Meshing Around with Observability

Thursday, 1:30 PM EST - SAND DUNE

Prerequisite: If you are unfamiliar with Kubernetes or Istio meshing be sure to attend: Understanding Kubernetes: Fundamentals or Understanding Kubernetes: Meshing Around with Istio.

Kubernetes is a complex container management system. Your application running in containers is also a complex system as it embraces the distributed architecture of highly modular and cohesive services. As these containers run, things may not always behave as smoothly as you hope. Embracing the notions of antifragility and designing a system to be resilient despite the realities of resource limitations, network failures, hardware failures and failed software logic. All of this demands a robust monitoring system to open views into the behaviors and health of your applications running in a cluster.

Three important aspects to observe are log streams, tracing, and metrics.

In this session, we look at some example microservices running in containers on Kubernetes. We add Istio to the cluster for meshing. We observe how logs are gathered, We see transactions are traced and measured between services. We inspect metrics and finally add alerts when metrics are indicating a problem.

  • Log aggregation with an EFK stack
  • Istio metrics gathering
  • Transaction tracing with correlation IDs
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Alertmanager

Video Preview

About Jonathan Johnson

Jonathan Johnson

Jonathan Johnson is an independent software architect with a concentration on helping others unpack the riches in the cloud native and Kubernetes ecosystems.

For 30 years Jonathan has been designing useful software to move businesses forward. His career began creating laboratory instrument software and throughout the years, his focus has been moving with industry advances benefitting from Moore’s Law. He was enticed by the advent of object-oriented design and applied it to financial software. As banking moved to the internet, enterprise applications took off and Java exploded onto the scene. Since then, he has inhabited that ecosystem. After a few years, he returned to laboratory software and leveraged Java-based state machines and enterprise services to manage the terabytes of data flowing out of DNA sequencing instruments. As a hands-on architect, he applied the advantages of microservices, containers, and Kubernetes with a laboratory management platform.

Today he enjoys sharing his experience with peers. He provides perspective on ways to modernize application architectures while adhering to the fundamentals of modularity - high cohesion and low coupling.microservices, containers, and Kubernetes to their laboratory management platform.

More About Jonathan »