AWS Innovate: Smaller IS Better – Exploiting Microservices on AWS, Craig Dickson

Smaller IS Better - Exploiting Microservices on AWSCraig S. Dickson, Solutions Architect, Amazon Web Services

Presentation Takeaways

When we are finished today, you will be able to answer the following questions:

• What are microservices?

• What do they look like on AWS?

• What problems can you address using a microservicesarchitecture?

• Is there a customer success story I can leverage?

• How do I get “microserviced”?

Who am I?

• Solutions Architect at AWS since 2012

• Software Engineer / Architect / Manager prior to that

• Based in Brisbane, Australia

Who are you?

• Architect

• Developer

• SysOps / Server Admin / Networking

• Development Manager

• CTO

What is a Microservice?

Google has been getting a workout …

https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=microservices

High Expectations …

Microservices

https://www.gartner.com/doc/3102217/hype-cycle-application-architecture-

“Microservices are the first post DevOps revolution architecture”

– Neal Ford

(Director, Software Architect, and

Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks)

Image: http://nealford.com/bio

Why does everyone

hate me?

Image: 1869 / ptwo / license

https://flic.kr/p/fbJMpB

https://www.flickr.com/photos/ptwo/

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/

What’s wrong with a monolith?

Self Contained Tightly Coupled Lacks Modularity

A Definition of Microservices

“… is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each running in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API. These services are built around business capabilities and independently deployable by fully automated deployment machinery. There is a bare minimum of centralized management of these services, which may be written in different programming languages and use different data storage technologies.”

- Martin Fowler (Chief Scientist, ThoughtWorks)

- James Lewis (Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks)

“Say hello to my micro friend!”

- Tony Montaña

(Cuban Software Architect)

Image: http://www.amazon.com/Scarface-Limited-Edition-Blu-ray-Digital/dp/B0019N94X6

Um, isn’t this just SOA?

SOA Microservices

Smart pipes, dumb endpoints Simple pipes, smart endpoints

Centralized governance (ESB) Minimal governance

Proprietary standards Open standards

Services provide myriad functions Services are single purposed

Distributed monoliths?

A Well-Architected Microservice on AWS

1. cannot be made any smaller• has a single functional purpose

• has minimized total lines of code, architecture components, etc.

• is cost optimized

2. is vertically isolated• runs in its own process

• uses the best fit-for-purpose architecture (app. & infra.)

• uses the best fit-for-purpose programming language

• uses the best fit-for-purpose persistance option(s)

A Well-Architected Microservice on AWS (2)

3. has a well defined interface (API)• can be versioned

• provides SDKs & documentation for clients

• no backdoors

4. is automatically and independently deployed• first deploy and all updates

• to all environments, not just test and dev.

5. is automatically tested thoroughly• functional, integration, performance, etc.

• baseline metrics collected and evaluated

A Well-Architected Microservice on AWS (3)

6. is operationally mature• horizontally scalable

• self healing

• metrics & logs collected centrally

• elegantly handles failures of downstream services

7. is managed by a small team (2 pizzas?) • co-located & cross-functional

• back-end devs, UX, ops, DBA, etc.

• with cradle-to-grave responsibilities

Microservice Patterns on AWS

The Poor-Man’s Microservice

Clients

Elastic IP

RDS

HTTP

REST

Running EC2

Instance

Auto Scaling Group

AZ-A

AZ-B

Min = 1, Max = 1

Future EC2

Instance

The Traditional Microservice

ClientsRDS

HTTP

REST

EC2

Instance

Auto Scaling Group

AZ-A

AZ-B

Min > 1

Elastic Load

Balancing

EC2

Instance

AWS

OpsWorksAWS Elastic

Beanstalk

And don’t forget …

.

That’s nice, but can we make it smaller?

