Our twenty-sixth issue of the Architects’ Newsletter focuses on the topic of multi-cloud and cloud-native application development. We believe these topics are vitally important, and in our latest DevOps and Cloud InfoQ Trends Report these themes are visible at every stage of adoption. Therefore, understanding all the emerging technologies, patterns, and techniques is essential for a modern software architect.

News

Three Pillars of Service Mesh, Service Mesh Interface, and Cilium

InfoQ recently sat down with Oliver Gould, co-founder and CTO of Buoyant, and explored the topic of service mesh. Gould commented that Kubernetes is “eating the world”, and he hopes that in the future we can use the primitives defined in this framework as a common language for talking about cloud systems.

Service mesh technology is still young, and the ecosystem is still very much a work in progress, but there have been several recent interesting developments within this space. One of these was the announcement of the service mesh interface (SMI) at the recent KubeCon EU in Barcelona. Gould discusses how the SMI spec seeks to unlock service mesh integrators and implementers.

Related to this topic, Thomas Graf recently joined the InfoQ podcast to talk about Cilium, a CNI plugin that offers layer 7 features typically seen with a service mesh. Cilium provides both in-kernel and sidecar deployments. For sidecar deployments, it can work with Envoy to switch between kernel space and user space code. The focus is on flexibility, performance, and low overhead.

Bert Ertman: Are We Really Cloud-Native?

In this recording (with transcript) of a recent QCon presentation, Bert Ertman went beyond the hype of “being cloud-native”, and focused instead on what being cloud-native actually requires in terms of skills and experience, with a particular focus on the Java ecosystem. He opened the talk by quoting Corey Quinn’s joke that “Kubernetes is the Greek god of spending money on cloud services”, and quickly moved on to cover the evolution of cloud, the ability to package and run Java applications for this infrastructure, and how to make good technical and economic decisions.

Key takeaways included: moving to the cloud involves a cultural shift as much as a technology shift; cloud can enable more rapid experimentation when implemented correctly; engineers should be broadly skilled with appropriate access to specialists on-demand.

Lightbend Released CloudState, Providing a Spec for Managing “Serverless” State and a Reference Implementation with Knative

Lightbend has recently released CloudState, an open source serverless framework designed to implement stateful management on the Knative and Kubernetes stack. Lightbend, the team behind Akka and the Play framework, have stated that CloudState consists of two components: a standardization effort to define a state management specification, which includes a protocol and a Technology Compatibility Kit (TCK); and a reference implementation, which implements the backend and a set of client API libraries in many languages.

Q&A with Gojko Adzic on the Book Running Serverless

In the book Running Serverless, Gojko Adzic introduces the basic concepts of serverless, including detailed step-by-step instructions to get started on AWS, but he also goes beyond the basics and explains subjects like storage, session state, and event handling. The book is divided into three parts with the first part explaining the basic development tasks. The second part is focused on working with AWS services, and the final part deals with the design of serverless applications.

The book targets developers and architects who have no experience with serverless applications, and those who want to learn about AWS Serverless Application Model (SAM). Key takeaways from the Q&A included: to benefit from serverless applications, developers must rethink how applications handle sessions and storage, and learn a new way for deploying; there are technical constraints in Lambdas that must be considered when building and running applications; Lambdas are suitable for many use cases, but not all; and only business logic should run in Lambda functions—other responsibilities can be handled by services.

Case Study

HashiConf US 2019: Terraform and Consul Updates, Multi-* Workflows, and Shared Learning

At the fifth HashiConf US conference, held in Seattle, HashiCorp co-founders Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto made several new feature announcements for their Terraform and Consul products, including the full release of the SaaS-based Terraform Cloud workflow management platform and a private beta release of HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure, a fully-managed Consul (service mesh) platform.

David McJannet, HashiCorp CEO, also took to the keynote stage and emphasised the importance to HashiCorp of continuing to support the ecosystem in relation to their tools, partners and customers, and also the wider open source community. He stated that “cloud is a generational shift in the way applications are built and delivered”, and empathised that training must be provided for engineers to embrace new workflows and tooling. In relation to this, there was much discussion at the event about the new discuss.hashicorp.com and learn.hashicorp.com websites, which aim to support engineers in their learning journey. The topic of learning was also explored in more detail in a previous InfoQ podcast with Armon Dadgar.

Key takeaways from the event included: the software delivery world is becoming multi-cloud, multi-platform, and multi-service, and engineers have to adapt to this; focus on implementing effective engineering workflows, not specific tooling; and there is still much that operations teams can learn from developers, and vice versa.

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This edition of The Software Architects' Newsletter is brought to you by:

API Traffic Management 101

The very nature of API traffic has been changing in the past few years. As more companies adopt the pattern of smaller, lightweight services composed into agile, resilient solutions, the amount of interservice traffic (typically called “East–West” traffic) is growing. Organizations that have spent time and resources building up a strong practice in managing traffic from behind the firewall to the outside world (called “North–South” traffic) might find that their tool selection and platform choices are not properly suited for the increased traffic between services behind the firewall.

InfoQ strives to facilitate the spread of knowledge and innovation within this space, and in this newsletter we aim to curate and summarise key learnings from news items, articles and presentations created by industry peers, both on InfoQ and across the web. We aim to keep readers informed and educated about emerging trends, peer-validated early adoption of technologies, and architectural best practices, and are always keen to receive feedback from our readers. We hope you find it useful, but if not you can unsubscribe using the link below.

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