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This project is a rewrite of parts of the Online Boutique (microservices-demo) demo application provided by Google in Rust.
It is a web-based e-commerce application that allows users to browse products, add them to a cart, and purchase them. It runs on a Kubernetes cluster and the microservices communicate with each other using gRPC. The development languages used are Go, C#, JavaScript, Java, and Python.
It consists of 11 microservices. I have rewritten 4 of these services in Rust.
In the following table, services marked in the Rewrote column as "Rust" have been rewritten in Rust. Services not marked as "Rust" remain in their original state.

This project was developed by forking the source code of microservices-demo as of March 11, 2024. Updates made to microservices-demo after that date have not been incorporated.

The purpose of rewriting microservices-demo in Rust was to see how a web system running on a Kubernetes cluster would perform in Rust. microservices-demo was just the right size project for learning and experimentation.
For the Rust implementation, I used the axum web framework for the frontend and tonic for the gRPC library.
On the frontend, I adopted a method of splitting the screen into components, where each component generates HTML. This was inspired by React. Despite generating HTML on the server-side, it became a program with a component-oriented approach similar to React. For more details on these implementations, please refer to Rewriting in Rust.
I believe there are still many areas for improvement in this implementation. If you have any suggestions or feedback, please feel free to share them.

Home Page	Checkout Screen

For information on how to develop this project in Rust, please see the Development in Rust.

1. Install Git, Docker Desktop and Skaffold

2. Select “Enable Kubernetes” in Docker Desktop Settings - Kubernetes

3. Clone the repository.

   git clone https://github.com/mnitta220/microservices-demo-rust.git
   cd microservices-demo-rust/

4. Run kubectl get nodes to verify docker-desktop control plane is running.

5. Run skaffold run (first time will be slow, it can take ~30 minutes). This will build and deploy the application. If you need to rebuild the images automatically as you refactor the code, run skaffold dev command.

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

7. Run kubectl port-forward deployment/frontend 8080:8080 to forward a port to the frontend service.

8. Navigate to http://localhost:8080 to access the web frontend.

• Cleanup

  • If you've deployed the application with skaffold run command, you can run skaffold delete to clean up the deployed resources.

1. Ensure you have the following requirements:

   • Google Cloud project.
   • Shell environment with gcloud, git, and kubectl.

2. Clone the repository.

   git clone https://github.com/mnitta220/microservices-demo-rust.git
   cd microservices-demo-rust/

3. Set the Google Cloud project and region and ensure the Google Kubernetes Engine API is enabled.

   export PROJECT_ID=<PROJECT_ID>
   export REGION=us-central1
   gcloud services enable container.googleapis.com \
     --project=${PROJECT_ID}

   Substitute <PROJECT_ID> with the ID of your Google Cloud project.

4. Confirm the services have been enabled for your project.

   gcloud services list --enabled --project=${PROJECT_ID}

5. Create a GKE cluster and get the credentials for it.

   gcloud container clusters create-auto online-boutique \
     --project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}

   Creating the cluster may take a few minutes.

6. Deploy Online Boutique to the cluster.

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

7. Wait for the pods to be ready.

   kubectl get pods

   After a few minutes, you should see the Pods in a Running state:

   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
   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
   

8. Access the web frontend in a browser using the frontend's external IP.

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

   Visit http://EXTERNAL_IP in a web browser to access your instance of Online Boutique.

9. Congrats! You've deployed the default Online Boutique. To deploy a different variation of Online Boutique (e.g., with Google Cloud Operations tracing, Istio, etc.), see Deploy Online Boutique variations with Kustomize.

10. Once you are done with it, delete the GKE cluster.

gcloud container clusters delete online-boutique \
  --project=${PROJECT_ID} --region=${REGION}

Deleting the cluster may take a few minutes.

When updating the source code and deploying it to GKE, build the Docker image for that service with the following command:
docker image build -t <image-name>:<tag-name> .
Then push it to your registry with the following command:
docker image push <image-name>:<tag-name>
Replace the image: in /release/kubernetes-manifests.yaml with the new image. For example, if you want to update the frontend image, replace:
image: masahironitta/microservices-demo-rust-frontend:0.1.0

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

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

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), AlloyDB or Google Cloud Spanner
• etc.

The method for developing this project on a local PC is described in the Rewriting in Rust.

See also original Development guide.

I measured the response time by accessing http://localhost:8080/ using the Thunder Client extension in VSCode after starting it with skaffold run on my local PC. The results of three measurements for both the original and Rust version are as follows: