In the past few years, several organizations made the jump from monoliths to microservices architecture. This architectural pattern breaks down a large complex application into a collection of smaller loosely coupled services that are easy to maintain, scale, and deploy independently. However, the downside of modern microservices architecture is the inherent complexity of service-to-service discovery and communications.

The pandemic has accelerated digital business initiatives. Ultimately, it’s the application that delivers new capabilities to customers and employees; but transformation occurs at several layers to support those applications. At VMware, we see our customers navigating three transformations, each of which supports digital business and app modernization at different levels.

Microservice architecture is a software design pattern in which we write applications by combining several small programs. These programs, which are called microservices, work together for a common goal. For some teams, it takes a lot less time and effort to write several small applications than a single large one.

With almost every blog you read about monitoring, troubleshooting, or more recently, the observability of modern application stacks, you’ve probably read a statement saying that complexity is growing as a demand for more elasticity increases which makes management of these applications increasingly difficult. This blog will be no exception, but there’s a good reason for that: we just enabled the first Sumo Logic customers with powerful new tools to tackle these exact challenges.

This article was originally published on InfoQ at December 3rd 2020. If you’ve migrated from a monolith to a microservices architecture you probably experienced it: Modern systems today are far more complex to monitor. Microservices combined with containerized deployment results in highly dynamic systems with many moving parts across multiple layers.