A People's History of Microservices

A People’s History of Microservices

Monitoring for the Small Fry

Camille Fournier, CTO, Rent the Runway@skamille

@lonelocust

How do we get out of here?

How did we get here?

A People’s History

Well, my muddled memories and impressions of living through the past 20 years of computing evolution

In the beginning…

Leslie Lamport

“A distributed system is one in

which the failure of a computer you

didn’t know existed can render your own computer

unusable”

@cra

@@adrianco

AAAHHHHHHHHH

To Sum Up:

Under conditions of…

SCARCITY

“Should” and “Must” need not apply

This does not require

perfection to reach!

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePremium.html

What is monitoring anyway?

Identify the cause of known problems quickly

Understand the state of systems at all times

(to detect hidden or upcoming problems)

Part 1: Identifying the cause of problems

quickly

And other incident management improvements…

TESTING

THE WISDOM OF INES SOMBRA @RANDOMMOOD

Monitoring is not a substitute for

testing

Seriously, stop saying that. Now. Stop it.

Clearly Articulate Dependencies

What downstream systems does this system rely on?

What does “healthy” look like for the system?

Enabling devs to hand off support of systems is actually good!

What about tools tho?

Pick a couple of tools, no more!

Consistency, Clarity over Creativity

Part 2: Detect and predict things that are wrong without alerts

And operating well enough when things are failed.

Your most useful data is an approximation of your

business

What is the CUSTOMER experiencing?

What is the CLIENT experiencing?

What are the rhythms of your business like?

Your Team

Your Customers

RESILIENCE

Any of your

services can die

User

Checkout

Static Asset CDN Origin

Drupal

Our Runway

Home

Grid

Product Detail

static assets

sinatra views / erbs

< Sinatra::Base

RtR API clients

Heroku

Rackspace

Engine Yard

In conclusion

We’re all in this together

“There is an underside to every age about which history does not often speak, because history is written from records left by the privileged”

Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States

Thanks! Questions? @skamille