We need deeper visibility to have a tighter control on any system performing its duties. In the ensuing microservices world, the number of moving parts and pieces is growing steadily, and hence manning each one deeply and decisively is beset with a few challenges and concerns. Automated tools are the way forward to minutely monitor and activate the counter measures in time with less intervention and interpretation from humans. Increasingly, software applications are being presented as microservices-centric containerized applications. The increasingly inspiring and important ingredient in any microservice and containerized environments is service mesh solutions.
Service meshes come with native monitoring capability. They provide a combination of network performance metrics such as latency, bandwidth, and uptime monitoring. They do this for nodes/hosts/physical machines, pods, and containers. They also provide detailed logging for all kinds of events. The monitoring and logging capability ultimately helps to find the root cause of any problem and to troubleshoot.
Distributed tracing turns out to be a key factor for achieving the goal of visibility. The idea here is that it gives each request an ID. As it passes through the network, it shows the path each request has taken. Using this, operators and troubleshooters can easily understand which parts of the network or which microservices instances are slow or unresponsive. These insights simplify and streamline the repair. Thus, monitoring tools are indispensable in microservices environments.
Security is another vital ingredient for achieving the intended success of microservices. Rather than relying on peripheral firewalls for the entire application, the new networking project (Calico) helps create micro-firewalls around each service within a microservices application. This enables the fine-grained management and enforcement of security policies for guaranteeing unbreakable security for microservices. Bringing down one microservice does not have any serious impact on other services. Since the service mesh operates on a data plane, it is possible to apply common security patches and policies across the mesh. A service mesh predominantly secures inter-service communications. A service mesh provides a panoramic view into what is happening when multiple services interact with one another.