Blue-green deployment is a well-known pattern for updating software components by switching between simultaneously available environments or services. The context in which a blue-green deployment strategy is used can vary from switching between data centers, web servers in a single data center, or microservices in a Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF) deployment. In a microservices architecture, […]

In this blog I will show some best practices for instrumenting Docker containers, using docker-compose with a few popular AppDynamics application agent types. The goal here is to avoid rebuilding your application containers in the event of an agent upgrade, or having to hard-code AppDynamics configuration into your container images. In my role as a […]

The goal of digital dexterity is to build a flexible, agile workplace and workforce invested in the success of the organization. This dexterity allows the enterprise to treat employees like consumers—researching their challenges, goals and desired technologies—and then allowing the employees to exploit existing and emerging technologies for better business outcomes. This post advises line-of-business […]

The first time I heard “idempotent” and “ephemeral,” I had no idea what they meant. Perhaps I should have, though, because idempotent and ephemeral patterns are not new to the computing world. In mathematics and computer science, idempotence is a property in which no matter how many times you execute some operations, you achieve the […]

There are several ways to instrument an application on OpenShift with an AppDynamics application agent. The most straightforward way is to embed the agent into the main application image. (For more on this topic, read my blog Monitoring Kubernetes and OpenShift with AppDynamics.) Let’s consider a Node.js app. All you need to do is to add […]

Here at AppDynamics, we build applications for both external and internal consumption. We’re always innovating to make our development and deployment process more efficient. We refactor apps to get the benefits of a microservices architecture, to develop and test faster without stepping on each other, and to fully leverage containerization. Like many other organizations, we […]

A complex series of interactions must take place for an investment bank to process a single trade. From the moment it’s placed by a buyer, an order is received by front-office traders and passed through to middle- and back-office systems that conduct risk management checks, matchmaking, clearing and settlement. Then the buyer receives the securities […]

In my last article, Microservice Patterns That Help Large Enterprises Speed Development, Deployment and Extension, we went over some deployment and communication patterns that help keep microservices manageable as you use more of them. I also promised that in my next post, I’d get into how microservice patterns can become toxic, create more overhead and […]

The serverless movement has recently received another jolt of momentum with Google’s recent release of KNative. Leveraging some of the hottest technologies including Kubernetes and Istio, KNative raises the bar of serverless by supporting a wide set of platforms including Pivotal Cloud Foundry and Red Hat OpenShift. With such a set of heavy hitters, if […]

This is the first in a two-part series on microservice patterns and anti-patterns. In this article, we’ll focus on some useful patterns that, when leveraged, can speed up development, deployment, and extension. In the next article, we’ll focus on how microservice patterns can become toxic, create more overhead and unreliability, and become an unmanageable mess. […]

Customers expect your business application to perform consistently and reliably at all times—and for good reason. Many have built their own business systems based on the reliability of your application. This reliability target is your service level objective (SLO), the measurable characteristics of a service level agreement (SLA) between a service provider and its customer. […]

It makes sense that every application you use should provide tangible business value. But IT has long been stymied in proving this is true. Traditional monitoring tools let you know how your systems were performing but offered little insight into whether a delayed response from a database—or any other performance issue—was having a cascading effect […]

As professionals in the IT space, we’re constantly introduced to new terms, concepts, technologies and practices. In many cases, we view these terms as IT-specific to help us be more proficient and cutting-edge. Or at least that’s what we strive to achieve. With many companies trying to disrupt the verticals they target, it’s important for […]

Capturing reliable telemetry on your apps is less about which toolchains you use, and more about using them effectively to automate the processes and techniques we discussed in my prior blogs (part 1, part 2, part 3) in this series. Don’t get me wrong, having the right tools is paramount, but when it comes to […]

In the last few years, we’ve heard a lot of buzz about cloud strategies. Although it has become something of a buzzword in broader circles, from a technical perspective, the purposes of “cloud” can be boiled down into two objectives: Actively manage as little infrastructure as possible Facilitate change within applications as much as possible From […]