IT Ops Query

Envisioning observability in 3D with knowledge graphs

What if you could see your application and infrastructure represented spatially instead of two-dimensional dashboard tabs, similar to atoms in a molecule or stars in the sky? According to Matt Young, founder and co-chair of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) technical advisory group (TAG) on observability, this will soon be a reality thanks to advanced AI models, knowledge graphs, and emerging data storage techniques such as columnar stores. In this episode, Matt discusses the implications of these new technologies for SREs, developers, and software supply chain security.

Charity Majors on AI observability and a call to action for SREs

Charity Majors pioneered the term 'observability' as co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb.io, based on her experience building and managing distributed systems at Parse, Facebook, and Linden Lab building Second Life. She is the co-author of the O'Reilly books Observability Engineering and Database Reliability Engineering. Her Honeycomb bio adds that she "loves free speech, free software and single malt scotch."
In this interview with Informa TechTarget senior news writer Beth Pariseau, Majors covers the interplay between AI and observability, "Observability 2.0," and urges site reliability engineers to lean into AI agents, even if they seem to be replacements.

Trailer: IT Ops Query Season 3: Observability in the Age of AI

Multifaceted connection points are emerging between observability and AI, from monitoring and improving AI models themselves to observing the ways the behavior of AI agents differs from traditional web apps. In short, AI-driven automation makes new kinds of observability workflows both necessary and possible.
This season of IT Ops Query will feature interviews with a variety of industry expert guests on how AI, including agentic AI, will change observability, as well as how observability will change AI. Join me starting March 20th, wherever you get your podcasts.

2024 in review and 2025 predictions with Dan Lorenc

Sigstore creator, Chainguard CEO, OpenSSF TAC member and Season 1 guest Dan Lorenc returns to discuss the year in open source and security. Topics range from software supply chain management, hardening container images and SBOMs in limbo to open product companies and business models, including his own company's shift in focus this year. Plus: a look ahead to SecOps and AI in 2025. 

The arc of SecOps is long, but bends toward improvement

S&P Global Market Intelligence principal research analyst Daniel Kennedy discusses what the results of his Voice of the Enterprise research project dating back to 2015 reveal about the notion of a cybersecurity skills shortage; the effects of the Crowdstrike outage on a long-running debate about unified cybersecurity platforms vs best-of-breed vendors; and hopeful signs heading in to the next decade of SecOps. 

Back to the future in business resilience post-CrowdStrike

SecOps, developers and infrastructure ops teams are often encouraged to work more closely together within IT, but for one industry analyst, the CrowdStrike outage exposed an even more significant gap between IT and businesses. 
Charles Betz is vice president and principal analyst for enterprise architecture at Forrester Research. He has also worked as an adjunct professor at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota, and as an enterprise architect at AT&T, Wells Fargo, Best Buy and Target. Following the CrowdStrike outage, Betz and a dozen other Forrester analysts collaborated on a report calling for a redefinition of enterprise resilience in the wake of the incident.
For Betz, the experience of Delta Airlines in the CrowdStrike aftermath is potentially instructive for improving business resilience. 
"This was not a failure of IT disaster recovery," he said in this episode of Delta's weeklong ordeal. "This was truly a failure of business continuity…a shock to the physical system that couldn't be unwound without a lot of hard work."

Questioning shift left: changing tech and security roles

In October, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a report that's still generating buzz in the security world – it questioned the data sources in often-cited reports about the value of "shifting left". Another section of the CISA report called into question the idea that security flaws cause people to stop using products and concluded that "In general, it seems that quality failures don’t always affect customer loyalty." 
In this episode, guest Adrian Sanabria, the host of the Enterprise Security Weekly podcast and principal researcher at The Defenders Initiative, discusses the fallout from CISA's report on the last decade's notions of organizational security roles and how changing technology will also change the roles organizations assign to those responsible for cybersecurity and risk.

Gen AI kicks multi-cloud security into overdrive

Doug Merritt was CEO of Splunk from 2015 to 2021 and led the company's transition from an on-premises software company to a cloud-based service provider. After two years in the venture capital and board advisory space, Merritt joined multi-cloud networking company Aviatrix as CEO in 2023. That company introduced its first security product, a distributed firewall for Kubernetes, in May, and rolled out a managed version of its multi-cloud network and security control plane this week.
Merritt identifies two ways generative AI is shifting multi-cloud security: first, data gravity and the costs of generative AI mean cloud computing is becoming increasingly distributed, often including hybrid and edge environments, which he says calls for a new approach to centralized network management. Secondly, Merritt said he's a believer that generative AI will help network and SecOps pros keep pace with these changes – and in the coming weeks, Aviatrix will roll out the first of its own GenAI-powered features for security incident management and event reduction.

Airgaps over AI? Cyberdefense pro's tips and predictions

Robert Slaughter is CEO of Defense Unicorns, a defense tech startup specializing in Airgap software delivery in highly secure and sensitive environments in the military and federal government. Previously, he was director of the U.S. Department of Defense's Platform One DevSecOps project and co-founder at Space CAMP, a predecessor of Platform One for the US Space Force. Prior to starting Defense Unicorns, he served 12 years in the US Air Force.
If companies think threats to the security of critical national infrastructure don't involve them, Slaughter says, they should think again. And he suggests they might adopt some of the techniques familiar to military and government cyberdefense pros, from proactive threat hunting to air gaps.

SecOps "where bits and bytes meet flesh and blood"

Joshua Corman is executive in residence for public safety & resilience at The Institute for Security and Technology (IST), a non-profit think tank based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He is also co-leader of a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) community working group for SBOM on-ramps & adoption. Previously, he was vice president of cybersecurity strategy for Claroty, an IoT security company; chief strategist on the CISA COVID task force; director of the Atlantic Council's Cyber Statecraft Initiative; and CTO at security software vendor Sonatype.
In August, Corman delivered a presentation at CISA's SBOM-a-Rama event warning that time is running out to more effectively protect critical infrastructure systems such as the water and power supply that rely on potentially vulnerable software to operate. Corman emphasized the urgent need to more effectively identify vulnerabilities and defend against attacks such as China's Volt Typhoon nation-state threat group. An initiative Corman is leading at IST under the working title UnDisruptable27 now looks to address these threats.
"We live in glass houses," he said in this episode's interview. "And people are about to start throwing rocks."