We live in an increasingly “as-a-service” world. From software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) to functions as a service (FaaS) and SaaS-delivered applications, service delivery has become paramount to business goals and practices. In today’s DevOps landscape, microservices—the cloud-native approach to designing scalable, independently delivered services—allow teams to prioritize each […]
Knowing What Your Microservices Are Doing
Microservicin’ ain’t easy, but it’s necessary. Breaking your monolith down into microservices is a must in a cloud-native world, but it doesn’t automatically make everything easier. Some things actually become more difficult. An obvious area where it adds complexity is communications between services; visibility into service to service communications can be hard to achieve, but […]
Time to Rethink Infrastructure Operations in Enterprises
“Business is technology and technology is business” seems to be the new mantra as the rules of corporate strategy are being rewritten across industries. According to IDC’s survey in 2017, “Two-thirds of global CEOs will have digital transformation as part of their corporate strategy.” That’s CEOs—not CIOs—who will have digital transformation as part of their corporate […]
The Executive’s Guide to Microservices Chapter 3: Choosing A Starting Point
In the previous chapter, Steve had been asked to provide a comparison of costs and resources needed to migrate to a commercial system versus modernize the current system. He works with Stacey, head of development, who comes up with a modernization plan that includes certain changes that the team will implement to limit downtime. Steve […]
The Executive’s Guide to Microservices Chapter 2: The Business Challenge
Steve and team have been working diligently to analyze the intricate web of code that has been organically developed over the past 12 years to design a program to modernize the application. Application is actually a poor name for all that Steve and his team manages. Steve’s team manages a complex custom supply-chain system that […]
Microservice Usage at Honeycomb
I recently joined Honeycomb, an observability startup where we are working to help generalist software engineers solve problems with their apps in an increasingly distributed world. The architecture we use to deliver our product can be described as using microservices, but interestingly, to use microservices specifically was not a deliberate design choice. It was instead […]
Continuous Deployment and Monitoring of Microservices
Continuous deployment and continuous monitoring have grown up in DevOps, and microservices have grown up as a delivery platform. While all are relatively stable concepts at this point, there are still a fair number of practitioners that are struggling with the merging of these concepts to create a holistic environment that allows for deep understanding […]
DevOps and the Challenge with Services
At RackN, we’ve been working for years to make DevOps portable across platforms. For us, that means the ability to move between clouds and from cloud to metal. Of the several challenges to portability—composability, API heterogeneity, sequence, cross-system dependencies—making configuration management tools work with services has been particularly important, as significant parts of building systems […]
DevOps Leadership Series: Monitoring Containers and Microservices
Trevor Parsons (@trevparsons) is a Co-Founder and Chief Scientist at Logentries, a leading SaaS-delivered log management and analytics service. I caught up with Trevor at the Velocity Conference in Santa Clara and asked him what themes were resonating with attendees this year. For this episode of the DevOps Leadership Series, Trevor briefly illustrates some current problems with […]









