Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Microservices are a popular architectural style for building applications that are resilient, highly scalable, independently deployable, and able to evolve quickly. But a successful microservices architecture requires a different approach to designing and building applications. A microservices architecture consists of a collection of small, autonomous services. Each service is self-contained and should implement a single business capability within a bounded context.

Time and resource consumption have become the driving forces of developing modern applications. While building cloud-native applications, it’s important to ensure that you have the most optimized code in place, and oftentimes that means leveraging concurrency. While writing concurrent code may sound overwhelming at first, Golang makes it extremely easy to get a handle on.

The Twelve-Factor methodology is a set of best practices for developing microservices applications. These practices are segregated into twelve different areas of application development. Twelve-factor is the standard architectural pattern to develop SaaS-based modern and scalable cloud applications. It is highly recommended by AWS if you are building containerized microservices. In this article, we will guide you on how to develop applications that will use microservices deployed on containers in AWS.

Using containers for microservices has gained a lot of popularity in the last decade or so. Developing the application through microservices across multiple containers results in the best of both worlds. It provides resilience as well as agility through scaling and improvements. Before we dwell on how containers and microservices form an ideal combination, let’s start with a basic understanding of microservices and containers.

The management of modern software environments hinges on the three so-called “pillars of observability”: logs, metrics and traces. Each of these data sources provides crucial visibility into applications and the infrastructure hosting them. For many IT operations and site reliability engineering (SRE) teams, two of these pillars — logs and metrics — are familiar enough.

In the era of Microservices, Cloud Computing and Serverless architecture, it’s useful to understand Kubernetes and learn how to use it. However, the official Kubernetes documentation can be hard to decipher, especially for newcomers. In this blog series, I will present a simplified view of Kubernetes and give examples of how to use it for deploying microservices using different cloud providers, including Azure, Amazon, Google Cloud and even IBM.

Another conversation that was recently had during our weekly field enablement office hours here at Shipa was “what exactly is a microservice?”. Certainly, a term that has been used to describe a paradigm and architectural practice. One can argue that the breaking down or decomposing of applications has been going on for decades and is not a monumental shift in computing. There are several definitions of microservices from a purist definition to a definition resembling a movement.