The Importance of Uptime and Efficiency in the Application Economy – InApps 2022

Aspen Mesh sponsored this post.

Modern organizations are using “application value” as a new form of currency in the software-first world. What this means is any business that delivers a product or service to its customers through an application must understand the importance of application security, reliability and feature velocity. As applications become increasingly important to enterprises, so do engineering teams.

Access to engineering talent is now more important to companies than access to capital. About 61% of executives consider this a potential threat to their business. The average developer spends more than 17 hours a week dealing with maintenance issues, such as debugging and refactoring. In addition, they spend approximately four hours a week on “bad code,” which equates to nearly $85 billion worldwide in opportunity cost lost annually. As the necessity of driving business value with applications increases, so does the importance of engineering teams. As customer demands on applications increase, enterprises have two options — increase the size and cost of engineering teams, or increase engineering efficiency.

Couple the need to increase engineering efficiency with the challenges around growing revenue in increasingly competitive and low margin businesses — and the importance of driving value through applications is top of mind for any business that considers itself a software company.

The Advantages and Challenges of Microservices Applications

Microservices architectures allow businesses to keep pace with the competition in their space through application scalability, resiliency and agility. Most importantly, microservices allow enterprises to more quickly deliver new features to customers to maintain customer satisfaction and increase affinity. Microservices provide a powerful way to develop modern applications but they also come with new challenges.

The beauty of service mesh is that it allows decoupling of Dev and Ops along infrastructure lines. The operators can maintain the platform and develop guardrails that ensure enforcement of security and compliance policies without burdening application developers with infrastructure concerns.

A common challenge our customers face is the difficulty of debugging and resolving problems in a microservices environment. It can be challenging to resolve issues in a timely manner, especially when there are cascading failures that can significantly impact the user experience. As a company that maintains a microservices-based SaaS platform, we understand the pain operators and developers go through while dealing with an outage.

Making the Most out of Modern Applications

This is why Aspen Mesh is focused on trying to make it easy for engineering organizations to reduce mean time to recovery (MTTR) through quickly identifying any configuration or application changes that are likely to have caused an outage. We try to offer a much-improved user experience both for users within that company, but more importantly, for their end-users.

A service mesh provides observability, tracing and logging capabilities that make it easy to identify when errors occurred and pinpoint their sources. It brings all of your data together into a single source of truth, removing error-prone processes, and enabling you to get fast, reliable information around downtime, failures and outages. More uptime means more revenue, and the agility with stability that you need for a competitive edge.

The Aspen Mesh platform was designed to allow DevOps teams to address what we consider to be the three most critical areas in providing application agility and stability:

• Proactive anomaly detection, quick incident response and resolution, and workflows that accelerate the remediation process.
• A unified source of multi-dimensional insights into application and infrastructure health and performance that provides context about the entire software system.
• Line of sight into weak points in environments, enabling engineering teams to architect more resilient systems in the future.

There are many tools that allow DevOps teams to more efficiently develop and deploy microservices applications. The beauty of service mesh is that it allows the decoupling of Dev and Ops along infrastructure lines. The operators can maintain the platform and develop guardrails that ensure enforcement of security and compliance policies without burdening application developers with infrastructure concerns.

If you or your team are running Kubernetes-based applications at scale and are seeing the advantages, but know you can get more value out of them by increasing efficiency and more quickly identifying failure root causes, it’s probably time to check out a service mesh. You can reach out to the Aspen Mesh team on how to easily get started or how to best integrate service mesh into your existing stack at [email protected]. Or you can get started yourself with a 30-day free trial of Aspen Mesh.

Feature image via Pixabay.