Monthly Archives: January 2016

Self-Healing Systems

Let’s face it. The systems we are creating are not perfect. Sooner or later, one of our applications will fail, one of our services will not be able to handle the increased load, one of our commits will introduce a fatal bug, a piece of hardware will break, or something entirely unexpected will happen.

How do we fight the unexpected? Most of us are trying to develop a bullet proof system. We are attempting to create what no one did before. We strive for the ultimate perfection, hoping that the result will be a system that does not have any bugs, is running on hardware that never fails, and can handle any load. Here’s a tip. There is no such thing as perfection. No one is perfect, and nothing is without fault. That does not mean that we should not strive for perfection. We should, when time and resources are provided. However, we should also embrace the inevitable, and design our systems not to be perfect, but able to recuperate from failures, and able to predict likely future. We should hope for the best but prepare for the worst.
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Clustering And Scaling Services

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Organizations which design systems … are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations” - M. Conway

Many will tell you that they have a scalable system. After all, scaling is easy. Buy a server, install WebLogic (or whichever other monster application server you’re using) and deploy your applications. Then wait for a few weeks until you discover that everything is so “fast” that you can click a button, have some coffee, and, by the time you get back to your desk, the result will be waiting for you. What do you do? You scale. You buy few more servers, install your monster applications servers and deploy your monster applications on top of them. Which part of the system was the bottleneck? Nobody knows. Why did you duplicate everything? Because you must. And then some more time passes, and you continue scaling until you run out of money and, simultaneously, people working for you go crazy. Today we do not approach scaling like that. Today we understand that scaling is about many other things. It’s about elasticity. It’s about being able to quickly and easily scale and de-scale depending on variations in your traffic and growth of your business, and that, during that process, you should not go bankrupt. It’s about the need of almost every company to scale their business without thinking that IT department is a liability. It’s about getting rid of those monsters.
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The Short History of CI/CD Tools

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Jenkins (forked from Hudson after a dispute with Oracle) has been around for a long time and established itself as the leading platform for the creation of continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery/deployment (CD) pipelines. The idea behind it is that we should create jobs that perform certain operations like building, testing, deploying, and so on. Those jobs should be chained together to create a CI/CD pipeline. The success was so big that other products followed its lead and we got Bamboo, Team City, and others. They all used a similar logic of having jobs and chaining them together. Operations, maintenance, monitoring, and the creation of jobs is mostly done through their UIs. However, none of the other products managed to suppress Jenkins due to its strong community support. There are over one thousand plugins and one would have a hard time imagining a task that is not supported by, at least, one of them. The support, flexibility, and extensibility featured by Jenkins allowed it to maintain its reign as the most popular and widely used CI/CD tool throughout all this time. The approach based on heavy usage of UIs can be considered the first generation of CI/CD tools (even though there were others before).
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The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit

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Today is an exciting day for me. I just decided that the book I spent the last eight months writing is ready for general public.

What made me write the book? Certainly not the promise of wealth since, as any author of technical books will confirm, there is no money that can compensate the number of hours involved in writing a technical book. The reasons behind this endeavor are of a different nature. I realized that this blog is a great way for me to explore different subjects and share my experience with the community. However, due to the format, blog posts do not give enough space to explore, in more details, subjects I’m passionate about so, around eight months ago, I decided to start working on The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices book. It treats similar subjects as those I write about in this blog, but with much more details. More importantly, the book allowed me to organize my experience into a much more coherent story.

The book is about different techniques that help us architect software in a better and more efficient way with microservices packed as immutable containers, tested and deployed continuously to servers that are automatically provisioned with configuration management tools. It’s about fast, reliable and continuous deployments with zero-downtime and ability to roll-back. It’s about scaling to any number of servers, designing self-healing systems capable of recuperation from both hardware and software failures and about centralized logging and monitoring of the cluster.

In other words, this book envelops the whole microservices development and deployment lifecycle using some of the latest and greatest practices and tools. We’ll use Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Ubuntu, Docker Swarm and Docker Compose, Consul, etcd, Registrator, confd, Jenkins, and so on. We’ll go through many practices and, even more, tools.

At this moment, around 70% is finished and you’ll receive regular updates if you decide to purchase the book. The truth is that my motivation for writing the book is the same as with this blog. I like sharing my experience and this book is one more way to accomplish that. You can set your own price and if you feel that the minimum amount is still too high, please send me a private message and I’ll get back to you with a free copy.

Please give The DevOps 2.0 Toolkit: Automating the Continuous Deployment Pipeline with Containerized Microservices a try and let me know what you think. Any feedback is welcome and appreciated.