What Are the 12-Factor Principles of Cloud-Native Microservices?
Discussing the 12-factor principles and delving into their significance in building successful microservices.
You must have heard the word Cloud-Native & microservices before, but do you really know the best practices while configuring or migrating your applications from monolithic to microservices?
Today microservices is the term so common for any developer who is building applications, or Cloud/DevOps/SRE engineer who deploys or manages applications.
Microservices architecture has revolutionized the way we build and deploy modern applications. It offers benefits such as scalability, resilience, and flexibility. However, harnessing the full potential of microservices requires adhering to proven best practices. One such set of principles that has gained widespread recognition is the 12 Factor Principles.
Let’s discuss the 12 Factor Principles and delve into their significance in building successful microservices.
1. Single Codebase
Maintaining a single codebase per application ensures consistency and simplicity. It eliminates complexities arising from managing multiple repositories and facilitates efficient collaboration among development teams.
For example, a developer has some commits not yet deployed to staging; staging has some commits not yet deployed to production. But they all share the same codebase, thus making them identifiable as different deploys of the same app.
2. Explicit Dependencies
By explicitly declaring and isolating dependencies, microservices become more self-contained and independent. This principle ensures clear boundaries between components, making it easier to manage and update dependencies.
For example, the build command for Ruby/Bundler is
bundle install, while for Clojure/Leiningen it islein deps.
3. Configurations Made Easy
Storing configurations separately from the code enables easy customization and deployment across different environments. It allows for swift configuration changes without requiring code modifications, promoting agility and flexibility.
4. Backing Services Unleashed
Backing services, such as databases or message queues, should be treated as attached resources. This principle emphasizes abstracting service dependencies and employing proper abstractions to leverage different services seamlessly.
For example, if the app’s database is misbehaving due to a hardware issue, the app’s administrator might spin up a new database server restored from a recent backup. The current production database could be detached, and the new database attached — all without any code changes.
5. Smooth Build, Release, and Run
Strictly separating the build, release, and run stages streamlines the deployment process. It enables reproducibility, and versioning, and promotes automation, ensuring that what works in development is identical in production.
6. Processes as First-Class Citizens
Treating processes as first-class citizens allow for better manageability and scalability. Microservices should be designed to be stateless and not rely on long-lived processes. This enables easy scaling, deployment, and recovery of microservices.
For example, downloading a large file, operating on it, and storing the results of the operation in the database. The twelve-factor app never assumes that anything cached in memory or on disk will be available on a future request or job — with many processes of each type running, chances are high that a future request will be served by a different process.
7. Port Binding
Microservices should export services via a well-defined port binding mechanism. This allows services to communicate with each other using standardized protocols, enabling seamless integration and interoperability.
For example, PHP apps might run as a module inside Apache HTTPD, or Java apps might run inside Tomcat.
8. Concurrency
Microservices should be designed to embrace concurrency, allowing them to handle multiple requests simultaneously. This ensures optimal utilization of resources and improves the overall performance and responsiveness of the system.
For example, HTTP requests may be handled by a web process, and long-running background tasks handled by a worker process.
9. Disposability
Designing microservices to be disposable enables easy startup and shutdown, facilitating rapid scaling and deployment. Microservices should be able to be created, terminated, and restarted without causing disruptions to the system.
For example, on RabbitMQ the worker can send a
NACK; on Beanstalkd, the job is returned to the queue automatically whenever a worker disconnects.
10. Dev/Prod Parity
Ensuring development and production environments are as similar as possible minimizes deployment-related issues. By leveraging containerization and automation, the differences between environments can be minimized, reducing potential bugs and inconsistencies.
11. Logs:
Treating logs as event streams provides valuable insights into the behavior and performance of microservices. Effective logging helps with debugging, monitoring, and analyzing system behavior, aiding in troubleshooting and performance optimization.
12. Admin Processes
Running administrative and management tasks as separate, one-off processes prevent interference with regular service operations. This approach ensures that administrative tasks can be executed without affecting the core functionality of microservices.
For example, Python program using Virtualenv should use the vendored
bin/pythonfor running both the Tornado webserver and anymanage.pyadmin processes.
By embracing these principles, organizations can unlock the full potential of microservices architecture and propel their applications to new heights of performance and scalability.
Thanks for reading till the end, hope you found some insights from this.
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