Review the top IT operations news stories of 2022

Atlassian Cloud Services went down

Atlassian experienced an almost two-week outage beginning April 5 and ending for all customers on April 18. Affected services included Jira Software issue tracking, Jira Service Management, Jira Work Management, Confluence documentation, Opsgenie incident response and the Atlassian Access single sign-on tool. Though Atlassian announced three new cloud-based products the week prior at the Atlassian Team '22 conference, the outage overshadowed all the advancements revealed at the conference.

Such a prolonged outage is uncommon for SaaS providers and left many customers' confidence shaken in Atlassian's ability. The affected customers represented a small percentage of Atlassian's overall customer base, but the damage to the company's reputation was already done, said Larry Carvalho, independent analyst at RobustCloud, to TechTarget Editorial senior news writer Beth Pariseau during the outage.

In a statement following the outage, Atlassian said the services went down during a routine maintenance script where the sites were disabled unintentionally. According to the post-incident review from Atlassian, 775 customers lost their services, but no more than five minutes of data was lost.

Splunk underwent highs and lows

After a three-month search, Splunk named Gary Steele its new CEO to mixed response. Some believed that his appointment would help fortify Splunk's strengths as a SaaS platform, but others thought it promoted complacency for a company that would benefit from major changes.

Later in the year, Splunk was back in the news when it filed a lawsuit against its former partner Cribl, claiming that Cribl had based its business on stolen intellectual property. The claim caused confusion as the company was founded in 2018, but Splunk didn't file the suit until 2022. Industry experts suggested that it was filed because of Cribl's major growth in the last two years -- which occurred in large part at Splunk's expense.

Though it was difficult to predict how the lawsuit would affect joint Splunk-Cribl customers, neither party's customer base would likely be affected by the ongoing litigation, IDC analyst Katie Norton told TechTarget Editorial at the time.

Service meshes began to edge Kubernetes out of the spotlight

Kubernetes has long held the attention and admiration of the tech industry, but service mesh has slowly been creeping in as the new and exciting technology on the scene. TechTarget Editorial senior news writer Beth Pariseau spoke with Brian Gracely, former senior director of product strategy for Red Hat and now vice president of product strategy at Solo.io, about his career shift toward service mesh.

Kubernetes is now an established and stable part of many organizations' IT environments, while service mesh is still in its relative infancy. Gracely's switch from Kubernetes to service mesh marked an overall industry shift toward the newest developing technology.

"Service mesh is still a space in which there's a lot of innovation," Gracely said in the interview. Though Gracely's career shift represents a small puzzle piece in a bigger picture, it's a good indicator of where the market is heading.

WebAssembly entered the edge computing ring

WebAssembly got its start in web browsers, but its move toward edge computing began earlier this year when it combined with the WebAssembly System Interface (WASI). Together, WebAssembly and WASI offer support for bespoke serverless workloads, enabling WebAssembly apps to access OS resources.

Many in the tech industry believed that the change had the potential to improve edge scalability and performance, but the development wasn't without its drawbacks. "It doesn't have the sleekness that a lot of other environments have," said Fintan Ryan, an analyst at Gartner. "There's a lot of work happening there, but it feels a little bit like going back to how you built software 15 years ago."

As WebAssembly lacks maturity, it remains to be seen how the technology will fare in the edge computing market.

Dell joined forces with OpenShift

Dell's collaboration with OpenShift meant organizations working with Kubernetes had more options than ever, but the announcement further drove a wedge of uncertainty regarding VMware's future under Broadcom.

With three new OpenShift products in the works -- Dell Apex Containers for Red Hat OpenShift, Dell Validated Platform for Red Hat OpenShift and an on-premises hybrid cloud infrastructure to integrate Red Hat OpenShift with Dell infrastructure -- Dell's goal was to reduce the complexity surrounding Kubernetes management.

These developments for Dell and OpenShift had many wondering if OpenShift would become the go-to container management platform, but experts still saw VMware as a strong contender in the Kubernetes industry despite Broadcom's acquisition of the company.

New Relic faced financial struggles

On the heels of releasing an update to its platform, New Relic's financial reports came out, which provided insight into the company's financial turmoil despite improving its observability agent.

The update meant New Relic now offered two methods to collect data within Kubernetes clusters: either with the extended Berkeley Packet Filter through New Relic's Pixie open source tool or with a traditional software agent. In addition, it added vulnerability management to its application performance monitoring tool in an attempt to move into the security realm.

Many commercial observability vendors, such as Splunk, faced similar internal upheavals and financial losses while attempting to maintain their customer bases and evolve with the market.

Open source security became an international concern

To protest the war in Ukraine, open source JavaScript library node-ipc's developer changed the code to wipe all systems in Russia and Belarus using the project. This was not the first time an open source project had been a vehicle for antiwar protest, but many open source experts said the act crossed an ethical line and went too far.

"The bottom line is that if this can happen to people in Russia, it can happen to you," wrote Matt Barker, CEO and co-founder of Jetstack, a Kubernetes professional services company, in an email sent through a spokesperson. The attack prompted new awareness surrounding open source security and risks, and left many questioning how to best protect themselves against such an attack.

New CloudBees CEO entered competitive CI/CD tool market

Anuj Kapur was named CloudBees' new CEO and shared an optimistic view of the company's future, although he faced a fierce market that offered consumers more CI/CD product choices than ever.

"Software can define an organization, or the software of competitors can destroy the organization ... the criticality has never been greater," Kapur said. To combat this, his goals as the new CEO were to speed up product innovation, strengthen the company's marketing approach, achieve geographical expansion and scale the company's global operations.

Even with clear goals, industry experts were still wary, pointing out that many younger competitors, such as GitLab and Harness, reached a $1 billion valuation faster than CloudBees. But that didn't seem to dampen Kapur's hopes for CloudBees' future.