Service instance per VM

Context

You have applied the [[Microservice architecture]] pattern and architected your system as a set of services. Each service is deployed as a set of service instances for throughput and availability.

Problem

How are services packaged and deployed?

Forces

  • Services are written using a variety of languages, frameworks, and framework versions

  • Each service consists of multiple service instances for throughput and availability

  • Service must be independently deployable and scalable

  • Service instances need to be isolated from one another

  • You need to be able to quickly build and deploy a service

  • You need to be able to constrain the resources (CPU and memory) consumed by a service

  • You need to monitor the behavior of each service instance

  • You want deployment to reliable

  • You must deploy the application as cost-effectively as possible

Solution

Package the service as a virtual machine image and deploy each service instance as a separate VM

Examples

Netflix packages each service as an EC2 AMI and deploys each service instance as a EC2 instance.

Resulting context

The benefits of this approach include:

  • Its straightforward to scale the service by increasing the number of instances. Amazon Autoscaling Groups can even do this automatically based on load.

  • The VM encapsulates the details of the technology used to build the service. All services are, for example, started and stopped in exactly the same way.

  • Each service instance is isolated

  • A VM imposes limits on the CPU and memory consumed by a service instance

  • IaaS solutions such as AWS provide a mature and feature rich infrastructure for deploying and managing virtual machines. For example,

    • [[Elastic Load Balancer]]

    • Autoscaling groups

    • …

The drawbacks of this approach include:

  • Building a VM image is slow and time consuming

Related patterns

  • This pattern is a refinement of the [[Single Service per Host]] pattern

  • The [[Service Instance per Container]] pattern is an alternative solution

  • The [[Serverless deployment]] pattern is an alternative solution.

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