Stephan Schulze, CTO at Berlin-based VC Project A, held a lightening talk about "Microservice experiences in 7 minutes - 8 questions and our answers to microservices in a 100mio revenue eCommerce business" at Symfony Conference 2016

1. Microservice experiences in 7 minutes
8 questions and our answers to microservices in a 100mio revenue
eCommerce business
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Contact: stephan.schulze@project-a.com

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1. What are major painpoints of microservices?
A microservice architecture is a distributed system.
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There is:
● an isolated vertical infrastructure for each service
● no referential integrity across services
● no “shared memory” across services
● communication only via APIs

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2. Micro vs. Macro?
rule of thumb: slice rather to large than to small
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We sliced:
business
● Customer
● Order
● Payment
● Checkout
● Contentmanagement
● Products/Search
● Cart
● Calculation
● Search
infrastructure
● Rendering/Routing
● Logging
● Authentification
● E-Mails
● Pricing
● Stock

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2. Micro vs. Macro? Our architecture
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3. Should I secure my service communication?
You must!
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We use:
- encrypted communication between services
- token based authorization for services and users
- role based access system for services and users

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4. What should my services return?
In general: everything you want!
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We return:
● pure JSON
or
● full rendered HTML wrapped in JSON with metainformation
(Status Codes, Messages, Redirects, …)
The question is: Who will merge everything together?

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5. What about sessions?
Shared data in a distributed system?
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Our approach:
The session
● is managed by the Routing/Rendering service
● is namespaced per service
● is transmitted to a service in the header
● can be updated by the service response

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6. What about different service/api versions?
You will have different versions of services in production!
You will probably have the same service in different versions in
production!
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Our approach:
● services are versioned
● APIs are versioned
● API version can be selected via Header
● APIs are documented via Swagger

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7. What about scaling and performance?
The application must be built to be scalable!
The infrastructure must be built to be scalable!
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Our approach:
● decided for docker (is a pain for developers on Mac)
● one kubernetes cluster per system
● running on a AWS infrastructure with terraform
● definition of performance budgets for services

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8. What else have we learned?
● You need a really good team
● Take time to think and discuss before
● Question whether a microservice architecture is really the way to go
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12. Thank you for your attention!
Contact: stephan.schulze@project-a.com
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