Satellite image of a giant whirlpool cloud with violin scroll design
Interview

The Cloud Management Maestro

In this episode of Alexander Ferguson’s UpTech Report, we talk about my founding journey and topics such as funding and market timing.
Tobias Kunze
· 9 min read
READ

Featured Posts

Photograph of Bertaux orrery (by user Rama, licensed under CC3.0)
Opinion

Cloud-Native Environments: Predictions for 2021

Five predictions of how cloud-native environments will fundamentally change in 2021. Here’s to an exciting and promising year!
Tobias Kunze
· 6 min read
Still of F1 Tuscan Grand Prix crash 2020
Operations

2020 Ops Incidents: The Year in Review

We review some of the more notable outage post-mortems of the year and look at what we can learn from them for 2021.
Tobias Kunze
· 12 min read
Animation frame of daycare center with kids playing peacefully
Opinion

Kindergarten Ops: How to Control Application Behaviors

The unpredictability of today’s complex service landscapes requires operators to control how applications interact, in real-time.
Tobias Kunze
· 6 min read
Manage the complex behaviors of modern microservice architectures

Recent Posts

Photograph of a plane flying into clouds
Interview

Getting Your Head in the Cloud

In this episode of Alexander Ferguson’s UpTech Report, we talk about how cloud complexity affects application reliability and operations.
Tobias Kunze
· 11 min read
Satellite photo of ocean currents surrounding Gotland
Interview

Reducing Operational Complexity

In this "Future of Biztech" episode, J.C. and Tobias talk about the motivation behind Glasnostic, today’s market and plans for the future.
Tobias Kunze
· 11 min read
Illustration of connected applications on Kubernetes
News

Bringing Glasnostic’s Observability and Control to Modern Kubernetes Operations

Glasnostic for Kubernetes lets operators observe and control how applications interact. As a result, they can create resilience and assure the customer experience.
Danial Faizullabhoy
· 1 min read
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Interview

Resilient Applications: Why They’re Critical

Transcript of Matt Wolach’s "Saas-Stories in the Making" podcast, where we talk about resilience in large-scale cloud operations.
Tobias Kunze
· 16 min read
Toshiro Mifune and Machiko Kyō in ‘Rashomon’ (1950)
Operations

Rabbit Hole or Control? A Tale of Two Timelines

When disaster strikes, we often hunt for a 'root cause.' What if we could remediate—detect and respond in real-time—instead?
Tobias Kunze
· 5 min read
Illustration of air traffic
Operations

Simplifying the “Ops Equation”

Cloud-native architectures are prone to application behaviors that can’t be addressed with more capacity. They require real-time control.
Tobias Kunze
· 8 min read
Photograph of Bertaux orrery (by user Rama, licensed under CC3.0)
Opinion

Cloud-Native Environments: Predictions for 2021

Five predictions of how cloud-native environments will fundamentally change in 2021. Here’s to an exciting and promising year!
Tobias Kunze
· 6 min read
Still of F1 Tuscan Grand Prix crash 2020
Operations

2020 Ops Incidents: The Year in Review

We review some of the more notable outage post-mortems of the year and look at what we can learn from them for 2021.
Tobias Kunze
· 12 min read
Animation frame of daycare center with kids playing peacefully
Opinion

Kindergarten Ops: How to Control Application Behaviors

The unpredictability of today’s complex service landscapes requires operators to control how applications interact, in real-time.
Tobias Kunze
· 6 min read
Close-up photo of an orchestral score
Technology

The Two Axes of Observability

Because complex and dynamic environments fail due to unpredictable service interactions, traditional observability is no longer enough.
Tobias Kunze
· 7 min read
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Interview

Microservice Routing

Transcript of my episode on Jeff Meyerson’s Software Engineering Daily podcast about microservices, traffic control, observability and more.
Tobias Kunze
· 32 min read
Illustration of an AWS GWLB setup with Glasnostic
News

Bringing Glasnostic’s Traffic Control to AWS Gateway Load Balancer

Glasnostic for AWS’s Gateway Load Balancer lets customers with complex and dynamic VPCs provision traffic control with a single click.
Tobias Kunze
· 5 min read
Apollo lunar landing module blueprint and in-flight photo
Interview

