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Glasnostic Blog

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

Tobias Kunze, 
I’m excited to be delivering my presentation, “Controlled Chaos: Taming Organic, Federated Growth of Microservices” at QCon San Francisco 2019 on November 12.…

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

Today’s application architects have effectively abandoned monolithic designs in favor of cloud native microservices so they can respond more quickly to changing business needs, accelerate developer agility and, of course, take full advantage of the elasticity of the cloud...
Aerial photo of Rundāle Palace’s baroque garden and surrounding landscape

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

Welcome to part 2 of our blog series on the benefits and operational limitations of service meshes. In part 1, we saw how developers can benefit from a service mesh’s ability to provide added observability, traffic control and security capabilities to microservices architectures...
Photo of lichen on a twig

What is an Organic (Microservice) Architecture?

Because Glasnostic is an operations solution that lets enterprises run the vast and continually evolving service landscapes that their teams create, we are often asked about our learnings and how they might apply to them. Our learnings tend to revolve around two facts. First, that subjecting each new service to a central “command and control” architecture is one of the biggest impediments to innovation. The second is realizing that a service landscape is ideally operated as an organic architecture....

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Control your Services

The ease with which applications and services can be developed today is of great benefit to businesses. But the proliferation of applications, microservices and serverless functions creates a jungle of services that is impossible to control and results in considerable loss to the business if left unmanaged. Glasnostic is a realtime operations solution that lets digital enterprises control the complex emergent behaviors that their connected applications and services exhibit so they can innovate faster and with confidence.

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

I’m excited to be delivering my presentation, “Controlled Chaos: Taming Organic, Federated Growth of Microservices” at QCon San Francisco 2019 on November 12....
Photograph of Apollo 13 mission control celebration

To Boldly Go: Mission Control For Microservices

When I co-founded a PaaS company many years ago, we single-mindedly focused on how to optimally support the building of applications. When that company then became Red Hat OpenShift and subsequently gained in popularity, I learned three interesting things...
Photo of Apollo 13 flight controller Eugene Kranz

Chaos Engineering in Organic Microservice Architectures

The resilience of a distributed microservice application depends fundamentally on how gracefully it can adapt to those all-too-certain environmental degradations and service failures. It is therefore not only a good, but essential practice that such applications be tested for how they will behave under various failure scenarios...
Altdorfer: Battle of Issus (detail)

Complex Emergent Behaviors in Organic Microservice Architectures

Today’s dynamic languages and powerful frameworks have enabled developers to write powerful business logic faster than ever before. Which, when combined with a “microservices-first” strategy, means that code can find its way into production quickly....
Photo of Godzilla emerging from the sea

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

When it comes to operating a microservices deployment, there are two core considerations to ask ourselves. First, how will we manage the actual communication between the services? Second, how will we manage the configuration and policies of said communication?...
Photo of air traffic controllers at work

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

Welcome to part 2 of our blog series on the benefits and operational limitations of service meshes. In part 1, we saw how developers can benefit from a service mesh’s ability to provide added observability, traffic control and security capabilities to microservices architectures...
Aerial photo of Rundāle Palace’s baroque garden and surrounding landscape

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

Today’s application architects have effectively abandoned monolithic designs in favor of cloud native microservices so they can respond more quickly to changing business needs, accelerate developer agility and, of course, take full advantage of the elasticity of the cloud...
Aerial photo of the baroque garden of Rundāle Palace

Mitigating Deployment Risk in Microservice Architectures: The Quarantine Operational Pattern

Enterprises are increasingly organizing themselves around self-managing teams that develop in parallel and embrace rapid decision making and learning cycles. Of course, with parallel development come independent release cycles...
Photo of Apollo 11 crew in quarantine.

Glasnostic Wins 2019 Red Herring Top 100 North America Award

Last week, Red Herring brought together over 300 C-level technology entrepreneurs, corporate strategists, and venture financiers to The Top 100 North America forum in Los Angeles, celebrating the top private companies in the North America region....
Satellite image of developments in Dubai

Preventing Systemic Failure: Bulkheads in Microservice Architectures

More microservices and a proliferation of applications lead to more complex interactions between applications and ultimately to less control for operators. Such large-scale, dynamic service landscapes are great for business agility, but they exhibit emergent behaviors that are difficult to manage and secure....
Aerial view of the Oosterscheldekering storm surge barrier

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

This is the second of a two-part series on canary deployments. In part one, we covered the developer pattern and how it is supported in Kubernetes, Linkerd and Istio. In this post, we explore the operational pattern, how it is implemented in Glasnostic, a comparison of the various implementations and finally the pros and cons of canary deployments....
Photo of chimpanzee in life support capsule

