Originally presented by Tony Erwin and Brian Martin at the CF Summit in Santa Clara, CA on May 12, 2015. The Bluemix UI is the front-end to Bluemix, IBM's PaaS cloud hosting platform built on top of CloudFoundry. The demands placed on the UI have outpaced the original implementation as a monolithic single-page app. To deal with these challenges, the UI is being migrated to leverage a more modern and scalable microservices architecture. We discuss the advantages of microservice architectures, approaches to migrating a monolith to microservices in a live product, and real-life lessons learned in the deployment and management of microservices in a CloudFoundry environment.

1. Migrating a Monolithic App to
Microservices on Cloud Foundry
Brian K. Martin, Bluemix Architect, @bkmartin
Tony Erwin, Bluemix UI Architect, @tonyerwin

2. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to Support
Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

3. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to Support
Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

4. IBM Bluemix
• IBM Bluemix:
– Open-standards, cloud platform for building,
running, and managing apps
– PaaS layer built on CloudFoundry
• Bluemix UI is the front-end, providing an
alternative to the CF command line

5. Bluemix UI
Home
Solutions (Marketing)
Pricing
Dashboard
Catalog
Orgs/Spaces

6. Bluemix UI Monolith
• Single-page application (SPA) to provide
desktop-like experience in the browser
• All HTML, CSS, and JavaScript loaded within
single web page and served from a single Java
app
• State-of-the-art not all that long ago
– Dojo + J2EE was the most common stack in IBM
when Bluemix UI dev started
– SPA still popular (AngularJS, Ember.js etc.)

7. Monolithic Architecture
Home
Solu)ons
Catalog
Dashboard
Pricing
Orgs/
Spaces
CF
Cloud
Controller
(and
other
APIs)
SQL
DB
Bluemix
UI
Server
(Java)
Bluemix UI (Client)
Bluemix PaaS

8. Challenges of Monolith
• How can we improve performance?
– Volume of client-side requests create bottlenecks
• How do we integrate code from other teams
using different stacks?
• How can we push smaller changes as they are
ready?
• Where do we find developers with Dojo
experience?
• How can we improve SEO?

9. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to Support
Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

10. Promises of Microservices
• Aids migration to more modern, lighter-weight stack without starting over
• Improves performance and developer productivity
– Small services optimized for speed and page size
• Use simplest approach that works
• Bare bones HTML, CSS, JS
• Node.js w/ Dust.js server-side templates
– Easier to find answers on Google, easier to find skilled developers
• Allows more regular updates as loosely-coupled services can deploy at their
own schedule
– Teams use stack of their choosing
– Teams don’t have to wait on others
• Leads to improved SEO
– Proxy facilitates “clean” URLs
– Server side generation results in crawlable content
• Improves cross-team UI consistency via microservice composition

11. Phase 1
Solu)ons
Catalog
Dashboard
Pricing
Orgs/
Spaces
CF
Cloud
Controller
(and
other
APIs)
SQL
DB
Bluemix
UI
Server
(Monolith)
Bluemix UI (Client)
Bluemix PaaS
Proxy
Common
Session
Store
No
SQL
Msq
Queue
Monitor
Home

12. Composition w/ Microservices
header
footer
inline
combined
Common
Home

13. End Goal
Home
Solu)ons
Catalog
Dashboard
Pricing
Orgs/
Spaces
CF
Cloud
Controller
(and
other
APIs)
Bluemix UI (Client)
Bluemix PaaS
Proxy
Common
Session
Store
No
SQL
Msq
Queue
Monitor

14. New Challenges
• More moving parts, more complexity
• Collecting federated status, monitoring
health of the system
• Seamless navigation with existing monolith
• Developer skills (need to learn new stack,
but will ultimately be more productive)
• Blue-green deployments

15. An Approach for Blue-Green – Just Change Route on
Proxy
Home
home-­‐XXX.bluemix.net
Solu)ons
solu1ons-­‐XXX.bluemix.net
Bluemix
UI
Server
classic-­‐XXX.bluemix.net
Proxy
Common
common-­‐XXX.bluemix.net
Home
Home-­‐YYY.bluemix.net
Solu)ons
solu1ons-­‐YYY.bluemix.net
Bluemix
UI
Server
classic-­‐YYY.bluemix.net
Proxy
Common
common-­‐YYY.bluemix.net
Router
console.ng.bluemix.net console-YYY.ng.bluemix.net

16. Agenda
• Introduction to the Bluemix UI
• Bluemix UI Microservices Architecture
• Features for Cloud Foundry to Support
Microservices
@bkmartin @tonyerwin

17. Context Path Routing
• bluemix.net/login ->
login.bluemix.net/login
• bluemix.net/account ->
account.bluemix.net/account
• To efficiently share user state and
allow individual microservices to be
updated independently, we need a
built-in ability to bind context paths
to apps and have gorouter routing

18. Application Versions
• CF has no formal concept of an application
version
• Would it be helpful to add a formal concept
of version so that a given application name
can have many versions installed formally
• Current way
– myapp-1.0 à myapp-1.1
• The app name may be constantly changing
which is harder for mgmt, CMDB, etc

19. Advanced Routing Policies
• When rolling out new versions of
microservices how can you control
which users are routed to the new
version?
• Advanced routing policies could
allow policies like random selection of
a percentage of the popultion,
specific user groups, etc

20. “Private” Applications
• An ability to hide microservices
applications from public routing
• Applications to be declared public or
private
• SDN for a space or org
• How to authenticate/grant access for
routing

21. Composite Applications
• What if you want to understand the health
and status of your complete microservice
based application?
• A composite application could allow
applications to be grouped for status and
control (the latter seeming less useful)
• Could simplify blue-green deployment if
multiple functions could be selected
simultaneously

22. Service Registry
• Need a new way to discover the
active endpoints for the
microservices rather then hard coded
paths and/or application names
• Service registry should have live
status to allow fast failover to
alternative services

23. Performance and Monitoring
• When your application is broken into
many components, monitoring the
performance and response time of each
component becomes even more
important to diagnose problems
• Common dashboards that can
aggregate stats from many applications
are required

24. Log Analysis for Problems
• Common log aggregation platforms
(ELK) solve most of the problem but
it has been hard to correlate across
applications for a given user
• Solution: use common correlators
across your microservices to track
individual users

25. Testing
• How to insure compatibility of
microservices as they are being
deployed
• Integrated to your CI/CD pipeline, but
is there anything else that could be
done?

26. IBM Bluemix
Free 30 day trial at http://www.bluemix.net
Email: bkmartin@us.ibm.com
Twitter: @bkmartin
Email: aerwin@us.ibm.com
Twitter: @tonyerwin