book

Production-Ready Microservices

by Susan J. Fowler

November 2016

Intermediate to advanced

172 pages

5h 5m

English

O'Reilly Media, Inc.

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Who This Book Is Written ForWhat This Book Is NotHow To Use This BookHow This Book Is StructuredConventions Used in This BookO’Reilly SafariHow to Contact UsAcknowledgments
From Monoliths to MicroservicesMicroservice ArchitectureThe Microservice EcosystemLayer 1: HardwareLayer 2: CommunicationLayer 3: The Application PlatformLayer 4: MicroservicesOrganizational ChallengesThe Inverse Conway’s LawTechnical SprawlMore Ways to FailCompetition for Resources
The Challenges of Microservice StandardizationAvailability: The Goal of StandardizationProduction-Readiness StandardsStabilityReliabilityScalabilityFault Tolerance and Catastrophe-PreparednessPerformanceMonitoringDocumentationImplementing Production-Readiness
Principles of Building Stable and Reliable MicroservicesThe Development CycleThe Deployment PipelineStagingCanaryProductionEnforcing Stable and Reliable DeploymentDependenciesRouting and DiscoveryDeprecation and DecommissioningEvaluate Your MicroserviceThe Development CycleThe Deployment PipelineDependenciesRouting and DiscoveryDeprecation and Decommissioning
Principles of Microservice Scalability and PerformanceKnowing the Growth ScaleThe Qualitative Growth ScaleThe Quantitative Growth ScaleEfficient Use of ResourcesResource AwarenessResource RequirementsResource BottlenecksCapacity PlanningDependency ScalingTraffic ManagementTask Handling and ProcessingProgramming Language LimitationsHandling Requests and Processing Tasks EfficientlyScalable Data StorageDatabase Choice in Microservice EcosystemsDatabase Challenges in Microservice ArchitectureEvaluate Your MicroserviceKnowing the Growth ScaleEfficient Use of ResourcesResource AwarenessCapacity PlanningDependency ScalingTraffic ManagementTask Handling and ProcessingScalable Data Storage
Principles of Building Fault-Tolerant MicroservicesAvoiding Single Points of FailureCatastrophes and Failure ScenariosCommon Failures Across an EcosystemHardware FailuresCommunication-Level and Application Platform–Level FailuresDependency FailuresInternal (Microservice) FailuresResiliency TestingCode TestingLoad TestingChaos TestingFailure Detection and RemediationIncidents and OutagesAppropriate CategorizationThe Five Stages of Incident ResponseEvaluate Your MicroserviceAvoiding Single Points of FailureCatastrophes and Failure ScenariosResiliency TestingFailure Detection and Remediation
Principles of Microservice MonitoringKey MetricsLoggingDashboardsAlertingSetting up Effective AlertingHandling AlertsOn-Call RotationsEvaluate Your MicroserviceKey MetricsLoggingDashboardsAlertingOn-Call Rotations
Principles of Microservice Documentation and UnderstandingMicroservice DocumentationDescriptionArchitecture DiagramContact and On-Call InformationLinksOnboarding and Development GuideRequest Flows, Endpoints, and DependenciesOn-Call RunbooksFAQMicroservice UnderstandingArchitecture ReviewsProduction-Readiness AuditsProduction-Readiness RoadmapsProduction-Readiness AutomationEvaluate Your MicroserviceMicroservice DocumentationMicroservice Understanding
A Production-Ready Service Is Stable and ReliableA Production-Ready Service Is Scalable and PerformantA Production-Ready Service Is Fault Tolerant and Prepared for Any CatastropheA Production-Ready Service Is Properly MonitoredA Production-Ready Service Is Documented and Understood
Stability and ReliabilityThe Development CycleThe Deployment PipelineDependenciesRouting and DiscoveryDeprecation and DecommissioningScalability and PerformanceKnowing the Growth ScaleEfficient Use of ResourcesResource AwarenessCapacity PlanningDependency ScalingTraffic ManagementTask Handling and ProcessingScalable Data StorageFault Tolerance and Catastrophe-PreparednessAvoiding Single Points of FailureCatastrophes and Failure ScenariosResiliency TestingFailure Detection and RemediationMonitoringKey MetricsLoggingDashboardsAlertingOn-Call RotationsDocumentation and UnderstandingMicroservice DocumentationMicroservice Understanding

Content preview from Production-Ready Microservices

Preface

This book was born out of a production-readiness initiative I began running several months after I joined Uber Technologies as a site reliability engineer (SRE). Uber’s gigantic, monolithic API was slowly being broken into microservices, and at the time I joined, there were over a thousand microservices that had been split from the API and were running alongside it. Each of these microservices was designed, built, and maintained by an owning development team, and over 85% of these services had little to no SRE involvement, nor any access to SRE resources.

Hiring SREs and building SRE teams is an absurdly difficult task, because SREs are probably the hardest type of engineers to find: site reliability engineering as a field is still relatively new, and SREs must be experts (at least to some degree) in software engineering, systems engineering, and distributed systems architecture. There was no way to quickly staff all of the teams with their own embedded SRE team, and so my team (the Consulting SRE Team) was born. Our directive from above was simple: find a way to drive high standards across the 85% of microservices that had no SRE involvement.

Our mission was simple, and the directive was vague enough that it allowed me and my team a considerable amount of freedom to define a set of standards that every microservice at Uber could follow. Coming up with high standards that could apply to every single microservice running within this large engineering organization was not ...