The document discusses the transition from monolithic applications to microservices, highlighting the benefits of agility, scalability, and resilience that microservices offer. It emphasizes the importance of using asynchronous messaging patterns, like MQ Light, to enable communication and loose coupling between services. Key takeaways include the necessity for developers to master DevOps practices before adopting microservices and the critical role of tooling in supporting modular app development.

1. © 2015 IBM Corporation1
IBM MQ Light :
From monolith to microservices for
speed and scale
Alan Chatt
Product Manager IBM Messaging
alan.chatt@uk.ibm.com

2. 2 © 2015 IBM Corporation
Agenda
• Microservices : what & why
• MQ Light messaging for Microservices
• How are others doing microservices

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Microservices
Development teams
Delivering elastically scalable, distributed
applications with unprecedented agility
using a microservices architecture
Agility comes from :
“2 pizza” teams operating completely independently,
owning the whole technology stack, deploying on their own
schedules, writing and owning services that will scale
when demand dictates
Not without challenges :
• Fallacies of distributed computing
• Operational overhead increases with the number of services to deploy
• New skills and tooling required to cope with additional complexities
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Motivations : Rate of change
More local changes
More GitHub check-ins
Changes go all the
way to Production

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Motivations : Flexibility

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Motivations : Resilience
Communication can:
1) Re-route
2) Stored for future delivery
3) Return cached/out of date data
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2 3

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Motivations : Scale
Steady state Workload increases Individual components
scale up as required

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Migrating from a monolith
• When & why
• Do it because you need to evolve rapidly
• Don’t just re-write
• Chip away at bits and improve
• Techniques
• Emit events from existing application
• Surround with simple service
interfaces that you can call
Monolithic
Application

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A few words of caution
Some wisdom shared by people in the trenches :
• Do not start a new implementation with microservices
• Master dev-ops before starting a microservices
deployment
• Cleanly separate platform services from the application
• Do not rush into creating too many microservices

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MQ Light
Messaging for microservices

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MQ Light : Software and Cloud
• Messaging that application developers will
love to use, helping them make responsive
applications that scale easily
• 3 ways to get it:
• Bluemix service
• MQ Light software download
• MQ Light API support in MQ (Beta)
• Open APIs crafted to feel natural in a growing
range of popular languages
• Tooling that makes modular app development
easy
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Messaging patterns for loose coupling
Worker offload • Image processing
• Text analytics
Multiple service instances use a shared destination
• Service scaled up by adding an instance
• MQ Light will start to distribute work to new instance
• Service scaled down by “killing” an instance
• MQ Light will stop distributing work to that instance and will re-
distribute unacknowledged messages
• Service can rate limit inbound work
• Use link credit to restrict amount of work currently being processed

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Messaging patterns for loose coupling
Event driven /
Fire and forget
• Posting video to multiple social
sites after transcoding
• Respond to external events
Using multiple MQ Light destinations subscribed to the same topic
• Cuts down unnecessary “polling” traffic between services
• Deploying multiple versions of a service simultaneously
• Allows duel running for a period of time
• Create new extensions driven by existing data
• New subscribers just listen to an existing topic, no need to update
publisher
• i.e. create new service which performs analytics on existing data flows

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Messaging for loose coupling
• Isolating your application from the availability and performance
of an external system
• Replace part of existing system by intercepting events and
running new logic
• MQ Light API support in MQ
• Subscribe to data already flowing between existing systems
Connecting external
systems
• Updating external booking system
• Running logic when existing CRM
system updates contact address

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Using open standards for technology freedom
• Using AMQP1.0 as standard protocol
• Open source clients from the Apache Qpid Proton
project
• Example for this for PHP :
https://developer.ibm.com/messaging/2014/07/01/using-php-mq-light-bluemix/
• Easily Integrated with microservices frameworks :
https://developer.ibm.com/messaging/2015/05/06/microservices-with-seneca-and-mq-light/
• MQ Light specific clients reduce quantity and
complexity of code
• Node.js, Java, Ruby, Python

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Designed for development
• MQ Light download quick and easy to run on a
laptop
• Works well with Vagrant & Docker
https://hub.docker.com/r/ibmcom/mqlight/
• No configuration : applications define behaviour
• MQ Light tooling designed for developers

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Deployment Options
17
MQ Light Service
for Bluemix
[Managed Service]
WebSphere MQ
[open Beta]
“MQ Light”

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Presence Insights
Adopting Microservices within IBM

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IBM Presence Insights
Bring the same personalized shopping experience you get
online to “bricks and mortar” stores
IBM SaaS offering built on the cloud using microservices

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Technologies used by Presence Insights

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Presence Insights : Today
• 22+ Microservices
• 70+ Node.js instances
• Application deployed across Bluemix and Softlayer
• Node.js (Web Tier)
• MQ Light (Messaging)
• Cloudant (Persistence)
• Redis (Caching)
• D3 (Charting)

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Presence Insights : Architecture

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Presence Insights : Use of MQ Light
• PI use the MQ Light service in Bluemix for communication
between their microservices, using both worker offload and
event driven patterns
• Wildcards : Feeding many separate streams of data to multiple services
• ClientID : Audit trail of which service instances receives which event
• Destination Sharing : Built in load balancer
• Advantage of managed MQ Light service : “…the team does not need
to manage the instances themselves (security compliance and operating system
monitoring/management)”
“MQLight as a managed service is a key element to our Presence Insights
strategy. The capabilities that are provided in the Node.js client libraries and the
MQLight service instance provides a great foundation for our messaging system
around publishing and subscribing to our location sensor events”

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Presence Insights : Lessons learned
• Streamlining the build & deployment pipeline is critical
• Developers need to be able to push changed and demo them in the
cloud environment
• Continuous and holistic testing combats the additional
complexities of a distributed application
• Tests run at each level act as gate for changes to be promoted
• End to end tests run every 10 minutes against all environments
• These End to end tests ensure platform services (i.e. Cloudant and
MQ Light)
• PI experiment before switching to node.js and current
technology stack
• Time boxing experimentation is essential

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Summary

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Summary
• Microservices is a great architecture for large, rapidly
evolving applications that need to scale
• Not a silver bullet that solves all problems
• Using asynchronous messaging patterns between services
supports the goals of a microservice architecture
• Provide workload balancing when scaling up and down
• Provides loose coupling, promoting resilience
• MQ Light works well in a dev-ops environment, essential for
making a microservice architecture work well
• Offline development
• Application defined behaviour, no separate configuration to manage

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Resources
• Bluemix PaaS :
https://console.ng.bluemix.net/
• MQ Light :
https://developer.ibm.com/messaging/mq-light/
• Redbook : Microservices from Theory to Practice
https://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks.nsf/RedpieceAbstracts/sg248275.html