We at Wix.com started our journey on DevOps and Microservices about two years ago and recently switched from a monolithic application to a microservices-based application. Yes, it took us a full two years to complete the transition from monolith to microservices!
Arun Gupta (@arungupta) got connected with Aviran Mordo (@aviranm), head of backend engineering here at Wix, through twitter:
We migrated to microservices because the “system could not scale” and the requirements for functional components were varied. The journey took our WAR-based deployment on Tomcat to fat JAR with embedded Jetty. On a side note, take a look at WildFly Swarm if you are interested in a similar approach for Java EE applications.
Arun Gupta discussed some points with Aviran about this journey and you can watch the same below.
In this discussion, you’ll learn:
Why Continuous Delivery and DevOps are important requirements for microservices?
How we migrated from a big monolith to smaller monoliths and then a full-blown microservices architecture
How database referential integrity constraints were moved from database to application?
“micro” in microservices refers to the area of responsibility, nothing to do with LOC
Neither REST nor messaging was used for communication between different services. Which protocol was used? JSON-RPC
How do services register and discover each other? Is that required during early phases?
Chef for configuration management and how to make it accessible for massive deployments
TeamCity for CI
Is 100% automation a requirement? Can 100% automation be achieved? Learn about Petri, Wix’s open source framework for A/B testing
Relevance of hybrid cloud (Google, Amazon, Private data center) and redundancy
Hardest part of migrating from monolith to microservice
How much code was repurposed during refactoring?
Where was the most effort spent during the two years of migration?
Distributed transactions
What was the biggest challenge in DevOps journey?
Look out for a nice story towards the end that could be motivating for your team as well 😉
Watch the slides from DevoxxUK: Scaling wix with microservices architecture devoxx London 2015 By Aviran Mordo. You can also learn more about our architecture in Scaling Wix to 60m Users. Enjoy!
Here is a link to the Original Post, by Arun Gupta, as posted on Voxxed.