LEAN & MEAN - GO MICROSERVICES WITH

DOCKER SWARM MODE AND SPRING CLOUD

ERIK LUPANDER
2017-11-09 | CALLISTAENTERPRISE.SE
ABOUT ME

• Erik Lupander, consultant at Callista Enterprise.

• Primarily a Java dude.
• ”Discovered” Go about 2 years ago.

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 Love at first sight!

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ON THE AGENDA…

• Background: The footprint problem.

• The Go programming language.
• Go in the context of:
• Microservices
• Spring Cloud/Netflix OSS
• Docker Swarm mode.
• Demos!

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THE FOOTPRINT PROBLEM

Can Go help us help us reduce the

footprint of a microservice?

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THE FOOTPRINT PROBLEM

• JVM-based solutions comes with a hefty footprint.

• If you need to run tens or even hundreds of microservice
instances, cost is definitely a factor.
• t2.micro (1GB) —> t2.small (2GB) doubles the cost / h.
• There are obviously many other alternatives for microservice
development….
• Very interesting topic… if we had all day.

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THE GO LANGUAGE

The Go Language

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THE GO LANGUAGE

It has been stated that the reason the three authors

created Go was their…

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THE GO LANGUAGE

”… shared dislike of C++'s complexity as a

primary motivation for designing a new language”

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THE GO LANGUAGE

Go was designed …

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THE GO LANGUAGE

”… to eliminate the slowness and clumsiness of

software development at Google”

Go official FAQ

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WHAT WAS IMPROVED WITH GO?

• ~50x build time improvement over C++

• Internal C++ application builds taking 30-75 minutes.
• Better dependency management
• Cross-platform builds
• Language level concurrency
• Readable and maintainable code
• Even for non superstar developers

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THE GO LANGUAGE

• Claims to be
• efficient, scalable and productive.
• Designed
• to improve the working environment for its designers and
their coworkers.
• Is not
• a research language.

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THE GO LANGUAGE

• Go is
• compiled, statically typed, concurrent, garbage-collected
• Has
• structs, pointers, interfaces, closures
• But does not have
• classes, inheritance, generics, operator overloading, pointer
arithmetic

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WHY GOLANG - DEVELOPING

What does actual developers think about Go?

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 ”… a disservice to intelligent programmers”
Gary Willoughby - blogger

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 ”… stuck in the 70’s”
Dan Given

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 ”… psuedointellectual arrogance of Rob Pike
and everything he stands for”
Keith Wesolowski

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THE GO LANGUAGE

But also

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”I like a lot of the design decisions they made in the [Go] language.
Basically, I like all of them.”
Martin Odersky, creator of Scala

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”Never used a language before that empowers you to solve problems
as quick as Go does”
Alexander Orlov @ Twitter

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”Go isn’t a very good language in theory, but it’s a great language in
practice, and practice is all I care about”
anonymous hackernews poster

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THE GO LANGUAGE

Some pros and cons

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DEVELOPMENT IN GOLANG - PROS

• Easy to learn, readable, productive and pretty powerful.

• The built-in concurrency is awesome.
• Cross-platform.
• Rich standard APIs and vibrant open source community.
• Quick turnaround and decent IDE support (getting better!)
• Nice bundled tools.
• Built-in unit testing, profiling, coverage, benchmarking,
formatting, code quality…
• Strongly opinionated.
• Code formatting, compile errors on typical warnings.

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DEVELOPING IN GOLANG - SOME CONS

• Missing generics
• Dependency versioning
• Verbose syntax
• Error checking, no autoboxing of primitive types etc.
• Unit testing and Mocking isn’t very intuitive.

