{"id":70018,"date":"2022-10-25T13:21:11","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T13:21:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/?p=4004012"},"modified":"2022-10-25T13:21:11","modified_gmt":"2022-10-25T13:21:11","slug":"taming-troubleshooting-at-the-cloud-native-connectivity-layer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/?p=70018","title":{"rendered":"Taming troubleshooting at the cloud-native \u2018connectivity layer\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id>\n<p> Diagnosing the health of connections between modern API-driven applications is a beast. Isovalent and Grafana Labs are working to give platform teams simpler options. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<div id>\n<figure id=\"attachment_4004017\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-4004017\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-article wp-image-4004017\" src=\"http:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/taming-troubleshooting-at-the-cloud-native-connectivity-layer.jpg\" alt=\"cloud computing\" width=\"770\" height=\"514\"><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-4004017\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Image: ShpilbergStudios\/Adobe Stock<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>KubeCon \u2014 underway this week in Detroit \u2014 is always a bellwether of where the pain points still exist around Kubernetes adoption, as platform teams evolve from the so-called \u201cDay 1\u201d challenges to the \u201cDay 2\u201d requirements needed to make K8s infrastructure easier to scale and operate.<\/p>\n<p>A clear focus this year at KubeCon is how platform teams troubleshoot what\u2019s increasingly being referred to as the cloud-native \u201cconnectivity layer.\u201d Integration between open source Grafana and Cilium brings heightened observability to this layer.<\/p>\n<h2>Working in the dark<\/h2>\n<p>\u201cThe shift toward building modern applications as a collection of API-driven services has many benefits, but let\u2019s be honest, simplified monitoring and troubleshooting is not one of them,\u201d <a href=\"https:\/\/grafana.com\/blog\/2022\/10\/24\/grafana-and-cilium-deep-ebpf-powered-observability-for-kubernetes-and-cloud-native-infrastructure\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">said Dan Wendlandent<\/a>, CEO at Isovalent. \u201cIn a world where a single click by a user may result in dozens, or even hundreds, of API calls under the hood, any fault, over-capacity or latency in the underlying connectivity can and often will negatively impact application behavior in ways that can be devilishly difficult to detect and root cause.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>SEE: <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/resource-library\/whitepapers\/hiring-kit-cloud-engineer\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">Hiring Kit: Cloud Engineer<\/a> (TechRepublic Premium)<\/strong><\/p>\n<aside class=\"pinbox right\">\n<h3 class=\"heading\">Cloud: Must-read coverage<\/h3>\n<\/aside>\n<p>And those devilish details are many. For one, the container replicas that Kubernetes creates of each service across multi-tenant Linux clusters make it very difficult to pinpoint where these connectivity issues occur. Between the application layer, and the underlying Layer 7 network, cloud-native connectivity is abstractions on top of abstractions \u2014 endless layers to troubleshoot. And because K8s clusters often run thousands of different services as containerized workloads that are constantly being created and destroyed, there is a ton of noise and ephemerality to contend with.<\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s a completely different architecture than legacy VM environments, where direct access to low-level network counters and tools like netstat and tcpdump were once common fare for troubleshooting connectivity, and where IPs were instructive about the sources and destinations of connections.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn the \u2018olden days\u2019 of static applications, servers run as physical nodes or VMs on dedicated VLANs and subnets, and the IP address or subnet of a workload was often a long-term meaningful way to identify a specific application,\u201d said Wendlandt. \u201cThis meant that IP-based network logs or counters could be analyzed to make meaningful statements about the behavior of an application.\u2026 Outside the Kubernetes cluster, when application developers use external APIs from cloud providers or other third parties, the IP addresses associated with these destinations often vary from one connection attempt to another, making it hard to interpret using IP-based logs.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>All is not lost, however. Relief may be ahead for platform teams, made possible by eBPF- based Cilium.<\/p>\n<h2>Enhancing observability through Cilium and Grafana<\/h2>\n<p>Cilium \u2014 a CNCF incubating project that\u2019s becoming a de facto container networking interface for all the major cloud service providers\u2019 Kubernetes engines \u2014 builds on top of eBPF\u2019s ability to inject kernel-level observability into a new connectivity layer.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCilium leverages eBPF to ensure that all connectivity observability data is associated not only with the IP addresses, but also with the higher-level service identity of applications on both sides of a network connection,\u201d said Wendlandt. \u201cBecause eBPF operates at the Linux kernel layer, this added observability does not require any changes to applications themselves or the use of heavyweight and complex sidecar proxies. Instead, Cilium inserts transparently beneath existing workloads, scaling horizontally within a Kubernetes cluster as it grows.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Today at KubeCon, Grafana Labs and Isovalent, the company whose founders include the creator of Cilium and the eBPF Linux kernel maintainer, have announced a new Cilium-Grafana integration. This Cilium integration into the Grafana stack means platform teams that want a consistent observability experience for service connectivity across their Kubernetes environments can start using their same Grafana visualization tools to roll up their logging, tracing and metrics across the cloud-native connectivity layer.<\/p>\n<p>This integration of the two open source technologies marks the beginning of the joint engineering initiatives launched after Grafana Labs\u2019 strategic investment in Isovalent\u2019s Series B funding round last month.<\/p>\n<p>I <a href=\"https:\/\/www.techrepublic.com\/article\/developers-how-observability-complements-the-future-of-monitoring\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener sponsored noreferrer\">previously argued<\/a> that \u201cobservability\u201d seems to have risen as the cool new term for much the same metrics, logs and traces that we\u2019ve been analyzing long before the term was coined. But clearly this cloud-native connectivity issue is an especially confounding problem domain for platform teams to troubleshoot, and with this new eBPF-driven, kernel-level data being exposed as a consistent connectivity datasource, there appears to be a very high ceiling for new observability use cases being discussed at KubeCon this week.<\/p>\n<p>Disclosure: I work for MongoDB but the views expressed herein are mine.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Diagnosing the health of connections between modern API-driven applications is a beast. Isovalent and Grafana Labs are working to give platform teams simpler options. Image: ShpilbergStudios\/Adobe Stock KubeCon \u2014 underway this week in Detroit \u2014 is always a bellwether of where the pain points still exist around Kubernetes adoption, as platform teams evolve from the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":70019,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[327,40,783],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-70018","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-api","category-cloud","category-cloudsync"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70018","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=70018"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70018\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/70019"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=70018"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=70018"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloudnewshub.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=70018"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}