Tag Archives: Istio

Bucharest Tech Week Conference – Monoliths in a Microservices World

29 Monday May 2023

Posted by in General, Technology

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Last week I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to present at the Software Architecture Summit as part of the Bucharest Tech Week conference. My presentation, Monoliths in a Microservice World, was all new content that, by chance, worked well, bringing together a number of points made by other speakers. The presentation aimed at the challenges of adopting Microservices and whether Monoliths had a place in modern IT, and for those of us not fortunate enough to be working for one of the poster children for microservices like Netflix, Amazon, etc, how we can get our existing monoliths playing nicely with microservices.

The conference may not have the size of Devoxx (yet), but it certainly had quality with presenters from globally recognized organizations such as Google (Abdelkfettah Sghiouar), Thoughtworks (Arne Lapõnin), Vodafone (IT Services business unit – _VOIS – Stefan Ciobanu), Bosch, as well as subsidiaries of companies like DXC (Luxsoft) and rapid growth SaaS vendor LucaNet.

As a presenter, you’re always wanting to walk the tightrope of being at the biggest conferences to maximize reach for your message while at the same time wanting the experience to be friendly and personable, which often means slightly smaller conferences. The Software Architecture Summit balanced that really well; rather than lots of smaller breakout sessions, the conference focussed on a single auditorium for a large number of attendees, with presentation slots varying in length depending upon the subject matter. If a session didn’t interest you, then there were plenty of exhibitors to talk with – although, from what I saw, the auditorium was full during the sessions, reflecting the interest in the content.

“Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live.” – John F. Woods

Quote of the conference – as cited by @DevPaco (Paco van Beckhoven)

The conference organizers (Universum) certainly put in the effort to ensure the presenters were looked after. It is the little touches that really make the difference, such as taking care of logistics which can be as simple as organizing airport transfers. A letter of thanks will be waiting for you at the hotel after the event, organizing a meal for the presenters at a local restaurant and so on.

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Istio In Action

25 Friday Mar 2022

Posted by in Book Reviews, Books, General, manning

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Christian Posta and Rinor Maloku’s book with Manning, Istio In Action has just been published. I’ve previously said it’s a good book, and that’s not surprising given Christian’s role at solo.io. When the final chapters became available I started to go through it in more detail and built a mind map (As with the recent review of Kubernetes best practices). The map can be seen below.

As you can see the map is very substantial reflecting on the depth and value of the book. For those who look at the maps, may notice there are a couple of chapters not fully mapped. I will update the map to fill those gaps in, but given they focus on monitoring and observability, I was less concerned about those areas given my own writing. The book’s exercises are very much built around using Docker Desktop making it very easy to spin up the examples and exercises. If you want to know about Istio Service Mesh on K8s then I’d recommend it.

Reading through the book, I’ve learned details that I was not entirely aware of, for example the integration of non K8s workloads into the mesh. The tuning of Istio to keep it highly performant with a lot of workloads.

The book can be obtained from:

And other retailers of course.

Kubernetes Best Practises – Review & Mindmaps

13 Thursday Jan 2022

Posted by in APIs & microservices, Book Reviews, Books, Cloud, Cloud Native, development, General, Technology

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I’ve had some time to catch up on books I’d like to read, including Kubernetes Best Practises in the last few weeks. While I think I have a fair handle on Kubernetes, the development of my understanding has been a bit ad-hoc as I’ve dug into different areas as I’ve needed to know more. This meant reading a Dummies/Introduction to entry style guide would, to an extent, likely prove to be a frustrating read. Given this, I went for the best practises book because if I don’t understand the practises, then there are gaps in my understanding still, and I can look at more foundation resources.

As it goes, this book was perfect. It quickly covered the basics of the different aspects of Kubernetes helping to give context to the more advanced aspects, and the best practices become almost a formulated summary in each section. The depth of coverage and detail is certainly very comprehensive, explaining the background of CNI (Container Network Interface) to network-level security within Kubernetes.

The book touched upon Service Meshes such as Istio and Linkerd2 but didn’t go into great depth, but again this is probably down to the fact that Service Mesh ideas are still maturing, and you have initiatives like SMI (Service Mesh Interface still in the CNCF’s sandbox).

In terms of best practices, that really stood out for me:

  • Use of Taints and Tolerations for refined control of pod deployment (Allowing affinity to be controlled to optimise resilience, or direct types of pod deployment to nodes with specialist capabilities such as GPU).
  • There are a lot more differences and options then you might realize in terms of ingress controller capabilities, so take time to identify what you may need from an ingress controller.
  • Don’t forget pods can be scaled vertically with the VPA (Vertical Pod Autoscaler)as well as horizontally through the HPA.
  • While using a managed persistence service will make statement storage a lot easier, stateful sets will give you a very portable solution.

As with a lot of technical books I read. As I go through the book I build up a mind map of what I think are the key points. Doing so leaves me with a resource I can use as a quick reference, but creating the mind map helps reinforce the learning. So here is the mind map …

Observability -London Oracle Developer Meetup

10 Tuesday Sep 2019

Posted by in Dev Meetup, Fluentd, General, Technology

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meetup-monitoringLast night was the London Oracle Developer Meetup’s sessions around observability.  Andrei Cioaca with a focus on the use of OpenTracing as provided by Jaeger, in a standard Kubernetes deployment with Istio – realized with Oracle Kubernetes Engine (OKE).  This was followed by my session on another pillar using logging via FluentD. Also incorporated into standard Kubernetes, but also able to support traditional monolithic use cases.

Andrei provided a great overview of the 3 pillars and the strengths and weaknesses of the different pillars. With the basics covered Andrei then dove into the configuration and execution of Istio combined with Jaeger and the corresponding insights available.  including a look at the kinds of visual insights that Jaeger and Kiali provide.  Some probing conversations followed about the relationship to Spring Cloud Sleuth, Open Zipkin and the OpenTracing as a concept more generally.

Andrei’s presentation material can be found in his GitHub repository here.

search-trend-fluentd

Google Analytics on Search Terms

My session followed a pizza break, as there was a delay in its arrival. With everybody having chatted over pizza about OpenTracing, we picked up on FluentD and the Logging aspect to Observability. FluentD, as an open-source project has been growing steadily, and actually baked into several Log Analytics products and services – as the above analytics from Google shows.

The presentation looked at the growing challenges of modern software in terms of making sense of logging.  We explored the capabilities of FluentD before drilling into real-world use cases and potential deployment models.

As you’ll see from the slides we ran a couple of demos. The configuration for the demos can be found at https://github.com/mp3monster/fluentd-demos along with an example payload.

The next meetup we have organized is around Blockchain, all the details can be found at https://www.meetup.com/Oracle-Developer-Meetup-London/events/264661742/.

Other related info …