape.” Glasnostic’s control plane is designed to keep it stable as it evolves.

“We’re focused on the operational challenges of service landscapes while steering clear of any single deployment,” says Kunze. “Our solution controls their pathological behaviors that their interactions produce while staying an arm’s length from any particular service. In this regard, we act almost like a network device.”

New technology, like containers, microservices and serverless, should accelerate business’ opportunities, not create new challenges. But without a way to knit together the different needs of existing and new deployments, companies will remain vulnerable to structural breakdown.

“Because service landscapes allow an enterprise’s architecture to evolve rapidly and organically, they are able to achieve significant agility on the business side. But the organic nature of this growth also makes them fragile at the systemic level. As a result, it’s often like a house of cards that threatens to come down with even the tiniest change,” Kunze explains. “You need to have a cloud traffic controller that can provide the necessary stability, availability and security.

Glasnostic helps enterprises control the complex emergent behaviors of their organically growing service architecture, rather than reverting to the old ways of building static systems. As a result, companies are able to deploy more services, more often and with more confidence.

Controlling complex emergent behaviors is a challenge organizations will continue to face as they accelerate the pace of their deployment and embrace continuous modernization, even if this challenge is not always easy to identify. “Today, we all live in a world where we need to be able to control things we don’t own. Everything we create depends on the work of others and everything we create is something somebody else will end up depending on. Because every dependency has the potential of sinking the ship, controlling how dependencies affect each other is the crux of rapid innovation and something we all need to get better at,” says Kunze. “Every CIO, every architect and every operator feels that the belief developers love to live by—that technical problem plus more technology equals solution—is off, they just don’t always know why. We often find that we help put a name to it.”