Major DevOps Practices To Consider While Implementing Microservices

Consider these DevOps practices for rapid application delivery, seamless management of Microservices, and hassle-free product release.

Enterprises both big and small, are focusing on modernizing applications and implementing Microservices & DevOps architecture to boost their businesses’ agility and productivity. Enterprises are competing against tighter time-to-market windows than ever before. Seeing how mercurial many markets have become now, there’s no time to waste when you have to create customer-facing applications that serve prospects and customers better than your competitors.

Today, migrating to the cloud, especially through cloud-native architectures such as Microservices, is a multidimensional problem. So, without a well-planned, sorted strategy and a well-devised DevOps roadmap in hand, migration could become a futile endeavour. You need to consider reliable strategies for adopting Cloud & DevOps architecture that can help deliver competitive strength to your organization and improve customer experiences through an agile & nimble tech platform.

Here, in this blog, I’ve discussed some important practices of adopting DevOps architecture to enable rapid application delivery, seamless management of Microservices, and hassle-free product release thus allowing your business to scale and exceed customer expectations!

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Basic DevOps Practices- Core Principles!

Before we dive into specific DevOps techniques and approaches to help your business succeed with Microservices, let’s look at some of the core ideas behind these types of architectures:

  • Microservices should be deployed at a faster pace.
  • Security should be a major focus area.
  • Comprehensive Monitoring and logging

Moreover, applying these approaches can help your IT teams in designing the right DevOps roadmap best-suited to meet the requirements of Microservices implementation in your organization.

But, executing each of these approaches and ideas poses its unique challenges. Let’s read further to know why embracing these DevOps practices is important if you’re thinking about Microservices.

Microservices should be deployed at a Faster Pace!

In a monolithic approach, fewer deployments are happening as compared to Microservices. What earlier was a single monolith application, now becomes a large collection of 50–200 services. Therefore, with Microservices, your team needs to be prepared for 100 times or even more deployment than ever before. With increased challenges, a slow pace of deployment would fail to support fast-moving Microservices. Moreover, the independent nature of Microservices poses additional difficulties.

Microservices have their independent code which needs to be deployed individually for each of these microservices without affecting the other modules of the application. Microservices are loosely coupled and need not have the same technology stack, libraries, or frameworks.

The deployment process for services differs from each other and thus needs to be done at a faster pace to enable production-ready Microservices. Along with improving the pace of Microservices deployment, it’s important that teams have the adequate DevOps skillset required to manage Microservices in a secured and seamless manner.

  • Automate everything- Automation should become a crucial part of the development process.
  • Operational excellence is a must– Strategies for continual improvement are important to increase the velocity.
  • Operation activities must work closely with the Development process– Ensure that the basic operational activities work along with the development process. This helps in enabling a faster deployment process.

By executing these simple yet so important DevOps practices, you can be assured of the complete security of your business application. Implementing Microservices without changing the way you execute the business operations may put your projects at risk.

Besides a well-planned DevOps roadmap, there is a need for the IT teams to possess appropriate DevOps skillset for implementing practices of DevOps architecture.

Security should be a Major Focus Area!

Independent deployments, business-oriented capabilities, agile teams, functional orientation, and rapid application delivery are some of the unique characteristics of Microservices. With all these changes, brought in the Microservices-led DevOps architecture, it should come as no surprise that the approach to security needs to change as well. Here’s what you can do to adopt a Shift Left Philosophy and embed security early on!

  • Involve experts to monitor complete security- Experienced security experts to monitor iterative product features. This helps to get early feedback on the security status of the application.
  • Implement security measures while detecting errors– Robust security measures in the bug tracking process should be adopted.
  • Integrate best security practices in the code review– Authentic and reliable security practices in the code review process must be executed, especially if you have to deal with authentication flows, configurations, secret storage, etc.
  • Move towards automation as much as possible– Automation techniques for application security can be adopted. Automated security practices such as dependency scanning and static analysis can become part of your deployment pipeline.

It’s important that you first analyze and then select the best security practices for your business applications. Make sure to devise a plan to implement the security measures not towards the end but pro-actively during the development process.

Comprehensive Monitoring & Logging!

Last but not least make sure to select the right approach for logging and monitoring Microservices. When you’re working with a single application, you usually get a chance to look at the logs and have a clear picture of what exactly is happening.

But what, if you have to deal with 20 applications( to be scaled dynamically), you surely need a different strategy then. The same is the case with Microservices where you have to work with many services. Logging and monitoring these services is a cumbersome and tedious process.

