Category Archives: Microservices

Mikro’s Serverless Saga: From Microservices to Madness and back

This is part 2 of a humor-inspired take on Monoliths to microservices that I wrote a few years back: https://blogs.justenougharchitecture.com/monos-journey-from-monolith-to-microservices/. If you did not read that, please do so first.

Mikro was serving his consumers as always. He consistently met his promises (SLAs), and his life was good. Suddenly, he felt a stab and excruciating pain. “Damnit, what was that?” he said. To Mikro’s horror, he found himself being sliced and diced into smaller and smaller pieces. “But I thought I was already micro enough!” he wailed as functions were extracted from his very being.

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Vault for storing secrets (plus Spring Boot & Mongodb)

So this is a mix of a couple of howtos. First, we have a simple Spring Boot app that retrieves some data from a MongoDB database that has authentication enabled to access it. Next, we will see how to store secrets in a Vault implementation and then programmatically access it (in our case the user ID and password to access the database).

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Running Istio on Minikube to implement traffic routing

There are multiple strategies you could use to introduce new service versions to an existing product. In this article I will go over how you can implement Canary deployments using Istio in a k82 cluster. The same approach can be used to implement Blue/Green deployments too.

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AWS Beanstalk (running Spring Boot jar) and Log aggregation with ElasticSearch & Filebeat

Most serious applications (and distributed microservices style architectures) will require to provide a log aggregation & analysis feature to its dev & operations teams. Reviewing log entires from 10s or 100s of server instances is not something to take lightly. Whether you choose to use a commercial product or an open source offering – that does not matter; just make sure you have one available.

Recently I have been deploying applications using AWS Beanstalk. You can definitely configure CloudWatch Logs to send log streams over to AWS ElasticSearch service. Log messages can be routed to a Lambda function which would break the log messages into individual attributes suitable for indexing. I wanted to try a slightly different route where I depend less on CloudWatch Logs and more on open source tools. Enter filebeat on Beanstalk.

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Taming your Microservice & Container Envy

It is hard not to be affected by the constant chatter on Microservices Architecture and Container technology. Both are leading the discussions nowadays and they combine to provide new ways to Architect distributed systems and provide agility in delivering business value. While they do bring in big benefits when implemented successfully, the path to success for most enterprises (other than startups/product/tech firms) is going to be difficult and having a level of measured caution would be good.

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Serverless Architecture Style

To discuss Serverless Architecture we need to understand how we got here. From using physical machines we moved to virtual machines (somewhere in between a few brave folks also used linux/solaris containers). The current trend is container technologies such as Docker or CoreOS RKT which allow even more efficient use of resources. Regardless of which you use, we are often required to plan our application infrastructure needs upfront and permanently keep the “servers” running.

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