Arijit Mukherji, SignalFx, & Karthik Rau, SignalFx | AWS re:Invent 2018
Channel: SiliconANGLE theCUBE
Date: 28/11/2018

Arijit Mukherji, CTO, SignalFX & Karthik Rau, CEO, SignalFX, sit down with John Walls & Justin Warren at AWS re:Invent 2018 in Las Vegas, NV.

#reInvent #SignalFx #theCUBE

https://siliconangle.com/2018/12/03/navigating-messy-microservices-maze-with-analytics-startupoftheweek/

Navigating messy microservices maze with analytics

Warning to those packing the shopping cart with the freshest tech for sale, such as virtualized container solutions and specialized microservices: The resulting mix is a whole different enchilada than the old nuts and bolts enterprises are used to. Microservices multiplying like germs across distributed, multicloud environments can dizzy development and operations teams.

The landscape is a bit like those messy data lakes; realistically, humans can’t tame it without analytics for categorization, permissions, access, monitoring and security.

SignalFx Inc. learned a trick or two for reigning in chaos in its formative years. The software as a service-based monitoring and analytics platform cut its teeth working with a startup characterized with an overwhelmingly busy IT environment.

“Much of our technical team were responsible for building the monitoring systems at Facebook back in the mid-2000s when they had their famous move fast and break things culture — which today everyone calls DevOps,” said Karthik Rau (pictured, right), founder and chief executive officer at SignalFX.

Today, smaller companies are stealing moves from the playbooks of giants, including Facebook. The endgame is usually agility — the ability to develop and deploy applications and detect and remediate problems quickly. Staying nimble across scattered environments requires new analytics-centric monitoring focused on identifying meaningful patterns, according to Rau.

Rau and Arijit Mukherji (pictured, left), chief technology officer at SignalFx, spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21), co-host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, and guest host Justin Warren (@jpwarren), chief analyst at PivotNine Pty Ltd, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed how they’re attacking microservices sprawl with data-science and analytics technology. (* Disclosure below.)

Not so micro after all
The microservice architecture method structures an application as a bunch of loosely connected services. Developers these days are building a lot of cloud-native applications with microservices and running them in containers. It’s important to note that microservices are not the same as serverless functions, though they are related. What lies beneath the service interface of a microservice are functions — single blocks of code. A function has one simple purpose — say, to process an image or translate data.

Many companies wading into these microservices and containers get swamped by the sheer number of elements. “The individual pieces are becoming smaller and they’re growing in number,” Mukherji said. “So the complexity of those interactions is becoming harder and harder to manage.”

Sixty-three percent of 354 enterprises surveyed by Camunda Services GmbH are currently using microservices. “Improved employee efficiency,” “improved customer/end-user experience,” and “cost savings on infrastructure and other development tools” are the top three business benefits, according to the survey.

The biggest challenge surveyed companies face or expect to face is “lack of visibility into end-to-end business processes that span multiple microservices,” the report stated.

“Microservices architectures provide teams with autonomy and flexibility but also introduce significant new challenges because a company’s core business processes nearly always span multiple microservices, making it difficult to gain visibility into the current state of an end-to-end process and to ensure that errors within a process are handled reliably and consistently,” said Jakob Freund, co-founder and CEO of Camunda. “Camunda’s survey makes it clear that while enterprises are adopting microservices for compelling reasons, the majority will be unintentionally limiting the benefits from the architecture and may even be impeding their ability to provide a better end-user experience.”

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Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS reInvent. (* Disclosure: SignalFx Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither SignalFx nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)