This slide deck explores architectural choices for making applications and integration services first class citizens in a container native environment. Watch video: https://wso2.com/library/conference/2018/07/wso2con-usa-2018-architecting-for-container-native-environments/

1. Director Solutions Architecture
Architecting for Container Native
Environments
Chintana Wilamuna

4. Containers
Fundamentally
altered the way we
build, deploy and run
applications

5. $ docker build my_svc .
Creating containers
FROM ballerina/ballerina:0.975.1
COPY svc.balx /home/ballerina
EXPOSE 9292
CMD ballerina run svc.balx
Base image
Copy your code
Add any changes
Start the app

6. Using containers
● Push image to a registry
$ docker tag my_svc private.hub.docker/my_svc:v1
$ docker push private.hub.docker/my_svc:v1
● Pull back and run your container
$ docker run private.hub.docker/my_svc:v1

7. Services in
containers

8. Manage
containers
+
Istio
Service Mesh

9. Agile = Developer “Flow”

10. ● Packaging and deployment
● Service discovery
● HA and scalability
● Configuration management
● Security
● Monitoring
● CI/CD
Container native characteristics

11. ● Image size
○ Smaller base images / platform specific images
○ Use multi-stage builds
● Low footprint, faster boot
● Helm charts - group related resources together
○ Versioned releases
Packaging

12. Packaging
Create consistent,
repeatable, and
predictable
deployment artifacts

13. ● Kubernetes manifests
○ Annotation driven (Ballerina / Metaparticle)
○ No manual YAML file creation
Deployment
Ballerina Metaparticle (python)

14. ● App behavior with multiple nodes
● Understand impact of cascading failures
○ Fault injection - network delays and crash failures
● Removing complex bolt-on framework dependencies
○ Ballerina resilient programming patterns
○ App agnostic error handling - Istio
Deployment

15. Deployment
Handle possible
issues at
deployment time
early in dev cycle

16. ● Environment variables
○ Injected into each pod in a deployment
○ {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_HOST, {SVCNAME}_SERVICE_PORT
● DNS
● Through a sidecar proxy
Service discovery

17. Service
Discovery
Effortlessly address
endpoints in
distributed service
clusters

18. ● Test at development time
○ Test HA setup - multiple nodes, clustered behavior
● Stateless and stateful app behavior in a cluster
○ ReplicaSet and StatefulSet
HA and scalability

19. HA and
Scalability
Reduce deployment
level surprises with
application state

20. ● Config and secret management
○ ConfigMap - decouple config from image / app
○ Secrets - sensitive info - passwords, keys, tokens
● Distribute config across a cluster
● No hard coding
● Decouple config from code
Configuration management

21. Configuration
Management
Unified approach to
access config and
credentials from app

22. ● Smaller images
● K8S namespaces
○ ResourceQuota
● Network level isolation
○ NetworkPolicy
● Automatic mutual SSL authentication between services
Security

23. Security
Have same security
policies/control
across dev/test/prod

24. ● Distributed tracing with Istio (forward incoming headers)
Monitoring

25. ● Service agnostic metrics collection
● Pre-configured dashboards
○ Prometheus + Grafana
Monitoring

26. ● Helm charts
● Rolling updates
● Canary / Blue-Green / A-B testing
CI/CD

27. ● Container orchestrators help manage disaggregated apps
● Containers are fundamentally changing how we
○ Develop / build / deploy / test apps
● Container native characteristics help developers
○ Develop and distribute faster
○ Deploy faster
○ Identify deployment levels problems early
Summary

28. THANK YOU
wso2.com