Going Cloud Native at Comcast
Speaker: Todd Migliore

Problems

• 10 year old services
• Had to scale platform has a whole with physical services. Couldn’t scale one service
• Shared release calendar for 15 dev teams.
• Only did deployments once a month.
• Took two hours to deploy all services.
• Had to deploy in middle of night to minimize impact
• Three level support team. Ops team split from dev and test teams. Finger pointing when there was an outage.
• Data store was active (east coast) and passive (west coast.) There was a 60 minute outage to transfer. Instead would troubleshoot for an hour before giving up and having another hour outage.

The challenge

• Needed to transform while still running

The approach

• Held a submmit
• Got smartest folks in room to answer “how are we going to get out of this mess”
• Someone suggested migrating apps to cloud
• Hard to move to cloud. WebSphere/WebLogic, rack database, monolith
• Then someone suggested microservices

Microservices – why it should be small

• Agile – deploy to prod in minutes
• Elastic – scale in minutes
• Resilient – survive outages form back end dependencies
• Distributed – automatic failover
• Event driven – stream data to other services
• Developed and run by a single team
• If you service talks to more than one dependency, it is not a microservice
• Need to define what that one thing is for your microservice
• Should own its own data.

Note: my session was right after this one so I spent the end getting ready for mine.