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

This is the first of a two-part series on canary deployments. In this post, we cover the developer pattern and how it is supported in Kubernetes, Linkerd and Istio. In part two, we’ll explore the operational pattern, how it is supported in Glasnostic, a comparison of the various implementations and finally the pros and cons of canary deployments....
Photo of dog in spacesuit

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

This is the second of a two-part series on circuit breaking. In part one, we covered the pattern and how it is approached differently by developers and operators. In this post, we’ll explore its typical use cases and how it is implemented in modern service middleware....
Photo of parking garage sign

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

This is the first of a two-part series on circuit breaking. In this post, we cover the pattern and how it is approached differently by developers and operators. In part two, we’ll explore its typical use cases and how it is implemented in modern service middleware....
Photo of a control instrument at Oak Ridge National Laboratory

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

In this blog post, we’ll take a deep-dive into understanding backpressure as an operational pattern, and how it can be applied to a service landscape that is controlled by a cloud traffic controller like Glasnostic....
Cover image

Comparing Service Meshes: Linkerd vs. Istio

Organizations across all industry verticals are continuing to accelerate their adoption of microservices. This has led to a corresponding explosion in the use of containers and client/service communications. It has proven very challenging to manage these communications securely, at-scale and with observability....
Cover image

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

In this blog post, we’re explaining segmentation as an operational pattern and how it can be applied to a service landscape that is controlled by a cloud traffic controller like Glasnostic....
Crowd queuing

What is an Organic (Microservice) Architecture?

Because Glasnostic is an operations solution that lets enterprises run the vast and continually evolving service landscapes that their teams create, we are often asked about our learnings and how they might apply to them. Our learnings tend to revolve around two facts. First, that subjecting each new service to a central “command and control” architecture is one of the biggest impediments to innovation. The second is realizing that a service landscape is ideally operated as an organic architecture....
Photo of lichen on a twig

How Does Glasnostic Complement Istio?

When working with customers who have heard about service meshes, we often get questions about how we work with and complement Istio....
Air traffic control radar screen

The 2019 Microservices Ecosystem

Despite the hype, most companies are just getting started with their microservices and container adoption journeys. Throw in a little marketing hyperbole, some competitive FUD, and it’s no surprise to hear from both operations teams and executives a bit of confusion as to which projects, products or services are the most appropriate to evaluate, based on where they are in their microservices journey....
Microservices and container ecosystem forest

A Brief Introduction to Linkerd

Linkerd (rhymes with “chickadee”) is an open source service mesh designed to be deployed into a variety of container schedulers and frameworks such as Kubernetes. It became the original “service mesh” when its creator Buoyant first coined the term in 2016....
Rail tracks connecting train services

Microservices Glossary

In this post, we’ve gathered many of the common (and some not so common!) terms, patterns and products developers and operators reference when describing various aspects of a modern microservices architecture. In this post, we’ll look at architecture and components, operational patterns and techniques, and finally, products and projects....
Microservices

What is an API Gateway?

An API Gateway is a reverse proxy that exposes microservices as APIs. As the name implies, it acts as a “gatekeeper” between clients and microservices, dealing with what is often called “north-south” traffic. Typical features of an API Gateway include the ability to authenticate requests, enforce security policies, load balance between backend services and throttle them if necessary....
Denver International Airport south terminal expansion

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....
Istio rigging

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

2018 was an exciting year for both, open source developers and vendors in the microservices and API space. In this post, we’ll recap the major developments and product announcements, plus make a few predictions for 2019....
2018 in Review: The Biggest Developments around Microservices, API Gateways, Kubernetes and Service Mesh

Should I Use a Service Mesh?

This post is the second of a two-part series on the benefits of service meshes. In part one we covered what a service mesh is, how it works and the benefits it provides. In this post we’ll explore why, where and when to use one and what lies beyond....
Air traffic over Great Britain

What is a Service Mesh?

This post is the first of a two-part series on the benefits of service meshes. In this post, we cover what a service mesh is, how it works and the benefits it provides. In part two we’ll explore why, where and when to use one and what lies beyond....
Airport ground markings for reliable routing of planes

Dealing with the ‘Gotchas’ When Deploying Microservices

It can be said that microservices have created a great disturbance in the force when it comes to building apps and the monolithic 3-tier development architecture that we’ve known so well for many years....
visual of post Dealing with the ‘Gotchas’ When Deploying Microservices

Glasnostic, or How to Operate a Service Landscape

My how the world has changed. As a former “PaaS guy” — I was the technical founder of a company that became Red Hat OpenShift — I...
Antony Gormley: Firmament III (2009).