If you’re responsible for a microservices app, you may be familiar with the idea of a “latency budget.” This is the maximum latency, measured as total request time, that you need for the app to work, in order to meet your SLAs and keep stakeholders happy. For a stock trading or financial services app, this budget might be the barest of microseconds.
An IBM survey of IT executives, developer executives, and developers found that 87% of microservices users agreed that microservices adoption is worthwhile. Microservices are popular with both technology leaders and developers, making them a highly effective tool for businesses of all sizes. Microservices have many uses, and security is one area where micro services can both help — and harm.
Organizations are increasingly turning to microservices to facilitate their ongoing digital transformations. According to ITProPortal, more than three quarters (77%) of software engineers, systems and technical architects, engineers and decision makers said in a 2020 report that their organizations had adopted microservices. Almost all (92%) of those respondents reported a high level of success.
What is a microservice? Should you be using microservices? How are microservices related to containers and Kubernetes? If these things keep coming up in your day-to-day and you need an overview in 10 minutes, this blog post is for you. Fundamentally, a microservice is just a computer program which runs on a server or a virtual computing instance and responds to network requests.
Over the past few years enterprises and industry leaders have been steadily adopting microservices to drive their business forward. At this point, companies like Amazon, and Google, to name a few, must agree that the microservices style of architecture is much more than a passing trend. Along with the many benefits of updating monolith systems to microservices architecture, there are also new security challenges that organizations need to address.
How companies like Netflix, Pinterest, Yelp, Chef, and Atlassian use OPA for ‘who-and what-can-do-what’ application policy. In the cloud-native space, microservice architectures and containers are reshaping the way that enterprises build and deploy applications. They function, in a word, differently than traditional monolithic applications.
Microservices and Kubernetes have completely changed the way we reason about network security. Luckily, Kubernetes network security policies (KNP) are a native mechanism to address this issue at the correct level of abstraction. Implementing a network policy is challenging, as developers and ops need to work together to define proper rules. However, the best approach is to adopt a zero trust framework for network security using Kubernetes native controls.
Cloud-native organizations embracing microservices are running into an unavoidable security question: how to handle microservice authorization controls? The central problem is this: unlike monolithic app structures, microservices architectures expose dozens more functionality through APIs, which can leave them vulnerable to attack.
We’ve had an exciting past six months at Styra, from a Series A funding announcement to tremendous growth in the Open Policy Agent (OPA) community to new enhancements to our commercial product, Styra’s Declarative Authorization Service (DAS). All of this great momentum maps to our overarching vision of unifying authorization and policy for the cloud-native environment.
Microservices provide great benefits to development organizations. They enable multiple autonomous development teams to work on the same application, maintaining efficiency,speed, and utilization of modern resources such as open source, containers and programming languages. The Microservice paradigm simplifies application building,debugging, management, deployment, scalability and of course time to market.
