Speakers: Brian K. Mar­tin, IBM; Tony Er­win, IBM To learn more about Pivotal Cloud Foundry, visit http://www.pivotal.io/platform-as-a-service/pivotal-cloud-foundry.

1. Migrating a Monolithic App to
Microservices on Cloud Foundry
Brian K. Martin, Bluemix Architect,
@bkmartin
Tony Erwin, Bluemix UI Architect,
@tonyerwin

2. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices
Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to
Support Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

3. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices
Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to
Support Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

4. IBM Bluemix
• IBM Bluemix:
– Open-standards, cloud platform for
building, running, and managing apps
– PaaS layer built on CloudFoundry
• Bluemix UI is the front-end, providing
an alternative to the CF command
line

5. Bluemix UI
Home
Solutions (Marketing)
Pricing
Dashboard
Catalog
Orgs/Spaces

6. Bluemix UI Monolith
• Single-page application (SPA) to provide
desktop-like experience in the browser
• All HTML, CSS, and JavaScript loaded
within single web page and served from
a single Java app
• State-of-the-art not all that long ago
– Dojo + J2EE was the most common stack in
IBM when Bluemix UI dev started
– SPA still popular (AngularJS, Ember.js etc.)

7. Monolithic Architecture
HomeHome SolutionsSolutions CatalogCatalog DashboardDashboard PricingPricing
Orgs/
Spaces
Orgs/
Spaces
CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)
SQL DBSQL DB
Bluemix UI Server
(Java)
Bluemix UI Server
(Java)
Bluemix UI (Client)
Bluemix PaaS

8. Challenges of Monolith
• How can we improve performance?
– Volume of client-side requests create
bottlenecks
• How do we integrate code from other
teams using different stacks?
• How can we push smaller changes as
they are ready?
• Where do we find developers with Dojo
experience?
• How can we improve SEO?

9. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices
Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to
Support Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

10. Promises of Microservices
• Aids migration to more modern, lighter-weight stack without
starting over
• Improves performance and developer productivity
– Small services optimized for speed and page size
• Use simplest approach that works
• Bare bones HTML, CSS, JS
• Node.js w/ Dust.js server-side templates
– Easier to find answers on Google, easier to find skilled developers
• Allows more regular updates as loosely-coupled services can
deploy at their own schedule
– Teams use stack of their choosing
– Teams don’t have to wait on others
• Leads to improved SEO
– Proxy facilitates “clean” URLs
– Server side generation results in crawlable content
• Improves cross-team UI consistency via microservice

11. Phase 1
SolutionsSolutions
CatalogCatalog DashboardDashboard PricingPricing
Orgs/
Spaces
Orgs/
Spaces
CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)
SQL
DB
SQL
DB
Bluemix UI Server
(Monolith)
Bluemix UI Server
(Monolith)
Bluemix UI (Client)
Bluemix PaaS
ProxyProxy
CommonCommon
Session
Store
Session
Store No SQLNo SQL
Msq
Queue
Msq
Queue MonitorMonitor
HomeHome

12. Composition w/
Microservicesheader
footer
inline
combined
CommonCommon
HomeHome

13. End Goal
HomeHome SolutionsSolutions CatalogCatalog DashboardDashboardPricingPricing Orgs/
Spaces
Orgs/
Spaces
CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)CF Cloud Controller (and other APIs)
Bluemix UI (Client)
Bluemix PaaS
ProxyProxy
CommonCommon
Session
Store
Session
Store No SQLNo SQL
Msq
Queue
Msq
Queue MonitorMonitor

14. New Challenges
• More moving parts, more complexity
• Collecting federated status,
monitoring health of the system
• Seamless navigation with existing
monolith
• Developer skills (need to learn new
stack, but will ultimately be more
productive)

15. An Approach for Blue-Green – Just Change
Route on Proxy
Home
home-XXX.bluemix.net
Home
home-XXX.bluemix.net
Solutions
solutions-XXX.bluemix.net
Solutions
solutions-XXX.bluemix.net
Bluemix UI Server
classic-XXX.bluemix.net
Bluemix UI Server
classic-XXX.bluemix.net
ProxyProxy
Common
common-XXX.bluemix.net
Common
common-XXX.bluemix.net
Home
Home-YYY.bluemix.net
Home
Home-YYY.bluemix.net
Solutions
solutions-YYY.bluemix.net
Solutions
solutions-YYY.bluemix.net
Bluemix UI Server
classic-YYY.bluemix.net
Bluemix UI Server
classic-YYY.bluemix.net
ProxyProxy
Common
common-YYY.bluemix.net
Common
common-YYY.bluemix.net
RouterRouter
console.ng.bluemix.net console-YYY.ng.bluemix.net

16. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices
Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to
Support Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

17. Context Path Routing
• bluemix.net/login ->
login.bluemix.net/login
• bluemix.net/account ->
account.bluemix.net/account
• To efficiently share user state
and allow individual
microservices to be updated
independently, we need a built-
in ability to bind context paths
to apps and have gorouter

18. Application Versions
• CF has no formal concept of an
application version
• Would it be helpful to add a formal
concept of version so that a given
application name can have many
versions installed formally
• Current way
– myapp-1.0  myapp-1.1
• The app name may be constantly
changing which is harder for mgmt,

19. Advanced Routing Policies
• When rolling out new versions
of microservices how can you
control which users are routed
to the new version?
• Advanced routing policies could
allow policies like random
selection of a percentage of the
popultion, specific user groups,
etc

20. “Private” Applications
• An ability to hide microservices
applications from public routing
• Applications to be declared
public or private
• SDN for a space or org
• How to authenticate/grant
access for routing

21. Composite Applications
• What if you want to understand the
health and status of your complete
microservice based application?
• A composite application could allow
applications to be grouped for status
and control (the latter seeming less
useful)
• Could simplify blue-green deployment
if multiple functions could be selected
simultaneously

22. Service Registry
• Need a new way to discover
the active endpoints for the
microservices rather then hard
coded paths and/or application
names
• Service registry should have live
status to allow fast failover to
alternative services

23. Performance and Monitoring
• When your application is broken
into many components,
monitoring the performance and
response time of each component
becomes even more important to
diagnose problems
• Common dashboards that can
aggregate stats from many
applications are required

24. Log Analysis for Problems
• Common log aggregation
platforms (ELK) solve most of
the problem but it has been
hard to correlate across
applications for a given user
• Solution: use common
correlators across your
microservices to track individual
users

25. Testing
• How to insure compatibility of
microservices as they are being
deployed
• Integrated to your CI/CD
pipeline, but is there anything
else that could be done?

26. IBM Bluemix
Free 30 day trial at http://www.bluemix.net
Email: bkmartin@us.ibm.com
Twitter: @bkmartin
Email: aerwin@us.ibm.com
Twitter: @tonyerwin