John Sheehan of Runscope discussed how APIs are changing the world of container-based workflows. Runscope specializes in API performance monitoring tools. These include uptime monitoring, workflows, chains, and end to end functional testing of APIs. Runscope aims to help businesses reduce lost revenue they may experience from broken APIs running slowly, as API slowdowns are often the first indicator something in an application is experiencing bugs.

Sheehan noted that slowness can be anywhere in a development stack. Working with a multitude of microservices becomes more complicated as a project expands. Understanding how one microservice may affect others even though they are not directly dependent on one another is still problem to solve. Runscope handles this by having none of its databases used by multiple services. Each new data store receives a new service as a result. Search services use Elastic Search, while request vaults use Dynamo. With contained states, services on Runscope don’t need to know about other services, resulting in a more cohesive individual scale data store.

These four discussions will be available for listening in their entirety on The New Stack’s Soundcloud channel. AWS Re:Invent 2015 was an exciting conference, with many opportunities to discuss the future of technology. Sitting down with Shannon, John, Loris, and Kamal offered a look into not only how containers, APIs, and security is changing, but how the industry can continue to develop products for use at-scale in enterprise level solutions, private sector, and via open source platforms.

Creating products with value that also help individuals not in programming work with containers to help improve their businesses is crucial, as is continuing to improve the security of working within containers. Appcito, Sysdig, Runscope, and Rancher Labs all offer their own unique solutions to some common issues experienced by application developers and individuals alike. These interviews shed light on how these four companies aim to solve these problems, the solutions they have to offer, and how other businesses can adopt container-driven technology to suit their unique needs.