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How to implement Microservices Architecture?
How can we implement Microservices architecture easily and quickly as per industry standards? The industries are moving towards Microservices Architecture because there are many benefits compared to the Monolithic application. But there are few things we should consider carefully before adopting Microservices architecture. A monolithic application or hybrid models like the combination of monolithic application and microservices would be a better choice as per business requirements.
What is Microservices Architecture-
A set of a loosely coupled domain or business-driven service-oriented architecture, e. g. product management service, payment service etc.
Services can be accessed through synchronous protocols such as HTTP/REST or asynchronous protocols such as AMQP.
Microservice size is not related to the number of lines of code but service should have a small set of responsibilities. Size will depend on decomposing strategy, like decompose by business capability, decompose by domain, decompose by a noun (like account service), decompose by a verb (like payment service), etc.
Difference between Monolithic and Microservices architecture-
Monolithic architectural – We create a big application with all components/services tightly coupled inside a single application.
Microservices architecture – Application components or services are standalone applications of their own. These are loosely coupled and communicate through synchronous or asynchronous protocols.
Why are industries moving toward Microservices Architecture-
- Frequent easy releases and support faster changes – Monolithic applications are big in size and components are tightly coupled. A quarterly or six-month release is supported to making sure the application should not break due to the newly released features.
But business is moving faster and current need is to deliver the product faster. Microservices architecture supports the continuous delivery easily due to the small size and loosely coupled services.
- Resiliency and High Availability – Microservice is designed to be resilient to failures and to be able to restart often on another machine in the cloud for availability.
- Fine-grained scaling – You don’t need to scale the complete tier like database or application server in the Microservices Architecture. Only desire service like payment service can be scaled horizontally or vertically without touching other services.
- Technology diversity – We can choose specific technology as per specific business need.
- Easy to replace – Microservices eliminates any long-term commitment to a technology stack. Services are loosely coupled so it can be replaced with a better design or performance without affecting the whole system.
- DevOps oriented – As per Microservices Architecture, teams should be arranged around services and continuous integration and continuous delivery should be implemented through automation tool.
DevOps automates the processes between the development team and operation team, in order that they can build, test, and release software faster, so both approaches are logically fit together.
Please note that if you are not going to implement the continuous delivery and not going to follow the DevOps, you should not implement the Microservices Architecture, it will become a premature optimization.
Steps to Implement Microservices architecture-
First of all, you need to analyze below points-
1. Are you going to use the Microservices Architecture benefits?
2. Is your organization/department ready for it?
3. How will you decompose the application?
4. What will be the deployment strategy? Like service instance per container or service instance per host or multiple service instance per host.
5. How will you manage the data? Database per service or Shared database?
6. And which Microservice chassis framework will you use to implement the Microservice Architecture?
You can use any Microservice chassis framework for Microservices scaffolding, I am going to use Spring Cloud and Spring boot in my next articles to implement Microservices. Spring Cloud and Spring boot are open source software and optimized for Spring application but can be used with any technology.
Common microservice distributed systems patterns (e.g. configuration management, service discovery, circuit breakers, intelligent routing, micro-proxy, control bus, one-time tokens, global locks, leadership election, distributed sessions, cluster state’) can be implemented quickly and easily using Spring cloud and Spring boot. And it can be deployed on any platform, cloud or containers.
This series of articles will have step by step descriptions including sample code and will help you to implement the microservices patterns. Below is the high-level architecture diagram and each component will be implemented in the separate article.
If you would like to read more about distributed configuration-management and its implementation, go to this link http://proficientblog.com/implement-microservices-architecture-configuration-management/
