tag
Cloud
- #91 17 min
Microservice Observability, Part 2: Evolutionary Patterns for Solving Observability Problems
In part one of this series, I described the difference between monitoring and observability and why the latter starts to become more important when dealing with microservices. Next, we’ll discuss some strategies and patterns for implementing better observability. Specifically, we’ll look at the idea of an observability pipeline and how we can start to iteratively improve observability in our systems. To recap, observability can be described simply as the ability to ask questions of your systems without knowing those questions in advance. This requires capturing a variety of signals such as logs, metrics, and traces as well as tools for interpreting those signals like log analysis, SIEM, data warehouses, and time-series databases. A number of challenges surface as a result of this. Clint Sharp does a great job discussing the key problems, which I’ll summarize below along with some of my own observations.
- #90 9 min
Microservice Observability, Part 1: Disambiguating Observability and Monitoring
“Pets versus cattle” has become something of a standard vernacular for describing the shift in how we build systems. It alludes to the elastic and dynamic nature of these (typically, but not necessarily) container-based systems with on-demand scaling and more transparent fault-tolerance. I’ve talked before about this transition before and specifically how it relates to monitoring. In particular, with these more dynamic, microservice-based systems, the conversation starts to shift away from traditional monitoring toward observability. In this series, I’ll describe that distinction, explain why it matters, and share some concrete tactical items for implementing observability in a microservice environment.
- #89 6 min
What’s Going on with GKE and Anthos?
GCP’s Slippery Slide into Enterprise When former Oracle exec Thomas Kurian took over for Diane Greene as Google Cloud’s CEO, a lot of people expressed concern about what this meant for the future of GCP. Vendor lock-in is already at the forefront of the minds of many cloud adopters, and Oracle is notorious for locking customers into expensive and prolonged contracts. However, I thought the move was smart on Google’s part.
- #85 8 min
Authenticating Stackdriver Uptime Checks for Identity-Aware Proxy
Google Stackdriver provides a set of tools for monitoring and managing services running in GCP, AWS, or on-prem infrastructure. One feature Stackdriver has is “uptime checks,” which enable you to verify the availability of your service and track response latencies over time from up to six different geographic locations around the world. While Stackdriver uptime checks are not as feature-rich as other similar products such as Pingdom, they are also completely free. For GCP users, this provides a great starting point for quickly setting up health checks and alerting for your applications.
- #84 6 min
API Authentication with GCP Identity-Aware Proxy
Cloud Identity-Aware Proxy (Cloud IAP) is a free service which can be used to implement authentication and authorization for applications running in Google Cloud Platform (GCP). This includes Google App Engine applications as well as workloads running on Compute Engine (GCE) VMs and Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) by way of Google Cloud Load Balancers. When enabled, IAP requires users accessing a web application to login using their Google account and ensure they have the appropriate role to access the resource. This can be used to provide secure access to web applications without the need for a VPN. This is part of what Google now calls BeyondCorp, which is an enterprise security model designed to enable employees to work from untrusted networks without a VPN. At Real Kinetic, we frequently bump into companies practicing Death-Star security, which is basically relying on a hard outer shell to protect a soft, gooey interior. It’s simple and easy to administer, but it’s also vulnerable. That’s why we always approach security from a perspective of defense in depth.