TurboTax Online's Journey into Microservices Architecture: Couchbase Connect 2015

INTUIT’S JOURNEY TO MICRO-SERVICES

Umed Zokirov | IntuitJustin Michaels l Couchbase

©2015 Couchbase Inc. 3

Agenda

Micro-Services and Couchbase Technology Justin Michaels, Solution Architecture Team from

Couchbase Use Case: Intuit’s Journey

Umed Zokirov, Lead Developer and Application Architect from Intuit

Micro-Services and Couchbase Technology


Framing the Discussion

• Micro-Services • Architecture strategy that provides individual services

focused on supporting finite independent services.

• Monolithic • Single application handling UI presentation, business

logic, data access and integration


Framing the Discussion

• The Art of Scalability• Martin Abbott … formerly COO of Quigo, spent nearly six

years at eBay, most recently as SVP of Technology/CTO.• Michael Fisher … veteran software and technology

executive, spent two years as CTO of Quigo. Previously, as VP of Engineering & Architecture for PayPal.

• “Scale Cube”


Micro-Services: Scale Cube

Y-Axis – Scale by isolating services

X-Axis – Scale by System/Application Duplication

Z-Axis – Scale by partitioning data



Travel Site

Application Container

Load BalancerBrowser User Interface Product Information Airline Schedule Price Information Recommendations



Travel Site

Application Container

Load BalancerBrowserTravel Site

Travel SiteTravel Site

Travel Site

Application ContainerPricing Engine

Application ContainerApplication Container

Schedule Service


Product Catalog


Recommendation Engine

Application ContainerApplication ContainerData Service

Y-Axis – Scale by isolating services

X-Axis – System/Application Duplication

Z-Axis – Scale by partitioning data


Micro-Services: Couchbase Technology

• Managing the Scale Cube• Partitioning Strategy (Z Axis)

ACTIVE ACTIVE ACTIVE

REPLICA REPLICA REPLICA

Couchbase Server 1 Couchbase Server 2 Couchbase Server 3

ACTIVE ACTIVE

REPLICA REPLICA

Couchbase Server 4 Couchbase Server 5

SHARD5

SHARD2

SHARD SHARD

SHARD4

SHARD SHARD

SHARD1

SHARD3

SHARD SHARD

SHARD4

SHARD1

SHARD8

SHARD SHARD SHARD

SHARD6

SHARD3

SHARD2

SHARD SHARD SHARD

SHARD7

SHARD9

SHARD5

SHARD SHARD SHARD

SHARD7

SHARD

SHARD6

SHARD

SHARD8

SHARD9

SHARD



• Managing the Scale Cube• System Duplication (X Axis)

Memory Resources

Cluster Capacity

Compute Resources

Storage Resources

node1 node8



• Managing the Scale Cube• Independent services for Query, Index and Data• Independent scalability for capacity per Service• Data access provided by distributed cache

Index ServiceGlobal

Secondary Indexes

Couchbase Cluster

Query Service

Data ServiceViews and Geo Views

node1 node8



Heavier indexing (index more fields) : add compute to index service nodes

Increased query load: linearly scale query serviceMore data: linearly scale data service

Couchbase Cluster

node1 node8 node9

Data Service

Index ServiceQuery

Service


Micro-Services

AirportsTravel

ServicesB2C/B2B

Travel Agent

Application Tier

Mainframe

Couchbase Cluster

Read requests go to Couchbase for high performance and saving MIPS

Data updates are written directly to the mainframe. Event Engine Push UpdatesDocument TTLs

RDMS

Intuit Confidential and Proprietary15

Micro-Services at Intuit


Intuit operates in 2 market segments

• Consumer Finance Software

• TurboTax – market leader in tax preparation software

• Quicken – day to day financial management

• Mint – personal finance management

• Small Business

• QuickBooks – small business accounting package

• TurboTax & Lacerte – tools for accountants and tax professionals

Introduction


• TurboTax Online is 20 years old, started its life as the port of the desktop software.

• Monolithic architecture was in its DNA

• Grew to be a 1.5 billion dollar business serving millions of customers

• Peak tax season the application supports 250,000 concurrent users who interact the application on average 35 minutes per session.

• Changes needed to support additional growth.

History – TurboTax Online


TurboTax Online Legacy Architecture


• Challenges of Monolithic Architecture

– Each change requires complete build, regression tests

– Difficulties to A/B test, scale

– 4 month tax season and organizational pushback

– Teams aren’t productive or innovative due to legacy code base

• Applied divide and conquer approach, i.e. micro-services around key pieces of functionality

History – TurboTax Online


• Ease of piece-by-piece deployment vs. monolith

• Teams are free to choose their technology stack

• Flexible testing

• Quick iterations focused on concrete features

• Multiple A/B testing strategies

• App vs. Micro-service. Some services offer UI widgets.

Why Micro-Services


TurboTax Online = Micro-Services and Apps


• Increased chatter and traffic between services

• Multiple services request and consume virtually the same data within milliseconds

• Resiliency issues with multiple app and services accessing the data store that can’t be scaled quickly enough.

• Issues with accessing services that we don’t own, external to Intuit.

• Hard to manage end-to-end user experience among multiple apps

Challenges of Approach


• Alternatives

• Go through and refactor service-by-service and address issues

• Strategically create a cache tier to reduce chatter between services and applications, hold frequently accessed data

• Data mine the request patterns, type of data being demanded, traffic flows and analyze use cases to see if caching is a good fit, what’s their tolerance of possibility of viewing stale data

• Evaluated multiple technology usage within as well as outside Intuit to choose Couchbase

Solution


Cache Service via Couchbase


TurboTax Online + Couchbase


• Reduce read response times by 50%

• Reduced intra-service chatter by 20%

• Cut write response times by factor of 4

Cache Service via Couchbase


• In-memory key-value store

• Easy to use Java SDK

• Support for XDCR and ease of deployment

• Good monitoring integration that plugs easily to existing monitoring solutions such as AppDynamics and Splunk

Why Couchbase


• Key part of Service Platform Infrastructure

• More and more teams are interested in using it

• Data Mining and Analytics

• Write-behind cache solution for Data Platform

• Replacement for Memcached, Ehcache

Couchbase At Intuit


Thank You

TurboTax Online's Journey into Microservices Architecture: Couchbase Connect 2015

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