In my earlier post, I had introduced the concept of microservices. As a quick recap, microservices model promises ease of development and maintenance, flexibility for developers/teams to work on different things, building block for a scalable system and a true polygot model of development. However, this model is not without challenges and the biggest being addressing the complexity of a distributed system. Since now we have to deal with multiple services spread across multiple hosts, it becomes difficult to keep track of different hosts and services. In order to scale further, the number of instances of services would further increase and this would in turn lead to increase in the number of hosts.
Container technology can help in reducing the complexity of microservice orchestration. The idea of operating system container is not new and has been present in one form or another for decades. Operating systems in general provide access to various resources in some standard way and share it amongst the running processes. Container technology takes this idea further by not only sharing but also segregating access to networks, filesystems, cpu and memory. Each container can have its own restricted amount of CPU, memory and network independent of the other containers.
Lets see how container technology helps with microservice deployment.
- This isolation between containers running on the same host makes deploying microservices developed using different languages and tools very easy.
- Portability of containers makes deployment of microservices seamless. Whenever a new version of a service is to be rolled, the running container can be stopped and a new container can be started using the latest version of service code. All the other containers will keep on running unaffected.
- Efficient resource utilization as containers comprise of just the application and its dependencies.
- Strictly controlled resource requirements without using virtualization.
There are two popular container technologies.
Docker – Google was amongst the biggest contributor for underlying container technology in Linux and it evolved into LXC. Docker was initially developed as a LXC client and allows the easy creation of containers. The container images are essentially filesystems with a configuration file that gives a startup profile for the process that runs inside the container. The biggest USP of Docker is its ease of use wherein a single command can download an existing image and boot it into a running container. This has helped in its popularity and widespread use. Latest versions of Docker have no dependency on LXC and through their libcontainer project have a full stack of container technology all the way to the kernel. Docker is all set to shake up the virtualization market by consuming it from the bottom.
There are some opensource additions on Docker – Kubernetes can deploy and manage multiple Docker containers of the same type and TOSCA can help with more complex orchestration involving multiple tiers.
Amazon ECS – The Amazon EC2 Container Service (Amazon ECS) defines a pool of compute resources called a “cluster.” Each cluster consists of one or more Amazon EC2 instances. Amazon ECS manages the state of all container-based applications running in cluster, provides telemetry and logging, and manages capacity utilization of the cluster, allowing for efficient scheduling of work. A group of containers can be defined using a construct called “task definition”. Each container in the task definition specifies the resources required by that container, and Amazon ECS will schedule that task for execution based on the available resources in the cluster. Amazon ECS simplifies “service discovery” by integrating with 3rd party tools like Zookeeper.
I would say use of containers to deploy microservices is an evolutionary step driven mostly by the need to make better use of compute resources and to maintain increasingly complex applications. The use of microservices architectural philosophy with containers addresses these needs. Containers offer the right abstraction to encapsulate Microservices.
| Reference: | Microservices Orchestration from our JCG partner Gurpreet Sachdeva at the gssachdeva blog. |
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