Building a Microservice Federation with Grails (and Spring Cloud)

Grails... microservices...

you must be crazy man!

About Me

1st Career

About Me

2nd Career

OCI Grails Team

The Story I'm About to Tell You is True

  • Microservices are here
  • Doing it the easy way
  • Building a small microservice federation

Microservices are here

  • Foundational concepts
  • Microservice advantages
  • Microservice disadvantages

What are microservices?

Microservices are small, autonomous services that work together.

Sam Newman Building Microservices, O'Reilly Media

Small is key

Small in functional scope...

http://www.whattofix.com/images/ComplexERDExample.gif

Probably not small functional scope...

... not necesarily size

Smaller is simpler

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler*

* though attributed to Einstein, this simple quote is actually from 
Roger Sessions paraphrasing (and simplifying!) a statement by Albert Einstein

Simpler is better

A system that is hard to understand is hard to change.

— Eric Evans, Domain-Driven Design

Autonomy is key

Development autonomy*

*Caveat: You can't break my stuff

http://www.memes.com/meme/498049

Consumer Driven Contracts

http://bit.ly/thoughtworks-consumer-driven-contracts

Testing: How much & what kind?

http://famouswonders.com/wp-content/gallery/pyramids-of-egypt/pyramid-of-khafre.jpg

Data Autonomy

http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html

Build/Deploy autonomy

http://www.openmakesoftware.com/images/ReleaseEngineer/CI-CD.png

Scale where the load is...

Operational Autonomy

https://media.licdn.com/mpr/mpr/p/8/005/083/1a8/257d716.jpg

All this sounds great, but...

...what about our monolith?

Identify bounded contexts...

... and divide along the seams

Favor choreography over orchestration

http://kennysilva.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/orchestra-conductor.jpg

Monolith

Microservice

class Passenger {
   String        accountNo
   String        firstName
   String        lastName
   Address       billingAddress
   Payment       paymentPreference
   List<Payment> paymentHistory
   Phone         home
   Phone         mobile
   Phone         work
   BloodType     bloodType
   ...
}
   

What about shared domain?

// For Trip Management
class Passenger {
   String accountNo
   String firstName
   String lastName
   Phone  mobile
   ...
}
   
// For Billing
class Passenger {
   String        accountNo
   String        firstName
   String        lastName
   Address       billingAddress
   List<Payment> paymentHistory
   Phone         home
   Phone         work
   ...
}
   

The evils of too much coupling between services are far worse than the problems caused by code duplication.

- Sam Newman, Building Microservices

 Microservices Federation Cross-cutting Concerns

  • Logging
  • Security
  • Metrics and monitoring

Logging Tips

  • Use a Correlation ID
  • Use a consistent log message format
  • Use log aggregation

Logging Aggregators

"ELK Stack"

Security

  • None
  • At the gateway only
  • At every microservice

Security at the gateway only

"They're inside the room!"

"Yikes!"

"Mmm, you look tasty."

Perimeter security reminds me of the movie, Aliens

Security at every microservice

Metrics, Monitoring & More

  • Microservices need to report metrics
  • Resiliency requires monitoring & circuit breakers
  • Automatic service discovery
  • Gateway / reverse proxy
  • Load balancing

Coming up:

Spring Boot & Spring Cloud to the rescue!

Microservice Architecture Advantages

  • Scalable
  • Adaptable
  • Resilient
  • Testable
  • More future-proof
  • More greenfield

Managers: Developers more likely to join and stay where they can work on new stuff

Microservice Architecture Disadvantages

  • Solid domain understanding
  • Development more complicated
  • More builds
  • More databases
  • Log aggregation is essential
  • Metrics, monitoring & more essential

Doing it the easy way

  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Cloud with Netflix OSS
  • Grails

Spring Boot includes metrics endpoint

There are many metrics out of the box, but you can create your own.

http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-endpoints.html

Spring Boot includes many endpoints

http://docs.spring.io/spring-boot/docs/current/reference/html/production-ready-endpoints.html

Spring Cloud provides monitoring
... and much more

Service discovery with Eureka

Gateway /Rev Proxy with Zuul

http://bit.ly/vignette2_wikia_nocookie_net_ghostbusters

Gateway /Rev Proxy with Zuul

Hystrix for Resilience

Monitoring & Circuit Breakers w/ Hystrix

http://martinfowler.com/bliki/CircuitBreaker.html

Grails plays well

  • Grails full stack development
  • Grails REST
  • Grails plugin architecture

Full stack != monolith

Grails full stack development

Web UI, SQL / NOSQL Database Support, Spring, Hibernate, Security, REST, Java, Groovy...

