Alternatives to Envoy

At my company, we are trying to move away from a monolith into microservices led architecture. We are now stuck with a problem to establish a communication mechanism between microservices. Since, we are planning to use service meshes and something like Dapr/Istio, we are not sure on how to split services between the two. Service meshes offer Traffic Routing or Splitting whereas, Dapr can offer state management and service-service invocation. At the same time both of them provide mLTS, Metrics, Resiliency and tracing. How to choose who should offer what?

As for the new support of service mesh pattern by Kong, I wonder how does it compare to Istio?

Our whole DevOps stack consists of the following tools:

• GitHub (incl. GitHub Pages/Markdown for Documentation, GettingStarted and HowTo's) for collaborative review and code management tool
• Respectively Git as revision control system
• SourceTree as Git GUI
• Visual Studio Code as IDE
• CircleCI for continuous integration (automatize development process)
• Prettier / TSLint / ESLint as code linter
• SonarQube as quality gate
• Docker as container management (incl. Docker Compose for multi-container application management)
• VirtualBox for operating system simulation tests
• Kubernetes as cluster management for docker containers
• Heroku for deploying in test environments
• nginx as web server (preferably used as facade server in production environment)
• SSLMate (using OpenSSL) for certificate management
• Amazon EC2 (incl. Amazon S3) for deploying in stage (production-like) and production environments
• PostgreSQL as preferred database system
• Redis as preferred in-memory database/store (great for caching)

The main reason we have chosen Kubernetes over Docker Swarm is related to the following artifacts:

• Key features: Easy and flexible installation, Clear dashboard, Great scaling operations, Monitoring is an integral part, Great load balancing concepts, Monitors the condition and ensures compensation in the event of failure.
• Applications: An application can be deployed using a combination of pods, deployments, and services (or micro-services).
• Functionality: Kubernetes as a complex installation and setup process, but it not as limited as Docker Swarm.
• Monitoring: It supports multiple versions of logging and monitoring when the services are deployed within the cluster (Elasticsearch/Kibana (ELK), Heapster/Grafana, Sysdig cloud integration).
• Scalability: All-in-one framework for distributed systems.
• Other Benefits: Kubernetes is backed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), huge community among container orchestration tools, it is an open source and modular tool that works with any OS.

We chose AWS because, at the time, it was really the only cloud provider to choose from.

We tend to use their basic building blocks (EC2, ELB, Amazon S3, Amazon RDS) rather than vendor specific components like databases and queuing. We deliberately decided to do this to ensure we could provide multi-cloud support or potentially move to another cloud provider if the offering was better for our customers.

We’ve utilized c3.large nodes for both the Node.js deployment and then for the .NET Core deployment. Both sit as backends behind an nginx instance and are managed using scaling groups in Amazon EC2 sitting behind a standard AWS Elastic Load Balancing (ELB).

While we’re satisfied with AWS, we do review our decision each year and have looked at Azure and Google Cloud offerings.

#CloudHosting #WebServers #CloudStorage #LoadBalancerReverseProxy

Around the time of their Series A, Pinterest’s stack included Python and Django, with Tornado and Node.js as web servers. Memcached / Membase and Redis handled caching, with RabbitMQ handling queueing. Nginx, HAproxy and Varnish managed static-delivery and load-balancing, with persistent data storage handled by MySQL.

We're using Git through GitHub for public repositories and GitLab for our private repositories due to its easy to use features. Docker and Kubernetes are a must have for our highly scalable infrastructure complimented by HAProxy with Varnish in front of it. We are using a lot of npm and Visual Studio Code in our development sessions.

We switched to Traefik so we can use the REST API to dynamically configure subdomains and have the ability to redirect between multiple servers.

We still use nginx with a docker-compose to expose the traffic from our APIs and TCP microservices, but for managing routing to the internet Traefik does a much better job

The biggest win for naologic was the ability to set dynamic configurations without having to restart the server

We are looking to configure a load balancer with some admin UI. We are currently struggling to decide between NGINX, Traefik, HAProxy, and Envoy. We will use a load balancer in a containerized environment and the load balancer should flexible and easy to reload without changes in case containers are scaled up.

As we've evolved or added additional infrastructure to our stack, we've biased towards managed services. Most new backing stores are Amazon RDS instances now. We do use self-managed PostgreSQL with TimescaleDB for time-series data—this is made HA with the use of Patroni and Consul.

We also use managed Amazon ElastiCache instances instead of spinning up Amazon EC2 instances to run Redis workloads, as well as shifting to Amazon Kinesis instead of Kafka.

Since the beginning, Cal Henderson has been the CTO of Slack. Earlier this year, he commented on a Quora question summarizing their current stack.

• Web: a mix of JavaScript/ES6 and React.
• Desktop: And Electron to ship it as a desktop application.
• Android: a mix of Java and Kotlin.
• iOS: written in a mix of Objective C and Swift.

• The core application and the API written in PHP/Hack that runs on HHVM.
• The data is stored in MySQL using Vitess.
• Caching is done using Memcached and MCRouter.
• The search service takes help from SolrCloud, with various Java services.
• The messaging system uses WebSockets with many services in Java and Go.
• Load balancing is done using HAproxy with Consul for configuration.
• Most services talk to each other over gRPC,
• Some Thrift and JSON-over-HTTP
• Voice and video calling service was built in Elixir.

• Built using open source tools including Presto, Spark, Airflow, Hadoop and Kafka.

• For server configuration and management we use Terraform, Chef and Kubernetes.
• We use Prometheus for time series metrics and ELK for logging.

How Uber developed the open source, end-to-end distributed tracing Jaeger , now a CNCF project:

Distributed tracing is quickly becoming a must-have component in the tools that organizations use to monitor their complex, microservice-based architectures. At Uber, our open source distributed tracing system Jaeger saw large-scale internal adoption throughout 2016, integrated into hundreds of microservices and now recording thousands of traces every second.

Here is the story of how we got here, from investigating off-the-shelf solutions like Zipkin, to why we switched from pull to push architecture, and how distributed tracing will continue to evolve:

https://eng.uber.com/distributed-tracing/

(GitHub Pages : https://www.jaegertracing.io/, GitHub: https://github.com/jaegertracing/jaeger)

Bindings/Operator: Python Java Node.js Go C++ Kubernetes JavaScript OpenShift C# Apache Spark

Our first experience with .NET core was when we developed our OSS feature management platform - Tweek (https://github.com/soluto/tweek). We wanted to create a solution that is able to run anywhere (super important for OSS), has excellent performance characteristics and can fit in a multi-container architecture. We decided to implement our rule engine processor in F# , our main service was implemented in C# and other components were built using JavaScript / TypeScript and Go.

Visual Studio Code worked really well for us as well, it worked well with all our polyglot services and the .Net core integration had great cross-platform developer experience (to be fair, F# was a bit trickier) - actually, each of our team members used a different OS (Ubuntu, macos, windows). Our production deployment ran for a time on Docker Swarm until we've decided to adopt Kubernetes with almost seamless migration process.

After our positive experience of running .Net core workloads in containers and developing Tweek's .Net services on non-windows machines, C# had gained back some of its popularity (originally lost to Node.js), and other teams have been using it for developing microservices, k8s sidecars (like https://github.com/Soluto/airbag), cli tools, serverless functions and other projects...