Microservices allow for extensible app architecture and a vendor-agnostic, scalable infrastructure. While microservices simplify app deployments, they come at a price: because they’re so fragmented, it is more difficult to track and manage all the independent, yet interconnected components of an app. All this information (requirements, code, test cases and results, build artifacts, and deployment blueprints) needs to live somewhere and most importantly be versioned. Using a real example and a live demonstration of Perforce Helix, Docker and Selenium, get best practices and tips for enabling a robust, scalable and extensible pipeline to support today’s modern app delivery.

1. Managing Microservices
at Scale
Avan Mathur
Global Technical Account Manager -
Electric Cloud

2. 2
Introductions
Avan Mathur
@avantika_ec
Global Technical Account Manager at Electric
Cloud
I work with large enterprises to design and
implement their DevOps automation and
application release pipelines at scale.

3. 3
Electric Cloud: Powering Continuous
Delivery
ElectricFlow
Deploy
Pipeline & Release Management
ElectricAccelerator
Build & Test Acceleration
DevOps Automation Platform
Build
DELIVERY
Plugs right in to
your existing tools
CONTINUOUS
Build Test
DEV
OPS

4. Intro Docker

5. 5
Why are people excited about
containers?
 Builds can be done inside the container, gives file system
isolation and reproducibility.
 Development/Production Parity. The container is the
deployable artifact.
 Container start up times measured in milliseconds

6. 6
Enter Docker
 https://docker.io/
 Open Source
 Used to wrap LXC, now has its own container
implementation
 Really, really fast. Start measuring in milliseconds

7. 7
Docker 102 containers vs. VMs

8. Microservices

9. 9
What are Microservices?
 A pattern for building distributed systems:
• A suite of services, each running in its own process, each exposing an API
• Independently developed
• Independently deployable
• Each service is focused on doing one thing well
“Gather together those things that change for the same reason,
and separate those things that change for different reasons.”
– Robert Martin

10. 10
What’s good/bad about monolithic apps?
 Can be easier to test
 Can be easier to develop
 Can’t deploy anything until
you deploy everything
 Harder to learn and
understand the code
 Easier to produce spaghetti
code
 Hard to adopt new
technologies
 You have to scale everything
to scale anything

11. 11
What’s cool about Microservices?
 Loose coupling, so each service can:
• choose the tooling that’s appropriate for the problem it solves
• can be scaled as appropriate, independent of other services
• can have its own lifecycle independent of other services
 Makes it easier to adopt new technologies
 Smaller more autonomous teams are more productive

12. 12
Am I ready for Microservices?
 If you’re just starting out, stay
monolithic until you
understand the problem better
 You need to be good at
infrastructure provisioning
 You need to be good at rapid
application deployment
 You need to be good at
monitoring
http://martinfowler.com/bliki/MicroservicePrerequisites.html

13. Pipelines

14. 14
Designing your pipeline
 Independent CI and Deployment pipelines per service
 “Automate all things”
• plug in all of your toolchain to orchestrate the entire pipeline
 Tools/environment agnostic to support each team’s workflow
and tool chain
 Test automation and service virtualization

15. 15
Designing your Pipeline
 Record the log of each artifact as it makes its way through
the pipeline
 Use parameters and modeling of the pipeline components for
reusability
 Bake compliance into the pipeline by binding certain security
checks and acceptance tests
 Allow for both automatic and manual approval gates

16. 16
Pipeline view and Monitoring
 Provide a real-time view of all pipeline statuses
 Consistent monitoring across all services
 Plug pipeline automation into monitoring so alerts can
trigger automatic processes

17. What I’m about
to show you

18. 18
Containers
Images from http://slides.com/kennycoleman/introdocker

19. 19
Microservices
Images from https://www.nginx.com/blog/introduction-to-
microservices

20. 20
All of the above

21. 21
All of the above

22. A few words before
I demo

23. 23
Everything can be done via
the Community Edition
http://electric-cloud.com/downloads/electricflow/communityedition

24. 24
But this is not a product pitch

25. Demo!

26. Wrap up

27. 27
Thoughts
• So much more to explore! So much glossed over.
• Notion of application manifest.
• Zero downtime, Rolling deploys and Roll back.

28. Thank you!
@avantika_ec
amathur@electric-cloud.com