Create App

$grails create-app HelloWorld

Hello World app... easy as 1 - 2 - 3

grails> create-controller demo.Hello
package demo

class HelloController {

    def index() { 
        render 'Hello SpringOne2GX 2015!'
    }
}

Full stack CRUD apps are about as easy...

1. Create controller

2. Make it do something

3. See it to believe it!

Create a Domain Class

Define demo.Person

package demo

class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    String email
    String twitterHandle

    static constraints = {
        firstName blank:false, maxSize: 32
        lastName blank: false, maxSize: 64
        email blank: false, maxSize: 128, email:true
        twitterHandle nullable:true, maxSize:64
    }
}

Generate Scaffolding...

.. to bootstrap CRUD app

After generation

Run App

grails> run-app

Retrieve Persons List

Create Person form

Create a Person record

Show a Person record

Retrieve Persons List

Delete a Person record

Grails REST URI patterns

What if I want to do more than CRUD?

package demo

import grails.rest.RestfulController

class PersonController extends RestfulController<Person> {
    static responseFormats =['json', 'xml']

    PersonController() {
        super(Person)
    }

    def findPersonsWithLastNameLike(String likeness) {
        respond Person.findByLastNameLike("${likeness}%")
    }
}
class UrlMappings {

    static mappings = {
        "/persons"(resources:'person')

        "/persons/search/withLastNameLike/$likeness"(controller: 'person', 
                                                     action: 'findPersonsWithLastNameLike')
    }
}

Restfully create a Person...

... yields a 201 created response

Test Rest

$ curl -i -X GET http://localhost:8080/persons.xml

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Application-Context: application:development
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 21:26:16 GMT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><list />

$

200 OK good ... XML weird, but you wanted weird

Test Rest

$ curl -i -X GET http://localhost:8080/persons

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Application-Context: application:development
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 21:26:16 GMT

[]

$

200 OK good ... JSON good.

Change @Resource to prefer JSON

package demo

import grails.rest.Resource

@Resource(uri='/persons', formats=['json', 'xml'])
class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    String email
    String twitterHandle

    static constraints = {
        firstName blank:false, maxSize: 32
        lastName blank: false, maxSize: 64
        email blank: false, maxSize: 128, email:true
        twitterHandle nullable:true, maxSize:64
    }
}

Grails content negotiation

$ curl -i -X GET --header "Accept:application/json" http://localhost:8080/persons

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Application-Context: application:development
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 21:26:16 GMT

[]

$

200 OK good ... JSON good.

Grails content negotiation

$ curl -i -X GET http://localhost:8080/persons.json

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Application-Context: application:development
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 21:26:16 GMT

[]

$

200 OK good ... JSON good.

Besides UI CRUD, what about REST?

package demo

import grails.rest.Resource

@Resource(uri='/persons')
class Person {
    String firstName
    String lastName
    String email
    String twitterHandle

    static constraints = {
        firstName blank:false, maxSize: 32
        lastName blank: false, maxSize: 64
        email blank: false, maxSize: 128, email:true
        twitterHandle nullable:true, maxSize:64
    }
}
grails create-app RestfulCrud

With an IDE...

Test Rest

$ curl -i -X GET http://localhost:8080/persons

[jfrosch@localhost demo]$ HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Server: Apache-Coyote/1.1
X-Application-Context: application:development
Content-Type: text/xml;charset=UTF-8
Transfer-Encoding: chunked
Date: Mon, 07 Sep 2015 21:26:16 GMT

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><list />

$

Hmm... 200 OK good ... XML bad.

Building a Grails microservice federation

Download all the sources for this from: https://github.com/jfrosch/GrailsMicroFederation

Build a Eureka Server

Build a Eureka Server

Build a Zuul Server

/product-catalog acts as the root of the uri

Build a Zuul Server

Inspecting Zuul Routes

Microservice Setup

product-catalog is the name we map the Zuul route to

Microservice Setup

Can use @EnableDiscoveryClient if not intending to use Netflix implementation

@HystrixCommand

Notice we're using Zuul server at port 8765 and Zuul route, not Recommendation Engine app's endpoint directly

I've had some difficulty applying circuit-breakers in controllers, so recommend doing so only in services

Build Hystrix Dashboard

Note we're using Zuul server, not a microservice endpoint, to catch all data streams

All services are up

... After killing recommendation engine ...

... After restarting recommendation engine ...

Summary

  • Adaptable
  • Scalable
  • Resilient
  • Maintainable
  • Monitorable
  • Cloud ready

You'd be crazy to adopt a microservice architecture using Grails...

unless your application needs to be ...

 (even if your company isn't ready for the cloud yet)

Resources

Questions?

NFJS Building a Microservice Federation with Grails & Spring Cloud

By Jack Frosch

NFJS Building a Microservice Federation with Grails & Spring Cloud

Building a Microservice Federation with Grails & Spring Cloud

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