Containers, Microservices, and Service Meshes

I will talk about the dotCloud platform, a platform that was built on 100+ microservices and which supported thousands of production applications running in containers; I will explain the challenges that were faced when building and running it; and how service meshes would (or wouldn’t) have helped. If you don’t want to dive into my previous blog post about dotCloud, all you need to know is that it was a PaaS allowing customers to run a wide range of applications (Java, PHP, Python…) supported by a wide range of data services (MongoDB, MySQL, Redis…) and with a workflow similar to the one of Heroku: you would push your code to the platform, the platform would build container images, and deploy these container images. As for the HTTP routing mesh, later versions provided detailed HTTP metrics, showing error codes and response times; but modern service meshes go above and beyond, and provide integration with metrics collection systems like Prometheus, for instance.

Source: jpetazzo.github.io