As organizations recognize that a digital-first, contactless customer experience model is the future, they are making a considerable push towards modernizing their applications and reducing their technical debt. There are several proven techniques they can apply in order to transform their processes, technologies, and businesses.
For all the talk of digital transformation, there’s one workflow that tends to hinder release velocity: changes to API routing rules. But while—much to the consternation of enterprise developers everywhere—this process has historically remained stubbornly ticket-based, Spring Cloud Gateway removes this bottleneck. The open source project provides a developer-friendly way to route, secure, and monitor API requests.
VMware recently announced that Apdex is now available in Tanzu Observability by Wavefront. Users can access it by selecting Apdex when viewing the application status page. Apdex is a “numerical measure of user satisfaction with the performance of enterprise applications," according to the Apdex Alliance website. Similar to how request, error, and duration (RED) metrics measure the health of a service, we can use Apdex to score response time based upon a self-defined target.
Chaos engineering has definitely become more popular in the decade or so since Netflix introduced it to the world via its Chaos Monkey service, but it’s far from ubiquitous. However, that will almost certainly change over time as more organizations become familiar with its core concepts, adopt application patterns and infrastructure that can tolerate failure, and understand that an investment in reliability today could save millions of dollars tomorrow.
Building containers securely, reliably, and consistently at scale is a daunting task. Yet, it’s an imperative for organizations embracing the rapid delivery of high-quality software. This is the scenario addressed by VMware Tanzu Build Service, which can help any enterprise IT group build and update containers automatically. And it’s flexible enough to slot right into any incumbent CI/CD toolchain.
You may have noticed the VMware Tanzu team talking and writing a lot about container security lately, which is no accident. As DevOps and Kubernetes adoption continue their exponential growth in the enterprise, securing container workloads consistently is among the most difficult challenges associated with that transformation. There is a term we have been seeing—and using—a lot lately that encompasses a new way of looking at container security for Kubernetes: DevSecOps.
Migrating to the cloud is a significant, complicated endeavor, one that requires a realistic migration plan for any application portfolios that will be mapped out first. To get started, a detailed technical analysis of each application's cloud readiness helps determine the best cloud migration approach and strategy to take. If this sounds like a daunting process, that’s because it often is! Let's understand why.
The hard part about application modernization isn’t determining whether or not it’s a good idea. It almost certainly is. Rather, the hard part is figuring out how to get started: Which applications you should focus on first, and what’s the best approach to modernizing them. Fully refactoring 1,000 applications from monolith into microservices, for example, might seem like the right goal, but it might also take the rest of this century.
Peter Grant, Kalai Wei, Gustavo Franco, Corey Innis, and Alexandra McCoy contributed to this post. The VMware Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team is proud to announce an open source Reliability Scanner for Kubernetes! It includes an extensible set of reliability assessments, or checks, performed against various components of a cluster, such as Pods, Namespaces, Services, etc. Operators can then configure appropriate constraints for the checks on their clusters.
VMware Tanzu eases the adoption of Kubernetes and supports modern applications with an automated application platform for container-based workloads. Since the application delivery components are among the most critical pieces of infrastructure needed to deliver enterprise-grade Kubernetes clusters, an ingress controller and services such as load balancing are typically deployed to enable external users to access the application.
