Hipster Shop: Cloud-Native Microservices Demo Application

This is a fork of the official Google Hipster Shop demo that replaces the Redis backend with a YugabyteDB. The application is a web-based e-commerce app called “Hipster Shop” where users can browse items, add them to the cart, and purchase them.

Google uses this application to demonstrate use of technologies like Kubernetes/GKE, Istio, Stackdriver, gRPC and OpenCensus. This application works on any Kubernetes cluster (such as a local one), as well as Google Kubernetes Engine. It’s easy to deploy with little to no configuration.

If you’re using this demo, please ★Star this repository to show your interest!

Screenshots

Home Page	Checkout Screen

Service Architecture

Hipster Shop is composed of many microservices written in different languages that talk to each other over gRPC.

Find Protocol Buffers Descriptions at the ./pb directory.

Service	Language	Description
frontend	Go	Exposes an HTTP server to serve the website. Does not require signup/login and generates session IDs for all users automatically.
cartservice	C#	Stores the items in the user's shopping cart in YugabyteDB and retrieves it.
productcatalogservice	Go	Provides the list of products from a JSON file and ability to search products and get individual products.
currencyservice	Node.js	Converts one money amount to another currency. Uses real values fetched from European Central Bank. It's the highest QPS service.
paymentservice	Node.js	Charges the given credit card info (mock) with the given amount and returns a transaction ID.
shippingservice	Go	Gives shipping cost estimates based on the shopping cart. Ships items to the given address (mock)
emailservice	Python	Sends users an order confirmation email (mock).
checkoutservice	Go	Retrieves user cart, prepares order and orchestrates the payment, shipping and the email notification.
recommendationservice	Python	Recommends other products based on what's given in the cart.
adservice	Java	Provides text ads based on given context words.
loadgenerator	Python/Locust	Continuously sends requests imitating realistic user shopping flows to the frontend.

Features

• Kubernetes/GKE: The app is designed to run on Kubernetes (both locally on "Docker for Desktop", as well as on the cloud with GKE).
• gRPC: Microservices use a high volume of gRPC calls to communicate to each other.
• Istio: Application works on Istio service mesh *permissive mode only at this time with yugabyte.
• OpenCensus Tracing: Most services are instrumented using OpenCensus trace interceptors for gRPC/HTTP.
• Stackdriver APM: Many services are instrumented with Profiling, Tracing and Debugging. In addition to these, using Istio enables features like Request/Response Metrics and Context Graph out of the box. When it is running out of Google Cloud, this code path remains inactive.
• Skaffold: Application is deployed to Kubernetes with a single command using Skaffold.
• Synthetic Load Generation: The application demo comes with a background job that creates realistic usage patterns on the website using Locust load generator.

Installation

You can deploy the microservices-demo application stack and YugabyteDB to any Kubernetes environment. For reference, install steps will be provided for GKE.

1. Running on Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE)” (~30 minutes) You will build, upload and deploy the container images to a Kubernetes cluster on Google Cloud.

2. Install tools to run a Kubernetes cluster locally:

   • kubectl (can be installed via gcloud components install kubectl)
   • Docker for Desktop (Mac/Windows): It provides Kubernetes support as noted here.
   • skaffold (ensure version ≥v0.20)
   • Helm v3 (https://helm.sh/docs/intro/install/)
   • YugabyteDB install local CLI and add to PATH (https://docs.yugabyte.com/latest/quick-start/install/)

   wget https://downloads.yugabyte.com/yugabyte-2.0.10.0-darwin.tar.gz
   tar xvfz yugabyte-2.0.10.0-darwin.tar.gz
   PATH=PATH:yugabyte-2.0.10.0/bin

3. Create a Google Kubernetes Engine cluster and make sure kubectl is pointing to the cluster.

   gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com

   gcloud container clusters create demo --enable-autoupgrade \
       --enable-autoscaling --min-nodes=3 --max-nodes=10 --num-nodes=5 --zone=us-central1-a

   kubectl get nodes
   

4. Prep your cluster and deploy a YugabyteDB cluster via Helm

   kubectl create namespace yb-demo
   kubectl config set-context --namespace yb-demo --current
   helm repo add yugabytedb https://charts.yugabyte.com
   helm repo update
   helm search repo yugabytedb/yugabyte
   helm install yb-demo yugabytedb/yugabyte -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/YugaByte/charts/master/stable/yugabyte/expose-all.yaml --version 2.0.9 --wait

