In this talk, you will hear the best practices from analysts at Gartner, engineers at Heroku, and experiences at VSP distilled down into a top ten list of characteristics that applications ought to have to achieve high availability, scalability and flexibility. Target audience includes developers of APIs and web-based applications, the analysts and architects that design them and the infrastructure teams that support them.

2. Credits
Richard Watson
Research VP, Gartner
Cloud Characteristics, Principles and Design Patterns
(G00226919)
Martin Fowler & James Lewis
ThoughtWorks
Microservices (http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html)
Adam Wiggins
Co-Founder, Heroku
The Twelve-Factor App (12factor.net)

4. Source: http://www.shawsystems.com/connectedMagazine/v5i1/ilities.html

5. Source: http://archive.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2013/07/facebook-bui

6. Source: IDC

7. Source: http://www.thewhir.com/web-hosting-news/google-cloud-provides-support-for-native-mysql-connections

8. Cloud Native

9. David Heinemeier Hansson
Ruby on Rails
Strict separation of
configuration from code

10. Configuration varies substantially across
deploys, code does not.
Source: http://12factor.net/config

11. What is Configuration?
• Database and Backend Service Endpoint
– jdbc:db2://10.0.1.2:50001/DB01:currentSchema=API
– https://api.vsp.com/claims
• Credentials
– L33t
– wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
• Canonical Hostnames
– www.vsp.com
Source: http://12factor.net/config

12. What isn’t Configuration?
• Spring Wiring
<bean id="myBean” class=”com.vsp.PintoBean”/>
• Rails Routes
– get ’/stuff', :to => ’things#show’
Source: http://12factor.net/config

13. A litmus test for whether an app has all config
correctly factored out of the code is whether the
codebase could be made open source at any
moment, without compromising any credentials.
Source: http://12factor.net/config

14. Where does it go?
• Source Control? NO
• Java System Properties? NO
• Environment Variables? YES!
Source: http://12factor.net/config

15. How are they managed?
• Chef
• OpsWorks

16. Alternatives…

17. Treats backing services as attached
resources
James Gosling
Java

18. A backing service is any service the app consumes
over the network as part of its normal operation.
Source: http://12factor.net/backing-services

19. Source: http://12factor.net/backing-services

20. Cloud Native applications must be isolated from
backing service failures or risk being taken down
with them.
Source: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

21. Source: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

22. Source: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

23. Source: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

24. Source: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

25. Source: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html

26. Richard M. Stallman
GNU Project
Leverages open source for innovation

27. Source: https://github.com/Netflix/Hystrix/wiki

28. Enable future innovation by building on top of
mainstream open source projects.

29. Super Awesome API
SCA
JavaEE App Server
AIX
P-Series

30. Super Awesome API
SCA
WebSphere App Server
AIX
P-Series
Spring
JBoss
RHEL
X86_64VMwareEC2
Tomcat
Spring Boot
Docker
EC2 Container Service

31. Alan Turing
Turing Machine
Designed with security

32. Organizations should look at how they can inject
security practices throughout the agile
development cycle.
Source: http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/security-sandwich

33. Source: http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/security-sandwich
Validation
Policies

34. Source: http://www.thoughtworks.com/radar/techniques/security-sandwich
CI Pipeline
Policies&Validation

35. The principle of defense-in-depth is that layered
security mechanisms increase security of the
system as a whole.
Source: https://www.owasp.org/index.php/Defense_in_depth

36. Source: http://www.infiltrated.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=28&Itemid=34

37. Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1vleeh/which_medieval_castles_were_the_hardest_to/
Defense in Depth

39. Linus Torvalds
Linux
Executed as one or more stateless
processes

40. The microservice architectural style is an
approach to developing a single application as a
suite of small services, each running in its own
process.
Source: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

41. Source: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

42. Source: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

43. Immutable servers allow you to be absolutely
certain what the state of a server is once it has
been provisioned
Source: http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/rethinking-building-cloud-part-4-immutable-servers

44. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImmutableServer.html

45. http://martinfowler.com/bliki/ImmutableServer.html

46. Source: http://www.thoughtworks.com/insights/blog/rethinking-building-cloud-part-4-immutable-servers
• Upgrade Time
• Data Persistence
• Logs
• Backing Service Endpoints

47. Sticky sessions are a violation of twelve-factor and
should never be used or relied upon.
Source: http://12factor.net/processes

48. Source: http://dunnry.com/blog/CategoryView,category,Azure.aspx

49. Source: http://dunnry.com/blog/CategoryView,category,Azure.aspx
Session Cache

50. Roy Fielding
REST
Capabilities are accessible over
standard mechanisms

51. A cloud native application exports HTTP as a
service by binding to a port, and listening to
requests coming in on that port.
Source: http://12factor.net/port-binding

52. Source: http://steveperkins.com/war-files-vs-embedded-servers/

53. The microservice architectural style consists of
services communicating with lightweight
mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.
Source: http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

56. “Be conservative in what you do,
be liberal in what you accept from others” – Jon Postel
RFC 760
Robustness Principle

57. Mark Zuckerberg
Facebook
Designed for continuous deployment
by keeping the gap between
development and production small

58. Time Gap
Source: http://12factor.net/dev-prod-parity
Developer may write code and have it
deployed in…
days, weeks, or even months.
hours or even just minutes later.

59. Source http://www.slideshare.net/mcallana/continuous-delivery-distilled
Reducing Batch Size Reduces Risk

60. Personnel Gap
Source: http://12factor.net/dev-prod-parity
Developers write code and…
ops engineers deploy it
are closely involved in deploying it
and monitoring in production

62. Tool Gap
Source: http://12factor.net/dev-prod-parity
Developers use a tech stack…
that is different from production
that is as similar to production
as possible

64. Close gaps through automation
• Enables more frequent deployments
• Dev and Ops share automation
• Achieve parity between environments

66. Larry Page
Google
Treats logs as an event stream

67. Source: http://12factor.net/logs
A cloud native app should not attempt
to write to or manage logfiles.

68. Where is that
logfile?!?

69. Source: http://12factor.net/logs
Each running process writes its event
stream, unbuffered, to stdout.

70. Winning!

71. Source: http://12factor.net/logs
• Finding specific events in the past
• Graphing of trends
• Active alerting according to user-defined heuristics
Enables....

73. Tim Berners-Lee
WWW
Instrumented for data about execution
and performance

75. Measuring system performance helps
lower MTTR.
• CPU
• Memory
• Heap
• IOPS
• Requests per Second
• Response Time

76. Little’s Law http://agileramblings.com/2012/12/11/littles-law-its-not-about-the-numbers/

78. Source: http://12factor.net/logs
Measuring system performance helps
increase agility.

81. Dennis Ritchie
C and Unix
Able to auto scale up or down in
response to load

82. Source: http://12factor.net/concurrency
The share-nothing, horizontally scalable nature
of cloud native app processes means that
adding more concurrency is a simple and
reliable operation.

83. Source: http://12factor.net/disposability
The cloud native app’s processes are
disposable, meaning they can be started or
stopped at a moment’s notice. This facilitates
fast elastic scaling.

84. Source: http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AutoScaling/latest/DeveloperGuide/as-scale-based-on-demand.html

85. Source: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-auto-scaling-console-sample

86. Source: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-auto-scaling-console-sample

87. Source: https://github.com/awslabs/aws-auto-scaling-console-sample

88. Source: http://12factor.net/disposability
Source: http://blog.appdynamics.com/cloud/cloud-auto-scaling-using-appdynamics/

89. Source: http://archive.datacenterdynamics.com/focus/archive/2013/07/facebook-bui

90. Personal: cplee@nektos.com
Work: casele@vsp.com
Casey Lee
Enterprise Architect