Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As applications move from monolithic architectures to microservices-based architectures, DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) teams face new operational challenges. Microservices are updated constantly with new features and resource managers/schedulers (like Kubernetes and GKE) can add/remove containers in response to changing workloads. The old way of creating alerts based on learned behaviors of your monolithic applications will not work with microservices applications.

One of the greatest strengths of containers is the ability to spin more of them up quickly. As the volume of traffic to your application increases, you can create more application containers on the fly to handle it, in almost no time at all. Kubernetes ships with autoscaling baked in, giving you the power to scale out when the system detects an increase in traffic—automatically!

Docker is a power tool for deploying applications or services, and there are numerous Docker orchestration tools available that can help to simplify the management of the deployed containers. But what if you are wanting to deploy a small number of services and not wanting to undertake setting up and managing another application stack just to run a handful of containers. I will cover how I deployed a handful of services on a single Docker host.

When building distributed, scalable cloud-native apps containing dozens or even hundreds of microservices, you need reliable monitoring and alerting. If you’re monitoring cloud-native apps in 2021, there’s a good chance you’ve chosen Prometheus. Prometheus is an excellent choice for monitoring containerized microservices and the infrastructure that runs them — often Kubernetes.

You probably can’t believe I’m asking that question. It’s like showing up to a party and immediately asking about the afterparty. Is it really time to look for the exit? No…but yes. We used to deploy apps on systems in data centers. Then we moved the systems to the cloud. Then we moved the apps to containers. Then we wrapped it all in Kubernetes for orchestration, and here we are. Each advance in technology unlocks doors we couldn’t reach before.

Large portions of software development budgets are dedicated for testing code. A new component may take weeks to thoroughly test, and even then mistakes happen. If you consider software defects as security issues then the concern goes well beyond an application temporarily crashing. Although even minor bugs can cost companies a lot of time to locate the bug, resolve it, retest it in lower environments, then deploy it back to production.

Dokku can be a cost-effective, convenient way to deploy apps to DigitalOcean. SolarWinds® Papertrail™ can make monitoring the logs of those apps simple and frustration-free. Combine these two technologies and you have an effective deployment process and log management system. Let’s look at Dokku first. Dokku is an open-source platform-as-a-service (PaaS). If you’re familiar with Heroku, you can consider Dokku a private Heroku that you manage.

During the next four weeks, our team will work to improve the overall experience of Qovery. We gathered all your feedback (thank you to our wonderful community 🙏), and we decided to make significant changes to make Qovery a better place to deploy and manage your apps. This series will reveal all the changes and features you will get in the next major release of Qovery. Let's go!