5. Prep your YugabyteDB instance with the following DDL

   bin/ysqlsh -h YOUR_YSQL_IP # default database & user = yugabyte
   \l
   CREATE DATABASE sample;
   \c sample
   CREATE TABLE carts(id serial PRIMARY KEY, userid VARCHAR(50), productid VARCHAR(50), quantity integer);

6. Enable Google Container Registry (GCR) on your GCP project and configure the docker CLI to authenticate to GCR:

   gcloud services enable containerregistry.googleapis.com

   gcloud auth configure-docker -q

7. In the root of this repository, run skaffold run --default-repo=gcr.io/[PROJECT_ID], where [PROJECT_ID] is your GCP project ID.

   This command:

   • builds the container images
   • pushes them to GCR
   • applies the ./kubernetes-manifests deploying the application to Kubernetes.

   Troubleshooting: If you get "No space left on device" error on Google Cloud Shell, you can build the images on Google Cloud Build: Enable the Cloud Build API, then run skaffold run -p gcb --default-repo=gcr.io/[PROJECT_ID] instead.

8. Find the IP address of your application, then visit the application on your browser to confirm installation.

   kubectl get service frontend-external
   

   Troubleshooting: A Kubernetes bug (will be fixed in 1.12) combined with a Skaffold bug causes load balancer to not to work even after getting an IP address. If you are seeing this, run kubectl get service frontend-external -o=yaml | kubectl apply -f- to trigger load balancer reconfiguration.

(Work in Progress) Deploying on a Istio-installed GKE cluster

Note: you followed GKE deployment steps above, run skaffold delete first to delete what's deployed. Enabling Istio-on-GKE sidecar injection may not allow previous deployed versions to be re-deployed until it is disabled and removed.

1. Create a GKE cluster and deploy YugabyteDB (described in "Option 2").

2. Use Istio on GKE add-on to install Istio to your existing GKE cluster.

   gcloud beta container clusters update demo \
       --zone=us-central1-a \
       --update-addons=Istio=ENABLED \
       --istio-config=auth=MTLS_PERMISSIVE

   NOTE: MTLS_STRICT is unsupported at this time. If you would like to enable MTLS_STRICT mode, you will need to update several manifest files:

   • kubernetes-manifests/frontend.yaml: delete "livenessProbe" and "readinessProbe" fields.
   • kubernetes-manifests/loadgenerator.yaml: delete "initContainers" field.

3. (Optional) Enable Stackdriver Tracing/Logging with Istio Stackdriver Adapter by following this guide. Work still needs to be done for Prometheus monitoring to update metrics here: https://cloud.google.com/istio/docs/istio-on-gke/installing

4. Install the automatic sidecar injection (annotate the yb-demo namespace with the label):

   kubectl label namespace yb-demo istio-injection=enabled

5. Apply the manifests in ./istio-manifests directory. (This is required only once.)

   kubectl apply -f ./istio-manifests

6. Deploy the application with skaffold run --default-repo=gcr.io/[PROJECT_ID].

7. Run kubectl get pods to see pods are in a healthy and ready state.

8. Find the IP address of your Istio gateway Ingress or Service, and visit the application.

   INGRESS_HOST="$(kubectl -n istio-system get service istio-ingressgateway \
      -o jsonpath='{.status.loadBalancer.ingress[0].ip}')"
   echo "$INGRESS_HOST"

   curl -v "http://$INGRESS_HOST"

Cleanup

If you've deployed the application with skaffold run command, you can run skaffold delete to clean up the deployed resources.

If you've deployed the application with kubectl apply -f [...], you can run kubectl delete -f [...] with the same argument to clean up the deployed resources.

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This is given as an example deployment of Yugabyte in a microservices environment.