Architecture and Deployment of Microservices for the Cloud

The case for running an own datacenter is vanishing rapidly. The cloud seduces with a low barrier of entry and full flexibility. Infrastructure can be spun up almost instantly in a fully automated way through an API. All this with no upfront costs and the ability to decommission it just as fast. But what does this mean for our applications and their architecture? Can we just lift and shift them to the cloud?

Everything comes at a price. To be able to fully leverage the potential of the cloud, new challenges must be mastered: from data privacy and security to cost-based architectures, dynamic provisioning, service discovery and efficient deployment models.

This talk provides architects and developers clear answers and battle-tested solutions for a successful journey to infrastructure heaven.

Transcript

1. Up in the sky
   Architecture and Deployment of Microservices
   for the Cloud
   AXEL FONTAINE
   @axelfontaine
   axel@boxfuse.com
   

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2. About Axel Fontaine
   • Founder and CEO of Boxfuse
   • Over 15 years industry experience
   • Continuous Delivery expert
   • Regular speaker at tech conferences
   • JavaOne RockStar in 2014
   @axelfontaine
   

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3. flywaydb.org
   

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4. boxfuse.com
   

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5. about
   questions
   

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6. POLL:
   what type of infrastructure are you running on?
   • On Premise
   • Colocation
   • Root Server
   • Cloud
   

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7. How did this evolve ?
   

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8. +
   =
   ON
   PREM
   +
   Challenges
   • Power, Network, Cooling
   • Physical Security
   • Physical Space
   • Procurement, Vendor Management
   • Capacity Planning
   • Financing
   • OS + Patches
   • App + Updates
   

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9. +
   =
   ON
   PREM
   +
   Our
   responsibility
   

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10. + +
    Our
    responsibility
    Their
    responsibility
    =
    COLO
    

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11. +
    =
    COLO
    +
    Simple, stable,
    standards-compliant
    interface:
    (19” Rack, AC Power,
    Ethernet, …)
    

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12. Can change as
    long as it
    complies with
    the interface
    contract
    +
    =
    COLO
    + Undifferentiated
    Heavy Lifting
    Our
    responsibility
    Their
    responsibility
    

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13. =
    ROOT
    SERVER
    + Undifferentiated
    Heavy Lifting
    Our
    responsibility
    Can change as
    long as it
    complies with
    the interface
    contract
    

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14. =
    ROOT
    SERVER
    + Undifferentiated
    Heavy Lifting
    Simple, stable, standards-
    compliant interface
    Software <-> Hardware
    

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15. Room
    For
    Innovation
    + Undifferentiated
    Heavy Lifting
    Simple, stable, standards-
    compliant interface
    

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16. what about the cloud ??
    

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17. Every day, AWS adds
    enough server capacity
    to power the whole $7B
    enterprise Amazon.com
    was in 2004.
    Weekends included.
    

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18. "Advanced Test Reactor" by Argonne National Laboratory -
    originally posted to Flickr as Advanced Test Reactor core,
    Idaho National LaboratoryUploaded using F2ComButton.
    Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons -
    http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Advanced_Test_Reac
    tor.jpg#mediaviewer/File:Advanced_Test_Reactor.jpg
    "RIAN archive 341194 Kursk Nuclear Power Plant" by RIA
    Novosti archive, image #341194 / Sergey Pyatakov / CC-BY-SA
    3.0. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons -
    http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RIAN_archive_341194_
    Kursk_Nuclear_Power_Plant.jpg#mediaviewer/File:RIAN_archi
    ve_341194_Kursk_Nuclear_Power_Plant.jpg
    Control Plane Data Plane
    

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19. Control Plane Data Plane
    

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20.  Shift to a world of abundance
    (no more resource scarcity)
     Clean Control Plane/Data Plane split
    with API-based provisioning
     Cost-based Architectures
    with the ability to turn infrastructure off
    benefits of the cloud
    

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21. moving to the cloud
    

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22. lift & shift
    (= the naïve approach)
    

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23. Congratulations! You now have:
     A more expense Hetzner/OVH
     Lots of (too much?) trust
    in your cloud provider
     Potential legal trouble
    due to data privacy laws
    lift & shift
    (= the naïve approach)
    

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24. understanding the cloud
    

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25. regions
    

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26. availability zones
    <>
    

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27. building blocks
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lego#/media/File:Lego_Color_Bricks.jpg
    

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28. building blocks
    Security
    Storage Network
    Compute
    

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30. The hard Truth about Security
    1. Always breakable with infinite time & resources
    2. Must make it more complicated/expensive to break
    than it’s worth (use defense in depth!)
    3. Has a usability cost
    4. Almost always about the data
    

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31. the 3 states of data
    Data at Rest Data in Motion
    Data in Use
    

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32. Trusting your neighbors
    is good. But it’s even
    better to put a good
    lock on the door.
    Werner Vogels
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Vogels#/media/File:Wernervogels_ddp.jpg
    

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33. Data in Motion
    TLS / SSL
    

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34. Data in Use & at Rest
    Client-side
    encryption
    

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35. Client-side encryption
     Encrypt sensitive & personally identifiable data
     Use different Encryption key for each field/record
     Encrypt Encryption Key using Key encrypting Key
     Secure & Rotate the Key encrypting Key
    

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36. Key Management
    In App
    €
    KMS
    €€
    HSM
    €€€€€
    

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37. Querying Encrypted Data
    Other
    clear text
    field
    Id Encrypted
    123 #!azw\b
    456 67ftf6&)
    Exact Match
    => Hmac
    Hmac Encrypted
    5841545832 #!azw\b
    0219237127 67ftf6&)
    Range
    => Lower fidelity
    Low Fi Encrypted
    48.5 #!azw\b
    37.2 67ftf6&)
    => Use transparent persistence layer converters!
    

