Apache SkyWalking application performance monitoring tool
Apache SkyWalking, Observability, Open Source

3X performance improvement in SkyWalking’s recent 6.1 release

Apache SkyWalking, the observability analysis and application performance monitoring (APM) tool, shattered its own performance record with its recent 6.1 release.

Designed especially for microservices, cloud native and container based architecture, SkyWalking provides distributed tracing, service mesh telemetry analysis, metric aggregation and workload visualization.

Following SkyWalking’s integration with Istio and Envoy-based Service Mesh at the end of 2018, our colleague, Hongtao Gao, set a performance baseline with his blog post SkyWalking performance in Service Mesh scenario.

Using an 8 CPU, 16GB VM test environment, SkyWalking was found to support 25K telemetry data per second, or 100K data per second in a 3-node cluster using elasticsearch as storage.

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Matt Klein - Envoy Proxy
Envoy Proxy & GetEnvoy, Events, Open Source, Tetrate

Envoy Proxy: Matt Klein on the standard data plane and where it’s going

Matt Klein, the creator of Envoy, says he had greatly underestimated the market demand for a proxy that could be used in a generic way. The Lyft software engineer wrote Envoy as a “communication bus” to handle issues like rate limiting, circuit breaking, and load balancing. It facilitates network-transparent applications and allows developers to focus on business logic rather than debugging and network management.

The keynote at Tetrate’s Service Mesh Day 2019 spoke about the rise of Envoy, its ecosystem, and its growth from a proxy into more of a platform.

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Apache SkyWalking application performance monitoring tool
Apache SkyWalking, Observability

Apache SkyWalking: The New Stack features “the APM for the Heterogeneous New Stack”

Apache SkyWalking, the open source APM that Tetrate has embraced as the path to observability, was featured yestreday by the New Stack, the podcast and DevOps tech blog.

In “[SkyWalking: APM for the Heterogeneous New Stack] (https://thenewstack.io/skywalking-apm-for-the-heterogeneous-new-stack/),” Susan Hall describes SkyWalking founder Sheng Wu– who is now a Tetrate engineer– grew SkyWalking in just four years from a small project supported by a handful of volunteers into an Apache Top Level Project with hundreds of contributors, used in more than 70 companies. SkyWalking provides a “holistic platform for collection, aggregation and domain specific query system,” Wu told the New Stack. “It also is truly heterogeneous, in that it not only has agents for different systems, it also seamlessly blends service mesh in.”

Tetrate has endorsed SkyWalking as an essential tool for any company looking for a complete and meaningful map of their entire, distributed system. SkyWalking went service-mesh ready with its last, 6.0 release, and will soon support service mesh observability directly from Envoy.

New Stack highlighted the following SkyWalking features:

  • A polyglot agent-based instrumentation mechanism.
  • Tools that focus solely on distributed tracing usually don’t provide agents. Multiple language agents provided, especially with auto instrumentation supported, in Java, .NET and Nodejs.
  • Performance: Its impact CPU on the monitored application is less than 10%, even with a payload instance of just over 5k transactions per second/requests per second. This lightweight payload would support 100% trace sampling in production environments.
  • Observability for distributed systems based on traditional, agent-based and service mesh architectures, with consistent analysis and visualization.
  • Topology and dependency analysis without sampling.
  • Easy operation and maintenance achieved directly by our clusters, without reliance on big data technology

Check back soon for SkyWalking’s performance-boosting 6.1 release, expected at the end of May.

Contact us to learn more about Apache SkyWalking!

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Service Mesh - Managing Service-to-Service
AWS, Envoy Proxy & GetEnvoy, Istio, Open Source, Service Mesh, Tetrate

451’s take on service mesh: The ‘Swiss Army Knife’ of modern software

Analysts Jean Atelsek and William Fellows of 451 Research give their take on the role of service mesh as a cloud-native enabler, calling it a potential “Swiss Army Knife of modern-day software, solving for the most vexing challenges of distributed microservices based applications.”

 

The role of service mesh as a cloud-native enabler is building fast

In a multi-cloud, hybrid IT architecture world, where applications are deployed as microservices, the use of service meshes is becoming an important (although not mandatory) component of cloud- native architecture. Early deployments of the technology – which promises network routing, security and configuration control for microservices-based applications – are largely based on open source code, with Envoy emerging as a de facto standard data plane.

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CVE Fixes, Envoy Proxy & GetEnvoy, Security

Envoy CVE security fixes for GetEnvoy

The Envoy security team today [announced] the availability of Envoy 1.9.1 to address two high-risk vulnerabilities related to header values and HTTP URL paths.

We also released the GetEnvoy build of Envoy 1.9.1 and the latest master build that fixes the vulnerability. Users are encouraged to upgrade to 1.9.1 or latest master build to address the following CVEs:

  • CVE-2019-9900: When parsing HTTP/1.x header values, Envoy 1.9 and before does not reject embedded zero characters (NUL, ASCII 0x0). This allows remote attackers crafting header values containing embedded NUL characters to potentially bypass header matching rules, gaining access to unauthorized resources.
  • CVE-2019-9901: Envoy does not normalize HTTP URL paths in Envoy 1.9 and before. A remote attacker may craft a path with a relative path, e.g. something/../admin, to bypass access control, e.g. a block on /admin. A backend server could then interpret the unnormalized path and provide an attacker access beyond the scope provided for by the access control policy.
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Case Studies, Istio, Tetrate

Case Study: Tetrate Resolves the Complexities of NAV’s Transition to Istio

About the Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV)

The Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration (NAV) is the government directorate responsible for implementing Norway’s welfare model, with services ranging from child benefits to pensions. NAV is responsible for distributing a third of Norway’s national budget. In five years, it’s estimated that 95% of the Norwegian population will be covered by one of NAV’s services.

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Apache SkyWalking, Observability, Open Source

Apache SkyWalking: v6 is service-mesh ready

Context

The integration of SkyWalking and Istio Service Mesh yields an essential open-source tool for resolving the chaos created by the proliferation of siloed, cloud-based services.

Apache SkyWalking is an open, modern performance management tool for distributed services, designed especially for microservices, cloud native and container-based (Docker, K8s, Mesos) architectures. We at Tetrate believe it is going to be an important project for understanding the performance of microservices. The recently released v6 integrates with Istio Service Mesh and focuses on metrics and tracing. It natively understands the most common language runtimes (Java, .Net, and NodeJS). With its new core code, SkyWalking v6 also supports Istio telemetry data formats, providing consistent analysis, persistence, and visualization.

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