Embracing the Future: Firefly Innovation and the Gartner SRE Hype Cycle 2024

By Ido Neeman

The Validation of Vision: Firefly and the Gartner SRE Hype Cycle

The recent release of the Gartner Site Reliability Engineering Hype Cycle for 2024 has brought immense satisfaction and validation to our team at Firefly. Seeing the trends and innovations we've been championing gaining market and analyst recognition alongside adoption, is both gratifying and motivating. At Firefly, we are deeply invested in pushing the boundaries of what’s possible in the realm of SRE and platform engineering across many domains and categories mentioned in the SRE Hype Cycle.

AI Assistants for Infrastructure as Code

It was a privilege to see Firefly named in this category at the peak of the hype cycle, alongside some of the biggest corporations in the industry like AWS, Google, Microsoft and Red Hat who have doubled down on AI. These companies, who are deeply invested with decades of engineering and funds in propelling AI forward, have produced some of the most valuable AI tools released to the industry to date––and it’s an honor to be in the company of such giants in this category.??

Firefly has invested much effort and engineering in delivering first of its kind embedded AI capabilities into our platform, that are cloud-aware and contextually intelligent. It’s not just about providing out of context code snippets, it’s about truly understanding the nuances and complexities of modern cloud native environments and leveraging AI’s unique capabilities to take our systems to the next level.

AI needs to understand everything from Git to GitOps, microservices environments and cloud complexities, and CI/CD processes and workflows to provide truly valuable assistance and insights.? At Firefly we are investing in research and development to be able to deliver on the promise to enable greater business impact, agility and innovation through AI.?

Despite being named in this category, Firefly is proud to have been focusing on bringing to market many of the capabilities mentioned in the current hype cycle.? Below is a snapshot of how Firefly is thinking about and delivering upon the diversity of emerging categories baked into its platform.

Unified Policy as Code: The Backbone of Governance as Code

One of the most exciting developments is the growing momentum behind Policy as Code (PaC), however while many claim to be doing this, there is a wide spectrum of what the implementation actually looks like.? When it comes to Policy as Code, Firefly is currently the only platform delivering unified PaC across code, CI/CD, and runtime environments. Other implementations only focus on one of these areas, for example code scanning is solely focused on the code, CI/CD policy enforcement on the deployment and GitOps, while runtime security only after the fact and remediation.? Providing PaC and AI automation around generating these policies and guardrails is where Firefly excels.? What’s more, robust Policy as Code is the backbone of Governance as Code (GaC), an emerging category that is also known as DevOps Continuous Compliance Automation.?

Where policy and governance differ is around management and hygiene. Common tasks like proper tagging, eliminating waste, and implementing liveness probes in every Kubernetes deployment are essential aspects of governance.? When governance can also be managed as code, it can be automated and enforced more consistently enabling greater compliance with regulatory requirements and internally defined policies.

Monitoring-as-Code and Codifying Your Entire SaaS

Firefly from day 1 has been an advocate for codifying your entire cloud footprint.? Our mantra from code to cloud, enables engineering organizations to apply the same coding practices across all of their clouds––treating all of their platforms like infrastructure––whether it’s monitoring and APMs, version control systems, CDNs and everything else.? Like all other aspects of engineering, there are many benefits to be gained from managing the diversity of your SaaS platforms as code .

Therefore, it is no surprise that one category of innovation in the hype cycle, Monitoring as Code (MaC), is a concept we've been excited about since as early as 2022––see this talk by Firefly co-Founder, Eran Bibi, from Open Source Summit North America. Monitoring as Code, like everything related to as-code management, enables organizations to manage your monitoring systems like you would manage all infrastructure as code.

Superior Infrastructure Orchestration through Workflows

When it comes to infrastructure orchestration, Firefly stands apart from other industry solutions like TACOs through our newly released Workflows support. By enabling better automation, management and portability of existing CI pipelines, reproducibility and visualization in a single platform, Firefly outperforms traditional approaches to CI/CD management that is currently fragmented and painful across software and infrastructure.?

Our platform enables this repeatability by understanding of the entire cloud environment, and through the implementation of guardrails in the form of drift and misconfiguration detection from deployment to runtime.? This enables platform engineers to provide greater autonomy to developers, knowing there are guardrails in place to enforce policy whether it’s security, cost considerations or code quality.

Immutable Infrastructure, Cloud Resilience and Automated Incident Response

When it comes to good practices with infrastructure management, immutable infrastructure is key to ensuring that once deployed, environments remain consistent and reliable. One way to achieve this is by automating resilience into your cloud management through the ability to detect and automatically fix drifts and misconfigurations, and prevent production errors. Auto-remediation helps to quickly address cloud issues, maintaining the integrity and performance of production environments.

Firefly recognizes that many cloud configurations are not yet ready for complex scenarios like those faced by organizations such as UniSuper with their recent cloud outage (catastrophe).? While the Infrastructure Manager at UniSuper deserves a medal of honor for having an additional and separate backup, and many companies today are leveraging platforms like Rubrik or Cohesity for data backup––it still took UniSuper an entire week to recover from their outage.??

This is because it’s not just a matter of backing up your systems and data––configurations also need to be backed up! And this is where Firefly is innovating in the areas of cloud resilience and automated incident recovery and response.? By providing codified backups of all of your systems configurations, in the cloud––in the event of an issue, recovery is swift and comprehensive with minimal downtime.

Real Innovation for Real Impact

The SRE Hype Cycle is only hype if it fails to deliver on its promises. At Firefly, we are dedicated to providing real, useful innovations for SREs and platform engineers. Our commitment is to make their work easier, more efficient, and more impactful. We are excited to continue developing and refining our solutions to meet the evolving needs of the industry.

In conclusion, the Gartner SRE Hype Cycle for 2024 highlights the direction we are headed, and we are thrilled to be at the forefront of these emerging trends. Firefly remains committed to innovation, excellence, and delivering solutions that make a difference. The future of SRE and platform engineering is bright, and we are proud to be a part of it.

Learn more about how Firefly can help you keep up with innovations in Site Reliability. Get started at firefly.ai .

originally posted on the Firefly blog. See full article here .