lanycrost
Hi Everyone!
I’m thinking about implementing micro-service architecture in our application. I’ve studied a lot of resources.
At the beginning I thought I’d implement it on the basis of processes and nodes, it would be more accurate to write the code of each micro service in a separate file and implement all their communications through messaging. To tell the truth, I had problems and I came across Umbrella Project, but this way solves our problems, but not as I expected.
I think about git sub-modules, but yours suggestion’s is very important.
- Dependencies and umbrella projects
- Using an Elixir Umbrella
- Create an Elixir umbrella project containing a phoenix app and build a release with Distillery
- Managing codebases of large umbrella projects
- Running Multiple Elixir Apps in Umbrella Project
There is no source code independence, which I really don’t like.
What do you think about this. What resources can you suggest me, what architecture, if it’s not secret, let’s give an example of code, or architecture.
Thanks.
Regards, Khachatur.
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LostKobrakai
Umbrella projects are a folder structure to develop related otp applications in a single fashion, mostly to resolve the issues of independent projects like version mismatches. If you’re after source code independence why not simply have multiple mix projects?
lanycrost
For in-service communication I can use restful api’s like in other micro-service architecture app’s, but why not to use Elixir messaging if it’s possible?
LostKobrakai
Sure, but that should be rather a matter of creating the correct kind of communication interface and deploying stuff onto your infrastructure in a way to let them talk to each other. Umbrella on the other hand is just a fancy word for “one folder for multiple apps”. At runtime there’s no difference between apps created as umbrella and apps created independently.
Also keep in mind, that by default erlang nodes connect in clusters automatically, where each node is connected to each other node in the cluster. Depending on the number of physical nodes you expect to be running on this might not be the best architecture.
Eiji
Because you are using them as a libraries - not as services. This means that you need to have them all on each node you deploy to.
I recommend to use WebSocket for fast communication between micro-services. You have one always active channel and two-way communication. In this case you could deploy each service to another node and/or mix part of them like:
So you are not limited - you can deploy each service to any node you want and you only need to simply configure each service, so it will know on which node it needs to call another service api.
lanycrost
But why no one not tell about Elixir built-in messaging future?. I think this way better then WebSocket’s or http.
Eiji
@lanycrost: Don’t know if it allows you to deploy services only to specified nodes (instead of all). Another way is to connect your nodes and call block using rpc:
See erlang docs for more info.
keathley
This is definitely possible using only distributed erlang: Distributed Applications — Erlang System Documentation v29.0.2
lanycrost
Elixir also has this method
axelson
Why do you prefer source code independence? There’s many benefits of keeping the source code to multiple parts of the entire application/company in the same code-base. Such as the ability to make updates to multiple parts of the system “atomically” (i.e. in one git commit). IIRC Google and Facebook actually just use one huge repository that has the code for all of the projects in the entire company.
OvermindDL1
In git the ‘entire’ repo could be huge if done like that. Should be using submodules or so. You can update those atomically as well.
Easier when using SourceSafe or SVN where you can checkout only a part of the tree or individual files. With git it is all or nothing.