Microservices: The Right Way

MicroservicesThe Right Way

GR8CONF / MINNEAPOLIS / 2015-07-30

@danveloper

A Simple Truth

There is no right way to “do” microservices.

• Microservices represent a problem domain that scales development, architecture, operations, and infrastructure

• Thinking that one-size-fits-all is naïve• Need to consider your domain and how it should

all fit together

Guidelines for Microservices

• Should perform a single function in the scope of the domain– Business/Platform/Operation function

• Should not emphasize LoC in the “micro” mindset– “Micro” should speak to a service’s function, not

its size• Should encapsulate its domain– Domain modeling, business logic, API

What Are You Building?

• Understand how your distributed infrastructure fits together

• Are you building a set of services that collaborate toward a common goal?– Then you’re building a “platform”

• Are you building services that act in a one-off or composable manner?– Then you’re building a “distributed service layer”

Building A Platform

• A Platform is composed of many different microservices that collaborate in terms of a broader “system”

• Microservices perform a very specific function in the overall processing

• A Gateway Layer should be employed to service consumers

Platform ArchitectureM

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Gateway Layer

Platform Architecture

• Consumers never speak directly to the underlying microservices

• Consumers talk to the Gateway layer as though they are talking to a monolith

• Microservices never talk amongst themselves– They are clean vertical slices in the architecture

• Gateway layer is responsible for consuming and aggregating data from microservices

Platform Architecture

• In a platform, the data model is coupled because of the overall collaborative nature of the system• It is OK to share a data model between microservice and

Gateway layers through a client library• Since the Gateway will be the only consumer of a backend

microservice, coupling via a client library is OK

• Gateway can gracefully degrade service or data offerings when a backend service is not available

Distributed Service Layer Microservices

• Distributed Service Layer microservices are those services that do not cooperate within a strict “system”

• They are able to be composed by many consumers for their purposes

• Consumers are responsible for understanding the service’s data structures and domains

Distributed Service Layer

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Distributed Service Layer Microservices

• Interconnectivity means the dependency graph can be difficult to figure out

• Failure in the overall infrastructure can be difficult to realize and trace

• May be difficult to push data structure and model changes without breaking many consumers

• Can quickly turn in “spaghetti infrastructure”

OFFICEModern Application Architecture

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REST API

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Brent’s Desk

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Courtesy of @bizzyunderscore

Distributed Service Layer Microservices Architecture

• Define two tiers of distributed service layer types: data consumers/aggregators & data producers

• Having a logical boundary between services that talk to other services and those that do not makes the infrastructure manageable

• Data producers should not inter-communicate at their level


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• Microservices should not share a domain model– The complexity of a distributed service layer can

make dependency management very difficult• Microservices should focus on documentation

as the contract• Consumer service tier should be resilient to

failure


• Considerations:– What about when one or more “consuming”

service tier microservices want to collaborate?– Dependency graph can still be messy; versioning

of APIs and data models should be strictly adhered to

– Documentation is hard to get right. How can we make service structures and APIs more discoverable?

Documentation

• It’s important to document a distributed service layer microservice in a “human consumable” way– Explaining the domain and what a service is doing

is more important than showing the endpoints– Showing the endpoints is still important

• Platform architectures should expose documentation through the Gateway layer

Documentation

• Discoverability:– Documentation can be difficult to maintain and

manage, especially with an evolving API– Statically documenting the API is OK, making it

programmatically discoverable is better– Documentation + making the API discoverable

gives great coverage over what a service is doing and how to interface with it

Discoverability

• HATEOAS– Informs of what relationships exist within the data

object that is returned– Informs of how to access the data of some

relationship– Can be a great strategy for gracefully degrading

behavior in a platform

Discoverability

• Platform ArchitecturePr

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Gateway Layer

/product/…

/review/…/user/…

/payment/…

Discoverability

{ “_links”: [ { “rel”: “product.list”, “href”: “/product/list” }, { “rel”: “product.search”, “href”: “/product/search” }, { “rel”: “reviews.show”, “href”: “/reviews/show{?productId}” }, ... ]}

GET /status

Discoverability

• Platform ArchitecturePr

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Gateway Layer

/product/… /user/…

/payment/…

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Discoverability{ “_links”: [ { “rel”: “product.list”, “href”: “/product/list” }, { “rel”: “product.search”, “href”: “/product/search” }, { “rel”: “reviews.show”, “href”: “/reviews/show{?productId}” }, ... ]}

Discoverability

• HATEOAS– When the review service goes offline, we can

inform consumers by removing it from the _links block in the data object

– This means that we only need to document the model and intention of the service

– Consumers will only need to know the relationship within the system to know

Discoverability

• JSON-LD– Provides a “linked data” structure for consumers– Allows you to provide a type for your API

endpoints, and can be programmatically interpreted in a number of ways

– Worth investigating: http://www.hydra-cg.com/

http://www.hydra-cg.com/

Project Structure

• Many questions in a microservice architecture:– Repo per microservice?– Module per microservice?– Every microservice in its own process space?

Project Structure

• In services that do not collaborate, they should not share a project structure

• It may make sense for platform microservices to exist as a module in a singular project

• Following a repo-per- approach for distributed service layer microservices keeps the concerns nicely isolated– “What about when we need to share common things

(constants, configs, etc)?” Publish a library; it’s easier than ever with things like jfrog* and jcenter*

* http://bintray.com

Project Structuremicroservice

microservice

Project Structure

Microservice’s own Main class

Project Structure

• Principles:– Generate a self-contained, lightweight artifact– Should be runnable and environment agnostic

(within the build)– Runnable JARs or a standalone distribution is the

best way to go

Project Structure

• Principles:– Generate a self-contained, lightweight artifact– Should be runnable and environment agnostic

(within the build)– Runnable JARs or a standalone distribution is the

best way to go

Project Structure

apply plugin: 'groovy’apply plugin: 'application'

mainClassName = "com.tld.microservice.Main"

repositories { jcenter()}

dependencies { compile 'org.codehaus.groovy:groovy-all:2.4.3’ ...}

How do we run this thing

Project Structure

apply plugin: 'groovy’apply plugin: 'application'




How do we build this thing

Project Structureapply plugin: 'groovy’apply plugin: 'application’

...

