vFunction unveiled new capabilities that provide software teams with essential functionality to accelerate application innovation while maintaining resiliency and reducing technical debt.

New software architecture governance capabilities allow organizations to implement rules that act as guardrails for distributed applications to combat microservices sprawl. These rules help engineering teams to monitor their distributed architecture and receive alerts to ensure all services are calling authorized servers, enforce boundaries between particular services, and maintain correct database-to-microservice relationships. Comprehensive flow analysis features, including live flow coverage for monoliths and sequence diagrams for distributed applications, align design intent with actual implementation. These tools help organizations identify inadequate testing and insufficient test coverage based on comparing actual production flows to tested flows. vFunction's domain-driven design, combined with its comprehensive approach to production flow analysis, empowers organizations to achieve the architectural clarity and control needed for improved engineering velocity, application scalability, and resiliency.

“Good software architecture matters to overall application health and business success, but it’s hard to enforce it without the right tools, particularly for microservices,” said Moti Rafalin, CEO and co-founder of vFunction. “It's all too easy to introduce unnecessary dependencies that violate architectural best practices and, in turn, result in more technical debt. vFunction addresses these complexities, helping teams maintain architectural integrity for resilient and scalable applications from release to release.”

vFunction now offers true software governance, allowing organizations to set architectural rules that act as guardrails to maintain architectural principles from release to release. The company implemented AI algorithms to categorize services into layers like API, core, and composite services. New tagging capabilities provide context and enable rule creation between services. For instance, dependencies between core services or API services can trigger alerts or block pull requests in CI/CD pipelines. By setting architectural governance rules, teams can develop and release faster without impacting application health.

With the introduction of comprehensive flow analysis capabilities, vFunction’s architectural observability platform addresses a critical gap in the management of monolithic and distributed microservices applications. It provides insights into actual application usage patterns versus documented expectations and identifies efficient or overly complex flows. This allows teams to proactively tackle architectural issues before they significantly impact performance.

Live flow coverage for monolithic applications goes beyond traditional profiling tools. Unlike existing solutions that focus on test environments or code coverage, vFunction constantly monitors production environments, providing insights into resource usage of specific flows and enabling comparison between production and pre-production flows. This unified approach allows developers to assess the real-world effectiveness of their tests by offering a more accurate understanding of application behaviors and test coverage in relation to real user journeys, filling a crucial gap in current application monitoring and management practices.

Sequence flow diagrams for distributed applications provide a deep view into application flows so developers and SREs can better distinguish between efficient processes and those at risk of failure due to excessive complexity. By visualizing flows as sequence diagrams in distributed architectures, vFunction solves the previously daunting task of tracking problematic flows through code and monitoring their changes over time. By correlating APM incidents with architectural issues identified by vFunction, engineering teams can significantly reduce mean time to repair (MTTR).

vFunction serves as a system of record for live application architectural diagrams, allowing teams to recognize drift in specific flows, track changes, and manage tasks as sequences evolve. Unlike traditional application performance management (APM) tools that collect performance data, vFunction's solution focuses on architectural drift, highlights overly complex flows that may compromise system resiliency, and notifies teams of significant changes. This capability, combined with the ability to export diagrams for each system flow, empowers development teams to maintain architectural integrity and optimize application performance in complex distributed environments.

Rafalin continued, “With our latest advancements, we’re helping teams better manage architecture and understand comprehensive business and user flows so they can avoid the most damaging types of technical debt.”