The Granularity of a Micro-Service

The Granularity of a Micro-Service(guidesmiths.com)

7 points by scresswell 11 years ago | 2 comments

chatmasta 11 years ago |

I really like the idea of microservice architecture, but my gripe with it is the one this post explicitly neglected to deal with. That is, deployment and service orchestration is a nightmare.

I recently experimented with a micro service architecture using Flask, but after wasting time trying to figure out how to properly deploy and orchestrate all the services (especially when running tests), I reverted to a simple backend/frontend model. It's still technically a "microservice" architecture, but the "services" are an API and the web-app. They're ~1000 lines instead of 100.

I get the sense that this kind of architecture is over optimization for a lot of projects. Martin Fowler himself describes it as an "architecture for monolithic applications." I suspect that for smaller applications, where services are not spread across multiple departments and locations, a microservice architecture is more trouble than it's worth. The deployment is simply too much of a headache (again, especially for testing). You're moving all of your maintenance work from maintaining one big service to maintaining the orchestration and deployment of dozens of small ones.

Again, I really like the idea behind this kind of architecture. But I had a lot of trouble with a solid deployment and orchestration mechanism. I want to be able to be able run tests quickly. And that doesn't just mean unit tests for each service, because necessarily when you use this architecture, integration tests become far more important.

If anyone with experience deploying microservice architectures using non-Java components wants to write a blog post on your experience, I would love to read it.

scresswell 11 years ago | |

Hi chatmasta,

Thanks for you're comment - we agree that the deployment of micro-services is more complicated, although we disagree it has to be a nightmare. Not wanting to jump the gun on my next blog post too much, the deployment solution for Campaign Manager was:

1. A co-ordination project, capable of setting up the development environment, starting services, running tests, building artefacts and deploying them. This sounds grand, but it was really a set of scripts (JavaScript), that relied on a consistent naming convention.

2. A file defining which services were deployed to which host per environment

3. A shared list of endpoints for service to service communication, datastores and the ESB.

The build scripts used the CI build number to version the artefacts and created an SMF manifest. The deploy scripts (also written in javascript) iterated over all hosts and performed the following steps...

1. Put the host into maintenance mode, causing the load balancer to remove it from the pool

2. Upload the new / updated service artefacts (tar.gz)

3. Stop services not supposed to be running on the host

4. Install the new / updated service artefacts (i.e. unzip them)

5. Import the SMF manifest (similar to an init.d script)

6. Take host out of maintenance mode

7. Delete services, retaining the last 5 versions

This is not vastly different to what I would have done if deploying a single application to multiple hosts. We didn't have any need for orchestration as the significant service-to-service communication was via asynchronous messaging. We've improved on this in other projects, e.g. deploying docker containers instead of tar.gz files, using AWS tags instead of a file to define where services are deployed and even adding a service dependency graph so that when one service becomes unavailable the dependent services can take appropriate action.

Will write all this up in more detail and post to HN.