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Ship Features Fearlessly
Turn features on and off without deploys. Used by thousands of Ruby developers.
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Swanand Pagnis
January 21, 2015
Technology
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Resilient Software Design
Lessons learned from Michal Nygard's "Release It!"
Swanand Pagnis
January 21, 2015
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Transcript
Resilient Software Design Building software that doesn’t give up!
1. What’s all this about? 2. Anti-patterns: What not to
do! 3. Patterns: Make your life easier.
Find the odd one 1. :cloud_factory 2. "CloudFactory" 3. CloudFactory
4. CLOUD_FACTORY
What will this code print? if fork puts "I won
the lottery!" else puts "I am bankrupt!" end
What’s all this about?
Stability
It Just Works™
It Should Work™
Bad things happen
Good things happen as well
But those are rare!
Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. - Murphy’s
Law
Developers think positive
Too much so!
Be negative.
Our goal is to build software
Our goal is also to minimise pain
Our goal is also to save money
Resilient software saves money by not breaking when needed
Resilient software saves money by using optimum infrastructure
Resilient software saves money by keeping developers happy
Anti-patterns
1. Integration points
Integration is not what you think™
Database is an integration
Third party services are integration.
Your cache layer is an integration
None
Networks fail more often
Socket based protocols have a special way of failing
Refused connection is bad.
Hanged connection is worse.
Micro-services that talk to each other, will stop talking abruptly
2. Unbalanced Capacities
Specially applicable to micro-services
3. Slow responses
4. Unbounded Result Sets
Major anti-pattern, overlooked by many
What is the size of an HTTP cookie?
Patterns
1. Use timeouts!
What is the default timeout on Ruby’s net/http?
Now and forever, networks will always be unreliable. - Michael
T Nygard
Every network call in your system must have a timeout
This includes database calls
This includes API calls
This includes cache lookups
What to do when the timeout occurs depends on where
it occurred
Highly context specific, so the dev team should make that
decision
ProTip: Do not use Ruby’s “timeout” module
Instead, depend on libraries for the timeout
If you’re a library author, just use net/http’s timeout
2. Circuit Breaker
None
3. Bulkheads
A ship is divided into several water- tight compartments
In case there is a leakage in one section, water
doesn’t flood into other sections
Same principle!
Use resource pools
Use rate limiting
Consideration: Capacity
Bulkheading often conflicts increasing or variable capacity
Consideration: Performance
Bulkheading often results in slightly reduced performance
It’s worth it, trust me™
4. Fail fast
Remember guard clauses in Ruby?
# class Event def closest_event return unless self.location # …
# … end
Same principle!
Any Ruby libraries?
Not a lot :(
shopify/semian
Thank you!
Questions?
Swanand Pagnis Principal Engineer @ First
Swanand Pagnis @_swanand on Twitter
Swanand Pagnis @swanandp on GitHub