Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

Microservices ArchitectureEnablesDevOps:MigrationtoaCloud-NativeArchitecture

ArminBalalaie,AbbasHeydarnooriSharifUniversityofTechnology

Pooyan JamshidiImperialCollegeLondon

Trend(DevOps-Microservices)

A. Balalaie, A. Heydarnoori, P. Jamshidi, Microservices Architecture Enables DevOps: Migration to a Cloud-Native Architecture, IEEE Software, will appear in May/June 2016 special issue on Software Engineering for DevOps. Please drop me an email for the pre-print.

2 IEEE SOFTWARE | PUBLISHED BY THE IEEE COMPUTER SOCIETY 0 7 4 0 - 7 4 5 9 / 1 6 / $ 3 3 . 0 0 © 2 0 1 6 I E E E

Microservices Architecture Enables DevOpsMigration to a Cloud-Native Architecture

Armin Balalaie and Abbas Heydarnoori, Sharif University of Technology

Pooyan Jamshidi, Imperial College London

// This article reports on experiences and lessons learned during incremental migration and architectural refactoring of a commercial mobile back end as a service to microservices architecture. It explains how the researchers adopted DevOps and how this facilitated a smooth migration. //

A LOOK AT the searches related to the term “microservices” on Google Trends revealed that the top searches are now technology driven. This im-plies that the time of general search terms such as “What is microser-vices?” has now long passed. Not only are software vendors (for ex-ample, IBM and Microsoft) using microservices and DevOps practices,

but also content providers (for exam-ple, Netflix and the BBC) have ad-opted and are using them.

In addition, Google Trends re-veals that both DevOps and mi-croservices are growing concepts, with an equal rate of growth after 2014 (see Figure 1). Although Dev-Ops can also be applied to mono-lithic software systems, microservices

enable effective implementation of DevOps by promoting the impor-tance of small teams.1 (For more on DevOps and Microservices, see the related sidebar.)

A microservices architecture is a cloud-native architecture that aims to realize software systems as a package of small services. Each ser-vice is independently deployable on a potentially different platform and technological stack. It can run in its own process while communicat-ing through lightweight mechanisms such as RESTful or RPC-based APIs—for example, Finagle. (REST stands for Representational State Transfer.) In this setting, each ser-vice is a business capability that can utilize various programming lan-guages and data stores and is devel-oped by a small team.2

Migrating monolithic architec-tures to microservices brings in many benefits. In particular, it pro-vides adaptability to technological changes to avoid technology lock-in and, more important, reduced time-to-market and better development team structuring around services.3

Here we explain our experiences and lessons learned during incre-mental migration of Backtory (www.backtory.com), a commercial mo-bile back end as a service (MBaaS), to microservices in the context of DevOps. Microservices help Back-tory in various ways, especially in shipping new features more fre-quently and providing scalability for the collective set of users from differ-ent mobile-app developers.

Furthermore, we report on migra-tion patterns we developed on the basis of our observations in migra-tion projects. Practitioners can use these patterns to migrate monolithic software systems to microservices. In addition, system consultants can use

FOCUS: DEVOPS

PopularSearchTermsonGoogle

buildingmicroservicesdocker microservicesjavamicroservicesmicroservicemicroservices architecturemicroservices examplemicroservices fowlernetflixmicroservicessoamicroservicesspringmicroservices

agiledevopschefdevopsclouddevopsdevopsawsdevopsengineerdevops jobsdevops puppetdevopsreactionsdevops tools

MicroservicesAcloud-nativearchitecture

Developingasingleapplicationasasuiteofsmallservices

Source:http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

Thereisabareminimumofcentralizedmanagementoftheservices(Polyglot-ness)


SSaaS (ServerSideasaService)Aplatformthatmakesmobileapplicationdevelopmenteasier

FeaturesofSSaaS

• Mobileapplicationdeveloperscanuseserver-sidecapabilitieswithoutknowinganyserver-sideprogramminglanguages• RDBMSasaService• DefinedatamodelsinSSaaS dashboard• Usethemodels’objectsinmobileapplicationdevelopment• Built-inusermanagement

• ChatasaService• IntegrationwithRDBMSaaS userauthentication

ArchitectureofSSaaS beforethemigration

Reasonsformigration

• On-demandcapabilityofChatasaService• Theneedforareusableresourcemanager• Managementofresourceslikerelationaldatabaseinstances,e.g.MySQL.