Therefore, it is important to introduce state-of-the-art logging and monitoring practices for enabling production-ready Microservices. Being able to track all the requests across different microservices is a must. Viewing these logs in one place is the only way to make things work.

Implementing & configuring all of this often becomes a huge challenge and thus a need for the platform to seamlessly manage Kubernetes and Microservices is highly recognized. Take a look at how BuildPiper provides out-of-the-box capabilities for Kubernetes & Microservices application delivery management.

With BuildPiper, you can benefit from comprehensive automation for the entire Microservices journey right from K8s cluster setup & config, onboarding microservices, robust security-enabled CI-CD engine, and complete observability that enables viewing of the overall performance, health status, availability, logs, and other important metrics of your services & Kubernetes components.

With the integration and set-up of infrastructure monitoring and log management tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Alert Manager, ElasticSearch, Fluentd, and Kibana, BuildPiper enables complete observability with detailed information of build and deploy logs.

BuildPiper provides your DevOps team with deep insights into the services to monitor & analyze app performance and the right DevOps skillset for enhancing the application performance.

Wrapping it all

These are some of the DevOps practices to make your Microservices journey successful. So, before you plan to implement these DevOps strategies, make sure to look at the pros and cons of each of these. Analyze and then decide which would work the best for your platform

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How To Choose A Kubernetes Management Platform That Is Right For You?

Growing Adoption of Kubernetes among Enterprises!

Kubernetes usage appears to be a popular pattern being adopted by enterprises these days. Recently, 56 percent of the organizations that polled for the 2020 edition of The State of Enterprise Open Source report, said that they expected their use of containers to increase in the next 12 months. The report polled 950 IT leaders.

Kubernetes has practically become the new norm for container orchestration. Enterprises going cloud-native consider Kubernetes as one of the important elements contributing to the success of implementing a cloud-first strategy. If you’re planning to re-architect your business architecture, I’m sure Kubernetes is the first thing that comes to your mind, isn’t it? Let’s take a look at other interesting Kubernetes facts. Continue reading “How To Choose A Kubernetes Management Platform That Is Right For You?”

Does Your Business Need “Managed Kubernetes”?

Explore and know more about the business benefits of Managed Kubernetes and why does your business need one! Read to know more!

There are multiple success stories out there that have leveraged a Kubernetes-based infrastructure to enable the scaling of business applications. Take Airbnb for instance; their transition from Monolithic architecture to Microservices had been much talked about.

The ultimate goal was to make continuous delivery available to hundreds of company’s engineers so that they could seamlessly add new services and enable the teams and ultimately the application to scale

The company adopted Kubernetes and Kubernetes components to manage the configuration and deployment of 250+ critical services to Kubernetes. The results were quite successful and allowed them to do over 500 deployments per day without any hiccups.

Containers have gained huge popularity in the business world due to their optimized performance and enablement of the speed of application delivery. They are rapidly being adopted by organizations both big and small.

With a 200% increase in Kubernetes adoption since the year 2017, it’s no doubt that Kubernetes is becoming the de-facto leader in container orchestration!

But with the increased demand for rapid growth and faster delivery in the competitive market space, there arises a need for an automated system to deploy, scale, monitor, and securely manage thousands of containerized applications.

A Kubernetes dashboard can help in deploying containerized applications to the Kubernetes cluster. Kubernetes offers an impressive set of features, including scalability, workload management, self-recovery, and progressive application deployment, but still, they require a significant manual configuration for better processing and controlled K8s cluster management processing and controlled K8s cluster management along with enhanced Kubernetes security.

Setting up an automated monitoring system that keeps a continuous check on Kubernetes components and its infrastructure is difficult. Managing all this can be taxing and challenging for the DevOps team already busy keeping up with multiple infrastructures and DevOps priorities.

CNCF Survey 2019

Managed Kubernetes takes care of this and much more. With Managed Kubernetes, users can easily monitor and manage their Kubernetes cluster without having to set up and maintain it themselves.

Just like a Kubernetes Dashboard can help deploy containerized applications to a Kubernetes cluster, troubleshoot issues of containerized applications, and manage cluster resources, Managed Kubernetes can take care of the overall management of a complete Kubernetes cluster.

Once the cluster set-up is ready and operational, managed Kubernetes provide all the tools needed to automate routine processes such as updates, scaling, load-balancing, and monitoring within the cluster. It also ensures improved Kubernetes security that can be tracked through the Kubernetes dashboard.

