Online Boutique

Online Boutique is a cloud-first microservices demo application. Online Boutique consists of an 11-tier microservices application. The application is a web-based e-commerce app 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, and gRPC. This application works on any Kubernetes cluster, as well as Google Kubernetes Engine. Its easy to deploy with little to no configuration.

If youre using this demo, please Star this repository to show your interest!

Note to Googlers (Google employees): Please fill out the form at go/microservices-demo if you are using this application.

Screenshots

Home Page	Checkout Screen

Quickstart (GKE)

Create a Google Cloud Platform project or use an existing project. Set the PROJECT_ID environment variable and ensure the Google Kubernetes Engine and Cloud Operations APIs are enabled.

PROJECT_ID="<your-project-id>"
gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com --project ${PROJECT_ID}

Clone this repository.

git clone https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/microservices-demo.git
cd microservices-demo

Create a GKE cluster.

GKE autopilot mode (see Autopilot overview to learn more):

REGION=us-central1
gcloud container clusters create-auto onlineboutique \
    --project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}

GKE Standard mode:

ZONE=us-central1-b
gcloud container clusters create onlineboutique \
    --project=${PROJECT_ID} --zone=${ZONE} \
    --machine-type=e2-standard-2 --num-nodes=4

Deploy the sample app to the cluster.

kubectl apply -f ./release/kubernetes-manifests.yaml

Wait for the Pods to be ready.

kubectl get pods

After a few minutes, you should see:

NAME                                     READY   STATUS    RESTARTS   AGE
adservice-76bdd69666-ckc5j               1/1     Running   0          2m58s
cartservice-66d497c6b7-dp5jr             1/1     Running   0          2m59s
checkoutservice-666c784bd6-4jd22         1/1     Running   0          3m1s
currencyservice-5d5d496984-4jmd7         1/1     Running   0          2m59s
emailservice-667457d9d6-75jcq            1/1     Running   0          3m2s
frontend-6b8d69b9fb-wjqdg                1/1     Running   0          3m1s
loadgenerator-665b5cd444-gwqdq           1/1     Running   0          3m
paymentservice-68596d6dd6-bf6bv          1/1     Running   0          3m
productcatalogservice-557d474574-888kr   1/1     Running   0          3m
recommendationservice-69c56b74d4-7z8r5   1/1     Running   0          3m1s
redis-cart-5f59546cdd-5jnqf              1/1     Running   0          2m58s
shippingservice-6ccc89f8fd-v686r         1/1     Running   0          2m58s

Access the web frontend in a browser using the frontend's EXTERNAL_IP.

kubectl get service frontend-external | awk '{print $4}'

Example output - do not copy

EXTERNAL-IP
<your-ip>

Note- you may see <pending> while GCP provisions the load balancer. If this happens, wait a few minutes and re-run the command.

[Optional] Clean up:

gcloud container clusters delete onlineboutique \
    --project=${PROJECT_ID} --zone=${ZONE}

Use Terraform to provision a GKE cluster and deploy Online Boutique

The /terraform folder contains instructions for using Terraform to replicate the steps from Quickstart (GKE) above.

Other deployment variations

Istio: See these instructions.
Anthos Service Mesh: See these instructions
non-GKE clusters (Minikube, Kind): see the Development Guide

Deploy Online Boutique variations with Kustomize

The /kustomize folder contains instructions for customizing the deployment of Online Boutique with different variations such as:

integrating with Google Cloud Operations
replacing the in-cluster Redis cache with Google Cloud Memorystore (Redis) or Google Cloud Spanner
etc.

Architecture

Online Boutique is composed of 11 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 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	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.
Cloud Operations (Stackdriver): Many services are instrumented with Profiling and Tracing. 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.

Local Development

If you would like to contribute features or fixes to this app, see the Development Guide on how to build this demo locally.

Demos featuring Online Boutique

Use Helm to simplify the deployment of Online Boutique, with a Service Mesh, GitOps, and more!
How to reduce microservices complexity with Apigee and Anthos Service Mesh
gRPC health probes with Kubernetes 1.24+
Use Google Cloud Spanner with the Online Boutique sample
Seamlessly encrypt traffic from any apps in your Mesh to Memorystore (redis)
Strengthen your app's security with Anthos Service Mesh and Anthos Config Management
From edge to mesh: Exposing service mesh applications through GKE Ingress
Take the first step toward SRE with Cloud Operations Sandbox
Deploying the Online Boutique sample application on Anthos Service Mesh
Anthos Service Mesh Workshop: Lab Guide
KubeCon EU 2019 - Reinventing Networking: A Deep Dive into Istio's Multicluster Gateways - Steve Dake, Independent
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
Google Cloud Next'18 London Keynote showing Stackdriver Incident Response Management

This is not an official Google project.