These slides are related to a talk I gave in Amsterdam for the Enterprise Cloud Computing and DevOps 2016 (ECCD2016). The presentation explores: - Adopting microservices to enforce team responsibilities and speed up development cycle in Continuous Delivery. - Monitoring and alerting: tools and strategies, to ensure availability, reliability and high performances with microservices.

1. Continuous Delivery in a microservices
environment
A success story
Luca Mazzaferro
luca.mazzaferro@holidaycheck.com

2. Outline:
• About me
• About HolidayCheck
• Adopting microservices to
enforce continuous
delivery

3. ▪ I was born in Rome where I spent most of my
life until 2013 when I moved to Munich.
▪ Former physicist, member of ATLAS
experiment @CERN since the master degree
and during the Ph.D. with physics analysis and
computing tasks.
▪ In June 2015, I sold my soul to the business,
leaving the public research for happily joining
Holidaycheck as DevOps engineer
About Me

4. About Holidaycheck

5. 1
Holidaycheck means…
Holidays and travel bookings

6. 1
Trustable reviews
Holidaycheck means…
Holidays and travel bookings
2

7. 1
Trustable reviews
Holidaycheck means…
Finding the best price
2
3
Holidays and travel bookings

8. 1
Trustable reviews
Holidaycheck means…
… and much more.
2
3
4
Finding the best price
Holidays and travel bookings

9. Hotels:
659.000
Dests:
195 Countries
52880 Towns
Reviews:
6.900.000
Photos:
7.470.000
Visit/Month:
13.66 Million
Tour operators:
100
About Holidaycheck
Some numbers
Holidaycheck is the largest review, booking and price
comparing portal for travel and holidays in German language.

10. Adopting Microservices
The puzzle

11. Pre HC microservices era:
Not so much time ago…
The Deployment Day

12. Pre HC microservices era:
Not so much time ago…
● All the teams together
● one big monolith application
● 2 weeks: development
● 1 week: collecting
● 1 day: Deploying and
Testing...

13. Pre HC microservices era:
Not so much time ago…
Consequences:
● Slow deployment rate
● High chance of rolling back
● Inter teams dependencies
● Team planning difficult
● Tests difficult
● High stress

14. Pre HC microservices era:
Not so much time ago…
The Elephant Release

15. Pre HC microservices era:
Not so much time ago…
● Only one team could deploy
● Queue system for deployment
(the elephant token)
● No microservices
Consequences:
● Slow deployments
● Teams waiting
● Inter teams dependencies

16. Adopting Microservices
Our solution

17. Adopting microservices approach
First steps
● Define a migration plan
● Rethink teams structure and responsibilities
● New Technology stack

18. Migration Plan:
1. Slow migration: from mobile to desktop
2. One section after another: less traffic to higher
3. Getting rid of old legacy software (when possible)
Adopting microservices approach

19. • Preferred small cross functional teams (5-6 people)
• Devops Culture adopted via in-team devops engineer
• Teams responsible for their own products (microservices)
• Continuous Delivery
Teams structure and responsibilities
PO/TO SM Devs Devops
Eng.
Ops Team
Adopting microservices approach
Organiza(ons which design systems ... are constrained to produce designs which are
copies of the communica(on structures of these organiza(ons [M. Conway]

20. Migration Plan
The Dust Project
Creation of Dust Team (Ops + Dev):
• Setup the new infrastructure
• Develop tools for microservices
deployments
• Support teams for services
“containerization”
Dust
Environment

21. Migration Plan
The Dust Project
Dust
Environment
Main advantages:
• Easily scalable
• Ready for Continuous
Deployments
• Services easy to monitor
• Isolated environment
• Enforce team autonomy

22. 1 Develop, commit and push
Continuous Delivery @HolidayCheck
Our Vision
Build
Basic tests (e.g. Unit, Reg.)
Deploy on staging env
Staging
Live
Team
Server
1
2
3
4
2
3
Sophisticated Tests (integr.,
accuracy)
4
Deploy in production
Smoke tests

23. Monitoring and Alerting
• Simple health checks
• Metric based
Alerts
• Logs
• System metrics
Default
Monitoring
• Teams defined
dashboards
Custom
Monitoring
Another ingredient for Continuous Delivery

24. • Required for each service
• Semi-automatically deployed
• As simple as possible
• Used mainly by ops-devops
Engineers
Alerts
You can’t survive without

25. • Automatically deployed
• Debugging (e.g. Kibana
Dashboards)
• Criticalities discoveries (e.g.
NewRelic Maps)
• Used by devs, ops and
devops
Default Monitoring
Makes your life easier

26. • Team defined metrics and
dashboards
• Service quality and
performances monitoring
• Data & Business analysis
Custom Monitoring
Can drive business decisions

27. MSs/Containers
100
Teams
12
Deployment Rate
Daily/Weekly
Main languages:
Scala/Go/
ReactJS
Main Backend Techs
ElasticSearch/
MongoDB/Kafka
HC Infrastructure in Numbers
During the migration the old PHP/Java technologies and MySQL/Tomcats
backend are in replacement.

28. Conclusions
The adoption of microservices
enforced team autonomy, enabled
the Continuous Delivery and
increased the deployment rate.
The entire infrastructure is more
stable, reliable, maintainable
and scalable

29. Conclusions
The adoption of microservices and
devops culture enforced team
autonomy, enabled the
Continuous Delivery and
increased the deployment rate.
The entire infrastructure is more
stable, reliable, maintainable
and scalable

30. www.holidaycheck.de
HolidayCheck Solutions
Neumarkter Str. 61 | D- 81673 München
Luca Mazzaferro
DevOps Engineer
T: Tel +41 (0) 71 686 9000
luca.mazzaferro@holidaycheck.com
Contact.

31. THANK YOU
FOR YOUR ATTENTION!