Service Discovery is an old problem, but one that has gotten much more attention recently because of the popularity of microservices.

The ultimate goal is to have a mechanism where every service has a continuous and correct view of which other services are available so it can find and consume those services, and so it can respond accordingly if there is a change. If, for example, a service you are using disappears, it probably makes sense to look for another compatible, service. If there isn’t any and it is essential for your service, it might make sense to retract your own service, so other services depending on you can respond to that appropriately. In a way this is a pro-active version of the ‘circuit-breaker’ pattern, as it can prevent calls to broken services.

OSGi

This is pretty much how services work in OSGi, and it works well. (For a more in-depth explanation about OSGi, check (http://www.osgi.org/Technology/WhatIsOSGi))

The scope is limited though: The service discovery only focuses on:

  • One host
  • Only OSGi services

This was less of an issue in the early days (remember that the OSGi spec. is over 15 years old) but nowadays you really need to be able to cluster hosts and consume non-OSGi services.

Distributed OSGi

There is something called Distributed OSGi that can be of help. This allows OSGi instances to export their services to other instances so other instances can discover and consume these services transparently, in other words, the service consumer does not need to know that the service is remote. Personally I’m not convinced that this is the way to go. Granted, it is very convenient if all ‘remoteness’ is abstracted away, so you don’t have to think about things like network transport, and if it works, well.. great, but it remains uncertain if it is generally possible and desirable to abstract this.

Micro services

There has been (still is, I guess) some debate about if an OSGi service is a ‘micro service’, I don’t want to get into this, but there is no denying that going OSGi-only has a drawback that there is no free choice of technology stack: It has to play nice with Java, and even then some Java code is notoriously hard to get to work well in an OSGi environment.

More and more services are not Java based, and definitely not OSGi based, and we should consider those too. In pretty much any system you will need some kind of database, maybe a mail server, or a third party HTTP service.

For these services it is not necessary to abstract that they are remote, as all the ‘drivers’ are network based to begin with, and will assume remoteness anyway. SQL databases use JDBC, mail is sent over SMTP. So in short we can integrate in a simpler way: We only need to ‘discover’ the configuration. We need to know to which JDBC url to connect, or to which SMTP server to connect, and we can leave the transport to the drivers.

OSGi does not address these services at all. From an OSGi point of view, those aren’t even services, so we’re on our own. What we do have in OSGi is a pretty decent configuration manager. In a nutshell, an OSGi service can have a “persistent id”, or PID. In a way you could call this the ‘type’ of the service. The configuration manager can associate that PID with a configuration object, which is basically a key-value map.

It might be somewhat opaque if you didn’t know how the OSGi configuration manager worked, but the thing to take away is that it decouples the source of the configuration from the consumer of the configuration.

This seems sort of obscure, but it really is powerful. You can create reusable components that use formally defined configuration settings, and customize how the configuration is obtained depending on the situation. The configuration data might simply be a file on a workstation, but in production it might be a Zookeeper-like distributed data store.

Docker

So how does docker fit in? Docker has created a pretty insane buzz over the last year. I’ll assume you know what it does: (Warning, oversimplification ahead)

  • It can run pretty much anything that runs in Linux
  • It reduces a (possibly very complex) application to an image, environment parameters and exposed ports.
  • It has a very decent CLI / API

There are also some things Docker explicitly does not do: - Orchestration - Service Discovery

Next: Monitoring the Docker daemon