You’re likely to read about the major innovations from the largest tech companies through their conferences and media coverage, while startups can get attention for their forward-looking innovations and the venture capital money funding them.
However, many other breakthrough capabilities receive less notice. Marketers
work hard to ensure that customers, end-users, and prospects learn about the
new capabilities, but with so many tech companies and platforms promoting
their feature releases, it’s challenging to build awareness.
So, I’m starting a new column on the blog about breakthrough innovations and, more specifically, shining a light on the CTOs and founders working tirelessly to release groundbreaking capabilities. I plan to cover innovations a few times a year, so look out for these “breakthrough” posts.
GenAI breakthroughs focus on quality
Several months ago, I wrote an article about how to test
large language models
(LLMs), and quite frankly, I was disappointed with the approaches that
relied on significant manual efforts to build test questions and validate
results. Organizations looking to develop LLMs and leverage retrieval
augmented generation (RAGs) with their intellectual property need a more
scalable approach, so I was thrilled to hear about innovations around
responsible AI.
“John Snow Labs recently released automated Responsible AI testing in the
Generative AI Lab, a first-of-its-kind no-code tool to test and evaluate the
safety and efficacy of language models,” says David Talby, CTO of
John Snow Labs. “The tool helps
healthcare organizations build AI models that are safe, fair, robust, and
transparent. This enables human expert oversight, something increasingly
important to ensure the quality and safety of LLM solutions. Second, it
allows non-data scientists, such as medical doctors, to use an LLM and train
a smaller, task-specific model that can be more accurate and far cheaper to
run.”
Talby’s recent article on
bias and fairness in healthcare
sheds light on the challenges of implementing a more equitable AI
experience.
Another example of efforts to improve genAI quality is from
Meaning, which launched its “soften”
feature for its genAI-powered voice technology. “This capability enables
users, primarily off-shore contact center agents, to enhance the clarity of
conversations without losing their identity,” says Yishay Carmiel, CEO of
Meaning. “Born out of the need from real agent feedback, Soften offers
another gradient of speech augmentation that meets users where they are,
empowering them to focus on excellent customer service rather than
conversational barriers.”
Site reliability engineering reliability diagnostic capabilities
My recent writing on DevOps focused on
advanced CI/CD
practices,
release management
principles, and improving the
developer experience. The innovations below focus on reliability and scalable operations,
which, in my opinion, are really the heart and soul of DevOps practices.
The first capability should help site reliability engineers (SREs) manage
SLOs and error budgets.
“In the process of driving updates to our platform this year, I have learned
that when it comes to reliability, teams want to know not only whether their
services are reliable and how reliable they are but also why,” says Alex
Nauda, CTO of Nobl9. “We built
Composite SLO 2.0 to effectively summarize error budget burn events, like
downtime and incidents, across an entire tree of SLOs — potentially hundreds
at once — to clearly show how each of the underlying services in that tree
contributes to a loss in reliability.”
Nauda shares more details on how the feature enables
holistic reliability management
across an ecosystem of monitoring tools.
“Composite SLO 2.0 unites data from a growing ecosystem of sources like
Dynatrace and Amazon CloudWatch for enhanced flexibility, providing
engineering and management with a straightforward reliability metric for an
entire product or service,” he says. “This allows our users to drill down
into the behavior of complex systems with composite SLOs of near-infinite
size and complexity while still receiving high-level business intelligence
to inform executive decision-making.”
DevOps innovations focus on scalable operations
If improving reliability is a primary objective, finding ways to help DevOps
team members improve operations is a key success factor. The next two
features highlight opportunities for DevOps teams.
“We introduced GitOps for IT and scheduled maintenance on your
calendar for system updates,” says Luke Heath, CTO of
Fleet. “Both features are the first of
their kind in the space and represent a new way of managing IT at a scale
that puts user experience first.”
Another example comes from Fabian Kramm, CTO and co-founder of
Loft Labs. “I was proud to drive the
release of vCluster for Rancher, which enables self-service virtual
Kubernetes cluster creation and management for teams using Rancher and helps
customers securely virtualize clusters for multi-tenancy from a single
central location,” he says. “Rancher users can now provision virtual
clusters just as they would traditional clusters, drilling down from within
Rancher to inspect, manage, install applications, and more.”
Kramm shared more details on
securing Kubernetes multi-tenancy
and unifying management of virtual clusters.
What about improving the developer experience and open source innovations?
Kramm shares his involvement in our open source projects
and excitement about seeing how users leverage recent updates to
DevPod, an open-source tool for creating
and managing dev environments without a heavy server-side setup. “We made
the UI more powerful, including easier workspace filtering and bulk
workspace actions, as well as built-in experimental support for a new VS
Code Insiders IDE so our users can take advantage of the latest VS Code
updates.”
I love hearing about brilliant innovations that drive business outcomes,
improve customer experiences, and provide real value to engineers. What
innovations will pique my interest over the next few months? Stay tuned!
Digital Trailblazers! Join us Fridays at 11am ET for a live audio discussion on digital
transformation topics: innovation, product management, agile, DevOps,
data governance, and more!
No comments:
Post a Comment
Comments on this blog are moderated and we do not accept comments that have links to other websites.