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38. the compute building block
    

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39. POLL:
    which level of automation are you at?
    • Build
    • Unit Tests
    • Continuous Integration
    • Acceptance Tests
    • Continuous Deployment (Code)
    • Continuous Deployment (Code + DB + Configuration)
    • Infrastructure
    

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40. Build Test
    

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41. Build Test
    

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42. • One immutable unit
    • Regenerated after every change
    • Promoted from Environment to Environment
    Classic Mistake: Build per Environment
    

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43. Image Instance
    Fully Baked Provisioned on
    Startup
    ?
    

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44. Fully Baked Provisioned on
    Startup
    Most people
     Every Instance 100% identical
     Fastest startup
     Launch always succeeds
    

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45. Fully Baked Provisioned on
    Startup
    Most people
     One immutable unit
     Regenerated after every change
     Promoted from environment to environment
    

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46. Fully Baked
     One immutable unit
     Regenerated after every change
     Promoted from environment to environment
    Image
    

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47.  One immutable unit
     Regenerated after every change
     Promoted from environment to environment
    

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48. Fully Baked
     One immutable unit
     Regenerated after every change
     Promoted from environment to environment
    Image
    

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49. instances
    General
    Purpose
    CPU
    RAM
    Disk
    

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50. scaling & costs
    vs
    auto-scale based on various factors
    => prefer smaller granularity
    

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51. types of services
    sync
    => load
    async
    => queue depth
    cron
    => time
    => but also instance health!
    

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52. high uptime is a liability
    The longer an instance is up,
    the harder it becomes to recreate exactly
    (and it will fail eventually!)
    

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53. Focus shift
    Individual instances become disposable
    Instance Service
    

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54. keep your instances stateless
    

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55. Treat servers like cattle instead of pets
    

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56. What are the implications ???
    

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57. How to solve service discovery ?
    Use a stable entry point with an internal registry
    Instance
    Instance
    Instance
    ? Elastic
    Load
    Balancer
    

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58. • Bake as much configuration as
    possible for all environments
    directly in the Image
    • Use environment detection
    and auto-configuration
    • Pass remaining configuration
    at startup and expose it as
    environment variables
    Key Value
    JDBC_URL jdbc:…
    ENV prod
    what about configuration ???
    

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59. what about the database ???
    • Keep all persistent state, including the
    database, out of the instance
    • Many good hosted solutions available
    like Amazon RDS or Google Cloud SQL
    • Use a database migration tool like
    Flyway to update on application startup
    

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60. what about the logs ???
    Ship logs to a central log server
    where they can be
    • aggregated
    • stored and backuped
    • indexed
    • searched through a nice web UI
    Many good hosted solutions
    • Loggly
    • Logentries
    • Papertrail
    • …
    => Think about data privacy!
    

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61. what about sessions ???
    Keep session in an encrypted and signed cookie
    • avoids session timeouts
    • avoids server clustering & session replication
    • avoids sticky sessions & server affinity
    

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62. what about rolling out new versions ???
    

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63. Load
    Balancer
    App
    v1
    App
    v1 Logs
    Availability Zone 1
    Availability Zone 2
    

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64. Load
    Balancer
    App
    v1
    App
    v1 Logs
    Availability Zone 1
    Availability Zone 2
    

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65. Load
    Balancer
    App
    v2
    App
    v1
    App
    v2
    App
    v1 Logs
    Availability Zone 1
    Availability Zone 2
    

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66. Load
    Balancer
    App
    v2
    App
    v1
    App
    v2
    App
    v1 Logs
    Availability Zone 1
    Availability Zone 2
    

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67. what about containers ???
    

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68. understanding modern CPUs
    Both Intel and AMD have
    hardware support for virtualization
    • isolation
    • performance
    

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69. Image
    Hardware
    Hypervisor
    Image
    Hardware
    OS+Container
    Runtime
    On Prem
    Container
    On Prem
    VM
    Image
    Hardware
    Hypervisor
    Cloud
    VM
    Image
    Hardware
    Hypervisor
    OS+Container
    Runtime
    Cloud
    VM + Container
    Only makes sense if
    you cannot afford
    $9.60/month
    granularity
    

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70. Image
    Hardware
    Hypervisor
    Image
    Hardware
    OS+Container
    Runtime
    On Prem
    Container
    On Prem
    VM
    Image
    Hardware
    Hypervisor
    Cloud
    VM
    Image
    Hardware
    Hypervisor
    OS+Container
    Runtime
    Cloud
    VM + Container
    Only makes sense if
    you cannot afford
    1.3 cents /hour
    granularity
    

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71. summary
     Put a good lock on the door (use encryption!)
     Use fully baked images (build once!)
     Treat servers like cattle (disposable!)
    

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72. boxfuse.com
    • Fully baked images generated in seconds
    (not minutes or hours)
    • Minimal images just 1% of size of regular OS
    (measured in MB not GB)
    • Images work on VirtualBox & AWS
    (completely identical from dev to prod)
    • Zero downtime updates on AWS
    (fully automatic blue/green deployments)
    

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73. Thanks !
    @axelfontaine
    boxfuse.com
    

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