microbs - Concepts

Here are the definitions of common terms that you will find in microbs.

microbs provides a command-line interface (CLI) to setup, rollout, and destroy your microbs environment. That environment includes your choice of a Kubernetes cluster, an application that runs in the cluster, an observability solution that monitors both the application and the cluster, and an alerting destination.

Applications ("apps") are bundled microservices that microbs deploys to Kubernetes and instruments for observability. See the ecommerce application as one example.

Variants are simulated issues that you can rollout to your applications. Examples might include code syntax errors, traffic spikes, networking misconfigurations, or anything else that changes the behavior of the application in an undesired way. Variants allow you to test the efficacy of the observability solution. You can ask yourself, "Do I see my expected alerts when this variant runs? Can I use my observability solution to identify the root cause of the variant?"

microbs deploys applications to Kubernetes ("k8s"), the industry standard for container orchestration and microservices. You can configure microbs to deploy to a Kubernetes cluster using one of the Kubernetes plugins.

Observability solutions capture information about the state of an application and its supporting infrastructure over time. That information can include logs, metrics, traces, probes, and synthetics checks. microbs instruments your chosen application and Kubernetes cluster with your choice of an observability solution using one of the observability plugins.

Microservices (or "services") are processes that run on Kubernetes and constitute part of an application. microbs treats an application as a set of services, each of which is implemented as a Kubernetes pod.

Synthetics are human-like traffic sent to your applications. An application may or may not implement a synthetics service. For example, the ecommerce application generates virtual user traffic that runs the steps needed to order a product.

Alerts are notifications of undesired or unusual behaviors of applications or their supporting infrastructure. microbs will implement alerts to allow realistic troubleshooting of variants.

microbs has not fully implemented any alerts plugins yet.