Containers at JustWatch

Presented at the Berlin DevOps Meetup 2017-04. We explain how we ended up using managed Kubernetes on the Google Cloud Platform and what we learned from using containers in production.

Transcript

1. Next Generation Movie Marketing for Cinema, Home Entertainment and VOD
2. Our Journey to Kubernetes Berlin DevOps Meetup 2017-04-05
3. Ever heard of JustWatch?
4. JustWatch is a new kind of international adtech and data company solely focused on the movie industry. JustWatch is providing data driven video advertising campaigns focused on the revenue relevant power users mostly on YouTube and Facebook. JustWatch has exclusive first party data about movie taste and purchase behavior and minimizes waste coverage worldwide on scale.
5. Why are able to reach this efficiency? JustWatch has exclusive first party data and technology B2C International Movie and TV-Show Apps B2B Next Generation Movie Marketing
6. JustWatch collects anonymized data about purchase behavior and movie taste of movie and TV show fans worldwide MovieGraph User Profile Genres Action Science Fiction Comedy Movie Taste WatchList Add Trailer Views Purchase Behavior Cinema Tickets DVD / BD Rent / Buy HD / SD VOD Provider Movie Theater
8. JustWatch is growing rapidly in currently 24 countries, adding more than 2 million new user profiles per month JustWatch Usage: Web, iOS, Android Launch February 2015 iOS & Android App Launch > 1 MM App Downloads > 4 MM New Users per Month
9. Act I: The Beginning
10. In 2015, we wanted to validate the business model as fast as possible
11. We started running Snowflakes, building and starting containers on the cloud instances via cluster ssh
12. Early 2016 we wanted to improve developer self-service in our evolving micro-service architecture
13. You said evolving micro-service architecture?
14. We build and maintain over 55 stateless 12 Factor micro-services written in Go and deploy to AWS, GCE and Kubernetes using ChatOps. We use gRPC and Prometheus.
16. How to turn your pets into cattle?
17. First thing we got rid off, was building containers on the target instances
18. CI would kick in after Git push. We still had to deal with docker-compose on all the instances
19. ChatOps
21. Custom Slack Bot, Consul Key-Value Store, a custom Agent and Logshipping.
22. Eventually keeping up with Docker changes and feature requests became too time consuming
23. Looking for alternatives: Kubernetes, Apache Mesos, Docker Swarm, Hashicorp Nomad, Amazon ECS
24. Act II: Migrating to Kubernetes
25. Moving the containers was easy, compared to moving the datastores
26. PostgreSQL (RDS -> GCE) ElasticSearch (Docker -> GCE) AeroSpike (EC2 -> GCE)
27. Still using ChatOps
28. Act III: Lessons Learned
29. Running containers in production is usually fine
30. Run Docker on Ubuntu LTS x64 only. Update Frequently. Avoid datastores in Docker.
31. Don’t use all of Docker. Images and Containers are great. Logging, Volumes and built-in Orchestration aren’t.
32. Build FROM scratch or FROM alpine
33. Vendor Dependencies
34. Use a Continuous Integration system
35. Try ChatOps
36. Containers are easy. Orchestration is hard(er). Try Kubernetes.
37. Questions?
38. We’re hiring. AdTech Engineers Site Reliability Engineers Fullstack Engineers Work with awesome people and state of the art technology in a self-funded, profitable startup.