The AutoScout24 journey to AWS and Microservices. With a strong emphasis on the cultural change. Digital Transformation from the trenches.

1. AWS Cloud for Breakfast | 27.04.2017 | Christian Deger | @cdeger
Highway to heaven
Building microservices in the cloud

2. Christian Deger
Chief Architect
christian.deger@scout24.com
@cdeger

3. Microservices on AWS?

4. Speed
Independent deployable
Fast local decisionsAutonomous teams
Strong boundaries
Loosely coupled Technology diversity
Scale the organization
Why Microservices?

5. Cloud =
no physical
limitations

6. Agility

7. Agility
• Technical agility

8. Agility
• Technical agility
• Organizational agility

9. 2.4 million
vehicles

10. 2000 servers
2 data centers
MTBF optimized

11. Development
“Change”
Operations
“Stability”
Dev and Ops Silos

13. New
CEO

14. talent?
Do you attract

15. 21st century
What does a
tech company
look like?

17. Great design
Universally connected
Mobile first
Instant business value
Massive data insight
Highly available

18. good, but not great
Hmm, we are

19. Reboot
everything

20. .NET/Windows to JVM/Linux
Monolith to microservices
Data center to AWS
Devs + Ops to collaboration culture
Involve product people

21. “Death Star” diagrams
Amazon 2008 Twitter 2013

22. http://scs-architecture.org/
Self-contained systems = microservices flavor
Team 1
Team 2 Team 3
One business
capability is
owned, built
and run as an
SCS by one
team.
Self-contained
systems are
vertical slices
integrated at
the UI.

23. Same
direction

24. STRATEGIC
GOALS
Goals of the business side
ARCHITECTURAL
PRINCIPLES
High-Level Principles
DESIGN AND DELIVERY
PRINCIPLES
Tactical measures
REDUCE TIME TO MARKET
Establish fast feedback loops to learn, validate and
improve. Remove friction, hand-offs and undifferentiated
work.
MOBILE FIRST
Start small and use device capabilities.
SUPPORT DATA-DRIVEN DECISIONS
Provide relevant metrics and data for user and market
insights. Validate hypothesis for problems worth solving.
YOU BUILT IT, YOU RUN IT
The team is responsible for shaping, building, running and
maintaining its products. Fast feedback from live and
customers helps us to continuously improve.
ORGANIZED AROUND BUSINESS CAPABILITIES
Build teams around products not projects. Follow the
domain and respect bounded contexts. Make boundaries
explicit. Inverse Conway Maneuver.
LOOSELY COUPLED
By default avoid sharing and tight coupling.
No integration database. Don’t create the next monolith.
MACRO AND MICRO ARCHITECTURE
Clear separation. Autonomous micro services within the
rules and constraints of the macro architecture.
AWS FIRST
Favor AWS platform service over managed service,
over self-hosted OSS, over self built solutions.
DATA-DRIVEN/METRIC-DRIVEN
Collect business and operational metrics. Analyze, alert
and act on them.
ELIMINATE ACCIDENTAL COMPLEXITY
Strive to keep it simple. Don’t over-engineer.
Focus on necessary domain complexity.
AUTONOMOUS TEAMS
Make fast local decisions. Be responsible. Know your
boundaries. Share findings.
INFRASTRUCTURE AS CODE
Automate everything: Reproducible, traceable, auditable
and tested. Immutable servers.
CROSS-FUNCTIONAL TEAMS
Engineers from all backgrounds work together in
collaborative teams as engineers and share
responsibilities. No silos.
BE BOLD
Go into production early. Value monitoring over tests.
Fail fast, recover and learn. Optimize for MTTR not MTBF.
SECURITY, COMPLIANCE AND DATA PRIVACY
Build with least privilege and data privacy in mind.
Know your threat model. Limit blast radius.
COST EFFICIENCY
Run your segment in the right balance of cost and value.
ONE SCOUT IT
Foster collaboration. Harmonize and standardize tools.
Pull common capabilities into decoupled platform services.
Version 2.0
Icons made by Freepik from www.flaticon.com are licensed under CC BY 3.0
BEST TALENT
Autonomy, purpose and mastery: We know why we do
things, we decide how to approach them and deliberately
practice our skills.

25. Build
MeasureLearn

26. Conway’s Law
“Organizations which design systems ...
are constrained to produce designs which
are copies of the communication
structures of these organizations.”

27. Autonomous teams
business capabilities
organized around

28. You build it,
you run it.

29. We are all
engineers!

30. Follow the
trail

31. Guilds
Self-organizing; common interests; across teams
Macro architecture, infrastructure, front end, QA...
Beware of Mandelbrot teams

32. Continuous
delivery

33. Application code in
one repository per
service.
CI
Deployment
package as
artifact.
CD
Deliver package to
servers
Delivery pipeline—data center

34. Application code
and infrastructure
specification in one
repository per
service.
CI
Deployment
package and
infrastructure
declaration as
artifact.
CD
1. Create or update
service infrastructure.
2. New instances pull
down package and
start application.
Delivery pipeline—AWS

35. No
staging
environment

36. Cattle,
not pets

38. Hamburgers,
not cattle

39. Event streaming

40. Monitoring is the new testing

41. 015 Teams
045 Lambda functions
250 Repositories
075 Microservices
019 Systems
Status quo

43. Picture Credits
Wandergeselle by Sigismund von Dobschütz, licensed under CC-BY-SA-3.0
"HotWheels - '69 Ford Torino Talladega“ by Leap Kye, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0
Enterprise IT Adoption Cycle by Simon Wardley under CC BY-SA 3.0
Leosvel et Diosmani by Ludovic Péron under CC BY-SA 3.0
Spare wheel by Brian Snelson under CC BY 2.0
Stopwatch by William Warby under CC BY 2.0