Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

Although the fundamental concepts of site reliability engineering are the same in any environment, SREs must adapt practices to different technologies, like microservices.

I recently had the opportunity to read the book “No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention” by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer of Netflix, and it dawned on me that while this book wasn’t at all focused on Netflix’s technology, the global company-wide culture had a significant impact on its technology choices. The book focuses on the many times Netflix had to reinvent itself and transform its business in order to revolutionize the entertainment industry.

It’s a common story: the product team gets early success and grows into a large monolithic code base. While everything is in a single code base, features can be added quickly. This is partly due to the ability to leverage shared code across each feature in the codebase. When your team is adding a new feature, a developer can leverage the existing codebase for needs such as logging or special error handling.

When building a microservices system, configuring events to trigger additional logic using an event stream is highly valuable. One common use case is receiving notifications when errors are seen in one of your APIs. Ideally, when errors occur at a specific rate or frequency, you want your system to detect that and send your DevOps team a notification. Since AWS APIs often use stateless functions like Lambdas, you need to include a tracking mechanism to send these notifications manually.

Microservices are the future of software development. This approach serves as a server-side solution to development where services remain connected but work independently from each other. More developers are using microservices to improve performance, precision, and productivity, and analytical tools provide them with valuable insights about performance and service levels.

In this article, we are going to look at Microservice architectures, their benefits, what makes them different from traditional monolithic architectures, and how to go about setting up monitoring and alerting for them. MetricFire is a Hosted Graphite, Grafana, and Prometheus service, where we help you set up and manage these open-source tools. If you would like to follow the steps in this blog, make sure to sign up for MetricFire's free trial and even book a demo session.