In BuildPiper, we have created a microservices application delivery platform that allows seamless setup and management of Kubernetes as well!

BuildPiper allows multiple clusters to be managed by a consistent set of security and configuration policies enabling more compliance and lesser management costs. With BuildPiper, you can easily monitor the health status of the nodes, pods, and the complete node lifecycle management and keep an account of all Kubernetes security measures being taken within the system.

BuildPiper eases the task of the DevOps team as it frees them from the task of keeping a check on the implementation details of Kubernetes components and making sure that the cluster is healthy, secure, and up to date. With added functionalities like Managed Microservices, security, compliance, and observability, BuildPiper is the most suitable platform for deriving value from your microservices applications.

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Major DevOps Challenges Faced While Implementing Microservices

 

‘Monolith to Microservices’ is one of the most sought-after application modernization initiatives taken by various technology leaders today. Microservices is an architectural style and approach to writing software applications wherein the applications are broken down into smaller, independent components.

Enterprises worldwide are considering this approach along with other DevOps skills to quicken their delivery process and fasten their deployment rates. With major benefits being– increased resilience, rapid delivery, improved scalability, and faster time to market.

Microservice architecture helps companies to respond rapidly and meet the growing business needs. They help increase resilience, render a faster time-to-market, improve the agility of software teams, reduce costs, enhance scalability and provide the freedom of choosing any technology stack best suited for your application.

With pros, there are cons too. Like most transformational trends dwelling in the DevOps ecosystem, implementing microservices has its own challenges. Here are some of the major DevOps challenges faced while deploying microservices. Let’s read in detail about these challenges of DevOps.

Managing Microservices

With the increase in the number of microservices, managing them becomes more challenging. Execution and deployment of large and complex life cycles of Microservices require a well-automated system that can manage them well.

Thus, for better scaling and deployment of microservices, you must have a well-planned strategy in hand, adequate DevOps skills and a team with the right DevOps skillset. Without a proper implementation plan, managing Microservices can be cumbersome and excessively demanding for your organization.

CI/CD Pipeline Management

Although Microservices offer a plethora of advantages when it comes to development and deployment, they are many challenges of DevOps that you might face while deploying Microservices. Scalability is one such issue that most enterprises face while implementing Microservices.

Managing CI/CD pipelines were still easy in the past when businesses used monolithic applications. With the increase in the number of applications within an organization, pipeline maintenance became a bigger issue. Management of code repositories and CI/CD pipelines becomes much more complex and challenging as the number of applications increases.

Let’s say, for instance, a company might have to manage only 1–5 pipelines in the case of monolith applications. But the situation becomes complicated while managing and adopting microservices where the number of pipelines to be managed increases to 250 as each monolith is divided into ~50 microservices.

Monitoring

Unlike monolithic architecture, the traditional forms of monitoring will not align and fit well in a microservices environment. Since multiple services make up the entire functionality which was earlier supported with a single application, monitoring becomes a difficult task to manage.

When a problem arises in the application, detecting and identifying the root cause can be challenging. For instance, if you do not have a way of monitoring and tracking the path a specific request took. You would never be able to find out how many and which Microservices were traversed for a specific request coming from a user interface.

Businesses using Microservices often struggle to analyze the chain of communication across these services to identify where the issue originally arose. This can cause huge delays in detecting and identifying the main cause of the problem resulting in much higher mean time to resolve.

Along with these challenges of DevOps that enterprises have to face while deploying Microservices, there are other issues that can hinder business growth. These are a lack of appropriate DevOps skillset, non-availability of resources & funds, slow pace of development lifecycle, delayed release and many others. Among these issues, finding a team equipped with proficient DevOps skills is of utmost importance and should be a critical priority for businesses who wish to increase both: their value and growth.

Wrapping It All

Despite these challenges, Microservices have become quite popular in the industry today. With several features responsible for the trend, scalability is the most important one. Adoption of MicroServices by tech giants such as Amazon, NetFlix, eBay, and others, gives an assurance that this architectural style is here to stay.

Given our strong expertise and past experience working with 100+ customers on their Cloud & DevSecOps journey, we have created the most powerful Microservices App delivery platform — BuildPiper, that takes away all the challenges to deliver a new microservice and enable seamless Day 1 & 2 operations.

