Microservice is now the architecture of choice for many developers when crafting cloud-native applications. A microservices application is a collection of loosely coupled services that communicate with each other, enhancing collaboration, maintainability, scalability, and deployment. There are several options for enabling this communication between microservices. REST is the most popular among developers, sometimes used synonymously with APIs. However, gRPC can be a better alternative to REST.

In this article, we will explore the main metrics of a GitHub repository and why it is important to monitor them. We will learn how to get GitHub data in a convenient format, process, then visualize it for further analysis. Finally, we will analyze the main advantages of using data monitoring tools such as Hosted Graphite and Grafana by MetricFire.

Welcome to the 7th edition of Open Source Matters: our regular publication about the latest happenings in open source! Let’s dive into the news.

One of the most well-known and commonly used open-source operating systems is Linux. It's a clone of UNIX, however unlike UNIX, it's free to download and use. Despite being an open-source operating system, it has a safe and resilient architecture, and many individuals and companies rely on it. You can, interestingly, make your own Linux version. You can accomplish so by simply downloading Linux and making the necessary adjustments. In essence, we can distinguish them as different Linux versions.

We discuss what an incident response team does, how it is structured, and how to form the best one for your organization.

When you think of who uses feature flags, your mind most likely goes to developers. In general, feature flags are closely associated with software engineering. But Site Reliability Engineers, too, can benefit from feature flags. SREs may not be the ones to create feature flags, but they should work closely with developers to ensure that the applications their teams support include feature flags.

Runbooks have been a game changer for many incident response teams, and we just made it easier for you to get up and running with them. Runbooks reduce toil for responders and ensure consistency in your incident management processes.In the thick of trying to resolve an issue, remembering things like emailing customers is likely the last thing on responders minds but yet forgetting to do so can be detrimental.

OpenStack storage is probably one of the most complex topics in OpenStack architecture right after networking. There are many different storage options, at least a few storage services, and tons of supported storage backends. It is very easy to get lost. But do not worry, there is hope. Since OpenStack was initially created as an open-source implementation of the Amazon Web Service Elastic Compute Cloud (AWS EC2), its storage architecture is quite similar to leading public clouds.

After becoming increasingly popular in the mid-2000s, cloud computing has revolutionized the data center industry. Aside from providing cost-savings, security, mobility, and scalability benefits, cloud computing was also expected to be more environmentally friendly than other data storing and processing methods. By being highly efficient, cloud operators can reduce the use of electricity and other materials that typically increase a data center’s carbon footprint.

In a world where organizations are often defined by the digital services they can deliver, it’s crucial for underlying IT infrastructure to move as quickly as the business demands. To support our customers with getting the most out of a Kubernetes powered environment, we continue to make enhancements to VMware Tanzu Kubernetes Grid. In this post we’ll discuss some of the new capabilities our customers will benefit from using in Tanzu Kubernetes Grid 1.5.