Monolithic applications and architecture had their heyday, but their relevance was destroyed by cloud. The demands of an always-connected, multi-device world mean the singular architecture and its coupled code has been split into myriad microservices that chatter back and forth through application programming interfaces.

“Docker and Kubernetes together really have unleashed a new era of microservices across pretty much every organization in the world,” said Marco Palladino (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of Kong Inc.

“With microservices running on top of Kubernetes containerized with Docker, we can now decouple our software and run it in a faster, better, more reliable way across pretty much any cloud vendor in the world. As a result of that, we can enter new markets faster. We can make our users happier by shipping fixes and features faster. And therefore we can grow the business.“

Palladino spoke with John Walls, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE’s livestreaming studio, for an exclusive CUBE Conversation prior to the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data, which was held on March 24. (* Disclosure below.)

Microservices proliferation means something is always down

The chatter of microservices has made the cloud computing era possible. But with the decoupling and dispersion has come complexity. Just as one voice is clear and easy to hear, monolithic architecture was simple to manage.

“If the monolith was up and running, the business was up and running. If the monolith was down, the business was down,” Palladino said.

Microservices are a different beast. The monolith fractured into hundreds of pieces, and as a tap on a piece of ice, the fragmentation took off running. Hundreds of microservices became thousands, with companies adding more each month as they increased their cloud computing capabilities. Service mesh architectures were designed to manage communication between thousands of services in a microservice-based system.

The price of this microservice proliferation is that there’s no way everything can be up and running at the same time. “With microservices, we’re effectively making ourselves comfortable always running in a partially degraded system,” Palladino said.

Service connectivity as a service

Kong was one of the top innovators in cloud data honored by Amazon Web Services Inc. during the recent Startup Showcase. The company’s Kong Konnect cloud connectivity platform is disrupting the development pipeline by offering service connectivity as a service.

“The key here is to abstract away all the things that [customers] don’t need,” Palladino stated.

Today a company will leverage a cloud vendor instead of building a physical data center, and the same applies to modern applications. “We don’t want to build the orchestration platforms by ourselves; we don’t want to build the connectivity stack by ourselves,” Palladino added.

Handing responsibility over to a specialized service provider, such as Kong, allows businesses to forget about connectivity issues and focus on what matters most: the application, the customer, and the user. Downtime will happen, but Kong’s infrastructure is designed so the customer and the users will never experience it.

A surprising counterintuitive benefit of abstracting connectivity is additional security.

“In a monolithic world, as long as the code base is accessible, anybody can do anything that the monolith can do. With microservices, it’s an opportunity for us to lock that down,” Palladino stated. He explained how Kong implements zero-trust security measures through a consistent, non-fragmented layer of security across all its applications, containerized and virtual machine-based.

“Microservices not only created a business advantage, but they gave us also many, many different chances for us to improve all the other aspects of security and productivity,” Palladino concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s CUBE Conversations, and watch theCUBE’s coverage of the AWS Startup Showcase Event: Innovators in Cloud Data. (* Disclosure: Kong Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Kong nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE