Hipster Shop: Cloud-Native Microservices Demo Application

This project contains a 10-tier microservices application. 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, and gRPC. 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	Go	Stores the items in the user's shopping cart in Redis and retrieves it.
productcatalogservice	Go	Provides the list of products from a JSON file and ability to search products and get individual products.
currencyservice	Go	Converts one money amount to another currency. Uses real values fetched from European Central Bank. It's the highest QPS service.
paymentservice	Go	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	Go	Sends users an order confirmation email (mock).
checkoutservice	Go	Retrieves user cart, prepares order and orchestrates the payment, shipping and the email notification.
recommendationservice	Go	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.
• 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

We offer the following installation methods:

1. Running locally (~20 minutes) You will build and deploy microservices images to a single-node Kubernetes cluster running on your development machine. There are two options to run a Kubernetes cluster locally for this demo:
   • Minikube. Recommended for the Linux hosts (also supports Mac/Windows).
   • Docker for Desktop. Recommended for Mac/Windows.

Option 1: Running locally

💡 Recommended if you're planning to develop the application or giving it a try on your local cluster.

1. Install tools to run a Kubernetes cluster locally:

   • kubectl (can be installed via gcloud components install kubectl)
   • Local Kubernetes cluster deployment tool:
     • Minikube (recommended for Linux).
     • Docker for Desktop (recommended for Mac/Windows): It provides Kubernetes support as noted here.
   • skaffold (ensure version ≥v0.20)

2. Launch the local Kubernetes cluster with one of the following tools:

   • Launch Minikube (tested with Ubuntu Linux). Please, ensure that the local Kubernetes cluster has at least:

     • 4 CPU's
     • 4.0 GiB memory

     To run a Kubernetes cluster with Minikube using the described configuration, please run:

   minikube start --cpus=4 --memory 4096

   • Launch “Docker for Desktop” (tested with Mac/Windows). Go to Preferences:
     • choose “Enable Kubernetes”,
     • set CPUs to at least 3, and Memory to at least 6.0 GiB
     • on the "Disk" tab, set at least 32 GB disk space

3. Run kubectl get nodes to verify you're connected to “Kubernetes on Docker”.

4. Make sure you have istio running in your cluster already with Jaeger add-on.

   1. Install and run Istio. Only follow up to the 'Install Istio' step. Don't deploy their sample application.
   2. Install Jaeger

5. Run deploy.sh (first time will be slow, it can take ~20 minutes).

   1. First, this script sets the Docker env to that of minikube.
   2. Second, it builds all Docker images.
   3. Third, it will run skaffold to deploy the built Docker images to minikube.
   4. It will most likely encounter an error deploying the services due to timeout exception. Don't worry about this. It takes a bit for the services to start up in Kubernetes.

6. Run kubectl get pods to verify the Pods are ready and running.

7. To check out traces, run istioctl dashboard jaeger

8. To check out the application frontend:

   1. Run kubectl get services | grep frontend to get the frontend node port.
   2. Run minikube ip to get the ip address of your minikube cluster.
   3. Go to http://$MINIKUBE_IP:$FRONTEND_PORT in your browser to see Hipster Shop.

Updating Services

When making code changes to a specifc service you need to rebuild the docker image. Then you have to delete the Kubernetes pod with that is running the service so that when it rescales the deployment, it grabs the new docker image.

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.

Conferences featuring Hipster Shop

• Google Cloud Next'18 London – Keynote showing Stackdriver Incident Response Management
• Google Cloud Next'18 SF
  • Day 1 Keynote showing GKE On-Prem
  • Day 3 – Keynote showing Stackdriver APM (Tracing, Code Search, Profiler, Google Cloud Build)
  • Introduction to Service Management with Istio
• KubeCon EU 2019 - Reinventing Networking: A Deep Dive into Istio's Multicluster Gateways - Steve Dake, Independent

---

This is not an official Google project.