Microservices Best Practices for Developers
Microservice is a widely accepted phenomenon for software development. Using this approach, businesses can gain an advantage in a highly competitive market. By collaborating with a leading software development company, businesses can implement microservices best practices to build applications that are highly scalable, maintainable and high-performing.
Additionally, having experts by your side to guide you through the process, working with microservices becomes way easier than dealing with traditional monolithic services. Here, we will take a brief look at the concept of microservices, and its benefits and then will have a detailed discussion on the microservices best practices.
What are Microservices?
Utilizing the microservices approach, the developers can create an application that is a set of small and modular services. Every feature or functionality of the application is built and launched independently. This also allows us to hold each service accountable. The maintenance and update of the app are simplified with the use of highly cohesive and loosely coupled components.
Benefits of microservice architecture
Business giants like Amazon, Netflix and eBay have embraced this architecture because it offers some compelling benefits. In comparison to the traditional monolithic designs, microservices provide a lot more advantages. They are:
1. Enhanced fault isolation
Even if a single component fails in a monolithic structure, the entire software can be destroyed. On the contrary, under a microservices architecture, every microservice works separately. So, even if any service fails, it won’t affect another. Moreover, you can improve the overall resilience of the infrastructure and build fault-tolerant microservices with the help of tools like GitLab.
2. Improved modularity
Microservices render enhanced modularity to organizations that are in need of rapid app modifications. When you break down an app into small components, it allows you to make quick changes and that too with a lower level of risk.
Microservices are of a self-contained nature which makes it easy to understand their functionalities and integrate them with a large app.
3. Enhanced scalability
Like in every other aspect, microservices outperform the traditional monolithic design in terms of scalability as well. You can see monolithic systems struggle whenever there is a spike in web traffic. But in microservices, resources are dedicated to each service which helps in averting any widespread disruptions.
In addition to that, if you use tools like Kubernetes to manage your resources effectively, you can further reduce the costs. Also, the process of updating the applications is simplified, thanks to microservices. So, if you are a rapidly growing company or want to be one, then microservices is the perfect option for you.
4. Tech stack versatility
Every single module inside the microservices architecture works as a small app. This provides the developers with an opportunity to use a custom mix of programming languages, development frameworks and other necessary technologies.
Such an approach to software development enables the developers to pick the suitable tech stack not just for the project but for the development of every single component. It means you can have different tech stacks for different components. And the best thing is that using various tech stacks would not compromise your app or give way to any kind of tech conflicts.
5. More efficient testing
When you test every component individually, your testing process becomes more efficient. The process of detecting and resolving the bugs gets streamlined with the use of such a modular approach. The risks of one service affecting others are also reduced which makes the maintenance of the system as smooth as possible.
Because concurrent testing is supported in microservices, different teams can test different services of the architecture at the same time. This ought to increase the speed of testing along with its efficiency. In the end, you will have a more reliable and resilient software system in your hand.
6. Highly Compatible
To make a microservices app highly scalable, available and robust, the containers need to be properly orchestrated. For that, the use of tools like Kubernetes and Docker is very crucial. They are indispensable in the microservices development toolkit as they can offer seamless load balancing for different hosts.
On the other hand, with the help of self-managed services in a contemporary landscape from cloud providers such as Elastic Container Services, the microservices architecture can achieve and enhance the capabilities of load balancing, high availability and fault tolerance.
You can also get orchestration solutions from major cloud providers to strengthen your infrastructure.
Microservices Best Practices
1. Dedicated Infrastructure
Despite meeting all the required standards for microservices development, if you use a poor hosting platform then you won’t get good results. To obtain better performance and fault tolerance, you need to separate the microservices infrastructure from other components.
2. Dedicated Database
When you pick a database and customize it to suit your requirements, you need to keep that database exclusively for your microservices, sharing that database with all your microservices would not serve your purpose effectively.
3. Single Responsibility Principle
Developers must design the microservices in a style where a class would only have one reason for making any changes. When a class or component is dedicated to a single responsibility, it can work well. The services get bloated when they are subjected to changes because of numerous reasons. That isn’t an ideal practice.
4. Understanding Cultural Shift
You have to prepare the developers working in an ongoing environment to adjust to the upcoming expectations. It would be ideal to help them through the cultural shift and make them aware of its long-term benefits.
5. Break Down the Migration into Smaller Steps
If you do not have any kind of experience with the migration then this would be a daunting task for you. A monolithic architecture would involve complicated tasks like monitoring, deployment, a web of repositories and more.
Migrating all of these at once is not an easy task, even for the experts. If you do it anyway, you ought to leave some gaps or make errors. So, if you already have plans for migrating all of monolithic architecture at once then I suggest you revise your plan.
