Closer Look at Cloud Centric ArchitecturesTodd Kaplinger

STSM, IBM MobileFirst Cloud Platform Architect

Presence Insights

• ”Web Analytics” for the physical world • Available in the Bluemix Catalog as part of the larger

Mobile set of capabilities. • May 28, 2015 - US Release Date • June 1, 2015 - London Release Date • November 11, 2015 - Sydney Release Date • POCs are in the process of moving to the new cloud

architecture • Large pipeline of opportunities • Initial focus is Retail but will extend to multiple industries in

2H2015 • Get Started Today!!!

https://www.ng.bluemix.net/docs/#services/presenceinsights/index.html

• Traditional JEE • Delivery model was focused on-

premises deliveries • WebSphere Application Sever

(Web-Tier) • DB2 ( Persistence) • Cognos (Reporting) • Docs (Knowledge Center) • Single Tenant

• 29+ Micro Services • 317+ Node.js Instances • 3 Bluemix Regions • SaaS Delivery Model on Bluemix • Node.js (Web Tier) • MQLight (Messaging) • Redis (Caching / Real Time Eventing) • Cloudant (Persistence) • Elastic Search (Analytics) • D3 (Charting) • Docs (Markdown) • Multi-tenant

Presence Zones Presence Insights

Presence Insights Cloud Architecture

Presence Insights Technical Cloud Architecture

Industry Trends

Evolution of Disruption

…..CloudMobileSOA RESTWeb

Cloud Centric Architecture• Standards Based Web Protocols

• HTTP• Provides largest breadth of environments today

• WebSockets | MQTT | Push Notifications • Next generation protocols

• Standards Based Data Models • JSON (primary)

• Standards based security models • OAUTH |SAML | OpenID Connect • Social Integration

• Facebook | Twitter | Linkedin • API Economy and Marketplace • Elastically Scale (Grow|Shrink) based on load

• Event Driven Flows • Fire and Forget • Loosely coupled interactions

• Messaging Backbone − Publish and Subscribe

• Data Persistence Tier − Unstructured Data • Structured Data

• Microservices Architecture − Expect failure − Be resilient − Limit Dependencies − Stateless− Elastic Scale

Cloud Centric Patterns

Presence Insights Embracing Tech Trends

MQ Light

Technology Adoption

Runtime Packages

express

lodash

bluebird

cuid

request

rbush

cloudant/nano

elasticsearch

ioredis

Development Packages

mocha

supertest

eslint

chai

grunt

shelljs

• Akka Model• Event Driven - IoT sensor events (Fire &

Forget)• Scalable - Autoscale instances to satisfy

demand• Resilient - Messaging Infrastructure• Responsive - Farm of Redis caches

• Actor Approach - Each Node app serves one role

• NPM Adoption• Best of breed open source packages

• express - REST • ioredis - caching• bluebird - promises

• Deployed custom NPM Private Repository• Shared node modules for our micro-

services• Extended to development

• Grunt builds with shelljs• ESLint to enforce coding standards• Mocha and Chai for testing• NPM CLI extensions (example npm test)

Node Embracement

Presence Insights Lessons Learned

Why Private Node Package Manager (NPM)?

• Simplify deployment process • Private Node modules need to be packaged in app

• Significant increase in build time (need to download and package each module for each app)

• Larger deployment artifacts causes deployment timeouts• Not feasible for micro services architectures with many

modules• CF push resolves node dependencies during upload process • CF push defaults to public NPM repo • Bluemix lacking service to host private modules

• Follows industry best practices • Encourages use of small reusable modules across micro

services • Provides built in model for versioning of modules • Built in security model

• Private modules are not intended to be consumed externally

Presence Insights Node Evolution• Actor Approach

• Decision on what qualifies as an actor (micro-service too small or too large)• Testing Approach

• Cloud Native Applications introduce new complexities• Multi-tenant architectures stress the system in different ways

• Scale for both large and small tenant configurations in the same system• Scaling characteristics

• Large number of node apps with limited memory• Small number of node apps with increased memory• Large number of small sensor event payloads (limited batching /more

frequent)• Small number of large sensor event payloads (batching / less frequent)

• Memory Management Lifecycles around Garbage Collection and Compaction• Identification of bottlenecks

• Micro-services approach introduces many variables in the flow to troubleshoot• Scaling on “actor” can result in performance degradations in other points in the

architecture• Instrumentation

• Actionable insights leveraging “runtime agents” to get insights into memory and CPU consumption

• ELK (Elastic Search / Logstash / Kibana)• Alerts and Pager Duty

Presence Insights Data Evolution• Persistence Tier

• Architecture led us to a NoSQL architecture• Choices abound (Cloudant/MongoDB/Cassandra/Spark/Elastic Search)• Right tool for the job (Battle over importance of read versus write)• No single answer is correct

• Real Time Eventing• Cloudant

• Track users (entry/exit/dwell) via Change Feed Listener• Scalability concerns w/ many Node.js instances long lived connections to

Cloudant• MQLight

• Track users (entry/exit/dwell) via MQ topics• MQLight lacked ability to be notified when topic key expired

• Redis• Track users (entry/exit/dwell) via publish subscribe• Warlock (node-redis-warlock) required for distributed locking (not inherent)

• Actionable Insights• Leveraging PI to make business decisions• Requires ability to dissect data and view from multiple vantage points• Need highly available and distributed architecture to support large data sets• Need ability to summarize data with well defined Time to Live (TTLs)

Take Aways• Develop A Point of View on Cloud Centric Architectures -

Guarantee this is a constant moving target and many ways to achieve success. Important to choose right tool for the right job!

• Document the Journey of Moving to SaaS - A Journey Takes Time.

• Adopt A Best Of Breed Technology - Open Source solutions are great accelerators

• Create a Vibrant Technical Team - Retaining top technical talent is priority #1. Be the team that other developers want to join!

• Share Lessons Learned - (Articles, Presentations and Conferences) - CTO Talks!