Asanka Abeysinghe

Cell-based Architecture An Emerging Architecture Pattern for Agile Integration

Deputy CTO & VP, Architecture - CTO Office WSO2 Inc.

2019

1997 2003

Architect

2012

VP Solutions Architecture

2001 2008

Director Solutions

Architecture

Deputy CTO

Open Source

Distributed Computing

Programmer COBOL

OLE, OLE2 COM, COM+ DCOM CORBA

Java DeveloperJ2EE MMS

286-DX4

Eventing FIX HL7

Committer

CONNECT-health

Global architecture team 500+ customers Champions program

Chief Architect2005

QSP AR Trusted advocate

Game hacker C++ programmer

Age-16

Hedge fund tools

Ref. Architecture Ref. Methodology Evangelize

2018

Middleware Developer/Architect

Entrepreneur

Objectives

#1 why: created a new pattern

#2 introduce: Cell-based architecture

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Motivation

Centralized & Layered

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Powerpoint Architects

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Reality of the Enterprise

Brownfield > Greenfield

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Legacy, monolithic Microservices, sprawl

Reference Implementations

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Underutilization of the Technology

Gap: architecture | development | deployment

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Dependency management

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Architecture Patterns

Timeline

Background: Layered Architecture

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A platform with an agile team 100 APIs, 60 message flows, 80 services, n DBs Multi-tenanted, 3 active tenants First release after 3 years

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Rise of Microservices

Pragmatic Microservices

Netflix: APIs

Uber: Edge Gateway

eBay: API Facade

Gartner: Mini Services

Background: Layered Architecture with MSA

Background: Segmented Architecture

BS-1 BS-2 BS-n

G-1 G-2

US-1 US-n

Platform of PlatformsPlatform (shared capabilities)

Proj

ect 1

Proj

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Proj

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Platform (shared capabilities)

Proj

ect 1

Proj

ect 2

Proj

ect 3

Proj

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Platform (shared capabilities)

Proj

ect 1

Proj

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Proj

ect 3

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Platform (shared capabilities)

Proj

ect 1

Proj

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Proj

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CI/CD User Store

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Making of……

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Paul Fremantle - CTO, Co-Founder - WSO2

Building the Concept

Business vs technical services

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Service: Technical definition

A code exposes through an interface that describes a collection of operations that are network accessible using a standardized messaging protocol.

Service: Business definition

Software components that can be spontaneously discovered, combined, and recombined to provide a solution to a business problem.

Microservice: Technical definition

A microservice must have a single purpose and be loosely coupled in design and deployed independently of other microservices. "Micro" is a concept of scope rather than size.

Microservice: Business definition

Microservices is an approach to application development in which a large application is built as a suite of modular components or services. These services are built around business capabilities.

Group of (Micro)services

The cell is the basic structural, functional, and

biological unit of all known living organisms

Cell-based Reference Architecture

Component: Atomic Units

A component represents a process or business logic running in a container, serverless environment, or an existing runtime. A component is designed based on a specific scope, which can be independently run and reused at the runtime.

Cell: Units of Enterprise Architecture

A cell is a collection of components, grouped from design and implementation into deployment. A cell is independently deployable, manageable, and observable.

Cell:Component 1:M 1:1

Connected Cells

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Control Plane: - Signaling of the network - Makes decisions about the traffic flow

Data Plane: - Forwards traffic between hops - Takes data packets

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Management Plane: - Configure - Observeabiltty, Monitor

Inter and Intra Cell communication

Local-meshGlobal-mesh

DP- data plane CP- control plane MP- management plane

Connected CellsCell gateway (ingress)

Sidecar (egress)

Adaptor (egress)

Ambassador (egress)

API-centric Architecture

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API-centric Architecture Pull APIs - RESTful HTTP, gRPC Push APIs - Events JMS, AMQP, SMTP - Streams Kafka, MQTT

Gateway Pattern

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Automated Governance (Re)-enables Flow

Policy Store (Registry)

Observability (Monitoring/


Analytics)

Policy 
Enforcement

(GW)

Automated governance is made of three things: A source of truth:

Policy store/registry

Enforcement of the policy Gateway or plugin attempting to keep the desired state

Observability How close to the desired state are we?

Security of Cells

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Security of Cells

Developer Experience (DX) of a Cell

Creating CellsBrand new Cell

Existing (micro)services

Update an existing Cell

Create a new version

Lifecycle of a Cell

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Structured Agility

Versioned Components

Versioned Cells

Dependency managed

Autowired

Reusable

Enhanced MSA & CNA

Cell-based Enterprise Architecture

Cell TypesCell Type Components

Logic Microservices, Functions, MicroGateways, lightweight storages

Integration MicroESB or other integration microservices, lightweight storage and/or cache

Legacy Existing systems, legacy services

External SaaS and partner systems

Data RDBMS, NoSQL, File, Message Broker*

Identity IDP, user stores

Channel Web Apps, IoT, mobile apps

Reference Implementation L0

Reference Implementation L1

Human-centric Architecture

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Cells and Podular Organizations

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Cell Boundaries

Defining Cell boundaries The design of systems has always required an approach to the clustering of functionality, and it remains an open Computer Science problem - so don't expect a definitive answer!

The number of component-component connections within a cell should be higher than the number that crosses the cell boundary.

Other approaches such as Domain-driven Design (DDD) may help, but fundamentally the cell model is there to provide team boundaries.

Hence the size of a cell should be based on the size, responsibility, and output of a team - and the size and output of a team based on team concepts.

Cell-based architecture aims to create business focussed architectural constructs that can reuse at a higher level, so naturally organizing the teams and cells around business functions is essential.

Measure the success

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https://www.tasktop.com/blog/5-best-metrics-youve-never-met/ https://dzone.com/articles/reducing-mttr

Mean Time to Repair

https://www.tasktop.com/blog/5-best-metrics-youve-never-met/https://dzone.com/articles/reducing-mttr

Self-contained

Deployable as a unit

Independently elastic

Data, control & management plane

Summary: Cell-based Architecture

My Contribution: walk the talk

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Just a (steady) start

https://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture

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https://github.com/wso2/reference-methodology

Reference Methodology

https://cellery.io/

Build, run, and manage code-first composites on Kubernetes

Cellery - simple composition and graphical view

A cloud-native programming language for microservices and APIs

- A compiled, transactional, statically and strongly typed programming language with textual and graphical syntaxes.

- Incorporates fundamental concepts of distributed system integration

- Offers a type safe, concurrent environment to implement microservices with distributed transactions, reliable messaging, stream processing, and workflows

- Compiles into container images for deployment on Kubernetes and Docker

https://ballerina.io/

Ballerina - code and visual syntax in sync

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Invitation to consume and contribute

https://ballerina.io

https://cellery.io

https://github.com/wso2/reference-architecture

https://github.com/wso2/reference-methodology

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@asankama

THANK YOU

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