One of the best ways to migrate is to retain the original monolithic structure of the software and when you are updating or adding a capability, make that a microservice.
When you keep adding microservices to the system, there will come a time when you will have enough services in place. That’s when you can start dismantling your old monolithic structure into relevant components and start migrating them one after another.
6. Invest in a Splitting System from the beginning
You can have a total mess on your hands if you do not start with a splitting system. One of the most critical and useful microservices best practices is to define the processes and interactions between different services of the infrastructure.
It not only clearly states what is happening but also gives a better understanding of the bigger picture, especially if you are in a migration phase. Every splitting system is unique to the microservices architecture that is currently in the development phase. But it mainly depends upon the methods you use and your expected results.
It is recommended that you understand the gaps in the monolithic structure and which one of its components is troublesome by inspecting it. You can then migrate them to microservices.
But that is only possible if you were monitoring the performance of those specific components from the beginning. So, if your focus is not on monitoring then you must start with the cleaning process. Some useful tools for monitoring are as mentioned below:
- Grafana
- Datadog
- New Relic
- Influxdb
7. Isolate the Runtime Processes
Because you have separate processes for each vertical, you will also need to isolate the runtime level. To make this happen, you have to implement distributed computing.
In addition to that, you have to make many more choices like figuring out if you would need to adopt circuit breakers, service meshes, different kinds of management approaches, event architectures and containerization. You have to figure it all out before it is too late for you to backtrack.
8. Picking a Suitable Technology
If you want to make some changes to your product later then you definitely need to implement the technology iteratively or directly to it. Some of your team members might think that technology is not that relevant whereas others might think that the product’s life depends on it.
Choosing the language depends largely on your team’s comfort level and personal preferences. No matter what decision you take, you have to make sure that your team is well-equipped to handle their decisions.
For example, if you have used a dozen different programming languages in the project then when the time comes to make changes, you might find yourself in a situation where you have to hire additional team members to work with those languages. It will be very complicated and chaotic.
If you are not sure which language to opt for your project then you need to consider a few parameters that a language must pass to be suitable to work on your project. They are:
- Ease of deployment
- Maintainability
- Scalability
- Cost of architecture
- Fault-tolerance
9. Consider Using Domain-Driven Design
When you apply Object-oriented programming to business models, it becomes similar to domain-driven design. It is a kind of design principle that utilizes practical ideals and rules to demonstrate object-oriented models. This means that microservices are built around business domains. Popular platforms like Netflix use such design models for their servers that they use to deliver content and other related tracking services.
10. Distinguish Between Dedicated and On-Demand Resources
If you wish to provide an optimal customer experience then you need to differentiate between your on-demand and dedicated resources.
For example, if an eCommerce store is built upon microservices and a cloud architecture then its operations will move quickly but securely between the cloud and on-premise environments.
Now, how would it help you? It will help increase your app’s response time. Moreover, if you are migrating to a cloud-based environment then it will become more intuitive.
11. Do not over-rely on Open Source Tools
Commonly, developers leverage open-source microservices tools for logging, debugging, monitoring and security purposes. However, it is necessary to ensure that the reliance on such tools is limited in a way that doesn’t interfere with the safety or the performance of the architecture itself.
You also need to implement appropriate organizational policies regarding the use of such tools depending on your needs and the types of tools used in the project. It is relevant to:
- Approving various software versions and organizing formal repositories.
- Understanding the supply chain of an open-source software
- Establishing governance for exception processing
12. Leverage the Benefits of REST API
For the creation of REST APIs, developers don’t have to install any additional library or software. So, REST APIs can definitely work wonders for microservices. When the data isn’t tied to a specific resource or method, these APIs offer great flexibility.
As a result, you can alter the structure with the right hypermedia implementation, return various data formats, and manage multiple kinds of calls. The HTTP requests are enough. So, you won’t need a software development kit or any other software for that matter.
There are four levels of REST. you just have to start from 0 and make your way to level 3, says Leonard Richardson, an expert on REStful APIs.
Conclusion
Before you haste into transforming your traditional monolithic system into microservices, first determine whether you need it or not. Study your system, and its features and analyze the parts that trouble you the most.
If you need to migrate to microservices, first consider doing it with a component that is less critical to the system. After migration, you can monitor the performance of that microservice component to determine whether it’s a success or not.
In addition to implementing the microservices best practices, you also have to ensure that your project manager can handle the end-to-end service-oriented architecture development and migrations.
Developers familiar with the concept of microservices or have experience working with it can take its advantage properly. Many popular platforms like Amazon and Netflix owe their agility and scalability to a successful migration to microservices.
