Guest Post by Savaram Ravindra
How AWS X-Ray helps developers analyze and debug production, distributed applications?
AWS X-Ray provides an end-to-end view of requests as they travel through your application and shows a map of your application’s underlying components. AWS X-Ray works with Amazon EC2, Amazon ECS, AWS Lambda, and AWS Elastic Beanstalk. You can use X-Ray with applications written in Java, Node.js, and .NET that are deployed on these services. This article demonstrates how AWS X-Ray make the life easy for IT professionals in analyzing the microservices applications.
Right from the time the term ‘Debugging’ has been coined by Grace Hopper, the QA teams were extremely busy in scouring the lines of code for bugs and errors. The testing methods were restricted to a single repository in the traditional waterfall software development environment. However, the virtualization and cloud computing technologies have brought IoT (Internet of Things) and heterogeneous networks into the picture. While all the resources are virtualized and passed to the cloud, the monolithic software development is progressing towards the microservices architecture.
Combined with the notification-based and asynchronous architectures in the cloud, the microservices architecture works with composite platforms containing numerous moving parts. The execution passes through the computing instances, application services, messaging services, database service, dockers, and containers. And, examining the performance bottlenecks and tracing the requests to enhance the system is a challenge. The solution of Amazon is AWS X-Ray. This article analyzes the working of AWS X-Ray.
AWS X-Ray is a tool that enables the developers to examine and debug the distributed, production applications like those developed utilizing a microservices architecture. With AWS X-Ray, you can determine how your application and the underlying services of it are performing to detect and troubleshoot the root cause of errors and performance issues. As the requests pass through your application, their end-to-end view is provided by X-Ray. Apart from this, a map of the underlying components of your application is shown with the help of X-Ray.
The performance of applications that are in development and in production can be tracked by AWS X-Ray. X-Ray works with applications based on microservices that are complexly coded and running with a large number of services and simple three-tier applications. It is similar to Google Dapper, Open Tracing API, and Twitter Zipkin. X-Ray can be utilized with Amazon EC2 Container Service, Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon EC2. It aids the applications that are written in Java,.NET and Node.js. Amazon has stated that AWS Lambda support would be added soon. X-Ray traces the requests that are made to Amazon DynamoDB, PostgreSQL and MySQL and supports the services like Amazon Simple Queue Service and Amazon Simple Notification Service. At present, in 12 regions, AWS X-Ray is available in the preview mode.
As stated that AWS X-Ray is running in the preview mode at present, this service is absolutely free and no charge is levied on this one. However, the users will be charged for the resources that are utilized in the application that is being debugged. Pay-per-use is the model in which X-Ray comes and there are no upfront fees. The charges depend on the amount of traces retrieved, recorded or scanned. The first 116,845 traces scanned, retrieved or recorded in a month are absolutely free. It costs $0.50 per ten traces scanned and retrieved per month and $5 per ten traces recorded in a month beyond this tier.
AWS X-Ray makes it extremely easy for the developers for analyzing the behavior of their distributed, production applications. AWS is coming up with out-of-the-box innovations day-by-day and becoming the buzzword in the market. It is analyzed that so many IT professionals are gaining expertise in this field through training in AWS and making it in their careers due to the high demand present in this field.
About Author
Savaram Ravindra is a Content Contributor for Mindmajix.com and Tekslate.com. His passion lies in writing articles on different niches which include some of the most innovative and emerging software technologies as well as digital marketing.
