Go with the Flow: Microservices and Containers Done Right!

Microservices and containers are now an integral component in any digital transformation strategy. As organizations look for ways to accelerate their releases, microservices and containers are being adopted at an increasingly rapid pace – as enablers to DevOps and CD. Microservices allow for faster delivery and better scaling. Each service can be developed, deployed and run independently. This enables faster releases, along with an easier and more efficient way to scale applications and development teams. As we've seen in the recent State of the DevOps Report , loosely-coupled architectures (i.e. Microservices) are a key predictor to CD and IT performance. Containers are an efficient way to deploy microservices. In addition, they help ensure consistency of the environment configuration and application code from the developer's machine all the way into Production deployments. While microservices and containers offer a lot of benefits, implementing them successfully comes with quite a few challenges – particularly on the Ops side of things. These new technologies can increase the complexity, scale, and sprawl of the IT environment, tooling and applications that modern enterprises need to operate in. In order to manage these complexities and minimize risk, enterprises need the ability to manage microservices and containers throughout the software delivery lifecycle, without:

1. Risking lock-in to a specific cloud vendor, container orchestration, or point-tool

2. Having to invest a lot of work (and steep learning curve) in rewriting complex scripting in order to have their deployment or release processes fit a new environment or tool. Re-usability of all models (applications, microservices, environments and processes) regardless of the chosen deployment target is key to ensure consistency, predictability and scale, without requiring re-scripting of the pipeline every time.

3. Silo’ing their microservices or containers deployments from the rest of their release practices – which include legacy/monolithic applications, on premises, VMs, and more.

As more organizations are in the process of decomposing their existing monolithic applications into Microservices, or designing new services to take advantage of microservices and containers, they find that they need to incorporate Microservices-based application releases and container orchestration deployments into their Application Release Automation (ARA) processes and tools. They require a DevOps solution that natively supports microservices modeling and deployment automation, has a breadth of integrations with the Container ecosystem, and provides granular visibility and control of all their Microservices pipelines and footprint. CloudBees Flow offers a complete solution for modeling, deploying, releasing and tracking microservices and containers, as part of an integrated end-to-end software delivery strategy. Let's review the key capabilities of the platform around microservices and containers:

Treated as first-level objects, CloudBees Flow allows teams to model microservices independently of applications and environments. This makes it easier to deploy microservices – often using containers – either as part of a 'traditional' application , or as a stand-alone , shared service. This allows you to support both 'traditional' applications (often, these are the apps that are in the process of being gradually de-composed) that incorporate 'hybrid' components of application artifacts and of microservices; as well as greeenfield, purely microservices-based applications.

CloudBees Flow's model-driven approach separates the definition of the microservice from where it is deployed to. This enables you to “Model Once, Deploy Anywhere" - allowing teams the flexibility to easily deploy the same service to any container environment, or port between providers, without having to learn new API integrations or re-code the pipeline. To take the rocket-science out of container deployments, CloudBees Flow boasts the industry’s most comprehensive support for one-click deployments to any container platform. Built-in integrations and plugins – for Docker itself, Kubernetes, Amazon Container Cloud (ECS), Google Container Cloud (GKE), OpenShift, Cloud Foundry, Azure Container Service , and others – all make container deployments and pipeline processes simple to define and easy to re-use. The container plugins also support advanced functionality out of the box, such as container-specific property definitions, deploying and un-deploying processes for microservices, rolling deployments, blue/green, auto-rollback, snapshots, and more.

Microservices introduce new levels of complexity and scale in your application architecture and deployments. It is critical to have the right level of visibility into all of your microservices, knowing how and where they are deployed. The Microservice Deployments Dashboard in CloudBees Flow's Devops Insight provides granular visibility into your Microservices footprint, with a reports that highlight key metrics specific to microserivces, including deployment throughput, success rates, cluster utilization and more. Watch the short demo video to learn more:

Microservices and containers can enable unparalleled developer productivity by allowing teams to independently and securely develop, test and deploy value quickly to customers. CloudBees Flow’s native support for microservices and containers tames the growing complexity of modern application delivery and enables teams to easily take advantage of these new technologies, even for legacy applications! By treating these modern technologies as an integral part of the software delivery strategy, and enabling shared visibility and orchestration across all types of applications and environments, CloudBees Flow helps you accelerate time-to-value, minimize the risk of failed releases, and future-proof for technology evolution.

Download the free Community Edition of CloudBees Flow to easily take advantage and simplify the management of microservices and containers, to accelerate your adoption of these new technologies. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about CloudBees Flow for microservices and containers.

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