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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

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Phil (aka MP3Monster)'s Blog

Tag Archives: Apache

Helidon and the embracing of micro services

24 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by mp3monster in development, General, Helidon, Oracle, Technology

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Apache, development, Eclipse, EE4J, EE8, Glassfish, Helidon, J2EE, Linus' Law, Linux Foundation, Micronaut, MicroProfile, microservice, WebLogic, WLS

XEYO9H51_400x400Oracle have announced another Open Source project called Helidon (Helidon.io) as a microservices platform built on top of Netty (which is built around a contemporary async model). If you look at the literature you’ll note two flavours one called SE which aligns to the programming characteristics or Node.js – asynchronous. The other is MP which aligns to the rapidly evolving J2EE MicroProfile which essentially follows a coding style along the lines of J2EE annotations.

Whilst it is perfectly possible to run Helidon based solutions in either profile natively, it is clearly geared up for running in any Docker+Kubernetes style environments such as Oracle Kubernetes Cloud (OKE) or even ACCS. Helidon website provides the means to quickly package your solution into Docker.

In both SE and MP forms the dependencies are hugely stripped back compared to the giants of WebLogic, GlassFish (now EE4J with the handover of J2EE to the Eclipse Foundation.

It does raise a number of questions what are the futures of WebLogic and Oracle support of EE4J (some answers here, but no Oracle specific)? WebLogic has never been the fastest to align to the latest J2EE standards (EE8 standard released last year should be become available sometime this year for WLS – see here), but today it is so central to many Oracle products it isn’t going to disappear, will it just end up slowly ebbing away? Which would be a shame, I have heard it said by Oracle insiders that if the removing the end of one component could be sorted then WebLogic could be easily be configured to have a small lightweight footprint.

The other interesting thing is what is happening to Open Source and what it might mean for the future.  Up until perhaps 3 or 4 years ago the use of open source you would think of software made available on of a small group of key sponsored organisations such as Apache, Linux Foundation, Eclipse which through its governance framework, provided levels of equality and process. As a result, levels of quality, trust crucially married to strong level of use and contribution that meant that to extrapolate Linus’ Law – bugs could be weeded out quickly and easily.  However with the advent of services like GitHub, whilst it has become easier to contribute and fulfil Linus’ Law. It also means that it is very easy to offer a solution that is Open Source. But, doesn’t necessarily garner the benefits of Linus’ Law and the other preconceptions we often have about Open Source such as it is/can be as good as a commercial solution. After all, throwing code into GitHub does not guarantee many eyes/contributors. Nor does it assure the governance, checks and balances that an Apache project, for example, will assure.

It is important to say that I am not against github, in fact, I am very much pro, and use GitHub myself to host utilities I make freely available (here). The important point is we have to be more aware of what open source actually means, in each context and can’t assume it is likely to have a strong community driving things forward, and critically dealing with bugs, and ensuring quality assurance processes are realized.

Helidon joins a number of other offerings in this space such as Micronaut (also built on Netty). Micronaut takes a different approach to Helidon by adopting a strong inversion of control/injection approach. In and in some respects feels a bit like the earlier versions of JBoss Application Server (now known as WildFly) which had a small footprint and made good use of Spring. This is in addition to Spark and Javalin. There is a good illustration of the different servers from Dmitry Kornilov shown below and the associated article can be seen here (who also happens to the Lead Engineer for Helidon).

helidon_landscape

Unlike Spark, Micronaut and a couple of others, Helidon only supports Java today rather than JDK based languages such as Kotlin and Groovy for example but is the only solution that can cover both the Micro Profile and Framework domains. It also has a challenge in terms of getting established, Spark has been around since 2015. Javalin appeared in May 2017. The J2EE Micro Profile standard is also driving a lot forward progress, so getting established will continue to get harder. Liberty, another Micro Profile solution is based on IBM WebSphere and Thorntail has links to WildFly (more here). We hope that it will make good headway with a Reactive engine in the form of Netty and avoiding IoC or introspection from the core should mean it will be very quick (particularly during startup) but it needs to show its value differentiation and importantly build a strong community contributing to it.

We hopefully will get the chance to further experiment with Helidon and write more about it here.

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Microservices

07 Sunday Jun 2015

Posted by mp3monster in General, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

AMQ, Apache, camel, karaf, Microservices, Oracle, OSB, Redhat, SOA Suite

Microservices are a hot topic at present. But microservices is neither a standard or a specific technology. Like REST it is more a set of ideas. So what constitutes a microservices. The best description I have come across yet has been by Martin Fowler ( http://martinfowler.com/articles/microservices.html ).

