Why Boring Tech is Best to Avoid a Microservices Mess
Microservices are all the rage. A Forrester study found that 76% of enterprises were rearchitecting applications for microservices. At the same time, microservices are definitely not a silver bullet. Among those already using microservices in production, one study found that 59% said each microservice added increased operational challenges such as data management. Even more concerning, […]
NGINX Unveils Hybrid Application Delivery Controller Platform
NGINX this week announced it has developed a common framework for managing application delivery that can be applied across both monolithic and microservices-based applications. Announced at the NGINX Conf 2018 conference, the NGINX Application Platform has been rearchitected to provide traditional load balancing capabilities and a web application firewall (WAF), as well as a built-in […]
Enabling the Financial Services Shift to Microservices
The financial services industry historically has been riddled with barriers to entry. Challengers found it difficult to break through low margins and tightening regulations. However, large enterprises that once dominated the market are now facing disruption from smaller, leaner fintech companies that are eating away at the value chain. These disruptors are marked by technological […]
How Service Mesh Addresses 3 Key Microservices Challenges
I was recently reading the “Global Microservices Trends” report by Dimensional Research and found myself thinking, “A service mesh could help with that.” Let’s look at three key challenges listed in the report. A couple key points in the report make it clear microservices are seeing widespread adoption. It’s also clear that along with the […]
Containers, Service Mesh and API Gateways: It Starts at the Edge
Anyone embracing container technology such as Docker or Kubernetes has no doubt heard about the associated next big thing: service mesh, which promises to homogenize internal network communication between microservices and provide cross-cutting nonfunctional concerns such as observability and fault-tolerance. However, the underlying proxy technology that powers a service mesh also can provide a lot […]
The Road Ahead for Service Mesh
If you’re struggling to manage microservices as architectures continue to scale, there’s a good chance you’ve at least heard of service mesh. For the purposes of this blog, I’ll assume you’re familiar with the basic tenets of a service mesh. I believe that service mesh is advancing microservice communication to a new level that is […]
Service Mesh: The Best Way to Scale Enterprise Apps
Microservices are great for DevOps, but the service-to-service communication these architectures depend on are complex to run and manage at production scale. Enter service mesh: the best way for enterprises to scale, secure and monitor apps. A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer enabling service-to-service communication to be quick, secure and reliable. If you’re building […]
7 Principles for Using Microservices to Build an API That Lasts
SparkPost launched the first beta version of our cloud-based email delivery service three years ago. At its introduction, a handful of customers sent a few million emails a month. Now, our API is used by tens of thousands of customers—including Pinterest, Zillow, and Intercom—to send more than 15 billion emails a month. That dramatic […]
Low-Risk Monolith-to-Microservice Evolution, Part 1
In designing and organizing a two-day workshop on microservices, I’ve been thinking a lot about how to explain monolith application decomposition and what a transition to microservices might look like. This is a small subset of that material, but I wanted to share it to get feedback (in the workshop we go into more detail […]
SOA vs Microservices
Some say microservices architecture is proof that SOA is still alive. I contend that microservices architecture replaces SOA due to deficiencies in how SOA has been implemented as well as the original intent. In the mid-1990s there was a surge of investment for implementing enterprise applications to replace the aging homegrown legacy applications. These new […]
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 […]
Sharding for Scale: Architecture Matters
In the days of monolithic applications, scale was simple. As every instance of the app was the same, it really didn’t matter which one processed a request, as long as it was processed. On the back end, a single, ginormous data store held everything. This model ran into serious issues as apps migrated to the […]
4 big challenges of microservices
The rise of microservices as a means of developing and delivering software value faster is clearly on the rise. Containers have skyrocketed from a fringe technology to a mainstream imperative and organizations are scrambling to jump on the microservices bandwagon. Before you rush out to embrace microservices, though, there are a few things you should […]
3 golden rules of microservices deployments
As a developer, you value the principles of SOA. You aspire to build applications as a set of consumable services via endpoints. Remember how Amazon used SOA to build the AWS platform and how Google is emulating AWS? However, not all is hunky-dory in the SOA world. Developing is one thing but running, managing, and […]