devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: application services

  • HAProxy Updates Data Plane API to Simplify Service Discovery

    HAProxy Updates Data Plane API to Simplify Service Discovery

    HAProxy has updated the open source HAProxy Data Plane application programing interface (API) to include service discovery capabilities alongside native support for the Consul service mesh being developed by HashiCorp.

    Version 2.2 of the HAProxy Data Plane API also adds support for file handling, SSL certificates, map files and configuration files for its Stream Processing Offload Engine (SPOE).

    HAProxy is best known for the open source load balancing software of the same name that is widely deployed by DevOps teams. As an extension of that platform, HAProxy Data Plane makes it possible to dynamically add and configure front ends and back ends and then route application traffic between them.

    Daniel Corbett, director of product and marketing for HAProxy, said the HAProxy load balancing software coupled with the Data Plane allows IT organizations to create a gateway through which they can manage their APIs.

    Corbett said the company is currently rounding out a suite of offerings, dubbed HAProxyOne, that are extensions to its load balancing software and that add a control plane and a service mesh to its portfolio. The company has already added a Kubernetes ingress controller to its portfolio.

    At the same time, however, HAProxy Data Plane will make it simpler for DevOps teams to integrate other offerings, such as Consul, within the control plane being developed by HAProxy, Corbett says.

    Corbett said, collectively, HAProxy will provide a suite of tools through which DevOps teams will be able to more easily manage application delivery across IT environments that span multiple platforms.

    HAProxy is not the only load balancing software provider with similar ambitions. The issue that HAProxy will address is the need for a framework that can apply equally well to both monolithic applications and microservices-based applications, Corbett says.

    In 2021, a major battle is brewing for control over the infrastructure that DevOps teams use to deploy applications at scale. Alongside proxy servers and load balancing software, IT organizations are starting to use API gateways, service meshes and ingress controllers as the number of APIs through which data flows rapidly increases. In effect, these technologies provide the connectivity infrastructure required to route data between the applications that make up a distributed computing environment.

    It’s still early days, though, as advocates for competing open source projects make their cases for the hearts and minds of developers. However, given the profound impact these decisions are likely to have on IT operations, it’s likely many organizations will soon standardize on one suite of offerings to minimize complexity.

    Whatever the result, applications environments are, in fact, becoming more complex. IT organizations will soon find themselves running monolithic applications alongside a raft of microservices-based applications, all of which need to use APIs to integrate with each other. Decisions made today about how best to integrate those APIs will have a profound impact for years to come.

  • F5 Networks Surfaces Application Insights

    F5 Networks Surfaces Application Insights

    F5 Networks, at its Agility 2020 online event today, unfurled Beacon, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that enables IT teams to better monitor and troubleshoot applications using telemetry data collected from networking equipment from both F5 and third-party sources.

    In addition, the company announced an update to NGINX Controller that enhances application analytics along with improvements to the declarative application programming interfaces (APIs) that NGINX Controller provides.

    Finally, F5 Networks unveiled an update to BIG-IQ, a set of tools for managing application services delivered via its network operating system. Version 7.1 of BIG-IQ adds visibility into legacy application services, streamlines management workflows and adds security management functionality.

    Hitesh Patel, senior director of product management for automation, orchestration and ecosystems at F5 Networks, said all three offerings are part of an ongoing effort to make it easier for IT organizations to meld network operations (NetOps) and best DevOps practices. Beacon, for example, ingests telemetry data streams from multiple sources to provide visibility and surface actionable insights via an application-centric view of the IT environment, he said, adding that approach makes it easier for NetOps and DevOps teams to collaborate.

    A companion Beacon Insights tool can be employed to detect anomalies and run analytics to determine the root cause of an issue, he said.

    Patel noted as IT environments become more complex, the need to eliminate silos that make managing IT holistically has become more pressing. For example, modern applications based on microservices are especially difficult to manage across an increasingly distributed computing environment.

    Less clear currently is how much or even whether DevOps and NetOps teams will merge. Network resources increasingly are being exposed via APIs that developers can programmatically invoke to provision resources. However, many IT teams are trying to control how much network bandwidth is allocated to any given application. As a result, many NetOps teams are setting up portals through which DevOps teams are given access to a maximum amount of bandwidth for specific sets of applications.

    On the plus side, Patel noted that as applications become more instrumented, thanks in part to the rise of DevOps, it’s becoming easier to apply analytics. That capability makes it easier for developers and NetOps teams to troubleshoot issues using a common set of metrics and dashboards that can feed data back to a continuous integration/continuous delivery (CI/CD) platform, he said.

    It may be a while before each IT organization finds the optimal level of convergence between their respective DevOps and NetOps teams. However, as applications become more distributed in the age of the cloud, networking will have a greater impact on application performance. The trouble is, most DevOps teams aren’t sure whether application performance issues are the result of the code written by developers or the latency being introduced by the network. Whatever the root cause, many IT teams are spending an inordinate amount of time trying to determine the root cause of application performance issues.

  • What’s hot with DevOps

    What’s hot with DevOps

    DevOps as a movement to transform people, technology, processes for higher business value is here to stay. It’s disrupting organizational processes replacing the old with the new. Command and control IT, a historical approach to regulating tech top-down, is trending toward decentralization thanks to DevOps.

    Software source control is another such case. We saw Git take on the source control bigwigs and redefine how we collaborate and build software. Now, which other areas is DevOps disrupting?

    What’s hot with DevOps?

    Application services

    We have a famous saying in my home country Spain, The King is dead, long live The King! I say, “The application is dead, long live the application.” I’m referring to the practice of implementing applications as monoliths. Monolithic applications are a dying concept. Why? Because it’s better to design them as a collection of services that link together. Such a flexible structure allows service reuse and control at a granular level. And you manage their lifecycles independently. Attempting to control these services centrally though is the equivalent of trying to balance the federal budget.

    It’s challenging to manage the lifecycle of services because of the very nature of agile business decision-making. Since services are much more granular, managing their lifecycle is also such. That’s why current application lifecycle management tools do not scale for service-oriented applications. Next generation application lifecycle management requires a focus on the service not on the application.

    Microservices and Docker

    Microservices is to infrastructure what service-oriented architecture (SOA) is to applications. Next generation applications require agile infrastructure to sustain the cadence of faster releases. Microservices align infrastructure management to the much more granular world of application services.

    Over the last year, microservices gained traction fueled by the container revolution. The unit of infrastructure shrank from a VM to a container allowing applications to run as a composition of smaller self-contained services making application releases that much more agile. So my second bet is on containerizing application services.

    Hybrid and multi-cloud

    Third, cloud infrastructure management tools must scale to the next generation of the container and service-ready applications. In the world where infrastructure is a service, application architecture can no longer rely on infrastructure implementing a particular way. A development or QA environment does not have the same SLA needs or constraints of a production environment as an example. So applications must be able to run across a diverse infrastructure.

    The first generation cloud management tools focused on managing servers in public clouds. That focus made every infrastructure provider a special case. Special cases don’t scale though. The cloud management tools must scale by removing dependencies between applications and infrastructure. Thereby, infrastructure becomes a choice, not a dependency. Application services must be able to run in private, public, hybrid, or multiple cloud environments. Such elasticity and independence are what applications demand from infrastructure.

    Having been in this space for more than a decade now, I live and experience these DevOps trends daily. What are your thoughts, are there any trends you’re following closely?