Service mesh is the next logical step to overcoming security and networking challenges obstructing Kubernetes deployment and container adoption. Check out the benefits of deploying a service mesh here.
With the increased adoption of Microservices, new complexities have emerged for enterprises due to a sheer rise in the number of services. Problems that had to be solved only once for a monolith, such as resiliency, security, compliance, load balancing, monitoring, and observability, now need to be handled for each service in a Microservices architecture.
For our latest StackPod episode, we invited Hyke’s DevOps team lead and AWS Cloud architect: Yousef Sedky. Axiom Telecom is one of the largest telephone retailers in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, and Hyke, its sister company, is a distribution platform for mobile products.
Yousef joined Hyke about 2.5 years ago. His first challenge was to build the architecture from scratch, which was a great experience for him. "All the logistics you don't know about when you're in a corporate company, you come to do it by yourself in a startup company," says Yousef. Yousef and his team learned a lot about DevOps principles and how to incorporate them into their practice, like CI/CD, infrastructure as code, production control, security, centralized logging and monitoring.
OpenTelemetry has been getting a lot of attention in the observability field. Moreover, in StackState’s latest release, we added support for OpenTelemetry traces. Melcom van Eeden, software developer at StackState, was one of our developer champions who made this possible. In addition to joining us on this episode of StackPod, he wrote a blog post on how to leverage OpenTelemetry with StackState and he recorded a tutorial video about the topic. Melcom is obviously very enthusiastic (and knowledgeable) about this technology. You can imagine we had to have Melcom on the StackPod to talk more about this “knight in shining armor,” as he calls it.
Melcom has been doing software engineering for a long time. He started in school, picking IT subjects and building what he likes to call “weird stuff.” After school, Melcom started working in IT and got introduced to different databases and programming languages. “I think that piqued my interest,” he says. “I wanted to learn more about different languages and technologies.”
Modern systems and applications span numerous architectures and technologies — they are also becoming increasingly more dynamic, distributed, and modular in nature. In order to support the availability and performance of their systems, IT operations and SRE teams need advanced monitoring capabilities. This Refcard reviews the four distinct levels of observability maturity, key functionality at each stage, and next steps organizations should take to enhance their monitoring practices.
Observability and telemetry work together to correlate the health of individual systems with the overall health of the business, highlighting what’s going on within the complex systems, processes, and microservices of an entire tech stack and/or application — purely from the existing data streams collected. In this Refcard, explore the fundamentals of full-stack observability and key components of the OpenTelemetry standard.
The following is a transcript of Episode 10 of the StackPod by StackState podcast.
We’re excited to share that we are celebrating our tenth podcast episode! For this episode, we invited Russell Foster. As a DevOps engineer at StackState, Russell is responsible for making sure our SaaS product runs smoothly on AWS.
Recently, I was asked to write an article on "How to Convince your Boss to Prioritize Observability." You can read it here). As I was pulling it together, one particular sentence sent me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole.
My original draft included a line that mentioned “winning the big _____ account.” My thought was to reference the famous account from the TV show Bewitched that Darren and his partner Larry were always trying to win.
With microservices architecture becoming the de facto standard for web applications now, effective debugging and anomaly detection calls for a system that is observable — which means, the internal state of an application can be inferred by observing and tracking the metrics, traces, and logs.
Observability is all about data exposure and easy access to information required to find issues when the communications fail, internal events do not occur as expected or events occur when they shouldn’t. Here, you’ll learn and know about different microservices monitoring tools and how to monitor microservices. Let’s take a look!
One of the things the other developer relations advocates here at New Relic and I often hear from customers is, "Even though I understand why observability is important, I'm having a dickens* of a time getting leadership to buy in (literally)."
Let me begin by pointing out how important it is for us — IT practitioners — to be willing and able to speak to management and leaders of the business about the work we do, and to do so in a way that is understandable and meaningful to the audience. I'm not implying you have to explain observability in a patronizing "explain it like they're five" kind of way. I mean you need to explain the WHY of observability in the context of what the audience feels is important.
The world has become more app-centric, increasing the demand for always-on, seamless, and secure digital experiences. As a result, organizations in all sectors ramped up their efforts to achieve full-stack observability to bring together disconnected tools and generate unified visibility across their IT environment.
