This document discusses Christian Deger's talk on building microservices in the cloud. It describes how Autoscout24 migrated from a monolithic architecture running on 2,000 servers in their own data centers to a microservices architecture running on AWS. Key aspects of the migration included moving from .NET to Java, adopting a self-contained systems approach where autonomous teams own their microservices end-to-end, implementing continuous delivery practices, and shifting to a more collaborative culture between development and operations teams. The new architecture aims to reduce time to market, be mobile-first, support data-driven decisions, keep services loosely coupled, and emphasize infrastructure as code.

1. GOTO Berlin | 15.11.2016 | Christian Deger | @cdeger
Highway to heaven
Building microservices in the cloud

2. Christian Deger
Chief Architect
cdeger@autoscout24.com
@cdeger

3. 2,4 Million Vehicles

4. Microservices in the cloud adoption?

5. 2000 Servers
2 Data Centers
MTBF optimized

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

9. New
CEO

10. Talent?
Do you attract

11. 21st Century
What does a
tech company
look like?

13. Great Design
Universally Connected
Mobile First
Instant Business Value
Massive Data Insight
Highly Available

14. good, but not great
Hmm, we are

15. Reboot
everything

16. Project
Tatsu

17. .NET / Windows to JVM / Linux
Monolith to Microservices
Data center to AWS
Devs + Ops to Collaboration culture
Involve product people

18. “Death Star” Diagrams
Amazon 2008 Twitter 2013

19. 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
System are
vertical slices
integrated at
the UI.

20. Migration strategy

21. same
direction

22. 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.

23. Build
MeasureLearn

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

25. Autonomous teams
business capabilities
organized around

26. collaboration culture

27. You build it,
you run it.

28. We are all
engineers!

29. Monitoring is the new testing

30. Follow the
trail

31. Templates
• Faster bootstrapping
• Copied not inherited
• Collect and share best practices

32. Guilds
Self-organizing; common interests; across teams
Macro Architecture, Infrastructure, Frontend, QA...
Beware of mandelbrot teams

33. Continuous
Delivery

34. DevOps Survey

35. Forsgren, Nicole and Humble, Jez, The Role of Continuous Delivery in IT and Organizational Performance (October 27, 2015). Forsgren, N., J. Humble (2016). "The Role
of Continuous Delivery in IT and Organizational Performance." In the Proceedings of the Western Decision Sciences Institute (WDSI) 2016, Las Vegas, NV. . Available at
SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=2681909 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2681909
DevOps Science

36. Application code in
one repository per
service.
CI
Deployment package
as artifact.
CD
Deliver package to
servers
Delivery Pipeline – Data Center

37. 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

39. Cattle,
not pets

40. Separate
code deployment
feature release
from

41. No
staging
environment

42. • Consumer driven contracts
• Canary releases
• Shadow traffic
• Semantic monitoring
Integrate in production

43. Unlimited Infrastructure with APIs

44. Frontend integration
Loosely coupled
Autonomous teams
High optimization

46. PageSpeed Module
css (page+fragment)
js (page+fragment)
ngx_pagespeed
css (page)
js (page)
css (fragment)
js (fragment)

47. Hamburgers,
not cattle

48. Event Streaming

50. Picture Credits
"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
And the future is private by Simon Wardley under CC BY-SA 3.0
Leosvel et Diosmani by Ludovic Péron under CC BY-SA 3.0
Wandergeselle by Sigismund von Dobschütz under CC BY-SA 3.0
Puzzling by Bernd Gessler (Own work) CC BY-SA 3.0