Introducing Microservice Builder

When the frequency of blog posts drops on this site it generally has two causes: I’m busy and/or I’m working on something that’s IBM Confidential. Both of these have been true over the past six months or so whilst I’ve been working on something we’re calling Microservice Builder. A public beta was announced in the run up to InterConnect which went live on the 24th which means that I can now come up for air and say a little about the work we’ve done so far.

Although not limited to Java deployments, Microservice Builder pulls together multiple strands of work that we’ve been doing in the WebSphere space. First, there is the work that is being done in the MicroProfile community to define a set of standard APIs for building microservices in Java. Initially, this took a set of existing Java EE technologies (JAX-RS, CDI and JSON-P) but now additional APIs are being defined. You can start to see the results of this work in the Liberty March beta where there are new features for injecting environmental configuration and utilizing fault tolerance patterns such as timeout, bulkhead and circuit breaker.

Another area where we’ve sought to improve the developer experience is by providing a fast-path to creating new projects. The Liberty App Accelerator has been around for some time now, allowing you to generate Java projects quickly through a web UI. We’ve taken this idea and extended it to cover Swift and Node.js. This can be achieved either through a web UI or through a new plugin to the Bluemix CLI. (Note that generated projects do not need to be deployed to Bluemix.) The plugin goes beyond just generating projects and allows you to build and run them locally using containers. This means that the developer no longer needs to have the prerequisites (e.g. Java, Maven and Liberty) installed locally.

For a runtime environment, we believe containers are a good fit for microservices and in the first instance we’re focusing on Kubernetes. That could be the newly announced Kubernetes in IBM Containers or it could be on-premises with IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers. On top of Kubernetes, Microservice Builder adds a lightweight fabric, installed as a Helm chart, that simplifies deployment of Liberty-based services. Specifically, in this first release it generates key and trust stores to facilitate inter-service communication. It also configures an ELK (Elasticsearch-Logstash-Kibana) stack to receive and display information including trace, FFDC, garbage collection and HTTP access logs from the Liberty logstashCollector-1.0 feature.

The final strand of Microservice Builder ties together the development and runtime environments via a Jenkins based pipeline. Once again, this is installed as a Helm chart, and is configured to automatically pick up projects from a GitHub or GitHub Enterprise organization. For a Java application, the pipeline will build and test using Maven, before creating a Docker image and pushing it to a registry. The Docker image is then deployed to a Kubernetes cluster using either the same or a separate pipeline.

To show all of this in action, we have taken the sample conference application from the MicroProfile community and broken it apart in to separate projects to deploy using Microservice Builder. Just follow the docs to recreate it in either your local minikube environment or with Spectrum Conductor for Containers.

One Response to “Introducing Microservice Builder”

  1. […] I posted here on the Microservice Builder beta, I thought it only fair that I should offer an update now that it is Generally Available. There is […]