A recent report from Cisco AppDynamics, "The Journey to Observability," reveals the transition to full-stack observability is now a priority for 90% of organizations around the world.
Chaos Mesh is an open-source cloud-native chaos engineering platform. You can use Chaos Mesh to conveniently inject failures and simulate abnormalities that might occur in reality, so you can identify potential problems in your system. Chaos Mesh also offers a Chaos Dashboard which allows you to monitor the status of a chaos experiment. However, this dashboard cannot let you observe how the failures in the experiment impact the service performance of applications. This hinders us from further testing our systems and finding potential problems.
Apache SkyWalking is an open-source application performance monitor (APM), specially designed to monitor, track, and diagnose cloud-native, container-based distributed systems. It collects events that occur and then displays them on its dashboard, allowing you to observe directly the type and number of events that have occurred in your system and how different events impact the service performance.
In preparation for the upcoming Developer Observability Masterclass we’re hosting at Lightrun with Thoughtworks, RedMonk, and JFrog, I sat down for a brief interview with Tom Granot – the Director of Developer Relations at Lightrun.
Tom will MC the event as he did for the Developer Productivity Masterclass we ran back in December.
With each day, enterprises increasingly rely on data to make decisions. This is true regardless of their industry: finance, media, retail, logistics, etc. Yet, the solutions that provide data to dashboards and ML models continue to grow in complexity. This is due to several reasons, including:
This need to run complex data pipelines with minimum rates of error in such modern environments has led to the rise of a new role: the Data Reliability Engineer. Data Reliability Engineering (DRE) addresses data quality and availability problems. Comprising practices from data engineering to system operations, DRE is emerging as its own field within the broader data domain.
Piece by piece, legacy monolith applications are being broken down and replaced by microservices. Organizations large and small are making the transition, but that doesn’t mean the transition is easy. Until recently, the challenge of transitioning well has held up many organizations, but there are some options to make this easier. In this post, we’ll look at some of the critical metrics to monitor when making the transition, along with helpful tools to get you from monolith to microservices.
The Why and the How
Organizations make the switch to microservices for several reasons. When an application is broken into small pieces, those pieces are easier to test and quicker to deploy. With this modularization also comes more clearly scoped responsibilities for developers and teams.
This is an article from DZone's 2021 Application Performance Management Trend Report.
For more:
Read the Report
Last summer, the OpenTelemetry project reached the incubation stage within the Cloud Native Computing Foundation. At the same time, OpenTelemetry passed another mile marker: over 1,000 contributing developers representing over 200 different organizations. This includes significant investments from three major cloud providers (Google, Microsoft, and AWS), numerous observability providers (Lightstep, Splunk, Honeycomb, Dynatrace, New Relic, Red Hat, Data Dog, etc.), and large end-user companies (Shopify, Postmates, Zillow, Uber, Mailchimp, etc.). It is the second-largest project within the CNCF, after Kubernetes.
This post recaps my talk with Chinmay Gaikwad, the tech evangelist at Epsagon, about distributed tracing and observability for microservices architectures. Check out the transcript and video from our conversation below!
Question: Can you talk a little bit about what you do, where you come from and what's Epsagon famous for?
If you’re an SRE, you’ve almost certainly heard all about Log4Shell, the Log4j vulnerability that some analysts are calling the worst software security flaw in decades. And you’ve also hopefully by now patched any systems you manage to fix the vulnerability (if you haven’t, go do that right away!).
Even after you’ve patched Log4Shell in your environments, though, you shouldn’t put the vulnerability in the back of your mind. For SREs, there are some important lessons to glean from this fiasco.
Our profession evolves every year, whether through the introduction of a new tool, a new cloud service, or a new working method. This constant evolution requires the establishment of a learning culture to continuously share experiences and ideas, thus encouraging everyone to gain new knowledge each year.
Obviously, this demands a portion of our working time and an online library of training resources maintained by entities with authority in the domain. These entities are responsible for updating the content to allow us to continuously improve our skills, sometimes to advance in our career in order to aim for an internal or external evolution. Therefore, relying on trusted education partners is important to ensure the highest-quality learning content.
