Go Faster - DevOps & Microservices

At the microXchg 2016 last week Fred George - who takes pride having been called a hand grenade - gave a very inspiring talk about how all the things that we do right now have one primary goal:
Go Faster

Reducing cycle time for deployments, automation everywhere, down-sizing services to "microservices", building resilient and fault-tolerant platforms and more are all facets of a bigger journey: Provide value faster and find out faster what works and what not.

DevOps

DevOps is seen by most developers as beeing an Ops movement to catch on with developers before their jobs become obsolete. Attending various DevOps Days in Germany and the USA, the developers who where also there always complained about the lack of developers and the lack of developer topics. They observed that the conference seems to be by and for Ops people. Consequently, DevOps conferences usually have two tracks: Methods and Tools.

Methods teach us how to do "proper" software development also in infrastructure engineering and to follow agile software development practices. Tools talks try to make us believe that you cannot be a good DevOps unless you use Puppet, Chef or Ansible. The success story talks all emphazise how "DevOps Tools", shared responsability and a newly formed "DevOps Team" saved the day. In more recent years the tools focus on building private clouds with Docker and on managing distributed storage.

In fact, DevOps is all about beeing faster through shared responsibility, mutual respect between different knowledge bearers and building cross-functional teams with full vertical responsibility for their work.

Microservices

Microservices is definitively an important hype amongst developers. Seasoned Ops people see it as the obvious thing to do, just like the well-known Unix philosophy teaches:

The Unix philosophy emphasizes building simple, short, clear, modular, and extensible code that can be easily maintained and repurposed by developers other than its creators. The Unix philosophy favors composability as opposed to monolithic design. Source: Wikipedia
Applying all that to systems design is a straight road to microservices. When going from millions of Lines-of-Code to just a few thousand and when going from 5 applications to 500 the glue code between all those applications suddenly becomes the governing system.

Service discovery, managing large amounts of micro instances, network latency, cyclic dependency trees etc. are all areas of expertise of Ops people. They where dealing with these questions for the last 20 years!

Microservice success stories, like the one of SoundCloud shown also at the microXchg 2016, show how more and more glue and abstraction layers where introduced into the emerging microservices architecture to compensate the degradation that came along with the exploding complexity of their microservices landscape.

Much of that could also be learned from modern Linux operating systems. A nice example is systemd which drives its own "microservices" revolution, just on a smaller scale within a single Linux computer.

Looking a the tools track of Microservices events it is no surprise to also find Docker in a dominating role here as well.

Common Values & Concepts

I don't want to argue that Docker is the common topic that everybody should care about. After all, Docker is just this years hype implementation of an operating concept. Savy sysadmins where doing the same thing with chroot or OpenVZ a long time ago. And in a few years we will probably have something even better for the same job.

What really brings these topics together are a lot of shared values and concepts (in no particular order):
  • KISS approach
  • Right-sizing everything to an easily managed size: microservices, two pizza teams, iterative solutions to problems
  • Full stack responsibility
  • Automate everything, especially the glue between all those small components
  • Observe-Orient-Decide-Act loops in different forms and fashions
As long as keep our core values in mind the actual technology or methodology doesn't matter so much. We will still achieve our goals. Just much faster.

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