System

Creating a system is the first step in optimizing your application.

A system is a representation of your application. It might be a complete representation of different layers, a single microservice, a batch job, or any IT system that you want to optimize.

A system can be used to fully model an application and then run multiple optimization initiatives or contain just the elements that are used for a specific optimization study.

The system is identified by a name, which in our example is "Online Boutique", and can be extended with a description to make it easily recognizable.

Components

The core elements of a system are the components. A component represents the fundamental element of an IT system, often composed of various layers or entities. It serves as a black-box definition of an entity involved in optimization, eliminating the need for intricate details in modeling.

A component comprises the following properties:

• Name: A distinct identifier within the context of the system.

• Description: A clarification of the component's purpose or function.

• Component type: An identification of the underlying technology or technology stack of the component.

• Properties: A set of additional properties that hold information about the component's configuration or telemetry (e.g. the IP used to reach an API or the username to connect to a server via SSH).

Akamas allows users to model their IT systems without the need to focus on technological aspects by providing several out-of-the-box component types to support system and component modeling.

Component types are platform entities (i.e.: shared among all the users) that contain key information about specific technologies such as parameters that can be tuned and key metrics.

Akamas includes off-the-shelf component types for the most popular technologies such as Containers, Linux Hosts, AWS EC2 instances, Web Applications, Spark, and runtimes such as JVM, Node, and Go.

Component types are shipped within Optimization Packs and can be easily installed and updated as support for new technologies is released.

Creating the Online Boutique system

Recalling our example of the Online Boutique application, we decided, for the moment, to model just the elements that are included in the optimization initiative. We have also decided not to model the entire Kubernetes cluster as we are not interested in optimizing and monitoring it at this stage.

We have mapped the JVM and the Pod to the respective component types and mapped the Kubernetes service to the Web Application component type. You can read more about these component types in their documentation reference.

To model our system we used the component types coming from these optimization packs:

• Open JDK
• Web Application
• Kubernetes

The following picture shows our choice of components starting from the architectural diagram.

From and architectural diagram to the Akamas system

Creating the system with the CLI

To create this system in Akamas you can use the following YAML file.

name: Online Boutique
description: The Online Boutique e-commerce application

Create the file system.yaml and run the following command.

akamas create system system.yaml

Now you can start adding components. The following three YAML files represent the three components of our Online Boutique system.

APIs component specification

name: Apis
description: The APIs exposed to users
componentType: Web Application
properties:
  dynatrace:
    tags:
      Application: Ad-Service

Ad Service component specification

name: Adservice
description: The adservice of the online boutique by Google
componentType: Kubernetes Container
properties:
  dynatrace:
    type: CONTAINER_GROUP_INSTANCE
    kubernetes:
      namespace: akamas-demo
      containerName: server
      basePodName: ak-adservice-*

JVM component specification

name: AdserviceJVM
description: The JVM of the adservice 
componentType: java-openjdk-11
properties:
  dynatrace:
    tags:
      JVM: Ad-Service

Create the files and run the following command for each file.

akamas create component <file-name> "Online Boutique"

Note that, since components are bound to a specific system, we need to provide as an argument to the creation command also the name of the system Online Boutique that we created a few moments ago.