From Development to Mission Control

Transcript of a "Digital Anarchist" episode about why architecture is obsolete and why Mission Control is the future of DevOps.
Tobias Kunze
· 12 min read
’Adventures in DevOps’ logo with sound wave on an aerial photo of a forest by https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Winding_Road_(Unsplash).jpg
Interview

Controlling the Digital Landscape

Transcript of my episode on the “Adventures in DevOps” podcast about how we can control today’s rapidly evolving digital landscapes.
Tobias Kunze
· 36 min read
Episode Cover
Interview

Nurture over Nature in Software

I had the pleasure of being the inaugural guest on Ant Weiss’ new “DevOps Shorts” podcast. Here is the transcript, edited for clarity.
Tobias Kunze
· 10 min read
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Opinion

From Peak to Peak: A Tale from the Trenches

Joep recounts the incidents he faced while leading cloud transformation at a Dutch retailer and argues for mission control in operations.
Joep Piscaer
· 5 min read
Stampede in the Serengeti
News

“Thundering Herd” or Sound of Customers?

It was not a “thundering herd” that brought down Robinhood. It was the inability to read golden signals and apply operational patterns.
Tobias Kunze
· 3 min read
Photograph of Apollo 13 mission control celebration
News

Presenting Controlled Chaos: Taming Organic, Federated Growth of Microservices at QCon SF 2019

Preview of my QCon SF presentation on controlling the chaotic environmental factors that afflict today’s advanced microservice landscapes.
Tobias Kunze
· 1 min read
Photo of Apollo 13 flight controller Eugene Kranz
Opinion

To Boldly Go: Mission Control For Microservices

When enterprises move to microservices, teams are left with a landscape of services that needs to be run with a mission-control mindset.
Tobias Kunze
· 5 min read
Altdorfer: Battle of Issus (detail)
Architecture

Chaos Engineering in Organic Microservice Architectures

Chaos engineering is essential for resilient distributed applications, but organic architecture needs real-time cloud traffic control.
Tobias Kunze
· 10 min read
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Architecture

Complex Emergent Behaviors in Organic Microservice Architectures

Emergent behaviors are complex interaction patterns that can cause significant harm to organic architectures and thus need to be controlled.
Tobias Kunze
· 11 min read
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Technology

Managing Microservices with a Service Mesh: Data vs. Control Plane

In this post, we explore the differences between microservices data and control planes in popular service meshes like Istio and Linkerd.
Marcus Schiesser
· 10 min read
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Architecture

Three Technical Benefits of Service Meshes and their Operational Limitations, Part 2

Service meshes bring valuable observability, traffic control and security benefits. In this post, we explore their operational limitations.
Tobias Kunze
· 12 min read
Aerial photo of the baroque garden of Rundāle Palace
Architecture

Three Technical Benefits of Service Meshes and their Operational Limitations, Part 1

Besides routing service calls, service meshes can provide developers with valuable observability, traffic control and security benefits.
Tobias Kunze
· 11 min read
Photo of Apollo 11 crew in quarantine.
Operational Patterns

Mitigating Deployment Risk in Microservice Architectures: The Quarantine Operational Pattern

Quarantining is essential in reducing deployment risk. This post explores the pattern and its support in Kubernetes, Istio and Glasnostic.
Pei-Ming Wu
· 12 min read
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News

Glasnostic Wins 2019 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award

Red Herring recognizes Glasnostic for its innovation in managing the increasingly federated, organic service growth in the enterprise.
Tobias Kunze
· 2 min read
Aerial view of the Oosterscheldekering storm surge barrier
Operational Patterns

Preventing Systemic Failure: Bulkheads in Microservice Architectures

Microservices architectures lead to emergent behaviors that must be managed. The bulkhead operational pattern helps contain such failures.
Yu-Han Lin
· 12 min read
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Operational Patterns

How Canary Deployments Work, Part 2: Developer vs. Operator Concerns

Developers and operators have differing views of canary deployments. This post lays out why canaries are best run by operations teams.
Pei-Ming Wu
· 10 min read
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Operational Patterns

