Blockchain and Microservices
Microservice architectures are already moving businesses in the right direction of lightweight digital collaboration — by integrating Blockchain as the key coordination mechanism in this distributed ecosystem, enterprises can realize immense benefits of trustless and agile data coordination.
Application developers today are shifting their attention to microservice architecture — the development, integration, and deployment of small, function-specific services to achieve application goals — and for good reason. As business and technological growth inevitably yields diverse, complex, and time-sensitive software needs, agility and distribution of work are among the top desired characteristics for software solutions.
Instead of building all functionality into one bloated, monolithic application stack, microservice architecture involves a collection of independent and loosely connected services.
Microservices provide developers with an open canvas to create unique solutions to accommodate their respective organizations.
This flip in architecture provides an agile approach to app development— each distributed service is independently deployable, more easily maintained, and highly customized.
Microservices are built, modified, and used by the growing community-centric group of developers that find value in building function-specific solutions and sharing methods with open source and open APIs.
The key challenge with microservices involves coordinating the many small moving parts. As a result of an overcrowded API landscape, security leakages are bound to happen. Coordinating multiple APIs and microservices in order to manage the rights of all participants in this new era of complexity, has become extremely challenging.
We hear about security leaks all the time — and they most often occur on the API layer broadly as a result of this growing complexity. They need a central source of truth to leverage for their coordination and stability.
Blockchain Fits Right In.
Trusted coordination is key, and there is no greater mechanism for shared truth than blockchain technology.
Microservice architectures are already moving businesses in the right direction of lightweight digital collaboration — by integrating Blockchain as the key coordination mechanism in this distributed ecosystem, enterprises can realize immense benefits of trustless and agile data coordination.
Coordination
Blockchain is an excellent solution to coordinating data, or state information, across services — essentially providing the mechanism for trust, integrity, and stability across these connected systems. And because blockchain itself runs by a set of predefined rules, it ensures that microservices have specific controlled ways to interact with that data.
Trust
Blockchain brings trust into the mix: it can handle distributed transactions in a trusted, immutable audit trail of changes. In the future, microservices will transcend company boundaries, both writing to and querying multiple data sources. These data sources should be secure, trusted, and immutable.
Coordinate and Secure Microservices with Fluree
The main implementation hurdle for this glorious combination is the distinction between their native environments: Microservices, while distributed, still exist to serve largely centralized platforms; Blockchain Technology instead serves a permissionless or permissioned decentralized network.
Fluree is a blockchain-backed data management platform that gives developers the enterprise database versatility they need and a wide set of choices in decentralization (from a completely centralized immutable ledger to a fully decentralized network).
Take a look at the top three benefits Fluree can bring to Microservice Architecture:
Consistency — Microservices work in dynamic environments that yield concurrent queries — a key challenge involves coordinating these requests across time. As an immutable, append-only ledger, Fluree can lock a moment-in-time to retrieve consistent answers — providing a central source of shared truth. This allows for coordination and stability across disparate microservices, no matter how complex or dynamic.
Permissions — The distribution of separate containers in a microservice world comes with a cost: coordinating security and preventing data leakage. With Fluree’s ability to secure permissions alongside the data at the source, contained services can bypass the discovery layer and guarantee they will never access or serve up data that was not intended for them or their current client.
Semantic Microservices— Fluree makes rich use of RDF and SPARQL query for rich data linkage across data sources. We see microservices leveraging multiple independent data sources in the future, and Fluree uses the semantic standards that are essential for lightweight, cross-boundary collaboration.
Real-Time Applications — If the mission of microservice architecture is to maximize deployment velocity — Fluree is a rocketship. A Fluree query peer can be optionally embedded directly in a browser or app — allowing you to speed up your delivery process 10X for “hot” queries.
Blockchain and decentralized applications integrate and work perfectly towards a future with open, fast collaboration and limited data risks. Blockchain can securely facilitate the distribution of transactional data, providing the perfect environment in which decentralized application solutions may thrive.
Many thanks to Flip Filipowski for contributing.
Learn More
Fluree is hiring!
Take a look at our open jobs here: https://fluree.breezy.hr
