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The 7 Deadly Sins of Microservices
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Tareq Abedrabbo
November 27, 2014
Technology
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The 7 Deadly Sins of Microservices
MuCon 2014
Tareq Abedrabbo
November 27, 2014
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Transcript
The 7 Deadly Sins of Microservices Tareq Abedrabbo - MuCon
2014
About me CTO at OpenCredo Author, developer, open-source committer, with
a long term interest in service-based architecture
Disclaimer Any resemblance to existing projects, overrunning or axed, is
purely intentional!
What are microservices?
Microservices Design Principles Tools Decoupling Separation of concerns Encapsulation Engineering
Practices Spring Boot RabbitMQ Hystrix Automation Scalability Fault-tolerance Continuous Delivery Testing Dropwizard Config Management
Why microservices anti-patterns?
1. The Enterprise-OSGI-Application-Service-Bus Building the wrong thing
There is no unique way to implement microservices
Don't build what you don't need - think about your
goals and your non-goals
Questions to ask: - What languages do I need to
support? - What libraries? - How dynamic and flexible does my implementation need to be?
Communicate goals and non-goals. Keep it simple.
2. Porcine Cosmetics Failing to adopt a contract-first design approach
Why do we need service contracts?
Abstraction
Encapsulation
Composition
Always start by designing the contract of your service (CDD,
it is like TDD but for microservices!)
Seriously, we've known this for 10 years!
3. Message in a Bottle Assuming the wrong communication protocol
Typically, microservices use http or lightweight messaging to communicate. Messages
can be binary or human-readable
Don't enforce one particular communication pattern before understanding what you
really need
Do I need: - Simple request/response paradigm? - Message persistence?
- Reliability? - Asynchronous notification?
Distinguish between services: external vs internal core vs supporting
4. The Single Domain of Failure Introducing a shared domain
model
Designing a shared domain model is common in a monolithic
architecture (it is even a best practice!)
Things domain models are used for: - drive business logic
- map business entities to the database - manage input & output
The shared domain model fallacy: we are in full control
of the context and the boundaries of the application
A shared domain model breaks encapsulation and introduces coupling between
services
Shared dependency on volatile binary artefacts makes deployments really hard
Define the domain in terms of service interaction, not service
implementation
Resource-oriented design
5. The Distributed Monolith Defining inappropriate service boundaries
A distributed monolith is an application that externalises its internal
services indiscriminately
Internal application components don't always make good microservices
Internal application services: - often have the wrong granularity -
can have interdependencies - or a dependency on a shared domain
Microservices are not a remoting abstraction
Design services that have business meaning and clear boundaries
6. The Horseless Cart Neglecting Macro System Concerns
Microservices: micro vs macro (macro is often missed)
Macro things to think about: - updating, deploying and scaling
services independently - functional, performance and regression testing - system-wide behaviour, including failure scenarios
Design for a distributed system (runtime introspection, fault-tolerance, latency, failure,
etc...)
Introduce continuous delivery and automated testing form the very start
7. The Sausage Factory Disregarding the Human Factor
In microservices world, developers need to have good understanding of:
- Messaging - Scalability, fault-tolerance and resilience - Integration and remoting And potentially learn a few new technologies and tools
Monolithic architecture is a rabbit hole!
Microservices do not make up for the gaps in your
developers' skills
Invest in your developers
–Melvin Conway “organisations which design systems […] are constrained to
produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organisations.”
Corollary organisations that operate in silos cannot benefit from a
microservices architecture
Microservices do not fix broken organisations
Collaboration on a microservices project between: - devs and ops
- techies and business - and across teams
The essence of microservices is collaboration
In conclusion
Microservices: it feels a little bit like quantum mechanics!
Hopefully, we can now begin to have pragmatic answers to
questions such as: - How do I design a (micro)service? - How big or small should a service be? - Should a microservices be reusable?
Links Microservice anti-patterns: http://bit.ly/ microservices-antipatterns OpenCredo: http://www.opencredo.com/blog Twitter: @tareq_abedrabbo Personal
blog: http://www.terminalstate.net Thank you! Any questions?
Credits • https://unsplash.com/ • The horseless cart: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ ellesmerefnc/4249596803/ •
Message in a bottle: https://www.flickr.com/photos/ rpenalozan/5128413528