We can focus down on a number of specific points that are central to the idea of Microservices:

  • the creation of small pieces of functionality that can be discretely deployed,
  • are connected typically by web APIs often using REST (but also seen using other abstracting protocols)
  • can be replaced with minimal dependency issues
  • microservices are typically built by small discrete teams usually in the range of 2-12 people (the so called 2 pizza rule)
  • services are usually orchestrated by dumb pipes (so publication/subscription strategies are often used, so the intelligence about how and what to do about each event is within the service not the orchestration).
  • design approach changes orientation from n-tier (presentation, orchestration/business logic, persistence) which could be described as horizontal separation to vertical separation where partitioning is functional/service centric (which internally may embody the horizontal partitioning but this is secondary and down to how the service delivery team wish to work).
  • Search service us running as their own CPU process – typically using container technologies such as Docker, Rocket, Spoon and Drawbridge
  • Any orchestration is dumb, the decisions of what to do and when to participate are taken by the service

The small container footprint (making the enforcement of the decoupling with minimal governance) means density of processes can remain high as the overhead compared to full VMs is a lot smaller but also means instantiating clean environments for fresh deployments and testing is very fast. This does not fit so well within many ESB environments such as Oracle’s SOA Suite as the pre-requisites create a substantial footprint that would need to reside within the container for the ESB (RedHat’s JBoss Fuse is one of the few exceptions if you consider the required footprint for Apache Camel for example).

However, some of the microcontainer principles can  be pursued within the larger ESB environments utilising capabilities such as :

  • Service Component Architecture (SCA) provides a means to create isolated versions of solutions that can run concurrently. By exploiting proper versioning and version dependency controls you can start pushing out different solution pieces with great ease.
  • Exposing composites via we services REST or WSDL based and adopt a more SOI approach to artefacts so don’t tap into DVMs directly use web services to perform the lookups
  • Microservice implementations have a number of NFRs characteristics that are not (atleast in my exerpience) often utilised when rich ESB frameworks such as
    • service compensation http://soapatterns.org/design_patterns/compensating_service_transaction
    • standard implementation of Tolerant Reader patterns –   http://servicedesignpatterns.com/WebServiceEvolution/TolerantReader (in conjunction with versioning patterns such as canonical versioning – http://soapatterns.org/design_patterns/canonical_versioning)

These approaches allow you adopt the dumb pipe approach (you don’t want services directly invoking each other except in case of utility services otherwise a lot of inter service dependency will build up). Using a publish & scribe framework or simple service sequencing we should be able to exploit OSB, Weblogic MQ in an Oracle Context and Weblogic as an OSGI container (for discovering technical services). In line with the Microservices ethos it would more than legitimate to build Microservices with other tools and then use an ESB like SOA Suite to provide the technology for weaving the services together.

In a Redhat product set there are more options as the solution footprints are smaller. But you would consider Karaf (OSGi container), Active MQ,and simple uses of Camel to weave microservices together.

With cloud middleware, adopting the goals of microservices will become easier as instantiating fresh environments and deployment approaches will become more akin to those of containers – for example Oracle Integration Cloud Service (ICS) deployment is simply an import of a whole set of configuration and integration process information.

It should be noted that Microservices does fit better with a number of organisational and management approaches, such as:

  • dev ops – the build team carry the role of operational support
  • product centric rather than project centric life cycles i.e. the team exists as long as the product, rather than existing until all the current funded features are complete
  • works for build rather than buy delivery (buy is likely to introduce artefacts too large for a Microservice model).

Each microservice is likely to contain its own copy of data – potentially leading to greater data duplication – therefore data reconciliation checks and management thinking maybe be needed.

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Packt has sent another Camel along

08 Monday Dec 2014

Posted by mp3monster in Books, Packt, Technology

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Apache, Apache Camel, book, camel, cookbook, Packt, review

 Having been a little inactive on the book reviewing front with Packt in the last couple of months.  They have been working on a new Camel book – in addition to the excellent Apache Camel Developer’s Cookbook and several smaller Instant books (Instant Apache Camel Message Routing, Instant Apache Camel Messaging System) and asked me to again prepublication review.

Does Packt need another Camel book?  Maybe, this new volume from what I have reviewed so far is focusing on custom development and certainly starts with the real Camel development basics.  So feels like it is more targeted to a complete newbie to Camel. Several chapters in and the book hasn’t faced into how Camel supports Enterprise Integration Patterns in a deep manner – although that may yet come.  Watch this space as I’ll  post on how the book is likely to shape up.

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To Author or Not to Author that is the question

12 Monday May 2014

Posted by mp3monster in Books, General

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Apache, Apache Camel, Apache Camel Developer, camel, Fuse, JBoss, OUG, Packt, Packt Publishing, zookeeper

It has been an interesting week. Packt Publishing out of the blue asked if I would be interested in authoring a book on Apache Camel targeted towards more tech manager and architect types. I have admit to having declined the opportunity in part because I’ve promised to put some presentations together of the UKOUG Middleware Special Interest Group (SIG), but also there are a number of Apache Camel books already out there including the one I technically reviewed for Packt (Apache Camel Developer’s Cookbook) co-authored by someone I have worked with in the past.

It did promote some thoughts about book authoring, and currently Packt have a gap in their coverage of the technologies that underpin JBoss Fuse, namely Apache ZooKeeper (which also underpins aspects of Hadoop and many others) which would make for an interesting project. Once we’ve got the SIG activities done perhaps something worth coming back to.

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