How we build microservices

How we build microservices(blog.yourkarma.com)

63 points by klaaspieter 12 years ago | 40 comments

al2o3cr 12 years ago |

"By just going ahead and building the app, we became familiar with the problem we were trying to solve, and the more familiar we were with the problem, the more obvious it was where we needed boundaries between aspects of the app. Every time we encountered something that clearly looked like it should be a separate piece, we turned it into a service."

THIS. This should be printed in 36-point font on every microservice article.

Nelkins 12 years ago |

"The biggest challenge with microservices is testing. With a regular web application, an end-to-end test is easy: just click somewhere on the website, and see what changes in the database."

I find this surprising. I would've thought having a more modular system would lend itself to easier testing. Have others had this same experience?

iain_hecker 12 years ago | |

It's easier to test individual items, for sure. Testing small code bases is the best thing ever. However, some actions require stuff to happen in multiple services.

There are "contracts" on how to talk to other services. You can test if you follow that contract, but it's hard to verify automatically that these contracts are in sync between apps.

palakchokshi 12 years ago | |

I think what the article is talking about is testing microservices in an event based messaging architecture is difficult. If the architecture did not comprise of queues with async servicing of queues it might have been easier to test the microservices in an end-to-end scenario.

Arie 12 years ago | |

Every little piece is easy/easier to test, but testing end-to-end over multiple micro-apps is hard in my experience.

vertex-four 12 years ago | | |

Why is this? Is it simply a deployment issue - that it's hard to get all the pieces running together in a test environment?

Smudge 12 years ago |

> We have an in-house tool we use called Fare which reads this configuration and sets up the appropriate SQS and SNS queues.

Would love to see this released publicly. As stated in the post, there aren't a ton of (public) examples of microservice architectures, so everyone seems to be solving the same problems independently. It would be great if we could start pooling more of our resources together.

iain_hecker 12 years ago | |

We will! There are however a couple of really nasty issues that we don't feel comfortable to release to the public yet.

cwt137 12 years ago |

I've been thinking a lot about SOA. Articles like this and Living Social's SOA blog posts series are a big help. But, I feel something is still missing. For example, no one talks about security of the various services. Are there any good books someone can recommend on SOA?

iain_hecker 12 years ago | |

We have all services running inside a VPN (see one of our older posts: https://blog.yourkarma.com/building-private-clouds-with-amaz...) and we also use HTTP Basic token auth that are configured upon deployment. Every app gets its own token, so we can trace which app does what.

cwt137 12 years ago | | |

I'd figured the services were on a private network (or at least the app is listening on an interface on a private network), but it is good someone confirmed it. Thanks for your insight on security.

pdx 12 years ago |

    The shipment app listens to the messaging system, sees an 
    order take place, looks at the details, and says, "Okay, 
    I need to send two boxes to this person." Any other 
    services interested in an order happening can do 
    whatever they need to with the event in their own 
    queues, and the store API doesn't need to worry about 
    it.

I'm curious how you guarantee that all the systems that need to see an event, will actually see it, before it is removed from the event queue. I assume the shipment app, in your example, is responsible for removing the event from the queue. So, what if it removes it before the mailer app or the "make cash register sound" app, sees the event?

swanson 12 years ago | |

I believe each service has it's own queue, so producing an event would "fan-out" and add the event to each queue. That was my interpretation of why they were using both SNS and SQS - but I could be mistaken. If a particular service is not interested in a given event, it can just pluck it out of the queue and move onto processing the next message.

iain_hecker 12 years ago | |

Each app gets their own queue. So there is a queue for the shipment app and for the mailer app. When an event is published to SNS, it gets added to both queues.

pdx 12 years ago | | |

I see. So you never add a listener, without also modifying the emitter to send to an additional queue.

tiglionabbit 12 years ago |

The text makes it seem like they're using SQS for many things, but the diagram only shows it between Orders and Shipments. I guess everything else communicates through the database and HTTP requests?

Using SQS means you're either polling or long-polling with hangups every 20 seconds. This seems pretty shitty to me. Also how do you structure one of these services around polling or long-polling to get its info? It sounds like they're using Rails. Does Rails have something that makes this easy to do?

At first, reading this reminds me of the Blackboard pattern from The Pragmatic Programmer. This pattern seems like a neat way to separate an application into different agents.

iain_hecker 12 years ago | |

We use SQS for basically everything that happens asynchronously to the main flow. So when a user signs up there are a bunch of things that need to happen straight away (create an account, give 100MB to every new user), these go via HTTP. The others (email, give the owner of a Karma an additional 100MB and a push notification) goes through SNS and SQS.

All these async things don't impact the main flow of the user, so it's no problem that it isn't instantaneous. We are running background processes that do this.

We only use Rails for our frontend applications, they don't contain any business logic. Our backend processes are usually Sinatra for HTTP requests, or custom daemons.

jessaustin 12 years ago |

What's the advantage for your situation of publishing to SNS which is in turn publishing to SQS vs. just publishing directly to SQS? Are you forking to multiple SQS queues?

iain_hecker 12 years ago | |

Yup we are. There might be multiple applications interested in the event and they each get their own queue.

marceldegraaf 12 years ago | | |

Have you looked into a "real" messaging queue for this, like RabbitMQ or another AMQP based system for this? Or are you bound to SNS/SQS for a particular reason?

MattGrommes 12 years ago |

Is there a difference between microservices and SOA? I've used architectures just like this in the past but never heard of "microservices" until recently.

dragonwriter 12 years ago | |

AFAICT, "microservices" is exactly SOA in its original sense; my guess is the rename is because SOA has become so attached to particular XML-based implementations and standards (e.g., the WS-* series of standards).

iain_hecker 12 years ago | | |

This. Also SOA means STD in Dutch, so we don't want to use it that often ;)

buzzkills 12 years ago | |

No difference, just a new name. Not so bad I guess, however I fear it will cropper when vendors leap on the bandwagon again and start sell inappropriate tools and frameworks badged as Microservice and we can start the process of renaming again.

mercer 12 years ago | | |

That's great news for vendors and consultants who jump on the bandwagon though :).

phazmatis 12 years ago |

Every time I cludge new functionality into an existing repo, I wish microservices were more generally acceptable.

The shipment app listens to the messaging system, sees an order take place, looks at the details, and says, "Okay, I need to send two boxes to this person." Any other services interested in an order happening can do whatever they need to with the event in their own queues, and the store API doesn't need to worry about it.