Service ExplosionHOW HOOTSUITE MANAGES ITSGROWING MICROSERVICE LANDSCAPE

Specialist Software Developer - Mobile Web and APIsAdam Arsenault

@Adam_Arsenault

● Road to SOA

● Service Graph

● Voltron

● Demo

● Lessons Learned

What We’ll Talk aboutApp

S2

S3

S4S1

● Founded in 2008

● PHP Monolith

● SOA started in 2013

● Hyper growth

● Continuous Integration

● ~20 services and counting

Road to SOA

“Organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”- Melvin Conway

Engagement MobilePublisher Analytics

Platform Tools Labs

Stable Teams

KABOOM!!!!

Ex. 1 - Integration Failures

● Dev merges changes

● Changes go to staging

● Integration tests fail

● Release pipeline frozen

KABOOM!!!!

Ex. 2 - Production Downtime

● Service goes down in production

● On call / teams affected get notifications

● Sift through flood of notifications to figure out what’s broken

KABOOM!!!!

VISIBILITY

The Service Graph

The Service Graph

App

The Service Graph

App

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The Service Graph

App

S2 S3 S4S1

The Service GraphApp

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S4S1

The Service GraphApp

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S4S1

S5S6

S7

The Service GraphApp

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S4S1

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The Service GraphApp

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S4S1

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S7

The API

DependencySomething that a service needs to function properly.

Types:

1. Internal

2. Traversable

App

Cachedb S1

/status/aboutReturns metadata information about the service or app such as version, description, maintainers, links to documentation, and gets the status of each individual dependency.

/status/:dependencyA configured status endpoint at '/status/:dependency

Examples:● '/status/service-core'● '/status/db'

OK

/status/aggregateReturns the overall status by checking all registered status checks and giving a simple response.

Examples:● OK● CRIT - error message

OK

/status/traverseEnables service graph traversal and execution of an "action" at the last level of traversal.

App

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S4S1

Usage

MonitorOK / CRIT

Debug

S1

db S2

Explore and LearnApp

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S4S1

S5S6

S7

Document

Status of single machine Overall status of application and services

Alerts / notifications Troubleshoot by drilling down

Monitoring Strategy

Technologies

Architecture

Browser 1 Browser N...

Play App

Status Poller Actor

WS Actor 1

WS Actor N

...

DEMO

“When there is a production issue, I see lots of people go to Voltron to perform diagnostics on what might be wrong”Geordie Henderson - VP Software Development

“Voltron is often the first to tell us when snowflake is down”Brandon Okert - Junior Software Developer Publisher

“When a critical service goes down, everything starts alerting and reporting problems, but Voltron gets through the noise by letting you drill down”Michael Reid - Senior Software Developer Platform

“We suspected the connection between dashboard and Billing Service was broken, but Voltron told us the communication channel was okay.”Martin Jung - Software Developer Mobile Web and APIs

Lessons Learned

• Productivity

• Happiness

Visibility Empowers

• Automate all the things

• Identify problems early and fix

• 10x factor

SOA Tools Early

• Standardize

• Add to a service framework

• Share common status checks

Make Checking Status Easy

• Synchronized views

• Performance

Websockets for Real time

Future Work

Analytics

Real Time Graph View

Open Source

Thank you!Questions?

Specialist Software Developer - Mobile Web and APIs@Adam_Arsenault

Adam Arsenault