Tag Archives: wix

Microservices and DevOps Journey at Wix

microservices,

Wix.com started their journey on DevOps and Microservices about two years ago and recently switched from a monolithic application to a microservices-based application. Yes, it took them full two years to complete the transition from monolith to microservices!

I got connected with Aviran Mordo (@aviranm), head of backend engineering at Wix on twitter.

They migrated to microservices because the “system could not scale” and the requirements for functional components were varied. The journey took their WAR-based deployment on Tomcat to fat JAR with embedded Jetty. On a side note, take a look at WildFly Swarm if you are interested in a similar approach for Java EE applications.

Video Interview

I discussed some points with him about this journey and you can watch the same too.

In this discussion, you’ll learn:

  • Why Continuous Delivery and DevOps are important requirements for microservices?
  • How they migrated from a big monolith to smaller monoliths and then a full-blown microservices architecture
  • How database referential integrity constraints were moved from database to application?
  • “micro” in microservices refers to the area of responsibility, nothing to do with LOC
  • Neither REST nor messaging was used for communication between different services. Which protocol was used? JSON-RPC
  • How do services register and discover each other? Is that required during early phases?
  • Why YAGNI and KISS are important?
  • Chef for configuration management and how to make it accessible for massive deployments
  • TeamCity for CI
  • Is 100% automation a requirement? Can 100% automation be achieved? Learn about Petri, Wix’s open source framework for A/B testing
  • Relevance of hybrid cloud (Google, Amazon, Private data center) and redundancy
  • Hardest part of migrating from monolith to microservice
  • How much code was repurposed during refactoring?
  • Where was the most effort spent during the two years of migration?
  • Distributed transactions
  • What was the biggest challenge in DevOps journey? Look out for a nice story towards the end that could be motivating for your team as well 😉

Additional Material

Watch the slides from DevoxxUK:

You can also learn more about their architecture in Scaling Wix to 60m Users.

Enjoy!