Dealing With a Microservice-based Architecture… What?!

Microservices are great until you have to deploy them, then they can be the worst

Original Photo by Darius Bashar on Unsplash, edits by Author

Welcome to the first installment of “Ask a Dev”, where I’m going to try and directly answer questions from people in our industry about what we do and how we do it.

Today’s question is packing a punch, because it deals with microservices and what are the logistics around deploying a whole application based on them.

To be more specific, Ricard Nikens on Twitter asked:

“Something I still haven’t quite figured out is how to build an entire product based on microservices. Like, if I have 3 microservices for the product I want to build, I have 4 GitHub repos, right?

Do I install these microservices as dependencies from GitHub? Do I have to publish them as private npm packages? How is this dealt with?

And if I have an update on one of these microservices, how do I update it in the whole product?

And then, also, how do I get it all up and running? Do I need a bash script to start several node processes on different ports and have the main application know where these microservices are at?”