Book Image

Cloud Native Applications with Ballerina

By : Dhanushka Madushan
Book Image

Cloud Native Applications with Ballerina

By: Dhanushka Madushan

Overview of this book

The Ballerina programming language was created by WSO2 for the modern needs of developers where cloud native development techniques have become ubiquitous. Ballerina simplifies how programmers develop and deploy cloud native distributed apps and microservices. Cloud Native Applications with Ballerina will guide you through Ballerina essentials, including variables, types, functions, flow control, security, and more. You'll explore networking as an in-built feature in Ballerina, which makes it a first-class language for distributed computing. With this app development book, you'll learn about different networking protocols as well as different architectural patterns that you can use to implement services on the cloud. As you advance, you'll explore multiple design patterns used in microservice architecture and use serverless in Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure platforms. You will also get to grips with Docker, Kubernetes, and serverless platforms to simplify maintenance and the deployment process. Later, you'll focus on the Ballerina testing framework along with deployment tools and monitoring tools to build fully automated observable cloud applications. By the end of this book, you will have learned how to apply the Ballerina language for building scalable, resilient, secured, and easy-to-maintain cloud native Ballerina projects and applications.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics
4
Section 2: Building Microservices with Ballerina
8
Section 3: Moving on with Cloud Native

Tracing with Ballerina

Traces are one of the important pillars of observability. This approach is important, especially in a distributed cloud system, where the requests go through different servers. Tracking a single message is complex just by using logs in a distributed system. OpenTelemetry is one of the popular tracing standards used in the industry. We will use the Jaeger tracing tool, which supports OpenTelemetry implementation, to collect and analyze traces as examples in this section.

Understanding the OpenTelemetry standard

OpenTelemetry is an open source observability framework that we can use to observe cloud native systems with traces. Traces can be used to track how a request flows through the system over different services. In this section, let's understand multiple terms used in tracing.

Span is the logical unit of work. A span has an operation life cycle with the starting time and ending time. A trace is an acyclic graph of spans with references. A trace...