Migrating a Monolithic App to Microservices on Cloud Foundry Brian K. Martin, Bluemix Architect, @bkmartin Tony Erwin, Bluemix UI Architect, @tonyerwin.

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 UIHome

Solutions (Marketing)

Pricing

Dashboard

Catalog

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

HomeHome SolutionsSolutions CatalogCatalog DashboardDashboard PricingPricing Orgs/ SpacesOrgs/

Spaces

CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)

SQL DBSQL DBBluemix UI Server

(Java)Bluemix UI Server

(Java)

Bluemix UI (Client)

Bluemix PaaS

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

SolutionsSolutions

CatalogCatalog DashboardDashboard PricingPricing Orgs/ SpacesOrgs/

Spaces

CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)

SQLDBSQLDB

Bluemix UI Server (Monolith)

Bluemix UI Server (Monolith)

Bluemix UI (Client)

Bluemix PaaS

ProxyProxy

CommonCommon

Session Store

Session Store No SQLNo SQL Msq

QueueMsq

Queue MonitorMonitor

HomeHome

Composition w/ Microservices

header

footer

inline

combined

CommonCommon

HomeHome

End Goal

HomeHome SolutionsSolutions CatalogCatalog DashboardDashboardPricingPricing Orgs/ SpacesOrgs/

Spaces

CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)

Bluemix UI (Client)

Bluemix PaaSProxyProxy

CommonCommon

Session Store

Session Store No SQLNo SQL Msq

QueueMsq

Queue MonitorMonitor

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

Homehome-XXX.bluemix.net

Homehome-XXX.bluemix.net

Solutionssolutions-XXX.bluemix.net

Solutionssolutions-XXX.bluemix.net

Bluemix UI Server classic-XXX.bluemix.net

Bluemix UI Server classic-XXX.bluemix.net

ProxyProxy

Commoncommon-XXX.bluemix.net

Commoncommon-XXX.bluemix.net

HomeHome-YYY.bluemix.net

HomeHome-YYY.bluemix.net

Solutionssolutions-YYY.bluemix.net

Solutionssolutions-YYY.bluemix.net

Bluemix UI Server classic-YYY.bluemix.net

Bluemix UI Server classic-YYY.bluemix.net

ProxyProxy

Commoncommon-YYY.bluemix.net

Commoncommon-YYY.bluemix.net

RouterRouter

console.ng.bluemix.net console-YYY.ng.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]: @bkmartin

Email: [email protected]: @tonyerwin