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Showing posts from May, 2021

Observability Done Right: Best Practices and Anti-Patterns for Effective System Monitoring

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  WHAT Observability is a concept that refers to the ability to gain insights into the behavior and performance of complex systems. In the context of software engineering, observability involves the collection, analysis, and visualization of data from software applications, infrastructure, and other components of a system. In the animal kingdom, observability plays a critical role in survival, allowing animals to monitor their surroundings, detect threats, and find food. Dolphins use echolocation to observe their surroundings. They emit high-frequency sounds that bounce off objects, allowing them to create a 3D map of their environment. Thanks for reading Knowledge Cafe! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Subscribed WHY In today's era, architectures are becoming increasingly large, complex, and fast-paced due to the faster development and deployment of software by distributed teams with the help of DevOps, continuous delivery, and agile development methodo...
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Container Patterns

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  Why we need Container Patterns: Due to popularity of microservices and distributed computing, containerization has become a major trend in software development.  It involves encapsulating or packaging software code and all its dependencies so that it can run uniformly and consistently on any infrastructure.  In distributed architecture which consists of many microservices, we want our microservices business focused and keep non functional aspects like security, service discovery, proxy, logging and platform configuration etc out of our microservices code, container patterns evolved.  There are 2 popular patterns: Sidecar Ambassadors Sidecar pattern:  In this pattern, we schedule a workload on the same hosts which is intended for specific things that don’t concern your application. There are various use cases for sidecar patterns like request authentication/authorization, service discovery, adding HTTPS to legacy service.  Usecase : We will d...
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Distributed Transactions in Microservices

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  What is a distributed transaction? Microservices architecture has been very popular architecture pattern in recent time. However, one common problem is how to manage distributed transactions across multiple microservices.  When a microservice architecture decomposes a monolithic system into self-encapsulated services, it can break transactions. This means a local transaction in the monolithic system is now distributed into multiple services that will be called in a sequence. Lets try to understand this concept with hypothetical train ticket booking system. Consider below ticket booking monolith application.  In the train ticket booking example above, if a actor sends a book ticket action to a monolithic system, the system will create a  local database transaction that works over multiple database tables (account table, booking table). If any step fails, the transaction can roll back and data consistency is guaranteed by database's ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isol...
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API Benchmarking with Gatling

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  What and Why Performance Measurement: The downtime of a mission-critical application can be very costly in recent time. It can lead to customer loss or financial loss. In today's world most of the web applications are built using APIs.  APIs should be functionally correct, as well as available, fast, secure and reliable. It is very important to gather the data about API performance periodically. This will give us information about health and hygiene of our application.  It doesn’t matter how beautiful your front end applications are if the API data sources take several seconds to respond or even worse if API performance is not consistent. API Performance matters very much in a world of microservices, which means the source of what a client application shows is probably being aggregated from multiple APIs behind the scenes. How to Measure API Performance: There are many tools available for performance measurement. This page list open source tools for performance measurem...
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