Platforms All The Way Up & Down

All businesses today are built on layers of platforms. The app running your business is built on top of the Kubernetes application deployment platform, running on the AWS cloud platform. AWS is built on top of platforms such as the Linux operating system and the Intel X86 processor architecture. Smartly managed, a good product evolves into a platform for users to extract value and for developers to create new products and platforms. We all stand on the shoulders of giants.

Perhaps the most obvious of the many giants upon which Sumo Logic stands is AWS. It was extremely obvious to us when we conceived Sumo Logic as a cloud-delivered service that we could not win the data center game of racking and stacking boxes. Plus, we wouldn’t have known how to do this in the first place––we are all software developers. What we did know was that AWS was providing a platform that turned data centers into APIs. That we could wrap our heads around!

Over the last 9 years, we have created a product that is used and loved by over 1,600 customers and 50,000 users worldwide. Needless to say, I am very proud of what our team has accomplished. We delivered the first and only scalable, multi-tenant log management solution starting in 2012. But since then, our own appreciation for the enabling power of platforms enabled us to continuously anticipate the need for, and ultimately engineer towards, turning our product into a platform on the shoulders of which many others are comfortably standing on.

It was our realization that a machine data analytics platform requires more than logs because there are many other types of machine data to analyze. Therefore we added support for metrics time series into the platform, available since 2016. Trust me, we are not done adding different types of machine data into our platform because we know the efficiency in analytics we want to provide to our users is greatly helped by additional types of data––distributed traces for monitoring and troubleshooting, security events for threat detection and forensics, the list goes on and on.

It is our focus to always enable you to focus on the availability and performance of your business. The giant multi-tenant database for “funky” data that we have built is a ready substrate for many teams across IT and really the entire business to, let’s face it, monitor and troubleshoot the business. Continuously, and in real-time. The Sumo Logic platform is delivered as a service and enables all of this without falling into the trap of becoming itself a burdensome behemoth and an all-consuming tarpit of financial and human resources. No watchmen required for this service!

We also knew from the beginning that true platforms are not constrained to work for a single use case only. You need to monitor the availability and performance of your applications. But you should also ensure the security of your applications! And ultimately, the business being conducted by your applications needs to be monitored as well. In our cloud-native platform, logs, metrics, traces, and events come together to help you understand all these aspects, and even more crucially, to perform debugging, troubleshooting, and forensics of the platforms your business is built on. Sumo is maniacally focused on continuing to expand and improve the platform we are providing you. We are working hard on exposing every single thing our platform is capable of as APIs. We are committed to supporting automation via declarative configuration and are ramping up our efforts to have Terraform support for all aspects of the platform. We are also continuing to focus on enabling integrations via SDKs and are thinking hard about allowing extensibility of our ingestion and query pipelines. Please do start conversations and let us know how we are doing when we meet, and join the discussion on the Sumo Dojo, our public Slack channel. Platforms enable innovation, and only platforms-as-a-service like Sumo Logic do so in a humane and efficient manner.