Microservices. Microservices everywhere! (At OSCON 2015)

Microservices.
Microservices
Everywhere!
Jérôme Petazzoni — @jpetazzo
Docker Inc. — @docker

Who am I?
French software engineer living in California
Joined Docker (dotCloud) more than 4 years ago
(I was at Docker before it was cool!)
I have built and scaled the dotCloud PaaS
I learned a few things about running containers
(in production)

Outline
What are microservices?
What are their challenges?
How does Docker help?
How can we do this today?

Microservices: a style of software architecture
Break big application down into many small services
Example: e-commerce
- web front-end
- catalog of products
- inventory/stock management
- shipping calculator
- payment processor
- billing/invoicing
- recommendation engine
- user profiles

Why are we doing this? (1/2)
Use different stacks for different services
(use the right language/tool for the job)
Replace or refactor individual services easily
Less coordination required when deploying
- deploy more often
- less risk
- more agility and speed

Why are we doing this? (2/2)
Promotes many small teams instead of one big army
- smaller teams = less communication overhead
- see Jeff Bezos' "two-pizza rule"
Enables effective ownership of services
- a service always has an "owner" (=team)
- the owner is responsible (=on call)
- the owner is empowered (=can fix things)

What are the challenges
associated with microservices?

Fast, efficient RPC calls
Docker does not help with that. See instead:
- ZeroRPC
- Cap'n Proto
- XMLRPC
- SOAP
- Dnode
- REST
- Queues (like AMQP), for long-running/async operations

Architecturing the application in small blocks
Docker does not help with that.
Some tips:
- Pretend that you're outsourcing parts of your stack
- Wrap database access;
each object (or table) = one service

Efficient deployment system
Instead of deploying one monolith once in a while,
we deploy many services very frequently
The manual, tedious, uniquely tailored deployment system
has to be replaced with something simple and reliable
It must be easy to add new components and deploy them
Docker does help with that.

Network plumbing
Instead of one monolith talking to a database,
we now have 100s of services talking to each other
Those services will often be scaled independently
Instead of direct, deterministic library calls,
we now have network calls across load balancers
Scaling, load balancing, monitoring must be easy to do
Docker does help with that.

More challenges
See Microservices: not a free lunch[1],
by Benjamin Wootton.
[1] http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/4/8/microservices-not-a-free-lunch.html

How does Docker help us to
implement microservices?

Building code, without Docker
Deployment scripts are fragile
Configuration management is hard
(and not a silver bullet)
Environments differ:
- from dev to dev
- from dev to prod

Building code, with Docker
Write a Dockerfile for each component
Builds are fast
- each build step is saved
- future builds will reuse saved steps
Builds are reproducible
- build environment can be well-defined
- outside context is limited

Shipping code, without Docker
Push code or build artifacts to servers
Distro packages (deb, rpm...) are great,
but hard to build (too generic)
Artifact libraries are great,
but tailored to specific languages (too specific)
When deployment fails, rollback isn't guaranteed to work

Shipping code, with Docker
Container images can be pushed to registries
Container engines can pull from those registries
Docker Inc. provides a free registry (the Docker Hub)
Works out of the box in 2 minutes
(includes account creation and engine setup)
Can also be deployed on prem
Rollbacks are easy
(see: immutable infrastructure with containers)

Network plumbing, without Docker
Application code must be modified to handle:
- service discovery
(e.g. lookup endpoint addresses into Consul, Etcd, ZK)
- failover
(same, but also needs to watch for changes)
Development stack becomes either:
- very complex
(because of those extra components)
- different from production
(because the code path differs)

Network plumbing, with Docker
Application code doesn't deal with plumbing
Application code connects to services using DNS aliases
DNS aliases are injected by Docker
(as entries in /etc/hosts)
In dev, DNS aliases map directly to service containers
In prod, DNS aliases map to special-purpose containers,
implementing service discovery, load-balancing, failover
Those containers are called ambassadors

Developing on a single node
Docker Compose
Describe a stack of containers in a simple YAML file
Start the stack with a single command
Compose connects containers together with links
Also provides simple scaling and log aggregation

Scaling with static resource scheduling
Docker Compose + Docker remote API
Deploy stateful services separately
Replace them with ambassadors in the stack
Instantiate the stack multiple times
Fits well with existing IAAS auto-scaling models

Scaling with dynamic resource scheduling
Docker Compose + Docker Swarm
Swarm consolidates multiple Docker hosts into a single one
Swarm "looks like" a Docker daemon, but it dispatches (schedules)
your containers on multiple daemons
Swarm speaks the Docker API front and back
Swarm is open source and written in Go (like Docker)
Swarm was started by two of the original Docker authors
(@aluzzardi and @vieux)
Swarm is not stable yet (version 0.3 right now)

No live demo
Video from DockerCon 2015, last month
(10 minutes)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=at72dhg-SZY&t=2600

Thanks!
Questions?
@jpetazzo — @docker

Microservices. Microservices everywhere! (At OSCON 2015)

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