I’m Alan Ngai, former CTO & Co-Founder of OpsClarity, and now VP of Cloud Services at Lightbend. I wanted to take this opportunity to share of my thoughts about our recent acquisition by Lightbend, as announced last Wednesday.
It’s fair to say that these are really exciting times. Back when OpsClarity was originally founded, we had a vision for where the software industry was headed. It was a vision where more and more organizations and software engineers would build larger scale systems on top of open source technologies. Architectures would fundamentally shift and be more distributed, and applications would be more data-oriented. These conclusions in themselves did not make us particularly prescient; the trends were as clear as day for any company building software 4 years ago.
The insight that we had was that such systems would become harder and harder to understand and operate. Monitoring a a traditional three-tier web app built with Tomcat and MySQL was one thing, but monitoring a large scale, distributed, asynchronous Reactive system built on top of dozens of services, databases, message buses, and cloud services was something else altogether.
The reason why OpsClarity was founded was to help organizations better understand and operate their software in the new world, with a monitoring platform that helps the user understand what their production environment looks like and what it is doing.
Parallel to that, Lightbend as an organization saw the same trends. Jonas Bonér, CTO of Lightbend, and his team authored the Reactive Manifesto in 2013. In it, he described what software architectures would necessarily need to evolve into in order to meet the demands of modern technological organizations.
Fundamentally, if you want a software system that is responsive, resilient, and elastic, your software would need to be architected in a specific way. The system would need to be composed of components that were asynchronous, isolated, replicated, and message driven. Open source technologies were shaping up to include more and more of these qualities (Kafka, Cassandra, Spark, etc.) and Lightbend (then Typesafe) was among the foremost technology providers in that effort with Scala, Akka, and Play Framework.
The intersection here was that while OpsClarity’s purpose was to help companies understand and monitor systems in the new world, Lightbend’s purpose was to help companies build such systems. With the joining of forces, Lightbend will now provide organizations an end to end solution to build and run the whole thing. The power could not be underestimated and the opportunities made too much sense to pass up.
Looking forward, the OpsClarity team is very excited to bring our technology to Lightbend’s hundreds of happy customers. It was precisely the type of customers who use Lightbend technology, whose aim is to build elastic, resilient, distributed systems, that OpsClarity was intended to serve. The marriage of product, technology, and talent of both companies will allow us to solve even harder problems and make even more meaningful impact in the months and years to come.
So, stay tuned. If you'd like to find out more about bringing end-to-end monitoring for your Reactive systems in both development and production, feel free to reach out to us below:
