Microservices Sprawl: How Not to be Overrun

February 20 2017
 

Read more about what you can do to maintain microservices framework so it can reach its highest capability in our latest guide on the microservices sprawl.


The rise of containers and microservices has skyrocketed the rate at which new applications are moved into production environments today. While developers have been deploying containers to speed up the development processes for some time, there still remain challenges with running microservices efficiently. Most existing IT monitoring tools don’t actually maintain visibility into the containers that make up microservices. As those container applications move into production, some IT operations teams are suddenly finding themselves flying blind. Unless IT operations upgrade to new approaches to managing DevOps by using more modern monitoring solutions, containers and microservices will wind up doing more to troubleshoot issues than actually speeding up development processes.

So what steps should you take to ensure that your containers and microservices framework are performing up to speed?

Microservices enabled by containers are popular with developers because they enable easily isolated functions. That makes it simpler to either build a new application or update an older one. So when product teams are under more pressure to build more dynamic, faster, and more agile applications, microservices and containers can provide those new capabilities.

However, this only marks one part of IT complexity. Every tool and channel that plays a role in the development to deployment process requires monitoring and optimization. Some teams might elect to implement a different monitoring system for every function, but having to connect several tools into one cohesive process can become taxing. Using a single IT monitoring platform that provides all the context an IT organization needs to respond to problems is now rapidly changing IT conditions. It’s necessary to be able to share metrics pertaining to both a specific container as well as the rest of the IT infrastructure environment. After all, while performance attributes of a specific container might be interesting, that information only becomes truly useful when it can be compared against everything else that is happening across the IT environment.

Without that capability, an IT team will waste endless hours in war rooms trying to prove their innocence whenever a problem arises. Given the thousands of containers that might be operating at any given time, IT teams could easily wind up chasing their tails trying to replicate a problem that might only exist for a few intermittent minutes.

Some organizations are also adopting a DevOps mindset by allowing developers to own an entire lifecycle management of containerized applications built by microservices. Rather than handing off the task, developers can manage and own the maintenance for the code they have created. Tasks like these are a sign that microservices and DevOps are working together to fundamentally change the way we optimize an application’s performance.

Learn more

Read more about how you can do more to maintain the microservices framework so it can reach its highest capability in our latest guide on the microservices sprawl. Download the eBook today.

Saba Anees
Saba is the Content Marketing Specialist at AppDynamics. She grew up in the SF Bay Area, graduated from UC Berkeley, and joined AppDynamics' Marketing team in 2015. You can follow her on Twitter at @sabaanees.

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