Mastering Chaos - A Netflix Guide to Microservices

• https://youtu.be/CZ3wIuvmHeM

What microservices are

...the microservice architectural style is an approach to developing a single application as a suite of small services, each reunning in its own process and communicating with lightweight mechanisms, often an HTTP resource API.

• Martin Fowler

An Evolutionary Response

• Separation of Concerns:

  • Modularity, encapsulation

• Scalability

  • Horizontally scaling
  • Workload partitioning

• Virtualization & elasticity

  • Automated operations
  • On demand provisioning

Microservices are an abstraction

Challenges & Solutions

What is a stateless service?

• Not a cache or a database
• Frequently accessed metadata (cached in memory)
• No instance affinity
• Loss of a node is a non-event

What is a stateful service?

• Databases & caches
• Custom apps which hold large amounts of data
  • "I strongly recommend you to avoid storing your business logic and your state all in just one application."
• Loss of a node is a notable event

Continuous Learning & Automation

Incident -> Resolution -> Review -> Remediation -> Analysis -> Best Practice -> Automation -> Adoption

Organization & Architecture

Conway's Law

Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.

simple version:

Any piece of software reflects the organizational structure that produced it.

practical example:

If you have four teams working on a compiler you will end up with a four pass compiler.

Outcomes & Lessons

• Outcomes

  • Productivity & new capabilities
  • Refactored organization

• Lessons

  • Solutions first, team second
  • Reconfigure teams to best support your architecture

Recap

Microservice architecture are complex and organic.

Health depends on discipline and chaos.

Dependency

• Circuit breakers, fallbacks, chaos
• Simple clients
• Eventual consistency
• Multi-region failover

Scale

• Auto-scaling
• Redundancy - avoid Single Point of Failure
• Partitioned workloads
• Failure-driven design
• Chaos under load

Variance

• Engineered operations
• Understood cost of variance
• Prioritized support by impact

Change

• Automated delivery
• Integrated practices

Organization & Architecture

• Solutions first, team second