Making the Most of Containers, Microservices, and Cloud-Native Computing Strategies

David Ishmael, VP, Intelligent Operations (iOps)

Two major transformational cloud-native orchestration and monitoring technologies of the modern era are Kubernetes and Prometheus. But, how can your business take advantage of them? Start here.

Containers, such as Docker, have emerged over the last eight years as a de facto standard for building portable applications that can run the same way regardless of the underlying environment. They do this by packaging the application code together with its runtime environment, such as binaries, libraries, and configuration files.

This enables containerized applications to be moved among different computing environments in the public cloud or data center with the assurance that the containerized application will run the same way regardless of where it’s hosted. The container abstracts out differences in the operating system, network topology, security policies, or storage infrastructure, ensuring a consistent application experience.

Containers don’t just package applications, they also can contain individual pieces of an application such as databases, front-end interfaces, or libraries, that can then be re-assembled or orchestrated into new applications. Kubernetes is the most popular tool to orchestrate these microservices.

Our customers are always asking us for ideas on how to improve their container strategies. Executives are typically interested in better understanding paradigms such as microservices, immutable architecture, and the merits of Kubernetes as the de-facto platform for container orchestration.

Engineers, on the other hand, are usually interested in tips and best practices to get the most out of the free and open-source tools commonly used to manage Kubernetes. The open-source Prometheus monitoring tool is often the subject of many such inquiries. Kubernetes and Prometheus were the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s first two incubated projects.

Fortunately, our partner OpsRamp has invested time and resources to create free educational content to help our extended community answer exactly those questions.

OpsRamp’s Executive Guide to Kubernetes sheds light on the strategic context around the rise of Kubernetes over the past decade. The guide is targeted to CIOs and other technology executives looking to develop a strategy for containerization and building a microservices architecture.

In this guide, you will learn:

  • What containers are and how they differ from virtual machines
  • The benefits of a microservices architecture
  • Reasons to use immutable architecture and how to employ infrastructure-as-code methodologies and tools for server management
  • What Kubernetes is and how it’s indispensable to any container strategy
OpsRamp’s Admin Guide to Prometheus is a set of technical articles to help IT administrators overcome the scaling limitations of this free and open-source monitoring technology. Prometheus is an ideal choice to monitor containerized applications and Kubernetes clusters.

In this guide, you will learn:

  • How to query Prometheus using PromQL
  • The ins-and-outs of Prometheus alerting
  • How to use Thanos to scale Prometheus and make it highly available
  • How to avoid common pitfalls with Prometheus Operator
Continue to check these free guides as more content will be added to them in the coming weeks and months.

OpsRamp is a committed member of the Prometheus community and has embedded its technology in the core of its platform to natively support Prometheus, including the PromQL query language.

To learn more about how to get started, contact iops-sales@trace3.com.
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