Preparing for Microservices: Software Patterns Made Easy with Cycligent
The leap from legacy system to a more agile microservices architecture is not always simple, but if you start by following the best practices and patterns outlined below (and use Cycligent’s platform), you can simplify the implementation of these prerequisites.
Continuous Integration
Continuous Integration is the practice where developers check-in code daily to a shared, master trunk which triggers an automated build. Once pushed, the code changes should also undergo a series of automated tests to ensure that new code does not break the functionality of the application. The seamless development and integration of code changes from multiple developers is particularly helpful when trying to automate and orchestrate multiple services within a microservices architecture.
How Cycligent Helps: Cycligent automates the build and testing process for your team. When developers push their Git repositories, the build is automatically triggered. Once complete, we provide an approval screen allowing your team to view all new code changes. After being reviewed and approved, the developer can use a 1-click deployment system to deploy the changes to a production environment.
Continuous Delivery
Continuous Delivery (CD) is the practice of creating an automated, zero-downtime deployment process in an effort to lower the risk associated with traditional deployments. This is achieved by implementing a successful continuous integration process, and then layering on top of this a well-developed automated deployment strategy. The most important practice in CD is to automate every step of the process so that your software is always in a place where it can be deployed at any time.
Continuous Delivery is vital, since microservices are componentized and deployed separately. It is important that this continuous delivery process is as automated as possible, and the process must be easily repeatable.
How Cycligent Helps: Cycligent was originally built to simplify our own deployment processes. At the core of Cycligent is a technology we call Holographic Hosting. This technology allows for developers to deploy their code and it is distributed (like a hologram) across all servers within a distributed system. Development teams use the 1-click deployment process and rollback system to navigate their application seamlessly through the continuous delivery pipeline.
Rapid Provisioning & Phoenix Servers
A good practice is to prevent changes to the configuration of existing servers (making them immutable). This solution leads to uniform servers throughout the architecture. In addition to mitigating configuration drift, it makes it easier to spin up a replica server easily in the event a server crashes (similar to how a phoenix rises from its ashes).
How Cycligent Helps: With Cycligent, you can use the one-page UI to start, stop, restart, resize, or delete any of your resources by just pointing and clicking. Additionally, we provide auto-scaling and other configurations. We give you full access to each machine for full control.
Monitoring
It is important to formulate a plan on how you will monitor your microservices architecture. With a distributed system and many moving parts, the event that a service becomes delayed or unresponsive is likely to occur. Having the proper monitoring systems in place that will alert your team when something goes wrong is imperative. If something does go wrong, then the combination of a microservices architecture and the ability to rapidly provision new resources will ensure a resilient system.
How Cycligent Helps: Cycligent monitors each machine. You can easily see how each machine is performing at any given time. Your team can sleep peacefully at night knowing that your application is running at peak performance.
A Tool Simplifying the Prerequisites of Microservices
It is perceived by some developers and organizations that microservices is only something that can be achieved by unicorn companies such as Netflix. Microservices seemingly is only implemented by a select few. This, however, is one of the main reasons we developed Cycligent with added microservices capabilities. We needed the same functionalities that companies like Netflix and others are building, and it works so well that we can share it with you and you don’t have to build it yourself. In other words, you can build like Netflix without coding like Netflix.
If interested, you can sign up for a 30-day free trial. Or, if you want to see Cycligent in action, you can schedule a demo. We would be more than willing to walk you through how Cycligent can be utilized in your own company.
Sign up to receive a 5 day crash course on Microservices.
About Cycligent
Cycligent is a microservices platform simplifying configuration, deployment, and overall management making the development process more agile. Development teams can use javascript, nodes, PHP, Ruby, .NET or any other popular languages or technologies, and can use SQL or MongoDB databases. Cycligent automates the build, testing, deployment, and resource management processes so your team does not have to code or configure your own microservices architecture.