• Gradle Task

./gradlew installDist

Creates a distribution of the application, which pulls down all the dependencies, structures them in a directory, and produces shell scripts that can start the app in a standalone way.

Can be found in {projectDir}/build/install/{projectName}

Project Structurebuildscript { repositories { jcenter() } dependencies {

classpath 'com.github.jengelman.gradle.plugins:shadow:1.2.1’ }}

apply plugin: 'groovy’apply plugin: 'application’apply plugin: 'com.github.johnrengelman.shadow’




Project Structure

./gradlew shadowJar

• Produces a “fat jar” with all the dependencies contained• Integrates with the application plugin to make the fat jar

runnable• Excellent solution for building lightweight deployables• Can be run anywhere Java is available

Infrastructure

• Managing a microservice infrastructure is difficult

• Big benefit to microservices/distributed systems is the ability to scale a service according to its specific requirements

• Means that all microservices will run on their own instances/containers

Infrastructure

• Infrastruct principles for microservices:– Follow immutable infrastructure paradigms– Make the unit of deployment for a microservice

portable– Structure microservices such that configuration is

derived from the runtime environment

Infrastructure

• Immutable infrastructure:– Once a server is provisioned, it cannot be changed– Any detail about provisioning a server for a

microservice should come from the microservice’s build– Initialization, service starting, base configuration should

be performed only once during provisioning, never adjusted after that

– Any modifications to the server’s runtime should be in change control under the microservice project’s purview

Infrastructure

• Portable deployables:– Building just a JAR is fine, but it doesn’t inform the

server as to how to run that JAR– Unit of deployment should specify all of the

dependencies required to run your application• “My microservice depends on Java”, for example

– Unit of deployment should self-contain any configuration steps, including things like ansible/chef/puppet runs (beyond any base-image configuration)

Infrastructure

• Portable deployables:– Package your project as an os-package– Gradle plugin available from Netflix (Nebula) to

pull your project into a .deb or .rpm file• Provides a DSL for specifying pre-install/post-install

steps• Uses Gradle CopySpec to install files into the resulting

os package

buildscript { repositories { jcenter() } dependencies {

classpath 'com.netflix.nebula:gradle-ospackage-plugin:2.0.2’ }}

... [snip] ...

mainClassName = "com.tld.products.Main"

ospackage { packageName = "products" release '3' into "/opt/products" from "${project.buildDir}/install/${project.applicationName}"

from("osfiles") { into "/" }}

buildDeb { dependsOn installDist requires(“openjdk-7-jre”) preInstall file('scripts/preInstall.sh')}



... [snip] ...





Places the generated applicationproject structure into /opt/products



... [snip] ...





Puts everything in the project’s“osfiles” directory into the root of theserver’s filesystem (config, start scripts, other?)



... [snip] ...





Informs the server as to any dependenciesthat your project might have



... [snip] ...





Will execute the script before your projectis installed on the server. Allows you to provideAny additional tuning.

Infrastructure

./gradlew buildDeb

• Produces the artifact into the {project}/build/distributions/{projectName}_{version}-3.deb file

• Can be installed on any server/container and all dependencies are resolved at provisioning

• “osfiles” can include anything, but common use-cases are startup scripts, any system-level configuration needed by the microservice

• Pre/Post install can include things like Ansible/Chef/Puppet runs

Infrastructure

Infrastructure

• Docker:– An “OK” option for microservices– Can be difficult to manage– Cloud providers out there taking this on• CloudFoundry (cloudfoundry.com)• Morpheus (gomorpheus.com)• Project Atomic (projectatomic.io)

– Gradle Plugin available for packaging your microservice as a Docker container• https://github.com/bmuschko/gradle-docker-plugin

https://github.com/bmuschko/gradle-docker-plugin

Microservice Configuration Management

• When you get into a distributed architecture, you need faculties to help manage configuration

• Builds/projects should be agnostic to the environment they are deployed in

• Environment configuration should be derived from the environment


• Configuration management (K/V store, consul for example)

Consul

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• Configuration management (K/V store, consul for example)$ curl localhost:8500/v1/kv/configs/dev/mymicroservice

{ “database”: { “username”: “user”, “password”: “…”, “url”: “jdbc:mysql://db.host:3306/db” }, …}


• Rules of thumb for configuration management:– Place config server in an internal DNS zone– For robust architectures, have a config server per

environment– Have microservices re-poll the configuration server

for any real-time changes– During server deployment, export the environment

key (as part of User Data, for example)


• Spring Cloud OSS helps provide integration with configuration management servers for pulling properties dynamically– Gives you the ability to read from Cloud CM– Provides management endpoints for updating

microservice configurations dynamically

– https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-config#spring-cloud-config-client– http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-consul/spring-cloud-consul.html

https://github.com/spring-cloud/spring-cloud-config%23spring-cloud-config-client

http://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-consul/spring-cloud-consul.html

Additional Considerations

• Metrics Reporting– Use statsd and things will be very portable

• Service Discovery– Eureka, Consul, Load Balancing

• Log publishing– Should write out application logs to a common

location (S3, for example) for inspection

QUESTIONS.

Technology

Microservices: The Right Way