Our experience with Gemnasium Enterprise, a complete rewrite of Gemnasium.com

1. FROMRAILSTO
MICROSERVICES
WITHGO
Our experience with Gemnasium entreprise
Jean-Philippe Boily
@jipiboily | jipiboily.com
http://metrics.watch
Philippe Lafoucrière
@plafoucriere
https://gemnasium.com

2. JEAN-PHILIPPE“JP”BOILY
• FounderofMetricsWatch(alertsforGoogleAnalytics)
• SoftwareEngineerwithexperienceworkingremotelyfor
US-basedSaaSstartups,andnowconsultant
• LastonewasRainforestQA(YCbacked)

3. PHILIPPELAFOUCRIÈRE
• FounderofTech-Angels/Gemnasium
• CSEngineerfromUniversitédeTechnologiede
CompiègneFrance

4. • Why?
• Genesis
• Criteriaforarchitecture
• Anatomyofamicroservice
• Conclusion
LET’STALKABOUT
MICROSERVICES!
«
«

5. WHY?

6. DEFINITIONS
Microservices: approach to developing a single application
as a suite of small services, each running in its own
process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms
Monolithic application: self-contained, and independent
from other computing applications.

7. RAINFOREST QA
Easier to onboard people
Easier to reason about
Small steps, no long term goals to rewrite

8. Performance issues
Migration to Rails 4 (5?)
Code boundaries
GEMNASIUM

9. GENESIS

10. FIRST PROJECT
badge server because…
• Performance issues
• A lot of traffic
• Easy to extract

11. CHOOSING TOOLS
We tried a lot of hosted PaaS.
We needed something solid and well
maintained.
Choice: OpenShift

12. CRITERIA FOR
ARCHITECTURE

13. SECURITY

14. DEPLOYMENT

15. SCALING

16. LOGGING

17. BACKUPS

18. MONITORING

19. DOCUMENTATION

20. ANATOMY OF A
MICROSERVICE

21. NO FRAMEWORK!
Just Plain Old Go

22. HOW TO CONSUME IT?
HTTP? Queueing? Protobufs?

23. Heard of zero downtime database migrations?
Same idea.
Defined & documented protocol, that
supports versions.
UPGRADING WITHOUT 💥

24. CONFIGURATION
Environment variables
Command line arguments
Mounts outside of Docker for secrets

25. TESTS
Test each microservices as any project.
Have high level end to end testing.

26. HOW WILL IT SCALE?
For us, nothing specific. Just keep in mind
many instance can co-exist.

27. Retry (Hystrix from Netflix)
Double check
EMBRACE FAILURE
Things will break one day.

28. MONITORING & ALERTING
Metrics, metrics, metrics.
Librato
Graylog

29. CONCLUSION

30. PROS & CONS
• Better security
• Easier evolution
• Targeted scaling
• Easier onboarding & maintenance
• Harder deployment
• Added failure management
• Longer to develop

31. START
WITH A
MONOLITH

32. THANKS!
QUESTIONS?
Hire JP - http://jipiboily.com
Metrics Watch: http://metrics.watch - freeGoogleAnalyticsCourse.com
Use Gemnasium: gemnasium.com or enterprise.gemnasium.com