Microservices architecture is the new norm for building products these days. An application made up of hundreds of independent services enables teams to work independently and accelerate development. However, such highly distributed applications are also harder to monitor. When hundreds of services are traversed to satisfy a single request, it becomes difficult to investigate system issues.

Developers need all the information they can get on APIs to get them to work in alignment with their vision. There is no dearth of knowledge in the software development industry today, but only when that knowledge is documented well is it of use to others. In the context of APIs, developer portals offer an effective way to document and communicate relevant information. In this article, we answer the following questions about developer API portals.

Microservices are being used every where and for good reasons. They do provide you with many benefits especially improved focus and cutting the time to market. Microservices do bring complexities too. Monitoring microservices is complex because of simply the number of them. Monitoring a user transaction requires monitoring many microservices. Correlating the data from them to identify the root cause manually is a nightmare especially in a complex environment with 100s or 1000s of microservices.

KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2022 kicks off next week (October 24-28 in Detroit), so we’ve been thinking a lot about how service catalogs can help you get the most out of your Kubernetes clusters!

One analogy of a microservice architecture that I personally like is the idea of a large office setting with disparate departments communicating through an internal mail system. I imagine manilla envelopes being passed around, carried on carts through hallways, up elevators—passing the information one department needs to the next department.

A microservices catalog is only useful if you are confident that anything stored in it is fully accurate and that the information will not become outdated. How can you be certain that your catalog stays up-to-date in the future? Should you look for an asset in the catalog and, despite finding it there, also double-check GitHub? The service catalog is supposed to be your single source of truth. The purpose is defeated if you have to look for what you need in multiple different places.

To improve reliability, we need to measure it, and to measure it we use SLOs (Service Level Objectives). Or at least, that’s what Google SRE has popularized. In practice, it can be difficult and time-consuming to identify the right things to measure, to get to the right data, and to surface the results in a way that engages the stakeholders and teams involved. And all this is especially hard as we scale our teams and applications across multiple technology stacks.

Microservices are loosely coupled services that are organized around business capabilities. In an ideal microservices architecture, each service can be developed and deployed independently. To form a functional application, these separate services communicate with each other in the production environment (and even beforehand).

Observability is a very important aspect of software that’s often taken for granted. You need to have visibility into what your application is doing at different levels to better understand an issue when it occurs. There are multiple open-source tools and initiatives to help you achieve improved visibility. When we talk about observability, there are three parts to consider: logs, traces and metrics.