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WHO USES GOLANG

• Some well-known software built entirely in golang

• Docker
• Kubernetes
• etcd
• influxdb (time series database)
• cockroachdb (spanner-like database)

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GOLANG - SYNTAX IN 2-5 MINUTES

Two code samples

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SAMPLE CODE 1 - HELLO WORLD

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SAMPLE CODE 2 - CONCURRENCY

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 Go microservices

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GO MICROSERVICE IMPLEMENTATION - CONSIDERATIONS

• When implementing microservices, we need working, mature

and stable libraries for things such as:
• HTTP / REST / RPC APIs
• Data serializers / deserializers (json, xml etc.)
• Messaging APIs
• Persistence APIs
• Logging
• Testability

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 The demo application

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 Curl Legend
ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW • CB = Circuit Breaker (Go Hystrix)
• TA = Correlated tracing (Opentracing API / Zipkin)
HTTPS
Docker Swarm
cluster Edge server
OAuth token relay
(Netflix Zuul)
CB/TA

HTTP

OAuth Security API (Go) Monitor

OAuth Res
Authorization Dashboard
Server (Hystrix Dashboard)
(spring-security)
CB / TA

HTTP
Configuration Hystrix Stream
Server Account Composite (Go) aggregation
(spring-cloud- AMQP (Modified Netflix
config) TA Turbine)
CB / TA
VipService (Go)

AMQP Trace
HTTP
Messaging HTTP Analysis
(RabbitMQ) (Zipkin)

TA

Images (Go) Quotes-Service

(Spring Boot)
WHY GO - RUNTIME CHARACTERISTICS

• Low memory usage

• Typically executes at least as fast as Java
• Fast startup
• Highly concurrent
• Garbage Collector geared for very short GC pauses

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GO MICROSERVICES - STATICALLY LINKED BINARIES

• Statically linked binary produces an executable without

external dependencies.
• No jar- or dll-hell
• No requirement on the OS having a JRE / CLR / NodeJS or
other libraries
• (except libc)
• Small executable size

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 DOCKER CONTAINERS & STATICALLY LINKED BINARIES

• In the context of Docker Containers, the statically linked binary

allows use of very bare parent images.
• I’m using iron/base which is ~6 mb, alpine is another popular
choice.

FROM iron/base

EXPOSE 6868
ADD vipservice-linux-amd64 /
ADD healthcheck-linux-amd64 /

HEALTHCHECK CMD [”./healthcheck-linux-amd64”, ”-port=6868”]

ENTRYPOINT [”./vipservice-linux-amd64", ”-profile=test”]

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 Demo 1
Footprint @ Docker Swarm Mode

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”what is hard in Microservices is all the things
around them”
Jonas Bonér - author of Akka

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 Consider:

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MICROSERVICE CONSIDERATIONS

• Centralized configuration
• Service Discovery
• Centralized Logging
• Distributed Tracing
• Circuit Breaking
• Load balancing
• Edge server / Reverse proxy
• Monitoring
• Security

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 Curl Legend
ARCHITECTURAL OVERVIEW • CB = Circuit Breaker (Go Hystrix)
• TA = Correlated tracing (Opentracing API / Zipkin)
HTTPS
Docker Swarm
cluster Edge server
OAuth token relay
(Netflix Zuul)
CB/TA

HTTP

OAuth Security API (Go) Monitor

OAuth Res
Authorization Dashboard
Server (Hystrix Dashboard)
(spring-security)
CB / TA

HTTP
Configuration Hystrix Stream
Server Account Composite (Go) aggregation
(spring-cloud- AMQP (Modified Netflix
config) TA Turbine)
CB / TA
VipService (Go)

AMQP Trace
HTTP
Messaging HTTP Analysis
(RabbitMQ) (Zipkin)

TA

Images (Go) Quotes-Service

(Spring Boot)
 Things not really Go-related…

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EDGE SERVER

• Our Go services doesn’t care about the EDGE / reverse-proxy

• Netflix Zuul, Nginx, HAProxy …
• Or use solution provided by container orchestrator
• Ingress Routing mesh (Docker Swarm mode)
• Ingress controller (K8S)
• Routes (OpenShift)
• Must forward HTTP headers.
• Security

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SERVICE DISCOVERY AND LOAD BALANCING

• Load-balancing and Service Discovery is handled by the

orchestration engine.
• E.g. the Docker Swarm or K8S / OpenShift ”service”
abstraction.
• Eureka service discovery and Ribbon-like client-based load-
balancing can be implemented too.

