Microservices is a software architectural method where you decompose complex applications into smaller, independent services. Containers are great for running small decoupled services, but how do you coordinate running microservices in production at scale and what AWS services do you use? In this session, we will explore the reasoning and concepts behind microservices and how containers simplify building microservices based applications. We will also demonstrate how you can easily launch microservices on Amazon EC2 Container Service and how you can use ELB and Route 53 to easily do service discovery between microservices.

1. © 2016, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.© 2015, Amazon Web Services, Inc. or its Affiliates. All rights reserved.
Nate Slater – Senior Manager, Solutions Architecture
August 2016
Deep Dive on Microservices
and Amazon ECS

2. What to Expect from this Session
Microservices: What are They?
Challenges of Microservices
Microservices on Amazon ECS

3. What Are Microservices?

4. What Are Microservices?
“is a software architecture style in which complex
applications are composed of small, independent
processes communicating with each other using
language-agnostic APIs. These services are small, highly
decoupled and focus on doing a small task, facilitating a
modular approach to system-building.” - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microservices

5. Monolithic vs. SOA vs. Microservices
SOA
Coarse-
grained
Microservices
Fine-grained
Monolithic
Single Unit

6. Order UI User UI
Shipping
UI
Order
Service
User
Service
Shipping
Service
Data
Access
Monolithic Architecture

7. Monolithic Architecture – Scaling

8. Order UI User UI
Shipping
UI
Order
Service
User
Service
Shipping
Service
Microservices Architecture

9. Order UI User UI UI
Order
Service
Service
Shipping
Service
Order UI
Order UI
User UI UIShipping
UI
Order
ServiceOrder
Service
Service
Service
Service
Service
User
Service
Shipping
Service
Microservices Architecture – Scaling

10. Characteristics of Microservices Architectures
Do one
thing well
Independent
Decentralized
Black box
Polyglot
You build it, you run it

11. What Are Microservices Challenges?
Resource and State Management
Monitoring
Service Discovery
Deployment

12. What Are Microservices Challenges?
Resource and State Management
Monitoring
Service Discovery
Deployment

13. Amazon EC2 Container Service

14. Containers Are Natural for Services
Simple to model
Any app, any language
Image is the version
Test & deploy same artifact
Stateless servers decrease change risk

15. Server
Guest OS
Bins/Libs Bins/Libs
App2App1
Managing One Host Is Straightforward

16. Managing a Fleet Is Hard
Server
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AZ 1 AZ 2
AZ 3

17. Easily Manage Clusters for Any Scale
Nothing to run
Complete state
Control and monitoring
Scale

18. Scalable

19. Flexible Container Placement
Applications
Batch jobs
Multiple schedulers

20. Designed for Use with Other AWS Services
Elastic Load Balancing
Amazon Elastic Block Store
Amazon Virtual Private Cloud
AWS Identity and Access Management
AWS CloudTrail

21. Clusters
Regional
Resource pool
Grouping of container instances
Start empty, dynamically scalable

22. Tasks
Unit of work
Grouping of related containers
Run on container instances

23. Services
Good for long-running applications
Load balance traffic across containers
Automatically recover unhealthy containers
Discover services

24. What Are Microservices Challenges?
Resource and State Management
Monitoring
Service Discovery
Deployment

25. Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch
Metric data sent to CloudWatch in 1-minute periods and
recorded for a period of two weeks
Available metrics: CPUReservation, MemoryReservation,
CPUUtilization, MemoryUtilization
Available dimensions: ClusterName, ServiceName

26. Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch

27. Monitoring with Amazon CloudWatch
Use the CloudWatch monitoring scripts to monitor
additional metrics, e.g. disk space:
# Edit crontab
> crontab -e
# Add command to report disk space utilization to CloudWatch every five minutes
*/5 * * * * <path_to>/mon-put-instance-data.pl --disk-space-util --disk-space-used --disk-
space-avail --disk-path=/ --from-cron

28. What Are Microservices Challenges?
Resource and State Management
Monitoring
Service Discovery
Deployment

29. Service Discovery with ECS Services & Route 53
Route 53 private hosted zone
Set search path on hosts with DHCP option sets
Define ECS services with ELB
Create CNAMEs for each ELB

30. Service
Discovery
with Route53
and
Application
Load
Balancing
New!

31. Service Discovery with Weaveworks
DNS interface for cross-host container communication
Gossip protocol to share grouped updates
Overlay network between hosts

32. Service Discovery with Weaveworks

33. Service Discovery and Configuration
Management with Consul
Three main components:
• Consul agent - Runs on each node, responsible for
checking the health of the services and of the node
itself.
• One or more Consul servers - Store and replicate data,
leader elected using the Raft consensus algorithm
• Registrator agent - Automatically register/deregisters
services based on published ports and metadata from
the container environment variables defined in the ECS
task definition

34. Service Discovery and Configuration
Management with Consul
ECSCluster
consul-server
ECS Instance
consul-agent
registrator
ECS Instance
Back end 1
Back end 2
consul-agent
registrator
ECS Instance
Front end
ECSCluster

35. What Are Microservices Challenges?
Resource and State Management
Monitoring
Service Discovery
Deployment

36. Scheduling Containers on ECS
Batch Jobs
ECS task scheduler
Run tasks once
Batch jobs
RunTask (random)
StartTask (placed)
Long-Running Apps
ECS service scheduler
Health management
Scale-up and scale-down
AZ aware
Grouped containers

37. Scheduling Containers: Long-Running App
Optionally run your service behind a load balancer.
ELB currently supports a fixed relationship between the
load balancer port and the container instance port.
If a task fails the ELB health check, the task is killed and
restarted (until service reaches desired capacity).

38. Scheduling Containers: Long-Running App
Deploy using the least space: minimumHealthyPercent =
50%, maximumPercent = 100%

39. Scheduling Containers: Long-Running App
Deploy quickly without reducing service capacity:
minimumHealthyPercent = 100%, maximumPercent =
200%

40. Scheduling Containers: Long-Running App
Blue-Green Deployments
• Define two ECS services
• Each service is associated w/ ELB
• Both ELBs in Route 53 record set
with weighted routing policy, 100%
primary, 0% secondary
• Deploy to blue or green service and
switch weights
TaskTask
Route 53
record set
with
weighted
routing
policy
0%
100%

41. Microservices Development Lifecycle
developers delivery pipelinemicroservices
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline
build pipeline

42. ECS CI/CD Partners

43. Continuous Delivery to ECS with Shippable

44. Demo
TaskTask
Task

45. Thank you!