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Microservice/Container Maturity Questionaire

Background

Migrating an application to "The Cloud" or "Containers" provides numerous benefits for both application developers and operators. However, this journey requires careful planning and preparation.

Purpose

Because each application is a special snowflake, this document is designed to provide a starting point to reveal any challenges or "red flags" you might encounter before running in a containerized environment.

These are designed to ask probing questions to determine the application's maturity in migrating to containers, but could also be applied to any Cloud Native solution.

NOTE: Many of these questions are inspired by: The Twelve-Factor App

Benefit

  • What benefit are you most interested in gaining from Microservices? (e.g. quicker deployments, easier scaling, etc.)

Application Codebase

  • What OS does the service run on?
  • How do user's interact with the application? (e.g. Browser, RDC, Run on Desktop, etc.)
  • How are you storing your code?
    • e.g. VSTS, TFS, GitLab, etc.
    • This question is designed to underand how developers interact with their source code. It can also be a leading indicator to their maturity model. i.e. CVS is a red flag
  • Do you have one repository per code base?
    • This question is to understand if the are able to build/deploiy their services separately.
  • How do you deploy your services?
    • Do you deploy your UI separately from your API?
    • What are your deployment artifacts? (e.g. Java WAR, .EXE, Container)
  • What languages are used? (e.g. C#, PHP, Python)

Config

  • How/Where does the application read it's config?
  • How do you generate your config?
  • How do you update config on your application?
  • Could you Open Source your application without exposing credentials?
    • Not asking if you plan to, but is just a litmus test

Application Process

  • Do the processes store any state?
  • Do they need to support "sticky sessions"?
  • Do they share memory with other processes?

Service Exposure

  • What ports are exposed internally?
  • What ports are exposed externally?
    • Are these exposed to the public internet?

Concurrency

  • How do you scale processes?
    • Can you scale those processes independently?

Disposability

  • What's the impact if the process dies unexpectedly?
  • What is the process start time?
  • Are there background jobs?
    • Are the jobs re-enterant? (can be interrupted during exe and restarted safely)
    • Are the jobs idempotent?

Culture

  • Who is driving the initiative?
    • e.g. top-down (CTO), bottom-up (devs/ops), or both
    • For maximum effectiveness a company wide, not project specific approach, is recommended
    • However, it's recommended to start with a single project to develop confidence + competence
  • How would you rate yourself from an automation perspective?
    • NOTE: If you rely on humans, you won't be able to scale.

References