The pandemic has accelerated digital business initiatives. Ultimately, it’s the application that delivers new capabilities to customers and employees; but transformation occurs at several layers to support those applications. At VMware, we see our customers navigating three transformations, each of which supports digital business and app modernization at different levels.

Microservice architecture is a software design pattern in which we write applications by combining several small programs. These programs, which are called microservices, work together for a common goal. For some teams, it takes a lot less time and effort to write several small applications than a single large one.

This article was originally published on InfoQ at December 3rd 2020. If you’ve migrated from a monolith to a microservices architecture you probably experienced it: Modern systems today are far more complex to monitor. Microservices combined with containerized deployment results in highly dynamic systems with many moving parts across multiple layers.

As microservices gain in popularity, containers have become a hot topic for developers. But how do they differ from virtual machines? Will containers replace virtual machines? And when should you choose containers over virtual machines? When it comes to defining virtual machines, the name says it all – machines (servers or desktops) that have been virtualized.

Breaking down larger, monolithic software, services, and applications into microservices has become a standard practice for developers. While this solves many issues, it also creates new ones. Architectures composed of microservices create their own unique challenges. In this article, we are going to break down some of the most common. More specifically, we are going to assess how observability-based solutions can overcome many of these obstacles.

The concept of a microservice perfectly fits the structure of a serverless function, which easily enables deployment and runtime isolation for different services. On the storage side, services such as DynamoDB also make it easier to have independent databases for each microservice and scale them independently (when required or desirable). Before we dive into details, please consider whether the benefits of Microservices abundantly outweigh its disadvantages for your particular project and team.

Microservices and Kubernetes have completely changed the way we reason about network security. Luckily, Kubernetes network security policies (KNP) are a native mechanism to address this issue at the correct level of abstraction. Implementing a network policy is challenging, as developers and ops need to work together to define proper rules. However, the best approach is to adopt a zero trust framework for network security using Kubernetes native controls.