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 Demo 2 -
Load balancing and fast scaling
@ Docker Swarm

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 Go Microservice
Anatomy

TA

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 HTTP / REST FRAMEWORK

HTTP/REST framework
(gorilla)

Configuration Trace
Server Configuration Distributed
Analysis
(spring-cloud- Client Tracing
(Zipkin)
config) (viper) (opentracing-go)

Logger
(logrus)

AMQP Hystrix Stream

Messaging AMQP
Circuit aggregation
client
(RabbitMQ) (steadway/
Breaker (Modified Netflix
(hystrix-go)
amqp) Turbine)

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GO WITH OUT WITHOUT WEB FRAMEWORKS?

• Consider using the native http packages + a router package over

a full-blown web framework such as gin, echo, beego.

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HTTP FRAMEWORK (GORILLA)

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HTTP FRAMEWORK (GORILLA)

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 CENTRALIZED CONFIGURATION

HTTP/REST framework
(gorilla)

Configuration Trace
Server Configuration Distributed
Analysis
(spring-cloud- Client Tracing
(Zipkin)
config) (viper) (opentracing-go)

Logger
(logrus)

AMQP Hystrix Stream

Messaging AMQP
Circuit aggregation
client
(RabbitMQ) (steadway/
Breaker (Modified Netflix
(hystrix-go)
amqp) Turbine)

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CENTRALIZED CONFIGURATION

• With possibly tens of microservices and hundreds of

instances, centralized and externalized configuration is a
must.
• Configuration providers:
• Config servers
• Spring Cloud Config, etcd …
• Container orchestrator mechanisms
• K8S and OpenShift has ”config maps” and ”secrets” in
order to mount configuration files, certificates etc. into
containers at startup.

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 CONFIGURATION USING SPRING CLOUD CONFIG AND VIPER

Docker Swarm
Microservices

Configuration HTTP VIPER

CB / TA
git HTTPS Server
repository (spring-cloud-config)
HTTP

VIPER
CB / TA

http://configserver:8888/imageservice-test/master

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CONFIGURATION - VIPER

• Viper supports YAML, .properties, JSON and Env-vars

• With a few lines of code, we can load and inject config from
Spring Cloud Config into Viper

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CONFIGURATION - VIPER USAGE

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 CONFIGURATION PUSH USING SPRING CLOUD CONFIG AND VIPER

<config change commit

pushed to repo>
Docker Swarm
Microservices

Configuration
git HTTP POST commit hook
Server
repository (spring-cloud-config) VIPER
CB / TA VIPER

<Refresh token> CB / TA

<Refresh token>
RabbitMQ

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 Demo 3 -
Configuration Push

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 CENTRALIZED LOGGING

HTTP/REST framework
(gorilla)

Configuration Trace
Server Configuration Distributed
Analysis
(spring-cloud- Client Tracing
(Zipkin)
config) (viper) (opentracing-go)

Logger
(logrus)

AMQP Hystrix Stream

Messaging AMQP
Circuit aggregation
client
(RabbitMQ) (steadway/
Breaker (Modified Netflix
(hystrix-go)
amqp) Turbine)

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LOGGING - LOGRUS

• Applications needs structured logging

• slf4j, log4j, logback…
• Logrus is a similar API for Go
• Supports levels, fields, formatters, hooks

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LOGRUS

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CENTRALIZING LOGS

• In a Docker context, we configure a logging driver when

declaring our ”service”.
• The logging driver adds lots of nice container metadata.
• Logs are sent to an aggregation service (typically something
like logstash)
• The log aggregation service may perform some filtering,
transforming etc. before storing logs to a storage backend or
sending them to a LaaS provider.

