Datadog Announces Integration with AWS CodeDeploy – and deftly resolves ecosystem issues

There are perennial conversations happening among those who closely watch Amazon Web Services (AWS) about the risks that third-party vendors have working within the AWS ecosystem. AWS’ pace of innovation and development is legendary, and there are many companies that have seen their lunch eaten by AWS’ juggernaut-like appetite. That’s not a criticism of AWS per se, the fact of the matter is that AWS is hyper-focused on meeting the needs of its customers. If meeting those needs means building a product that competes with its own ecosystem, so be it.

And so it was when AWS introduced CloudWatch, its native monitoring solution, a few years ago. The pundits wondered what this introduction would mean for the plethora of third-party monitoring solution that has AWS as a significant part of their business. Would their market opportunity suddenly disappear?

Often a platform vendor moving into a parallel area, either by building or buying a solution, is a seriously bad thing for anyone else in the space. I’m reminded of Salesforce’s acquisition of Steelbrick a couple of years ago, and the huge impacts that had on Steelbrick competitor Apttus. While the space that Steelbrick plays in (pricing and quoting for large organizations) is very different from that CloudWatch answers, would CloudWatch be similarly damaging to all other monitoring solutions?

Well, it seems not, at least for the moment, and at least as far as Datadog is concerned.

Datadog is a monitoring service that is designed for cloud-scale applications. In an increasingly common trend that sees monitoring vendors move away from very specific centricity (either application or infrastructure), Datadog covers the spectrum: servers, databases, tools, and services. The SaaS-based platform is designed to deliver the Holy Grail – developers and operations staff working together to really deliver the DevOps promise.

I first met Datadog, ironically enough, at AWS’ reInvent show a few years ago and, since their inception back in 2010, the company has signed on high-profile customers such as Airbnb, Atlassian, Netflix, PagerDuty, Salesforce, Twilio, Warner Bros, and Zendesk.

BFFs (Best Frenemies Forever)

Datadog is today announcing a new partnership with AWS, specifically with regards AWS CodeDeploy tool. CodeDeploy is an automation offering that automates code deployments across thousands of virtual machines. Not only does this make development much faster, it mitigates the room for human error. Win, win. But, since there are ecosystem factors at play here, it is worth noting that because CodeDeploy is baked into the AWS ecosystem, it’s displacing third party services that perform similar tasks such as Jenkins.

One would be forgiven for thinking that Datadog, in the face of seemingly cannibalistic moves, would be cautious but, in a sign of the pragmatism that they bring to their business, the company is going all in and leveraging AWS’ investments in CodeDeploy to build out additional functionality. The new integration with AWS CodeDeploy will, as Datadog sees it, provide a new layer of visibility and insight for DevOps teams.

“AWS CodeDeploy makes it easier for developers using Amazon Web Services (AWS) to deploy code across their entire infrastructure,” said Daniel Langer, Product Manager at Datadog. “We now track these deployments in Datadog, so users can see them alongside the rest of their AWS environments and application metrics. If a system metric begins to spike, developers can correlate it with a specific AWS CodeDeploy deployment to make code-level fixes in real time.”

MyPOV

It is somewhat ironic to see Datadog talk about the fact that AWS’ development has the unintended consequence of displacing third-party tools within the ecosystem, only to partner with AWS on a product that does just that. It’s especially ironic given that Datadog is itself at a degree of risk (arguably) from AWS own monitoring solutions. That said, pragmatism rules here, and Datadog is making the best of the situation.

Of course, this isn’t an isolated integration – Datadog covers a huge number of individual AWS services and this offering will be additive to that, but it will be interesting to watch the moves that AWS makes with its own monitoring solution and the impact that has on companies like Datadog.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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