Managing Microservices with Neo4j

Lending Club's journey to microservices is a common story in the tech industry. They started with five production microservices and grew to 139, which can be overwhelming for many organizations. To manage this complexity, Lending Club uses MacGyver, a tool that hooks into various services such as GitHub, AWS, Splunk, HipChat, and VMware. MacGyver collects data from these services and saves it in Neo4j, a graph database that provides fast queries, great join and traversal capabilities, and scalability. The app instances report to MacGyver, which then saves them to Neo4j, creating virtual servers and pools. This allows Lending Club to automate deployments, monitor infrastructure, and gain visibility into their services. By using Neo4j, they can query the data in real-time, making it easier to answer questions like "What pool should I deploy to?" or "Are live pool revisions in sync in different environments?" The tool also helps with infrastructure mapping, allowing them to identify single points of failure and monitor their entire infrastructure. Lending Club's experience demonstrates the potential of Neo4j in managing microservices and promoting agility in the development process.