My talk at the inaugural micro services meet-up at the Engine Yard in Dublin! An honest look at how we've landed on our micro-services architecture at Gilt, and the challenges we're facing.
8. 2011: java, scala, loosely-typed services
Hidden
linkages; buried
business logic
Monolithic Java
App; huge
bottleneck for
innovation.
lots of
duplicated code
:(
teams focused on
business lines
Large loosely-
typed
JSON/HTTP
services
9. enter: µ-services
“How can we arrange our teams around
strategic initiatives? How can we make it
fast and easy to get to change to
production?”
21. Lessen dependencies
between teams: faster code-
to-prod
Lots of initiatives in parallel
Your favourite
<tech/language/framework>
here
We (heart) μ-services
Graceful degradation of
service
Disposable Code: easy to
innovate, easy to fail and
move on.
23. 1. staging
We find it hard to maintain staging
environments across multiple teams with lots of
services.
We think TiP is the way to go: invest is
automation, use dark canaries in prod.
24. 2. ownership
Who ‘owns’ that service? What happens if that
person goes away?
We have chosen for teams and departments to
own and maintain their services. No throwing
this stuff over the fence.
25. 3. deployment
Services need somewhere to live. We’re
building tooling over docker and AWS to give
elasticity + fast provisioning + service isolation
+ repeatable, immutable deployment.
26. 4. lightweight APIs
We’ve settled on REST-style APIs.
Developing http://apidoc.me. Separate interface
from implementation; ‘an AVRO for REST”
(Mike Bryzek, CTO)
Note: need 'dumb' zero-dependency clients to
those APIs.
27. 5. audit + alerting
How do we stay compliant while giving
engineers full autonomy in prod?
Really smart alerting: http://cavellc.github.io
orders[shipTo: US].count.5m == 0
28. 6. io explosion
Each service call begets more service calls;
some of which are redundant
This is still a worry for us. We currently don’t
automatically detect loops.
29. scaling μ-
services at gilt
ade@gilt.com
Microservices Dublin Meetup,
Engine Yard, Dublin
24th Feb 2015
Adrian Trenaman, VP Engineering, Gilt