Loosely coupled independent components are the essence of microservices architecture. The design principles aim at small services developed by independent teams using different technologies. The services can be scaled up and down irrespective of the other services. Although the services are independent, they are built as a solution which means there is a heavy need for interaction among the...
One fine day - or in fact, not-so-fine day - our brand new microservice-based app stopped functioning during off-hours. When we started working, we got to know the shocking news, and then started the investigations aka debugging! After hours of impatient slogging, the root cause came out to be a micro-service that would write to a telemetry service! It...
"We already have CI/CD in place… builds and deployments are already automated… what else do you need?", the project manager was confused by the team's demand for further automation for load balancing and failovers. A few months ago, a huge effort began to redesign the existing monolith application into lightweight micro-services. The team worked smart and hard, and the microservice-based...
"Now the release will swap the old deployment with the new one in just 2 to 3 minutes!" exclaimed our DevOps person, happy with his achievement! "Good achievement on the deployment side, but it doesn't solve my issue", the technical manager had some more concerns - "Any data loss is not acceptable - devices send 6 messages in a...
Sensors, controllers, gateways, MQTT, AMQP… all these buzzwords welcome you to the 'connected' world of Internet-of-Things and its inseparable buddy, Cloud-computing! Poor sensors, at the heart of the system, have little idea of the intricate cobweb built around the measurements diligently taken by them, synonymous with the heartbeats in the living beings! The sensors emit measurements, there are nearby 'smart'...
"IMO, unless the infra-related issues are resolved and the infra is frozen, the real stabilization of the app will not even start!", complained a product dev-lead who was more interested in finding functional defects in the integrated application, but was hearing more of the infra-related issues from the QA team. A typical scenario - everything works on the dev setups,...
"Wow! This PaaS service is a free offering from the cloud provider!!", exclaimed an enthusiast in our team and proposed that we design the solution to maximize the use of the free PaaS service. Our director didn't seem impressed… he said "Anything free comes with some caveats or the other. We should know the exact caveats or reasons why...
SQL and NoSQL are like Tom and Jerry - always fighting but still won't live apart. A new product design is incomplete without debating about these two when it comes to choosing data storage! Both are great at storing data with care and making it accessible when required. That's the common thread that ties them together!! SQL is the traditional...
It's a busy day in the office, business-as-usual. The customer is chasing the team for deliverables, which includes database schema design… The development team, counting on their previous experience, doesn't take long to create a design using a well-known RDBMS. The lead ensures the schema is in good-old third normal form… Done! Fast forward to six months down the line...
It's been a good long vacation nearing year-end, family, celebrations, outing… After the team is back to work, they notice the production web application is running on … neither 2 nor 4 instances but a whopping 10 instances! A hurried inspection shows auto-scaling kicked off as per the thresholds set by the team when the cloud infra was acquired....
