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Kerno exists make production knowledge accessible to every developer.
We are in an era where shipping reliable software faster has become table stakes for every business. The customer experience and system reliability yardstick has shifted - everyone expects more for less. At the same time, software complexity and costs continue to rise, putting more strain on resources to deliver. System reliability once concentrated on a small but brave team of Ops or SREs, can no longer keep pace with rising demands and must adapt. The future of application reliability depends on developer contribution.
If more developers understand how their code behaves across distributed production systems and can act with confidence, it will lead to mature shared ownership of production risk, effective collaboration, and ultimately, fixing and then preventing issues sooner. Welcome to the You built it; you help us run it era of software reliability.
Underpinning this is knowledge, more specifically, how we federate the right type production knowledge to developers, making it accessible and actionable. Application observability tooling can play a central role in this, but given the current data mining business model, it completely underserves developers. It blurs the lines between what data is important and what is not, resulting in stockpiles of metrics, logs, and traces that developers need to piece together. In other words, the onus of UX is on developers, leading to steep learning curves, slower response times, and a poor use of developer time.
If businesses are serious about moving faster and meeting their customers' needs, the traditional application observability approach will not work.
At Kerno, we take a different path. We start with the user experience and work back from the outcome we want to create, putting the needs of developers (and their customers) at the forefront - so all developers can contribute without being a systems expert. We are building for 90% of developers.
To build this means we need to disrupt the conventional wisdom of how application observability is done, which means rethinking how we:
- Ingest application telemetry
- Process and store telemetry
- Blend user experiences around developer workflows and
- How we run and operate our application observability stack
This has formed our design principles to make Kerno a real developer-centric experience.
OPINIONATED > HIGHLY CUSTOMISABLE
For Developers, speed is essential. They are not ProdOps experts, so leaving all the heavy cognitive load on them through a poor, indifferent UX is unfair. At Kerno, we believe in OPINATED WORKFLOWS. We do the heavy lifting to generate a localized context for developers, closing the knowledge gap faster and achieving an outcome sooner. This does not mean that teams can’t set custom attributes or alerts, they can – opinionated flows is a means of getting people on the same page faster.
EVENT-DRIVEN > ALWAYS MINING
Timing is key. Software in production is an interconnected system. It's complex, busy, and noisy, which is only exacerbated by today's approach. We believe in EVENT-DRIVEN data processing. By focusing on events, we can orientate the context around the event, leading to more efficient data processing and storage while retaining high-quality data resolution for troubleshooting. Event-driven helps teams focus only on what matters in stressful situations.
CODELESS > CONTINUOUS INSTRUMENTATION
We believe that Application Observability should be CODELESS. We are betting on machine-level magic. Resources at scale matter, but today's approach undervalues this, leading to unnecessary engineering and resource tax. Manual Instrumentation, SDKs, and Sidecars are prohibitive. We bet that ebpf and starting at the Kernel is a more efficient way to create a living fabric of your production system that drives better economies of scale and reduces overall toil work, enabling us to shift production intelligence left economically.
AI IS AN AMPLIFIER NOT A SOLUTION
Finally, we believe that AI can augment the entire development lifecycle and help us get further with less. We believe that the true power of AI is in how we use it to drive better predictability, reduce noise, and reduce cognitive overload for every developer. Harnessing AI's full potential requires embedding it within engineering, not a bolt-on exercise that results in diminishing returns over the medium to long term.
Executing these principles will unlock a new standard in developer experience for application observability, eliminating all the traditional technical, usability and financial constraints currently holding developers back. Kerno will introduce smarter, more efficient and lightweight approach that gets teams further with less and without the fear of long term financial jeopardy.
Over the coming decade, there is no doubt that, given the already rapid pace of AI innovation, the way we build and run applications will be remolded, bringing new sets of challenges and trade-offs. Reliability, however, must remain non-negotiable—it’s foundational. The success of system reliability will depend on how well we can equip those who are better placed to have the biggest impact. Bridging the knowledge gap—the true challenge of "You build it; You help us run it"- marks the start of the new frontier of application reliability – the developer frontier. We at Kerno, are dedicated to ensure that this happens.
