Build Systems that Drive Business
Sep 30–Oct 1, 2018: Training
Oct 1–3, 2018: Tutorials & Conference
New York, NY

Switching horses midstream: The challenges of migrating 150+ microservices to Kubernetes

Sarah Wells (Financial Times)
4:45pm–5:25pm Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Kubernetes
Location: Beekman/Sutton North Level: Intermediate
Secondary topics:  Systems Architecture & Infrastructure

Prerequisite knowledge

  • Familiarity with microservices and containers

What you'll learn

  • Learn how the Financial Times migrated 150+ microservices from one container stack to another without affecting the existing production users

Description

The Financial Times content platform team put its first containers live in mid-2015 and migrated the rest of its services over by April 2016. At that point, the team was using a largely self-built stack on CoreOS Container Linux with Fleet to do cluster management.

At the end of 2016, the team members decided they wanted to benefit from the work other people were doing and switched over to Kubernetes. But it’s not easy to do that kind of move when you have 150+ microservices and you need to keep the existing platform running in parallel while you do the migration.

Sarah Wells explains why the team decided to do this migration, the challenges they faced in doing it while supporting their live platform, and the lessons learned along the way.

Photo of Sarah Wells

Sarah Wells

Financial Times

Sarah Wells is the technical director for operations and reliability at the Financial Times. Her teams build operational and developer tooling and help engineering teams at the FT to support the systems they build, including coordination, communication and learning around major incidents. Previously, Sarah was a developer and tech lead for nearly 20 years. Building a new microservices-based system about five years ago led her to develop a deep interest in operability, observability, and DevOps—and learn a lot about containerization, Kubernetes, and Go in the process.