Image: http://www.nowverybad.com/honey-i-shrunk-the-kids-1989/

The Elastic Container Service Microservice

ClientsRDS

HTTP

REST

ECS Fleet

AZ-A

AZ-BElastic Load Balancing

Servers? Where we’re going, we don’t need servers

Doc Brown

(Early Cloud Adopter)

Image: http://memorydelta.wikia.com/wiki/Emmett_Brown

“No server is easier to manage than no server”

Werner Vogels

(CTO, Amazon.com)

Image: 20081108 DDP Werner_Vogels / Guido van Nispen / license

https://flic.kr/p/5AaBsp

https://www.flickr.com/photos/vannispen/


The Serverless Microservice

Clients

HTTP

REST

AWS

Lambda RDS

Never pay for idle!

The Serverless Microservice API

Amazon API

GatewayClients

HTTP

REST

AWS

Lambda

Amazon

S3

Amazon

DynamoDB

Amazon Machine

Learning

Amazon

SNSAmazon

SQS

Amazon

Kinesis

Lambda

Blueprints

The Hybrid Microservice API

Amazon API

GatewayClients

HTTP

REST

Amazon

EC2

AWS

Lambda

Lambda

Blueprints

Amazon ECS

Elastic Load

Balancing

The Micro-Microservice API

Clients

Amazon API

Gateway

Free

Amazon API

Gateway

Premium

Amazon API

Gateway

Partner

Amazon API

Gateway

Experimental

Amazon

EC2

Amazon ECSAWS

Lambda

Lambda

Blueprints

Exploiting Microservices to Address Business Problems

• Product Management has a great idea

• Even better: Product Management has many

great ideas, but are not sure which ones are

winners

• Takes weeks, months or worse to get them in

front of a customer

• A massive barrier to innovation

Problem: Long Feature Cycle Times

• Create an architecture that enables rapid change, inherently

supports agility and encourages innovation

Exploit Microservices to …

Conway’s Law

”organizations which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations”

- Melvin Conway

Image: https://twitter.com/conways_law

• Large pieces of software, require large teams

• Increased inertia, lack of agility

• Hard to integrate work from other teams

• Many problems are actually people problems, not

technology problems

Problem: Large Teams

• Create an architecture that encourages smaller

software components

• Better align team size and responsibilities to

services


“Being woken up at 3am every night by your pager is certainly a powerful incentive to focus on quality when writing your code.”

- Martin Fowler

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Fowler

• Monoliths lead to “shared” responsibilities• Focus is on project deliverables, not full lifecycle

Problem: Lack of Ownership

• Create small teams working on small pieces of functionality

• Provide an opportunity for cradle-to-grave ownership• Foster a “You build it, you run it” philosophy


• Geographically, Temporally, Organizationally• Burden of orchestration

Problem: Distributed Teams

• Provide a mechanism to divide work up so that only co-located teams have to collaborate heavily

• Define service level APIs that allow distributed teams to move at different velocities


• Upskilling takes time

• Unable to make use of temporary resources

Problem: Inelastic Human Capacity

• Reduce the surface area that individuals need to

understand at any one time

• Enable temporary resources to work quickly and

integrate easily


Netflix slide

• Lack of Availability = Loss of Revenue

• Small issues rendering whole applications

unusable

Problem: Availability

• Encourage a design-for-failure attitude

• Enable individual services to implement

appropriate fall-back plans and continue to

provide value to customers


• Cannot create à la carte application offerings to

users

• Cannot easily get feedback about new ideas

before investing large resources

Problem: Product Management

• Enable flexibility for product management and

increase innovation

• Quickly test ideas by combining strategies such as

Feature Toggling and A/B Testing


Exploiting Microservices to Address Technical Problems

"I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”

- Abraham Maslow (1966)

Maslow’s Hammer

Image: DSC_1607 / Justin Baeder / license

https://flic.kr/p/96VdSv

https://www.flickr.com/photos/justinbaeder/


“Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding.”

