The What, Why, and How of a Microservices Architecture
For many years, developers have stepped in to build some amazing systems, and they seem to get better with it all the time. There are several best practices, architectural patterns, and technologies that have emerged out of this over time. Microservices is one of the architectural patterns that is able to provide help with platform and infrastructure automation, continuous delivery, domain-driven design, scalable systems and so much more. Your business will benefit greatly from using this type of architecture for your needs.
What is a Microservices Architecture?
Before we dive into some of the benefits and ways of using this architecture, we need to explore what this is all about to start with. The microservices architecture takes on the approach that we need to use the single responsibility principle. This is the idea where we need to gather together those things that will change, but change for the same reason, and then we will separate those from things that will change for different reasons.
The microservices architecture will take this approach and then can extend it to the loosely coupled services we can deploy, develop, and maintain on their own. Each of the services that you use under this umbrella will be responsible for a discrete task, though they will also still communicating with some of the other similar services through APIs if you have some bigger business problems to solve.
What are the Benefits of Using a Microservice Architecture?
There are a lot of different benefits of using Microservices architecture. As many of the services on this are small, you can get them built up By one or more small teams right in the beginning. You just need to separate them out with the right boundaries of service. This is beneficial because it reduces waste and makes it easy to scale up the whole process if you need it later on.
Once you have had time to develop everything, these services do not have to run together. The company can choose to deploy them independently of one another and identify the best services. So, you may have multiple services, but if you find that one or two of them are popular and need to be scaled, this can be done without wasting time scaling everything else.
In addition to this, microservices also offer what is known as improved fault isolation. What this means is that when an error shows up in one of the services, this error will not cause the whole application to stop working. Once you fix the error, you can deploy it just on that respective service, without needing to try and redeploy everything in the process.
Another advantage that your business may enjoy with microservices architecture is that it makes it easier to know which technology stack to use. You do not need to work with a standardized version if this isn’t the best for you. Instead, businesses can choose which databases, which programming languages, and more, will suit their needs the best.
How Can I Use Microservices?
There are many different things that you can do with microservices architecture. Learning how to start is important and can help you to get the most out of using this service. Some of the common tasks that you may want to consider doing with this kind of architecture includes:
How to Decompose?
One way that you may use this to make your job easier is to define out all of the services based on what your business is able to do. Your capability must line up to something you can do to provide something of value to the end users. Identifying these capabilities and services will require you to really understand how your business works. We can look at some examples of how this would look for an online shopping application By seeing the business capabilities are:
- User management
- Delivery management
- Order management
- Inventory management
- Product catalog management
- Product recommendations
Building and Deploying
Each company has to set their own service boundaries to help them use this architecture. It is easy to do this with a small team that can hold all of the responsibility. There are different programs and tools a company can choose based on the services they like, including MySQL or Spark for some online options.
Once you get these developed, you must set up CD/CI pipelines for all of your servers. This helps to run any automated test cases and from there it is easier for you to deploy all of the services, whether you want to do them together or have them work in different environments independently.
Design Your Individual Services
When you decide to design a service, you should do so carefully. Always consider what protocols you must have in place, what you will need to expose, and all the other parts that come together. It is important to hide the complexities and the implementation details that come with the service. Your customers do not need to see these, no matter how important they may be.
If there are some unnecessary details that end up exposed, it is harder to change the service later because you have to figure out who is relying on that part of the service and whether they will stick around or not. In addition, you could lose a lot of flexibility when it comes to deploying these services independently.
Taking care to design the services the right way, and considering how they all work, both independently and together, will make a difference in how well the system will work for you. Planning all of this out ahead of time will ensure the architecture does what you want.
Decentralize What You Can
There are some companies who have found success when they use microservices and they go through with a model so their teams will build up services that take care of each aspect of that service. They are the ones who will develop, deploy, maintain and then support it all. There will not be a separate team who comes through and does this.
This is just one method for you to use. Other companies can do something similar with an internal open source model. With this method the person who will change the service doesn’t have to wait around for someone else. They can take some time to look at the code and make the necessary changes to any part of it that needs improvements. They will then make some submissions to PR when necessary. The method you choose will depend on your business and what seems to make the most sense for you.
Deploy
The final step you can work on is to deploy the system. It is important to write out a Consumer Driven Contract for any of the API that you plan to depend on. This will be important because it helps all changes to occur without breaking the API. You need to have these passed completely before they are deployed and before you see any of the changes happen to the API. It can also help the provider know what services they are putting on this as well.
Of course, these are just a few of the different options that you can use with the microservice architecture. Your company can take a look at this and determine what is the best options for you. Always take care to add the right security to the process, and set this up to see the best results, without causing more work for the end consumer.