• Theneedfordecentralizeddatagovernance• Chatservice’smetadataneededadedicatedplace

• Theneedforautomateddeployment• Theneedforbuilt-inscalability

TargetArchitectureofSSaaS

MigrationStepsIncrementalsteps

PreparingtheContinuousIntegrationPipeline

TransformingDeveloperData toaService

IntroducingContinuousDelivery

IntroducingEdgeServer

IntroducingDynamicServiceCollaboration

IntroducingResourceManager

IntroducingChatServices andDeveloperInfoServices

Clusterization

Monitoring

DeliveryPipeline

TeamFormation

LessonsLearnedExperiencesinmigratingtomicroservices

Deploymentinthedevelopmentenvironmentisdifficultfora

typicaldeveloper

Servicecontractsaredoubleimportant

Distributedsystemdevelopmentneedsskilleddevelopers

Creatingservicedevelopmenttemplatesisimportant

TheresearchonMicroservices hasstartedonlyin2015,Plentyofopportunitiesahead!

1. Kratzke,N.:Aboutmicroservices,containersandtheirunderestimatedimpactonnetworkperformance, CLOUD(March2015).

2. Levcovitz,A.,Terra,R.,Valente,M.T.:Towardsatechniqueforextractingmicroservices frommonolithicenterprisesystems, VEM(September2015).

3. Rahman,M.,Gao,J.:Areusableautomatedacceptancetestingarchitectureformicroservices inbehavior-drivendevelopment, SOSE(March2015).

4. Stubbs,J.,Moreira,W.,Dooley,R.:Distributedsystemsofmicroservices usingdocker andserfnode, IWSG(June2015).

5. Viennot,N.,L´ ecuyer,M.,Bell,J.,Geambasu,R.,Nieh,J.:Synapse:Amicroservices architectureforheterogeneous-databasewebapplications, EuroSys (April2015).

6. Knoche,H.,SustainingRuntimePerformancewhileIncrementallyModernizingTransactionalMonolithicSoftwaretowardsMicroservices,ICPE(2016).

More details? http://arxiv.org/abs/1507.08217

MigrationTransitionGraph

CloudMigrationthroughPatternComposition

• Themigrationpatternscanbeseenasasequenceofactivitiesbywhichanapplicationisgraduallymigratedtothemicro-services.

• Themigrationpatternscanbecomposed(i.e.,executedsequentially)tomoveamonolithicapplicationtomicro-services.

MigrationPatternSelection

Objective MP1 MP2 MP3 MP4 MP5 MP6 MP7 MP8 MP9 MP10 MP11 MP12 MP13 MP14 MP15

Timetomarket -- -- -- -- --

Newcapabilities -- -- -- --

Reduceoperationalcost -- -- -- -- -- --

Leverageinvestments -- -- --

Freeupon-premise resources

Scalability -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Operationalefficiency -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Re-h

ost

Clou

dific

atio

nRelocation

RefactorRebinding

Replacement

Mod

erni

zatio

n

Assembly-basedSituationalMigration


Time to market -- -- -- -- --

New capabilities -- -- -- -- --

Reduce operational cost -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Leverage investments -- -- -- -- -- --

Free up on premise resources

Scalability -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Operational efficiency -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Assembly-basedMigrationPlanConstruction


Time to market -- -- -- -- --

New capabilities -- -- -- -- --

Reduce operational cost -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Leverage investments -- -- -- -- -- --

Free up on premise resources

Scalability -- -- -- -- -- -- --

Operational efficiency -- -- -- -- -- -- -- --

MigrationPatternMeta-Model

MigrationPatternsinthecontextofCloud-RMM

P. Jamshidi, A. Ahmad, C. Pahl, "Cloud Migration Research: A Systematic Review", IEEE Transactions on Cloud Computing, 2013, DOI:10.1109/TCC.2013.10.

Migration patterns Primarily facilitate

planning

Enable Auto-Deployment of Multi-Tier Systems in Hybrid Cloud Environment

Developing a single application as a suite of small services


Architecture of SSaaSbefore the migration

Target Architecture of SSaaS

Clusterization

Services are built around business capabilities


Services are independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery


There is a bare minimum of centralized management of the services (Polyglot-ness)


Transforming DeveloperData to a Service Introducing Continuous Delivery

Introducing Edge Server Introducing Dynamic Service Collaboration Introducing Resource Manager

Deployment in the development environment is difficult for a

typical developer

Service contracts are double important

Distributed system development needs skilled developers

Creating service development templates is important