This platform takes care of everything that your team needs to overcome different challenges of DevOps related to Microservices and empowers it with appropriate DevOps skills and enables seamless delivery of dockerized code at reduced costs with a 10X faster time to market

BuildPiper supports seamless and highly intuitive Kubernetes cluster management, robust security, configuration management, Macro & micro CI-CD pipelines, observability, complete observability with a 360-degree view, and comprehensive Manageability with Automated Log Shipping, Secrets, Config Maps and Service Access Management, thus enabling smooth handling of Microservices with a secure product release through feature-rich delivery pipelines.

Does your team have the DevOps skills needed to enable seamless and hassle-free Microservices management? If not, consider taking a look NOW!

Leverage BuildPiper and its features to empower your teams with the right DevOps skill set for better management of Microservices and much more!

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3 Ways Microservices are Transforming Businesses Today!

Read more on the advantages of Microservices here! Take a look!

The tech world has always been churning out new concepts and buzzwords every now and then. Here, in this blog, I’d like to talk about a buzzword that has been popular for a while now- Microservices, what Microservices is and the advantages of Microservices implementation.

“Disaggregation” — the idea of segregating functions like computing, storage, and networking to drive organizational efficiency and agility. While the idea of division isn’t entirely new, it is with respect to software development. The notion is best represented by the term Microservices today!

Wondering about the fact what Microservices are? So, here you go! Microservices are modular components that can be deployed independently for improving the agility of software development processes. The benefits of implementing and architecting Microservices Microservices are numerous, including but not limited to better scalability, faster deployment, and improved maintenance.

The process of architecting Microservices can be seen as being adopted by businesses in almost everything around us. I’m sure you’ve probably interacted with a microservice and still didn’t know about it. Do you have a Netflix subscription? Do you buy stuff on Amazon.com or use PayPal? Microservices are a crucial part of all these things.

Companies, at present, are facing intense competitive pressures of delivering the best to their end-users. This relentless pressure and the extraordinary advantages of Microservicesis what continues to drive the adoption of microservices architecture in software development. Here are 3 main reasons how enterprises are leveraging microservices to transform business applications these days.

1. Adapt to Changes

A large monolithic-designed application is not highly adaptable to changes, particularly for unanticipated changes. In today’s ultra-competitive business environment, where everything keeps changing at a lightning speed, we need a technology ecosystem that can easily adapt to changes. This is why all businesses need to know what Microservices are and how they can help. Being a collection of small, independent processes, a microservices-designed application is best suited to adapt to such constant changes taking place in the disruptive market space.

2. Scalability

One of the major advantages of Microservices is improved scalability. The need to scale an application is definitely a tough task when it comes to handling monolithic applications. Since the application is built as one integral whole, there is no option but to scale the entire application, when only a part of the application is required to be scaled. Things are not the same in a microservices architecture wherein each application consists of many modules. So, each module can be scaled independently allowing efficient use of resources and controlled handling of operations. You can easily deploy the updates as it’s much easier and safer to update little parts of an application than to update one big monolithic application.

3. Flexibility

While deploying an application, you might need one of the business modules of your application to be in Java and another in PHP. Different business models need to be designed depending on the technology that is being used. With a microservices architecture, each module of an application is an independent standalone unit and can be designed using whatever parameters are best for that single module. This enables quick adoption of new technologies and allows you to work with the latest technologies combining the “best of the best” components.

Wrapping It All

Microservices are enabling this revolution by delivering improved scalability, enhanced flexibility, high availability, and orchestration services that monolithic software design can’t measure up to. So, it wouldn’t be wrong to say that Microservices has changed the way businesses operate now and therefore architecting Microservices has become a preferred choice for most businesses now.

The incredible advantages of Microservices such as flexibility, easy product management, quick delivery, and faster deployment allow businesses to increase their productivity. This is the reason why the tech community and industry experts are deeply interested in knowing what Microservices are and how they can transform the technology world.

But, there are some disadvantages to employing and architecting Microservices. Difficulties faced while debugging defects and managing the coordination between microservices are some of these. It becomes quite cumbersome and challenging for software teams to manage such complicated and large groups of Microservices.

Realizing this issue(and many others that are faced while delivering a microservices application), we built a single, standardized, comprehensive Microservices Delivery platform — BuildPiper!

Buildpiper brings along a comprehensive solution for seamless and intuitive microservices delivery with onboarding, environment provisioning, security, Macro & Micro CI-CD pipelines, monitoring, and much more! With its incredible ability to enable production-ready Microservices on Day 1, Buildpiper helps in deploying services in a hassle-free manner. It helps software teams in easy and controlled handling of services thus saving huge time and costs associated to take your product to the market!

Try or schedule a demo today to kick start your Microservices app delivery journey!

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