How Canary Deployments Work, Part 1: Kubernetes, Istio and Linkerd

Canaries are a great step towards deploying to production. In this post, we compare how popular projects support their implementation.
Pei-Ming Wu
· 6 min read
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Operational Patterns

Preventing Systemic Failure: Circuit Breaking—What it is and How it Works, Part 2

Circuit breaking can minimize the impact of failures, prevent them from cascading and assure performance. This post explores its use over time.
Yu-Han Lin
· 11 min read
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Operational Patterns

Preventing Systemic Failure: Circuit Breaking—What it is and How it Works, Part 1

Circuit breaking can minimize the impact of failures, prevent them from cascading and assure performance. This post looks at the pattern.
Yu-han Lin
· 7 min read
Cover image
Operational Patterns

Preventing Systemic Failure: Backpressure—What It Is and How It Works

Backpressure is a fundamental technique to prevent systems from potential collapse. This post discusses the operational pattern and how to apply it.
Pei-Ming Wu
· 7 min read
Cover image
Technology

Comparing Service Meshes: Linkerd vs. Istio

In this post, we compare and contrast the core features of two popular service meshes, Linkerd and Istio.
Marcus Schiesser
· 9 min read
Crowd queuing
Operational Patterns

Security: Segmentation—What Is It and How Does It Work?

Segmentation is a fundamental to securing and insulating workloads. This post explains how to apply the pattern to endpoints in a microservices environment.
Yu-Han Lin
· 6 min read
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Architecture

What is an Organic (Microservice) Architecture?

Organic architecture is of great benefit to the agile enterprise, but exhibits complex emergent behaviors that must be controlled for it to become successful.
Tobias Kunze
· 11 min read
Air traffic control radar screen
Technology

How Does Glasnostic Complement Istio?

In this blog post we analyze how Glasnostic and Istio complement each other.
Marcus Schiesser
· 7 min read
Microservices and container ecosystem forest
Technology

The 2019 Microservices Ecosystem

Confused about microservices and containers? We survey the projects and products that make up the current ecosystem.
Tobias Kunze
· 13 min read
Rail tracks connecting train services
Technology

A Brief Introduction to Linkerd

Despite the recent rise of Istio, the original service mesh still has a lot going for it, in particular in its new second-generation version.
Tobias Kunze
· 6 min read
Microservices
Technology

Microservices Glossary

In this post, we explain the most important terms related to microservices and organic architecture as they apply to the development and operations worlds.
Marcus Schiesser
· 14 min read
Denver International Airport south terminal expansion
Technology

What is an API Gateway?

In this post, we explore what an API Gateway is, review its basic functionality and compare and contrast a few popular API Gateways.
Marcus Schiesser
· 7 min read
Istio rigging
Technology

The Kubernetes Service Mesh: A Brief Introduction to Istio

In this blog we explore what the Istio service mesh is, its architecture, when and where to use it, plus some criticisms of the platform.
Tobias Kunze
· 6 min read
2018 in Review: The Biggest Developments around Microservices, API Gateways, Kubernetes and Service Mesh
Technology

2018 in Review: The Biggest Developments around Microservices, API Gateways, Kubernetes and Service Mesh

Our review of 2018 in microservices, kubernetes, service mesh, api gateways and our view of what lies ahead in 2019…
Marcus Schiesser
· 8 min read
Air traffic over Great Britain
Architecture

Should I Use a Service Mesh?

In this second installment of a two part series on the benefits of service meshes we explore why, where and when to use a service mesh and what lies beyond.
Tobias Kunze
· 16 min read
Airport ground markings for reliable routing of planes
Technology

What is a Service Mesh?

In this post, we cover what a service mesh is, how it works and the benefits it provides. In part two we explore why, where and when to use one and beyond.
Tobias Kunze
· 7 min read
visual of post Dealing with the ‘Gotchas’ When Deploying Microservices
Opinion

Dealing with the ‘Gotchas’ When Deploying Microservices

Deep dive into the various development and operational issues arising from microservice architectures and how to overcome them.
Arsalan Farooq
· 9 min read
Antony Gormley: Firmament III (2009).
News

Glasnostic, or How to Operate a Service Landscape

An explanation of what service landscapes are, how they differ from traditional applications and how to operate them.
Tobias Kunze
· 3 min read