SOA checklist

Disclaimer - Trust no one, use your brain! (Work continuously in progress)

Administrative (people, flows, responsibilities)

• Blueprint/template for a new service
• Documentation, standards, guides (how-to, know-how documents)
• Team support
  • Understanding of the whole process by each member
  • Pro-active development and support
  • Accepted responsibilities and duties for each stage of a service
• Plan for service live circle
  • Pre-production development
  • Launching
  • Rollout backward compatible version of a service
  • Hotfixing
  • Rollout backward incompatible version of a service
    • Data migration
    • Switchover
    • Service rollback

Automated processes

• Continuous development
  • Tests
    • Automated
      • Unit tests
      • Functional tests
      • Code style (lints and sniffers)
      • Code quality monitoring (Sonar, Scrutinizer)
      • Code coverage checks
    • Manual
      • Feature acceptance/Business acceptance
      • A/B tests
  • Conditions of integration
    • Code style checks
    • Test results
    • Code coverage percentage
  • Conditions of disintegration a feature
    • Error rate after deploy live
    • Helthchecks
  • Storing a new tested snapshots/artefact of a service
    • Artefact storage (Docker registry)
      • Cleanup policy (Delete old tags with timeout)
• Continuous delivery of stable artefacts
  • Images builder
  • Services provisioning(Ansible)

Implementation

• System layers
  • Hardware: Servers and networks
    • Scaling (adding new nodes) should not affect consistency of other layers
    • Degradation (removing nodes) should not affect consistency of other layers
    • Monitoring
      • Hardware
      • Network
      • Resources and load
    • Alerting policy
  • Cluster: Services management system (Kubernetes, alternatives: OpenShift,Apache Mesos/Apache Karaf)
    • Monitoring
      • Availability of each node in the cluster
      • All services up and running
      • Connectivity between different pods and services
      • Public endpoints accessibility
    • Alerting policy
    • Restart (full or partial) should bring cluster and systems up without destruction
    • Log aggregation system - collect all logs from all containers
    • Execution environment
      • Meta-project with topology of the system
        • Showroom + Staging
          • Separate namespace for each showroom
          • Fixed showroom for the staging (last stable pre-release)
        • Production
          • Configuration
            • Secrets
            • Configs should be a part of the meta-project
  • Service: Application and any service
    • Service itself (Docker image)
      • Backward compatibility for a few generations
        • Cleanup policy for deprecated/unused:
          • Logic branches
          • Data structures (RDBMS/NoSql)
      • One container - one process
        • Segregated commands even in one image (management layer can pick any to run)
        • Built in commands
          • Test service/source code (docker compose to setup required test ENV)
        • DEV/DEBUG mode
      • Logging
        • Writing in stdout (without using containers’ file system) will enforce cluster layer to keep all logs
      • Monitoring
        • Application and business checks (New Relic: throughput, metrics)
        • Self health checks (metrics+Prometeus+Grafana)
          • Queues content (amount of messages)
          • Db content (custom checks)
          • Cache utilization check
      • Alerting policies (Prometeus, NewRelic)
      • Tracing system agent (zipkin)
      • Self-sufficiency
        • Interfaces documentation
          • Restful API
            • Swagger
          • Port and service description (README.md files)
        • Service should be able to set itself up
          • Wait for required related services and ports (dockerize)
          • Configuring from environment variables (confd)
          • Warming up
            • Run data migration (needed maintenance service)
            • Cache fulfilment
    • Replication, balancing and scaling on service level
    • Failover and self-reorganisation in case of:
      • Service crashed
      • Physical node out of cluster
      • Resources problems on specific node
    • Logs system
      • Service to collect and access logs grabbed from Cluster layer
        • ELK stack/Gray Log/etc
    • Persistent volumes to keep data
      • EBS AWS
      • Ceph
      • NFS
• Common services
  • Tracing system (Zipkin)
  • Single sign-on service
    • Authentication service (JWT)
    • Authorization requests from all services
  • Detached processing (CQRS)
    • Request-Queue-Processor schema
    • Stream data addressing and processing (Reactor)
  • Real Time data requests processing
    • Reliable data provider/API gateway (sync data retrieving)
      • Request-Manager-Service solution
  • Reliable data-bus for events
    • Event-Broker-Subscriber solution (Apache Camel)
      • Http/TCP API endpoint to accept events
      • Event fulfilment (Earn required information for subscribers)
      • Event delivery
      • Event delivery policies
        • Retry
        • Reque
        • Giveup
  • RDBMS: Postgres cluster
  • DB backups: PG backupper
  • Key-value + Queue: Redis cluster
  • Messages system: Rabbit MQ cluster
  • Healthcheck system
  • Alerting system