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

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed monitoring cloud applications with the Ballerina language by using tools that are commonly used in industry. We also discussed the importance of observability and monitoring cloud native/distributed systems. We have discussed different observability methods with reference to the three pillars of observability.

The first method we discussed was logging. This was the easiest way of collecting valuable information from the system. We discussed using Filebeat to collect logs from an instance or a container. Then, we discussed using Logstash to collect those logs and publish them on Elasticsearch. We also discussed analyzing and visualizing logs with Kibana.

In distributed systems, it is difficult to track the requests flowing through different services. Therefore, we learned how to use distributed tracing to collect and analyze how requests flow among services. We used Jaeger to collect data, which was built on the OpenTracing/OpenTelemetry...