- Abraham

Kaplan (1964)

Image: Thor and his hammer / tenthousandcubans / license

https://flic.kr/p/ai24aV

https://www.flickr.com/photos/tenthousandcubans/


• Different teams forced to use/learn technologies

that they are not effective with, just because it is

“the standard”

• Inability to adopt different or emerging

technologies

Problem: Single Technology Syndrome

• Encourage a polyglot attitude

• Allow the best solution for each problem to be

selected


• Fear of deployments due to assumed risk

• Large deployment sizes due to dependencies

Problem: Constrained Delivery Velocities

• Allow different parts of applications to move at

different speeds for development and deployment

activities

• Minimize risk by reducing the deployment sizes

down to single services


• Large functional surface area

• All potential failure scenarios are hard to define

• Long running tests delay feedback

Problem: Lack of Testability

• Provide well defined APIs that can be deployed in

isolation

• Allow for quicker, yet more complete testing


• Standardizing onto limited EC2 instance types

• Using generic scaling strategies

• Scaling every thing, every time

• Failing to use existing AWS services

Problem: Inefficient Scaling

• Allow the correct scaling option for each service to

be selected

• Scale services independently

• Quickly adopt new AWS services


• Inability to easily/safely try new algorithms or

patterns

• Inability to quickly adopt disruptive technologies

Problem: Lack of Technical Innovation

• To encourage vertical decoupling of components

• Evolve individual services quickly without

interfering with other parts of an application


Evolving to Microservices

Microservices may not be the right choice for you.

Image: http://insec.in/blog/2015/01/09/discounts-ethical-hacking-course-in-kolkata/shocked-woman-1/

Before Adopting Microservices

• Are you are a startup?

• Is this a brand new green field project?

• Do you have a deep understanding of the domain?

• Is your organisational structure compatible?

• Have you adopted DevOps practices?

Consider these questions …

“A microservices-first approach for a brand new project that we didn’t fully understand the domain for led to a lot of unexpected complexity. We are however, having great success on another project refactoring an existing monolithic service into microservices.”

Mark Bond

(Group Architect, Dominos Pizza Enterprises)

Mo’ services, mo’ problems

The Notorious B.I.G.

(Influential East-Coast Software Architect)

Image: http://www.neontommy.com/news/2014/03/notorious-big-top-ten-songs

Focus on DevOps and Automation

• Even a medium scale microservices architecture (10s or 100s of services) is difficult to manage by hand

• Invest in automating EVERYTHING

• Code builds and testing (CI)

• Code deployments to all environments (CD)

• Operational monitoring• CloudWatch Metrics, CloudWatch Logs, custom dashboards etc.

• A/B testing, function toggling

Focus on Your Organisation

• Evolve team sizes and responsibilities

• Moving towards smaller, cross-functional teams

• With cradle-to-grave responsibilities

• Integrate Product Management, QA, Ops, etc.

Focus on Your Services

• Business capability, rather than technical function

• Everything fails, all the time• retry, fail-over and service down scenarios

• the circuit-breaker pattern

• Netflix Hystrix

• Centralized metrics and logging collection

Conclusion

µSummary

7 tenets

7 architecture patterns 8 business problems

6 technical problems 1 big warning

3 tips for evolving 13 awesome jokes (at least)

What You Should Do Next

µAWS Lambda Amazon API Gateway Identify problems

Hunt MonolithsChampion Microservices Get Help

Resources

• Microservices – Martin Fowler & James Lewis• http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

• Introduction to Microservices – Chris Richardson• https://www.nginx.com/blog/introduction-to-microservices/

• Are You Well Architected? – AWS Blog• https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/are-you-well-architected/

• Netflix Hystrix• https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix

http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

https://www.nginx.com/blog/introduction-to-microservices/

https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/are-you-well-architected/

https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix

Online Labs & Training

Gain confidence and hands-on

experience with AWS.

Watch free Instructional Videos and

explore Self-Paced Labs

Instructor Led Classes

Learn how to design, deploy and

operate highly available, cost-effective

and secure applications on AWS in

courses led by qualified AWS

instructors

Validate your technical expertise

with AWS and use practice

exams to help you prepare for

AWS Certification

AWS Certification

More info at http://aws.amazon.com/training

http://aws.amazon.com/training

Thank You for Attending AWS Innovate

We hope you found it interesting!

Do provide us with your feedback for the session and complete the feedback form.

Let us know your thoughts of today’s event and how we can improve the event

experience for you in the future.