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 LOGGING WITH CONTAINER METADATA (GELF)

{
"version":"1.1",
"host":"swarm-manager-0",
"short_message":{
”level”:"info",
"msg":"Successfully initialized service”,
”time":"2017-07-17T16:03:35+02:00"
},
"timestamp":1.487625824614e+09,
"level":6,
"_command":"./vipservice-linux-amd64 -profile=test",
”_container_id”:”894edfe2faed131d417eebf77306a0386b430….",
"_container_name":"vipservice.1.jgaludcy21iriskcu1fx9nx2p",
"_created":"2017-02-20T21:23:38.877748337Z",
”_image_id”:”sha256:1df84e91e0931ec14c6fb4e55…..”,
"_image_name":"someprefix/vipservice:latest",
"_tag":"894edfe2faed"
}
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63
 DISTRIBUTED TRACING

HTTP/REST framework
(gorilla)

Configuration Trace
Server Configuration Distributed
Analysis
(spring-cloud- Client Tracing
(Zipkin)
config) (viper) (opentracing-go)

Logger
(logrus)

AMQP Hystrix Stream

Messaging AMQP
Circuit aggregation
client
(RabbitMQ) (steadway/
Breaker (Modified Netflix
(hystrix-go)
amqp) Turbine)

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DISTRIBUTED TRACING

• Track a request over multiple microservices

• Also trace within services and methods
• Invaluable for high-level profiling across the service stack.
• Facilitated by go-opentracing and zipkin

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GO-OPENTRACING CODE SAMPLE

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DISTRIBUTED TRACING

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 Demo 4 -
Distributed Tracing with Zipkin

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 CIRCUIT BREAKER

HTTP/REST framework
(gorilla)

Configuration Trace
Server Configuration Distributed
Analysis
(spring-cloud- Client Tracing
(Zipkin)
config) (viper) (opentracing-go)

Logger
(logrus)

AMQP Hystrix Stream

Messaging AMQP
Circuit aggregation
client
(RabbitMQ) (steadway/
Breaker (Modified Netflix
(hystrix-go)
amqp) Turbine)

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CIRCUIT BREAKING - HYSTRIX

• Mechanism to make sure a single malfunctioning microservice

doesn’t halt the entire service or application.
• go-hystrix (circuit breaker)
• Netflix Turbine (aggregation)
• Netflix Hystrix Dashboard (GUI)

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CIRCUIT BREAKING

• Programmatic hystrix configuration

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CIRCUIT BREAKING

• Example go-hystrix usage, non-blocking.

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 CIRCUIT BREAKING

• Hystrix stream aggregation using customized Netflix Turbine

Go Services

:8181/hystrix.stream

CB / TA

Hystrix Stream Monitor

:8181/hystrix.stream aggregation :8282/turbine.stream Dashboard
(Modified Netflix (Hystrix Dashboard)
CB / TA Turbine)

:8181/hystrix.stream
CB / TA

Client Discovery token

Client Discovery token

RabbitMQ

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 Demo 5 -
Hystrix Dashboard

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DISTRIBUTED TRACING

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SUMMARY

• Go is an interesting option for microservices due to runtime

characteristics and rather pleasant developing.
• Although but not without it’s fair share of quirks especially
regarding the lack of traditional OO constructs and missing
generics.
• Microservice development in Go requires a bit of work
regarding integration with supporting services, but can be
mitigated by using integration libraries such as go-kit or our
own little toolkit.
• Don’t be afraid to pick your favorite libraries!

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WANT TO LEARN MORE?

• Nic Jackson
• July 2017 from Packt
• Technical reviewers:
• Magnus Larsson
• Erik Lupander

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DVIZZ - A DOCKER SWARM VISUALIZER

• https://github.com/eriklupander/dvizz
• Pull requests are more than welcome!

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RESOURCES

• My 12-part blog series: http://callistaenterprise.se/blogg/

teknik/2017/02/17/go-blog-series-part1/
• Demo landscape source code: https://github.com/
callistaenterprise/goblog
• Branch ”nov2017”
• Spring Cloud Netflix: https://cloud.spring.io/spring-cloud-
netflix/
• go-kit: https://github.com/go-kit/kit
• dvizz: https://github.com/eriklupander/dvizz
• packt book: https://www.packtpub.com/application-
development/building-microservices-go

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 Questions?
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