As 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 already the official announcement, various coverage in the press including ZDNet and ADT, a post from my new General Manager Denis Kennelly, and, indeed, my own post on the official blog, so I thought I’d focus on what has changed from a technical standpoint since the beta.
If I start with the developer CLI, the most significant change here is that you no longer need a Bluemix login. Indeed, if you aren’t logged in, you’ll no longer be prompted for potentially irrelevant information such as the sub-domain on Bluemix where you want the application to run. Note, however, that the CLI is still using back-end services out in the cloud to generate the projects so you’ll still need internet connectivity when performing a bx dev create.
Moving on to the next part of the end-to-end flow: the Jenkins-based CI/CD pipeline, the Helm chart for this has been modified extensively. It is now based on the community chart which, most significantly, means that it is using the Kubernetes plugin for Jenkins. This results in the use of separate containers for each of the build steps (with Maven for the app build, Docker for the image build, and kubectl for the deploy) and those containers are spun up dynamically as part of a Kubernetes pod representing the Jenkins slave when required.
The Jenkinsfile has also been refactored to make extensive use of a Jenkins library. As you’ll see in the sample projects, this means that the generated Jenkinsfile is now very sparse:
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@Library('MicroserviceBuilder') _ microserviceBuilderPipeline { image = 'microservice-session' } |
I could say much more about the work we’ve done with the pipeline but to do so would be stealing the thunder from one of my colleagues who I know is penning an article on this subject.
Looking at the runtime portion, what we deploy for the Microservice Builder fabric has changed significantly. We had a fair amount of heartache as we considered security concerns in the inter-component communication. This led us to move the ELK stack and configuration for the Liberty logstash feature out into a sample. This capability will return although likely in a slightly different form. The fabric did gain a Zipkin server for collation and display of Open Tracing data. Again, the security concerns hit home here and, for now, the server is not persisting data and the dashboard is only accessible via kubectl port-forward.
Another significant change, and one of the reasons I didn’t post this immediately, was that a week after we GA’d, IBM Spectrum Conductor for Containers morphed into IBM Cloud private. In the 1.2 release, this is largely a rebranding exercise but there’s certainly a lot more to come in this space. Most immediately for Microservice Builder, it means that you no longer need to add our Helm repository as it will be there in the App Center out of the box. It also meant a lot of search and replace for me in our Knowledge Center!
You may be wondering where we are heading next with Microservice Builder. As always, unfortunately I can’t disclose future product plans. What I can do is highlight existing activity that is happening externally. For example, if you look at the Google Group for the MicroProfile community, you will see activity ramping up there and proposals for a number of new components. Several of the Microservice Builder announcements also refer to the Istio service mesh project on which IBM is collaborating with Google. It’s still early days there but the project is moving fast and you can take a look at some of the exciting features on the roadmap.