From Monolith to Microservices with Iron.io

Sep 2nd, 2016 8:40am by Kiran Oliver

In this episode of The New Stack Makers podcast, we explore how serverless software provider Iron.io helps organizations rebuild their monolithic applications as sets as microservices, as well as how the company helped the popular social drinking application Untappd to enter the serverless ecosystem. The New Stack founder Alex Williams spoke with Iron.io co-founder & CEO Chad Arimura and Iron.io sales engineer Doug Colburn on the show floor at DockerCon 2016 for a brief discussion about these issues.

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The conversation can also be heard on YouTube.

Having recently announced a strategic partnership with Mesosphere, Iron.io hopes to usher in the new era of serverless computing, which relieves the end-user from maintaining servers by offering a platform to execute blocks of code. When the company began in 2011, it was LXC containers that were handling job and batch processing, Arimura noted.

Though this soon changed, “When Docker came around it was the perfect fit, because it standardizes the way to contain and ship code,” Arimura noted. Containerizing their workflow allowed the developers at Iron.io to split up single VMs so that they could have multiple users running their applications at scale without impacting one another.

Abstracting developers away from how one’s infrastructure is built and maintained is something of a hot-button topic lately. At Iron.io, it is this abstraction away from the internal workings of one’s infrastructure, which Colburn explained is one of the benefits of serverless computing.

“By abstracting infrastructure from developers, it makes it simpler for them to just work. Whether that’s creating tasks or a payload. From the microservices side of things, it allows them to create a container that does one task and does it well. It’s moving from monolith to microservices, and this abstraction has now gone even further. Developers can focus on, ‘here’s my bit of code, it does this in its own release cycle, and now I don’t have to worry about the infrastructure.”

Arimura later offered a final takeaway: “The new stack is forming. That’s what’s great about this thriving ecosystem, is a team of developers can choose a set of technology to get them to this serverless world”

Iron.io and Mesosphere is a sponsor of The New Stack.

TNS owner Insight Partners is an investor in: The New Stack, Docker.