Quick Thoughts

Businesses need to be agile to compete in today’s global economy. Programmers use various tools and techniques in order to meet this business requirement. The challenge is great and quite complex. Going too fast without the right approach can lead to ephemeral success.

I believe that Microservices give us the agility and architectural patterns that empower us to scale and create value at a far greater pace for the business compared to using a traditional tiered architectures approach.

Forget about 3-tier architectures, they just doesn’t scale. Stateless services need to rebuild their internal state for every call, and they can generate tremendous pressure on data stores. Consequently, this generates back pressure that bubbles up through the layers of our solution and reaches out to the edge. Back pressure then translates into unavailable services. The key is Data Locality and Stateful Services.

Lessons Learned – On #Azure, Log Everything!

Log everything, I mean it! If it wasn’t logged, it never happened.

So you’re probably thinking “doesn’t logging tax an application’s performance?” Absolutely, some logging frameworks can even bring down your application under load. So you really need to be careful about what you log. Therefore, we should log everything that can help us figure out what went horribly wrong. I used the past tense, because on the cloud it’s normal to fail. Never build an application without thinking of Mean Time to Recovery. In other words, how will you recover and how long will it take. Sometimes, when you start on a fresh project, you can only plan for the obvious cases. That means that we have a lot to learn from a brand new application. So in order to facilitate this learning process, I urge you to log anything that can help the DevOps that will get a phone call late at night. Who knows… you might be the one supporting this application.

Take a moment and think about your system. What would you need to know, to be able to identify what went wrong?

Running applications on the cloud without meaningful logs is like flying an airplane without windows or instruments. We know we’re going somewhere… well we think we’re going somewhere. But really where are we going? Is the engine on? Are we climbing or descending? How high are we?

Are these questions making you uneasy?

Let’s think about our applications, do we really know what’s going on? Sure we have performance counters around CPU, Network, Memory and Disk utilization. But what kind of information does that really provide about our application? Knowing that a Virtual Machine (VM) is running, is like being on an airplane without knowing where we’re going. Having meaningful logs provides us with the insights required to know where we’re going.