Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Developers need all the information they can get on APIs to get them to work in alignment with their vision. There is no dearth of knowledge in the software development industry today, but only when that knowledge is documented well is it of use to others. In the context of APIs, developer portals offer an effective way to document and communicate relevant information. In this article, we answer the following questions about developer API portals.

Microservices are being used every where and for good reasons. They do provide you with many benefits especially improved focus and cutting the time to market. Microservices do bring complexities too. Monitoring microservices is complex because of simply the number of them. Monitoring a user transaction requires monitoring many microservices. Correlating the data from them to identify the root cause manually is a nightmare especially in a complex environment with 100s or 1000s of microservices.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 kicks off next week (October 24-28 in Detroit), so we’ve been thinking a lot about how service catalogs can help you get the most out of your Kubernetes clusters!

A microservices catalog is only useful if you are confident that anything stored in it is fully accurate and that the information will not become outdated. How can you be certain that your catalog stays up-to-date in the future? Should you look for an asset in the catalog and, despite finding it there, also double-check GitHub? The service catalog is supposed to be your single source of truth. The purpose is defeated if you have to look for what you need in multiple different places.

To improve reliability, we need to measure it, and to measure it we use SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Or at least, that’s what Google SRE has popularized. In practice, it can be difficult and time-consuming to identify the right things to measure, to get to the right data, and to surface the results in a way that engages the stakeholders and teams involved. And all this is especially hard as we scale our teams and applications across multiple technology stacks.

Observability is a very important aspect of software that’s often taken for granted. You need to have visibility into what your application is doing at different levels to better understand an issue when it occurs. There are multiple open-source tools and initiatives to help you achieve improved visibility. When we talk about observability, there are three parts to consider: logs, traces and metrics.

Cortex’s Resource Catalog allows engineers to track all of their infrastructure components — from databases to Kafta topics — in a single place. The Resource Catalog demystifies infrastructure, giving developers clear insights into exactly how their service architecture works. Using the Resource Catalog, it’s easy to find information about which infrastructure assets are running and how all the distinct components connect.

Microservice architecture is an application system design pattern in which an entire business application is composed of individual functional scoped services, which can scale on demand. Each team focuses on an individual service and builds it according to their skillset or language of choice. In addition to flexibility, this pattern provides: These features have made microservices architecture a popular choice for enterprises.

Mickael Alliel 5 Min read September 20th, 2022 DevOps Kubernetes

Microservice architectures have become extremely popular in recent years, and for good reason. When managed properly, they improve scalability, encourage faster development and deployment, and reduce data and domain coupling. Companies of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises, have migrated their monolithic applications over to microservice and service-oriented architectures. Making the move from monolith to microservices is a big shift, though.