The bumpy road towards containerised microservices: why early adoption meant it took longer for us to get there

Video: https://skillsmatter.com/skillscasts/12371-the-bumpy-road-towards-containerised-microservices-why-early-adoption-meant-it-took-longer-for-us-to-get-there

A more up to date version of my "Journey to containerised microservices". I did this talk at Cloud Native London 2018 and JAXLondon 2018:

How we run our applications is always evolving – Monoliths to microservices, migration to the cloud, containerisation, improved orchestration. Containers have become synonymous with microservices but they present a new set of challenges…

In this talk I will share some of our experiences and rationale behind early adoption of containerisation using an in-house written orchestration mechanism through to migrating to Kubernetes.

In this talk I will discuss:

Our motivation for moving services into containers
The pain that went along with very early adoption
Which development approaches and practices help or hinder containerising a service
How our development process changed when we started running in containers
Best practices and lessons learnt around migrations

Transcript

1. The Bumpy Road Towards Containerised Microservices: Why Early Adoption Meant It Took Longer For Us To Get There @nickywrightson nicky.wrightson@ft.com
2. @nickywrightson Nicky Wrightson Principal Engineer & Tech Lead @ FT
3. @nickywrightson
4. https://six-degrees.ft.com/ @nickywrightson
5. https://www.ft.com The news business has changed a lot in the last 130 years
6. Over 200 services … In two regions … All containerised … Running on Kubernetes @nickywrightson
7. 2. A meandering journey 3. Where we are now? 1. Why we chose containers 4. What’s next?
8. 1. Why we chose containers
14. Over 200 services … In two regions … ~550 VMs @nickywrightson
15. https://www.flickr.com/photos/bluesquarething/5165177846 We realised that we needed to look at containered solutions
16. We could reduce costs by ~ 80% using containers @nickywrightson
17. What about serverless? @nickywrightson
18. 2. A meandering journey 1. Why we chose containers
19. 3 and half years ago we started a proof of concept
20. Java service:
 9k Requests Simple JSON manipulation 340MB Go service:
 40k Requests Database query + manipulation 12MB @nickywrightson
21. @nickywrightson
22. Content in Containers == CoCo @nickywrightson
23. Containerise every service @nickywrightson
24. Monitoring @nickywrightson
25. Change database and programming language at the same time!!
26. It was not all plain sailing @nickywrightson
27. Stateful services do not play nice @nickywrightson
28. “We need a bigger boat” Richard Dreyfus in Jaws (1975) Image: http://goo.gl/4r26gS
29. We kept losing our live clusters
30. @nickywrightson
31. @nickywrightson
32. Monitor and react at the right levels
33. Metrics Dashboards for health
35. React quickly to security patching @nickywrightson
36. Deployment needs to be automated, consistent, repeatable and have the ability to be rolled back @nickywrightson
37. @nickywrightson
38. Massive shift in operational thinking @nickywrightson
39. If it is hard do it more often If it is really hard automate it! @nickywrightson
40. @nickywrightson
41. https://coreos.com/blog/migrating-from-fleet-to-kubernetes.html
42. @nickywrightson
43. How to iterate on 200 services at the same time? @nickywrightson
44. Photo by chuttersnap on Unsplash @nickywrightson You rarely get it right the first time
46. “Stateful services are painful to containerise” Nicky Wrightson January 2016
47. 2. A meandering journey 1. Why we chose containers 3. Where we are now?
48. What did our containerisation journey give us? @nickywrightson
49. @nickywrightson
50. Operationally supportable @nickywrightson
51. Kubernetes will fix that …. @nickywrightson
52. Deployments are more graceful @nickywrightson
53. 2. A meandering journey 1. Why we chose containers 3. Benefits to us now? 4. What’s next?
54. Enhance our initial approach
55. @nickywrightson
56. Get someone else to do the heavy lifting @nickywrightson
57. One cluster to rule them all … @nickywrightson
58. Federation
59. In Conclusion … @nickywrightson
60. Hindsight is always 20:20 Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
61. Spend your innovation tokens wisely http://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology Photo by rawpixel on Unsplash
62. @nickywrightson nicky.wrightson@ft.com Thanks