Good microservices

A good microservice platform should offer a set of solid, reliable services – that’s obvious – but it should not stop there – and maybe that’s less obvious. Developing and publishing the API specs is just the first step.

Proper API docs are also critical. Up-to-date, example-rich documentation helps and guides developers minimizing the number of tech support emails going back and forth. If complete sample code can be offered for each REST operation it will reduce prototyping to a copy/paste activity. And that of course reduces the time to the first microservice call while simultaneously reducing the adoption friction.

If you want to delight your users you might want to go one step further. Eliminate even the copy/paste process by providing a playground for your API right there along with the docs and the sample code. Imagine your developers would have access to a minimal Postman-like web interface customized for each API call your microservice offers.

What else can you add? A forum, a slack channel, analytics, maybe even dedicated social media pages for your microservice. That would give a chance to your microservices to become truly ubiquitous. At least that’s what we try at microfabrik.com