Microservices Gone Wild – Tech Dive Part 4
In this last post of my four-part series on microservices, I’ll look at some of the positive aspects of microservices, and how much simpler they can potentially make things once you overcome the up-front effort required to make them work.
Scalability
When a monolithic app needs to scale, how can that be achieved? Well, for example:
- More RAM (if the app is memory-bound)
- More or Faster CPUs (if the app is CPU-bound)
- More instances of the app (front with a load balancer)
These are all effective ways to scale the application. What if one function within the application could really use a performance boost, even though the others are working just fine? Using a load balancer to distribute work requests can mean that scaling up the ability for a single module to process concurrent requests can be as simple as spinning up a few more containers and sharing the load:
There’s some effort required to allow the main program to issue concurrent calls, but the benefits can be worthwhile. Plus, of course, each of our microservices may be called by other programs, or may call each other as necessary, so there may be more than just one source of activity. Continue reading
Enterprise Networks Bracing For Olympics
IT pros nervous about network performance and security with employees streaming the games at work, poll shows.
Rethinking Your IT Security Strategy
Before rushing out to buy more security products, enterprises need to re-evaluate their security priorities.
General – The Future of Networking – Russ White
Hello my friends,
Lately I have been thinking a lot about the future of networking and the career paths in this domain. As you probably know I like to guide and mentor people and with everything going on in the industry it can be confusing to find your way and to know what skills to work on to stay ahead of the curve.
I decided to reach out to some of my friends to ask them of their vision of the role of the future networking engineer and how to prepare for the changes that we are now seeing. First out is my friend Russ White who is also the co-author of the book Unintended Features that we wrote together.
Daniel: What are the major skills that people in networking need to learn to stay ahead of the curve?
Russ: Some of these have never changed — for instance, communication and abstraction. Some skills have been more important forever, such as people skills and project manage, but they never seem to really rise to the top in terms of actual demand. I don’t think this is going to change much; companies say they want people skills, and then recruit based Continue reading
Networking in 1980s
Summer is a great time to do odd jobs that you always wanted to do but never found time for. One of mine: document the crazy stuff I’ve been doing decades ago. Starting point: how I got into networking in 1980s.
Making Networking Great Again: Leveraging ifupdown2 in the Data Center
I love election season, mainly for all the great slogans. Every candidate is trying to find a way to catch the attention of the electorate in order to get their ideas across. If people don’t know the benefits of a new solution, they’ll be hard pressed to understand how much better life can be.
The same can be said for Linux networking when ifupdown2 came along. This article describes the improvements made to ifupdown2, but it doesn’t describe the excruciating pain of having to run the classic ifupdown. I feel obliged to join this campaign cycle to wholeheartedly endorse ifupdown2 and tell you about how it’s making networking great again.
I was recently simulating a data center environment with Vagrant to test scalable architectures. I was trying to leverage ECMP via the new Routing on the Host feature on an Ubuntu 14.04LTS server over a Cumulus Linux spine/leaf Clos network. One requirement for this feature to work is peering BGP between the Ubuntu server and the first-hop leaf. Sounds simple, right? I had already peered BGP throughout my entire Cumulus Linux switch network, and since Ubuntu is also a Debian-based distribution, it should have been a trivial task.
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