Migrating a Monolithic App to Microservices on Cloud Foundry

Brian K. Martin, Bluemix Architect, @bkmartin Tony Erwin, Bluemix UI Architect, @tonyerwin

Agenda

• • • Introduction to the Bluemix UI Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture Features for Cloud Foundry to Support Microservices @bkmartin @tonyerwin

Agenda

• • • Introduction to the Bluemix UI Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture Features for Cloud Foundry to Support Microservices @bkmartin @tonyerwin

IBM Bluemix

• • IBM Bluemix: – Open-standards, cloud platform for building, running, and managing apps – PaaS layer built on CloudFoundry Bluemix UI is the front-end, providing an alternative to the CF command line

Bluemix UI

Home Dashboard Solutions (Marketing) Catalog Pricing Orgs/Spaces

Bluemix UI Monolith

• • • Single-page application (SPA) to provide desktop-like experience in the browser All HTML, CSS, and JavaScript loaded within single web page and served from a single Java app State-of-the-art not all that long ago – Dojo + J2EE was the most common stack in IBM when Bluemix UI dev started – SPA still popular (AngularJS, Ember.js etc.)

Monolithic Architecture

Bluemix UI (Client)

Home Solutions Catalog Dashboard Pricing Orgs/ Spaces

Bluemix PaaS Bluemix UI Server (Java) SQL DB CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)

Challenges of Monolith

• • • • • How can we improve performance?

– Volume of client-side requests create bottlenecks How do we integrate code from other teams using different stacks?

How can we push smaller changes as they are ready?

Where do we find developers with Dojo experience?

How can we improve SEO?

Agenda

• • • Introduction to the Bluemix UI Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture Features for Cloud Foundry to Support Microservices @bkmartin @tonyerwin

• • • • •

Promises of Microservices

Aids migration to more modern, lighter-weight stack without starting over Improves performance and developer productivity – Small services optimized for speed and page size • • • Use simplest approach that works Bare bones HTML, CSS, JS Node.js w/ Dust.js server-side templates – Easier to find answers on Google, easier to find skilled developers Allows more regular updates as loosely-coupled services can deploy at their own schedule – – Teams use stack of their choosing Teams don’t have to wait on others Leads to improved SEO – – Proxy facilitates “clean” URLs Server side generation results in crawlable content Improves cross-team UI consistency via microservice composition

Phase 1

Bluemix UI (Client)

Catalog Dashboard Pricing Orgs/ Spaces

Bluemix PaaS

Proxy Common Home Solutions Bluemix UI Server (Monolith) SQL DB Session Store No SQL Msq Queue

CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)

Monitor

Composition w/ Microservices

header Common footer inline Home combined

End Goal

Bluemix PaaS Bluemix UI (Client)

Proxy Common Home Solutions Catalog Pricing Dashboard Orgs/ Spaces Session Store No SQL Msq Queue

CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)

Monitor

New Challenges

• • • • • More moving parts, more complexity Collecting federated status, monitoring health of the system Seamless navigation with existing monolith Developer skills (need to learn new stack, but will ultimately be more productive) Blue-green deployments

An Approach for Blue-Green – Just Change Route on Proxy Router console.ng.bluemix.net

console-YYY.ng.bluemix.net

Proxy Common

common-XXX.bluemix.net

Home

home-XXX.bluemix.net

Solutions

solutions-XXX.bluemix.net

Bluemix UI Server

classic-XXX.bluemix.net

Proxy Common

common-YYY.bluemix.net

Home

Home-YYY.bluemix.net

Solutions

solutions-YYY.bluemix.net

Bluemix UI Server

classic-YYY.bluemix.net

Agenda

• • • Introduction to the Bluemix UI Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture Features for Cloud Foundry to Support Microservices @bkmartin @tonyerwin

• • •

Context Path Routing

bluemix.net/login -> login.bluemix.net/login bluemix.net/account -> account.bluemix.net/account To efficiently share user state and allow individual microservices to be updated independently, we need a built-in ability to bind context paths to apps and have gorouter routing

• • • •

Application Versions

CF has no formal concept of an application version Would it be helpful to add a formal concept of version so that a given application name can have many versions installed formally Current way – myapp-1.0  myapp-1.1

The app name may be constantly changing which is harder for mgmt, CMDB, etc

Advanced Routing Policies

• • When rolling out new versions of microservices how can you control which users are routed to the new version?

Advanced routing policies could allow policies like random selection of a percentage of the popultion, specific user groups, etc

“

Private

”

Applications

• • • • An ability to hide microservices applications from public routing Applications to be declared public or private SDN for a space or org How to authenticate/grant access for routing

Composite Applications

• • • What if you want to understand the health and status of your complete microservice based application?

A composite application could allow applications to be grouped for status and control (the latter seeming less useful) Could simplify blue-green deployment if multiple functions could be selected simultaneously

Service Registry

• • Need a new way to discover the active endpoints for the microservices rather then hard coded paths and/or application names Service registry should have live status to allow fast failover to alternative services

Performance and Monitoring

• • When your application is broken into many components, monitoring the performance and response time of each component becomes even more important to diagnose problems Common dashboards that can aggregate stats from many applications are required

Log Analysis for Problems

• • Common log aggregation platforms (ELK) solve most of the problem but it has been hard to correlate across applications for a given user Solution: use common correlators across your microservices to track individual users

Testing

• • How to insure compatibility of microservices as they are being deployed Integrated to your CI/CD pipeline, but is there anything else that could be done?

IBM Bluemix

Free 30 day trial at http://www.bluemix.net

Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @bkmartin Email: [email protected]

Twitter: @tonyerwin