9 posts tagged with "load-management"

Service Mesh technologies such as Istio have brought great advancements to the Cloud Native industry with load management and security features. However, despite all these advancements, Applications running on Service Mesh technologies are unable to prioritize critical traffic during peak load times. Therefore, we still have real-world problems such as back-end services getting overloaded because of excess load, leading to a degraded user experience. While it is close to impossible to predict when a sudden increase in load will happen, it is possible to bring a crucial and essential feature in Service Meshes to handle unexpected scenarios: Observability-driven load management.

In this blog post, we will discuss the benefits of Istio and how FluxNinja Aperture can elevate Istio to be a robust service mesh technology that can handle any unexpected scenario by leveraging advanced load management capabilities.

Web services must be equipped with the ability to anticipate and manage unpredictable traffic surges, a crucial requirement for businesses with a growing online presence. Failure to do so can lead to a degraded user experience, resulting in potential revenue loss over time. Users expect seamless and reliable service, and any disruptions or downtime can severely impact a business's reputation.

By taking a proactive approach to managing unpredictable traffic surges, web services can ensure the ongoing satisfaction of their users and the long-term success of their business. It is crucial for businesses to prioritize user journeys and invest in solutions that can help navigate these challenges.

At a Glance:

• The blog aims to demystify the process of coupling HashiCorp Consul, a widely adopted service mesh, with FluxNinja Aperture, a platform specializing in observability-driven load management.
• HashiCorp Consul and FluxNinja Aperture's technical teams collaborated to enable seamless integration. This is facilitated through the Consul’s Envoy extension system, leveraging features like external authorization and OpenTelemetry Access logging.
• By integrating these two platforms, the service reliability and performance of networked applications can be significantly improved. The synergy offers adaptive rate-limiting, workload prioritization, global quota management, and real-time monitoring, turning a previously manual siloed process of traffic adjustments into an automated, real-time operation.

In the dynamic world of software, modern applications are undergoing constant transformation, breaking down into smaller, nimble units. This metamorphosis accelerates both development and deployment, a boon for businesses eager to innovate. Yet, this evolution isn't without its challenges. Think of hurdles like service discovery, ensuring secure inter-service communication, achieving clear observability, and the intricacies of network automation. That's where HashiCorp Consul comes into play.

Imagine a bustling highway system, a complex network of roads, bridges, tunnels, and intersections, each designed to handle a certain amount of traffic. Now, consider the events that lead to traffic jams - accidents, road work, or a sudden influx of vehicles. These incidents cause traffic to back up, and often, a jam in one part of the highway triggers a jam in another. A bottleneck on a bridge, for example, can lead to a jam on the road leading up to it. Congestion creates many complications, from delays and increased travel times, to drivers getting annoyed over wasted time and too much fuel burned. These disruptions don’t just hurt the drivers, they hit the whole economy. Goods are delayed and services are disrupted as employees arrive late (and angry) at work.

But highway systems are not left to the mercy of these incidents. Over the years, they have evolved to incorporate a multitude of strategies to handle such failures and unexpected events. Emergency lanes, traffic lights, and highway police are all part of the larger traffic management system. When congestion occurs, traffic may be re-routed to alternate routes. During peak hours, on-ramps are metered to control the influx of vehicles. If an accident occurs, the affected lanes are closed, and traffic is diverted to other lanes. Despite their complexities and occasional hiccups, these strategies aim to manage traffic as effectively as possible.

We’ve been hearing about rate limiting quite a lot these days, being implemented throughout popular services like Twitter and Reddit. Companies are finding it more and more important to control the abuse of services and keep costs under control.

Before I started working as a developer advocate, I built quite a few things, including integrations and services that catered to specific business needs. One thing that was common while building integrations was the need to be aware of rate limits when making calls to third-party services. It’s worth making sure my integration doesn't abuse the third-party service API. On the other hand, third-party services also implement their own rate-limiting rules at the edge to prevent being overwhelmed. But how does all this actually work? How do we set this up? What are the benefits of rate limiting? We’ll cover these topics, and then move on to the reasons why adaptive rate limiting is necessary.

Have you ever tried to buy a ticket online for a concert and had to wait or refresh the page every three seconds when an unexpected error appeared? Or have you ever tried to purchase something during Black Friday and experienced moments of anxiety because the loader just kept on… well… loading, and nothing appeared? We all know it, and we all get frustrated when errors occur and we don't know what's wrong with the website and why we can't buy the ticket we want.

Even thirty years since its inception, PostgreSQL continues to gain traction, thriving in an environment of rapidly evolving open source projects. While some technologies appear and vanish swiftly, others, like the PostgreSQL database, prove their longevity, illustrating that they can withstand the test of time. It has become the preferred choice by many organizations for data storage, from general data storage to an asteroid tracking database. Companies are running PostgreSQL clusters with petabytes of data.

San Francisco — FluxNinja is thrilled to announce the General Availability of its innovative open source tool, Aperture. This cutting-edge solution is designed to enable prioritized load shedding driven by observability and graceful degradation of non-critical services, effectively preventing total system collapse. Furthermore, Aperture intelligently auto-scales essential resources only when necessary, resulting in significant infrastructure cost savings.

In today's world, the internet is the most widely used technology. Everyone, from individuals to products, seeks to establish a strong online presence. This has led to a significant increase in users accessing various online services, resulting in a surge of traffic to websites and web applications.

Because of this surge in user traffic, companies now prioritize estimating the number of potential users when launching new products or websites, due to capacity constraints which lead to website downtime, for example, after the announcement of ChatGPT 3.5, there was a massive influx of traffic and interest from people all around the world. In such situations, it is essential to have load management in place to avoid possible business loss.