In a landscape where technologies evolve overnight, software systems must be built not just for today but for whatever tomorrow might bring. Real-time functionality isn’t just a feature anymore; it’s foundational to staying ahead.
In software, developers pursuing future-proof solutions often seek to incorporate real-time functionality. Future-proofing requires agility. The rapid adoption of emerging capabilities keeps software on the cutting edge. To stay relevant, developers must often be able to produce quick enhancements that respond to emerging issues.
Real-time functionality empowers that agility. Developers fall behind the curve when they don’t have real-time access to the data that reveals the direction in which technology is moving. Those who can’t facilitate necessary software updates in real time can quickly find themselves falling behind industry leaders.
Yet many factors work against real-time functionality in software. Updates must be tested, compatibility must be assessed, and resources — often involving developers and other tech workers — must be secured to manage new workloads. These and other common steps can lead to considerable development delays, resulting in a reality that is far from real time.
LowOps is a software development approach that proactively opens doors to a higher level of real-time functionality. It leverages several innovative features to streamline operations across the complete development, deployment, and maintenance process. With LowOps, developers can provide real-time responsiveness, putting future-proofing within reach.
Meeting the future with real-time scalability
Automation is central to the LowOps approach. A sizable part of the software development cycle is streamlined with automation, including infrastructure provisioning, deployment, and monitoring. This characteristic increases efficiency by eliminating many of the manual tasks that are error-prone and time-consuming.
Scaling is an area where LowOps automations allow for enormous efficiency gains. By empowering the automation of scaling policies, LowOps leads to systems that adjust resources in real time based on user demand. Sudden spikes are taken in stride without requiring human involvement.
The use of Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) is key to enhancing scaling capabilities within LowOps environments. IaC defines and automates the provisioning of infrastructure resources. It empowers rapid provisioning, which supports real-time adjustments to resource availability.
LowOps also makes scalability more efficient by leveraging cloud-native environments. It taps into the inherent elasticity of cloud environments, driving automated scaling based on the real-time metrics cloud platforms provide.
The containerized deployment empowered by LowOps automations also adds efficiency to horizontal scaling initiatives. Containerization allows for implementation to be less complex. When the need for higher availability triggers horizontal scaling, containerization allows for rapid deployment while reducing the risk of issues that threaten functionality.
See also: AI Workloads Need Purpose-built Infrastructure
Optimizing adaptability with real-time insights and solutions
Real-time responses require real-time insights. When those who maintain systems are unaware of evolving issues, they lose the ability to step in and address problems before they become failures. Optimizing adaptability — and empowering the enhanced performance it provides — requires real-time insights.
LowOps provides real-time insights by promoting advanced monitoring strategies. Its comprehensive monitoring and logging tools show real-time application performance and infrastructure health. Those supporting the software can be automatically alerted when performance dips below predetermined thresholds.
Because LowOps is cloud-native, it also supports distributed tracing. Requests flowing through a complex microservice architecture can be tracked in real time, allowing for the evaluation of performance and identification of bottlenecks.
The combination of LowOps monitoring and LowOps automations allows systems to adapt in real time when issues are detected. For example, IaC can define circumstances where failover mechanisms are activated, with automated monitoring triggering the automation. As a result, systems adapt to ensure users are seamlessly routed to available resources.
Improving security with real-time capabilities
Security considerations are central to future-proofing. Security threats are constantly evolving, and technological advances make them more sophisticated and effective. To withstand this never-ending barrage, security frameworks need to be constantly updated.
LowOps supports future-proof security in several ways, starting with encouraging a shift-left mentality. The shift-left approach places key developmental components, including security checks, earlier in the development lifecycle than is typical. Shift-left development proactively considers security needs and integrates them within software coding rather than reacting to vulnerabilities after the software is used.
A LowOps approach also facilitates the use of automated security scanning tools. Placing these tools in the continuous integration, continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipeline empowers continuous monitoring for security vulnerabilities. The scanning tools allow for potential weaknesses in coding or configurations to be flagged in real time, rather than having them show up in testing or after they are exploited by a hacker.
The automations central to LowOps allow for security enhancements to be deployed in real time, mitigating the risks that can arise when human implementation is delayed. Security can be tested, and patches can be deployed automatically. By leveraging IaC, developers can ensure security is configured consistently and according to best practices, both when initially deployed and when making updates.
LowOps automations also allow developers to take zero-trust security, which is seen as a top-tier security model, to the next level. Using automation tools like Terraform agents or Argo Workflow template deployment, infrastructure changes can be done without human engagement. Whereas zero-trust seeks to increase the steps that must be taken for users to gain access to systems, LowOps removes the need for users to have access. It does away with key entry points and the attack threats they pose rather than increasing security at those points.
Empowering flexibility through simplification
Efforts to future-proof often fall short when they assume a fixed vision of the future. True resilience lies in designing systems that can adapt to multiple, unpredictable scenarios. Flexibility, rather than certainty, is the key to succeeding in a future that will always be difficult to predict, especially when facing the challenge of developing technology for optimal impact.
LowOps aids in future-proofing primarily by supporting an environment that optimizes flexibility through automation and simplification. Support for CI/CD pipelines allows for faster development. IaC allows for rapid provisioning and modifications. Cloud-native capabilities mean scaling can be done on demand.
When the advanced security provisions LowOps empowers are added to the equation, developers have an environment that allows for rapid shifts without creating dangerous vulnerabilities. LowOps ensures that all of the components are in place to act in real time when the best course forward becomes clear.
As the pace of technological evolution accelerates, organizations that embrace LowOps will be best positioned to meet the unknown with confidence, turning agility into a long-term advantage.
Yashin Manraj, CEO of Pvotal Technologies, has served as a computational chemist in academia, an engineer working on novel challenges at the nanoscale, and a thought leader building more secure systems at the world’s best engineering firms. His deep technical knowledge from product development, design, business insights, and coding provides a unique nexus to identify and solve gaps in the product pipeline. The Pvotal mission is to build sophisticated enterprises with no limits that are built for rapid change, seamless communication, top-notch security, and scalability to infinity. Pvotal’s products and services create Infinite Enterprises that give business leaders total control and peace of mind over their technology systems and their businesses.
