marking/microservices-workshop

Developing Microservices

This workshop will walk you through creating and composing a set of microservices in Node.js using fuge, docker, and docker-compose.

Note: This is a beginners level workshop. Whilst you should be comfortable with Node.js modules and applications and have a basic understanding of docker and it's principles we will be helping you through the basics. This workshop presents a series of fairly simple challenges to help you get up to speed with these technologies.

The app

The app you're building is a sensor fed chart that provides realtime data from a dummy sensor. This 'app' is broken down into a number of individual services, each with its own well defined concern, as outlined in the following diagram.

Frontend

A simple web app that uses jQuery, Rickshaw charts, and WebSockets to show a realtime graph of data being emitted by our sensor. This app has an API which is included in the same microservice who's sole job is to talk to and read from other microservices.

Actuator

A small microservice that causes reads on the sensor based on an offset.

Sensor

A dummy temperature sensor that sends out varying values based on what it receives from the actuator.

Serialization

A service that handles reads and writes in serial fashion to the database. Uses websocket-stream to update the web app and thus the graph, in real time.

Broker

A robust messaging layer build for IoT based devices. We use this to wire up the actuator, serializer, and sensor in a loosely coupled fashion.

Influx

A database in a container that the serializer uses for robust storage of data.

Once we have built the application it should look a bit like this:

The libraries

The system uses the following libraries and technologies:

• Rickshaw Charts - Charting library for the web.
• hapi - A rich framework for building applications and services.
• websocket-stream - Websocket streams implementation for realtime communication to the browser.
• browserify - Module to let you require modules client side by bundling up dependencies.
• Seneca - A Microservices framework for Node.js.
• Mosca / MQTT - MQTT broker that enables robust message, particularly suited to IoT.
• InfluxDB - Time series database particularly suited to time sensitive data.
• Fuge - A microservice development environment.
• Docker - A container engine.

Setting up

To complete this workshop you will need Node.js and some supporting tools installed on your laptop along with a working docker installation with an InfluxDB image.

You should follow the instruction for each component to get set up:

Node.js

Download and install the latest stable build of Node.js for your system.

fuge

Once you have installed Node.js, fuge may be installed by running:

npm install -g fuge

cURL

Windows does not come with cURL included in CMD.exe. If you are using Windows please install cURL ensuring you select the version that matches your installed version of Windows. cURL can be found at https://curl.haxx.se/download.html. Please use the Windows generic version if using CMD.exe.

Docker

Download the latest version for mac or windows and install.

Docker Compose

Download docker-compose at https://docs.docker.com/compose/install/.

Confirm that all is well by running:

docker ps

This tutorial uses a docker influx db container you should pull this container from the docker registry using the following command:

docker pull tutum/influxdb

You should also pull a Node.js container using:

docker pull node:6-slim

Once you have the following complete its time to move to challenge 1.

Workshop

You should clone this repository to your local machine:

git clone https://github.com/lloydbenson/microservices-workshop

Then setup the repository by installing the required Node.js modules:

cd microservices-workshop
npm install

Slides

To follow along with the slides, after everything is installed execute the following.

npm run slides

Next Up: Challenge 1

Credits: This was heavily borrowed and modified from https://github.com/nearform/micro-services-tutorial-iot. This was modified to work with another workshop.