IT Operations is experiencing lightning-fast change right now. From the emergence of cloud computing to the explosion of data—not to mention ever-present cyber threats—every day is a new day for IT Ops. At BigPanda, we’re laser-focused on making life easier for IT Ops teams, which means we’re staying on top of all this change to help IT Ops keep up.

Microservices architecture allows technology companies to build application services around business capabilities. It enables rapid development and also boosts developer productivity. But it also introduces complexity. Troubleshooting and operating an internet-scale application based on microservices is hard. And that’s where distributed tracing comes into the picture. Traditional monolithic application architecture is easy to develop, deploy and monitor.

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) practice was established by Google nearly 20 years ago, and was popularized with Google’s monumental SRE Book. Everyone’s been attempting to follow that iconic path ever since.

In my prior blog, Continuous Test Data Management for Microservices, Part 1, we offered an introduction to the key approaches for applying continuous test data management (TDM) to microservices. The continuous TDM process for microservices applications is similar to that for general continuous TDM (see figure below), but tailored to the nuances of the architecture. In this post, I’ll outline the key steps for applying TDM across the lifecycle.

Microservice is now the architecture of choice for many developers when crafting cloud-native applications. A microservices application is a collection of loosely coupled services that communicate with each other, enhancing collaboration, maintainability, scalability, and deployment. There are several options for enabling this communication between microservices. REST is the most popular among developers, sometimes used synonymously with APIs. However, gRPC can be a better alternative to REST.

As enterprise applications changed over time to serve different business needs and computer systems evolved from the monolithic architecture of mainframes into client-server and distributed systems, mechanisms for communications between different tiers of computer systems also had to develop.

With dozens of microservices running on multiple production regions, getting to a point where any error log can be immediately identified and resolved feels like a distant dream. As an observability company, we at Coralogix are pedantic when it comes to any issue in one of our environments. That’s why we are using an internal Coralogix account to monitor our development and production environments.

Many organizations are experiencing the need to modernize their IT systems to keep pace in an increasingly digital world. Adopting DevOps helps companies implement and initialize the modernization processes. At xMatters, our path to IT modernization has included implementing DevOps, but we have done it a little differently to ensure we are using agile processes.

According to a 2020 CNCF survey, the use of containers in production has been rapidly increasing for the past several years. Nutanix, a global leader in cloud software and a pioneer in hyperconverged infrastructure solutions, is part of that trend.