Developers Are Participating in and Making IT Buying Decisions. Why?

IDC Updates Its Future of Digital Innovation Framework projects that 750 million cloud-native applications will be created globally by 2025. As applications become more sophisticated, the complexity is growing beyond the human scale. As a result, developers are under pressure to deliver applications faster. This has led the information technology (IT) buying decision-making process in organizations to include developers and DevOps.

Red Hat surveyed IT leaders across various industries to understand their IT decision-making processes. Respondents comprised a subset of Red Hat customers and others drawn from a broad industry panel. Details are in the 2023 Global Tech Outlook: A Red Hat report.

The survey showed that developers are increasingly becoming decision makers or influencers. Thirty-eight percent of developers surveyed said they made IT decisions and 62% of developers identified themselves as decision influencers.

What are developers (and DevOps) looking for when making purchasing decisions?

IT decision makers, developers, and DevOps teams have specific requirements when evaluating technology products and services. These include:

• Open source: They prefer open-source products with a large community of users and developers for support.
• Automation: Products with automated deployment allow them to focus on development and other tasks more quickly.
• Observability: Tools that provide easy troubleshooting and remediation save time and effort.
• Ease of use and integration: DevOps and developers seek products that are easy to use and integrate well with existing tools and systems.
• Scalability and reliability: Buyers seek products that can reliably handle increased demands as the organization grows.
• Security: Products that protect sensitive data are critical in production environments.
• Cost: Organizations seek cost-effective products but need to maintain performance and reliability.
• Support: Respondents preferred products with a large and active community of users and reliable customer support.

Developers/DevOps are increasingly adopting Apache Kafka® and Kubernetes for managing streaming applications and real-time data processing in a scalable and reliable manner. By deploying Kafka on Kubernetes, administrators can leverage the benefits of both technologies to build a robust, scalable, and resilient event-driven architecture.

However, operationalizing Kafka in a cloud-native environment has several challenges, including complex deployment processes, monitoring, and configuring network and storage on Kafka clusters.

Cisco Calisti can remedy these problems to ease Kafka management in Kubernetes environments.

Calisti features:

• Auto-managed operations:
  • Automated deployment operationalizes quickly
  • Graceful upscale/downscale
  • Self-healing
  • Alert-based storage expansion
  • Smooth, zero-downtime upgrades
• Observability and ease of use:
  • Automatically configured Grafana dashboards
  • Default Prometheus rules for alerts
  • Kafka cluster overview dashboard
• Seamless security:
  • Encrypted and authenticated communications between Kafka components
  • Kubernetes-native declarative Kafka access-control list (ACL) management
  • Zero-configuration mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) for client applications
• High availability and reliability:
  • Disaster recovery from Kubernetes snapshots
  • Cross-cluster replication

The bottom line is that Calisti increases developer productivity and addresses the issues important to buyers as they make important purchasing decisions. Learn more.