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Platform Engineering Trends in Cloud-Native: Q&A With Tom Wilke

The rise of Kubernetes, cloud-native, and microservices spawned major changes in architectures and abstractions that developers use to create modern applications. In this multi-part series, I talk with some of the leading experts across various layers of the stack — from networking infrastructure to application infrastructure and middleware to telemetry data and modern observability concerns — to understand emergent platform engineering patterns that are affecting developer workflow around cloud-native. The next participant in our series is Tom Wilkie, CTO at Grafana Labs, where he leads engineering for Grafana Cloud.

Q: We are nearly a decade into containers and Kubernetes (Kubernetes was first released in Sept 2014). How would you characterize how Kubernetes has influenced modern thinking around distributed systems?

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Grafana Cloud Dropwizard Metrics Reporter

Time series metrics reporting and alerting is an essential tool when it comes to monitoring production services. Graphs help you monitor trends over time, identify spikes in load/latency, identify bottlenecks with constrained resources, etc. Dropwizard Metrics is a great library for collecting metrics and has a lot of features out of the box including various JVM metrics. There are also many third-party library hooks for collections metrics on HikariCP connections pools, Redis client connections, HTTP client connections, and many more.

Once metrics are being collected we need a time series data store as well as a graphing and alerting system to get the most out of our metrics. This example will be utilizing Grafana Cloud which offers cloud-hosted Grafana, a graphing and alerting application that hooks into many data sources, as well as two options for time series data sources Graphite and Prometheus. StubbornJava has public facing Grafana dashboards that will continue to add new metrics as new content is added. Take a look at the StubbornJava Overview dashboard to start with.