Dublin JUG February 2018 - Building microservices with Vert.x

1. Building microservices with Vert.x
Bert Jan Schrijver
@bjschrijverbertjan@openvalue.nl

2. @bjschrijver
Let’s meet
Bert Jan Schrijver

3. @bjschrijver
Outline
• Background
• Why Vert.x?
• Basic demo
• Deep dive
• Advanced demo
• Microservices with Vert.x
• Vert.x in practice

4. @bjschrijver
Background
•Introduction
•Why Vert.x?
•Basic demo
•Deep dive
•Advanced demo
•Microservices with Vert.x
•Vert.x in practice
Malmberg is
an educational publisher
in the Netherlands. Malmberg
is building modern, rich and
scalable e-learning applications
using Java 8, Vert.x, AngularJS
and MongoDB, running on
Amazon cloud
services.

5. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Vert.x basics

6. @bjschrijver
Vert.x: the basics
• Toolkit for building reactive applications on the JVM
• General purpose application framework
• Swiss army knife for building modern and scalable
web apps
• Event-driven, non-blocking
• Polyglot
• Lightweight and fast
• Fun to work with!

7. @bjschrijver
Why did we choose Vert.x?
• We love open source
• Powerful module system
• Reactive characteristics

8. @bjschrijver
Vert.x is reactive

9. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Demo

10. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Vert.x in depth

11. @bjschrijver
Vert.x in depth
• Event driven and non blocking event loop
• Multi-reactor pattern

12. @bjschrijver
Event loop
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/clement.escoffier/vertx-31-be-reactive-on-the-jvm-but-not-only-in-java

13. @bjschrijver
Multi-reactor pattern
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/clement.escoffier/vertx-31-be-reactive-on-the-jvm-but-not-only-in-java

14. @bjschrijver
Vert.x in depth
• Event driven and non blocking event loop
• Multi-reactor pattern
• Actor-like concurrency
• Management and monitoring built-in
• Distributed event bus

15. @bjschrijver
Vert.x’s golden rule
• Never ever ever block the event loop!
• Need to do blocking stuff? Use a worker

16. @bjschrijver
Vert.x event bus
• Both request/response and publish/subscribe
• All Vert.x instances have access to the event bus
• Verticles interact using messages
• Messages are received by Handlers

17. @bjschrijver
Vert.x in depth
• Verticle, application, instance, JVM:
Host
JVM
Vert.x instance
Verticle
Event Bus
Verticle
Verticle
Verticle
JVM
Vert.x instance
Verticle
Verticle
Verticle
Verticle

18. @bjschrijver
Vert.x in depth
• Verticle, application, instance, JVM:
HostHost
JVM
Vert.x instance
Verticle
Event Bus
Verticle
Verticle
Verticle
JVM
Vert.x instance
Verticle
Verticle
Verticle
Verticle

19. @bjschrijver
Vert.x in one slide
Source: http://www.slideshare.net/clement.escoffier/vertx-31-be-reactive-on-the-jvm-but-not-only-in-java

20. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Demo

21. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Vert.x & microservices

22. @bjschrijver
Anatomy of a microservice
• Small in size, single responsibility
• Runs in its own process
• Independently develop, deploy, upgrade, scale
• Has its own data store
• Distributed by default
• Potentially heterogeneous/polyglot
• Light-weight communication

23. @bjschrijver
Anatomy of a microservice
• Small in size, single responsibility
• Runs in its own process
• Independently develop, deploy, upgrade, scale
• Has its own data store
• Distributed by default
• Potentially heterogeneous/polyglot
• Light-weight communication
microserviceVert.x module

24. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Vert.x in practice

25. @bjschrijver
4 years of Vert.x: situation
• Organisation structure:
• Core platform team (infrastructure)
• Core modules team (Vert.x modules)
• Product teams
• Deployment model: AWS, Nginx, MongoDB
• A product consists of multiple lightweight artifacts
• Re-use of Vert.x modules (no central services)

26. @bjschrijver
4 years of Vert.x: deployments
• Rolled our own deployment tooling and open
sourced it
(https://github.com/msoute/vertx-deploy-tools)
• Controlled from Jenkins
• Zero-downtime deployments
• Microservice deployments

27. @bjschrijver
4 years of Vert.x: experiences
• Very suitable for test driven development
• Integration tests with embedded MongoDB
• Good cooperation from the Vert.x team
• The Vert.x community is awesome!

28. @bjschrijver
4 years of Vert.x: challenges
• Callback hell
• Java 8 helped a LOT
• Rx fixes the remaining issues
• Blocking the event loop
• Scaling / JVM overhead
• Debugging
• Static code analysis
• Upgrade from Vert.x 2 to Vert.x 3

29. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
Almost there ;-)

30. @bjschrijver
Summary
• Vert.x: toolkit for reactive applications on the JVM
• Polyglot, distributed, event-driven
• Very suitable for building microservices

31. @bjschrijver
Resources
• https://github.com/bertjan/vertx3-examples
• http://vertx.io
• http://vertx.io/blog/my-first-vert-x-3-application
• https://github.com/vert-x3/vertx-examples
• http://github.com/msoute/vertx-deploy-tools
Don’t worry, I’ll tweet a link to the slide deck ;-)

32. @bjschrijver@bjschrijver
One more thing…

33. @bjschrijver
Summary
• Vert.x: toolkit for reactive applications on the JVM
• Polyglot, event-driven
• Very suitable for building microservices
More info: https://www.slideshare.net/BertJanSchrijver/devoxx-be-2017-building-a-selfdriving-rc-car

34. Questions?
@bjschrijver

35. Thanks for your time.
Got feedback? Tweet it!
All pictures belong
to their respective
authors
@bjschrijver