Best practices in Microservices Architecture.

Building and managing Microservices is an arduous task. This is because Microservices are like having several monolithic applications in parallel and they all have to be in synced communication and concurrent uptime. Therefore, it is important to consider and apply the best practices when designing and building them. Below is a list of such practices, although not exhaustive:

1. Don't build Microservices.

   • Seriously, building Microservices should only be considered as the last option.

• Be pragmatic.

• Try and build a modular monolith first. Microservices should come last.

1. Design for failure.

   • Any distributed system that uses Microservices will always have a chance of failing. The earlier this is designed for, the better.

   • The design for failure must cater to each level- infrastructure level, Database level, and the individual Microservices.

   • Circuit breakers, graceful degradation methods, and bulkheads should be used.

2. Build small services.

   • Microservices should be very specific and should excel in that one thing. Building Microservices as a Swiss knife is a recipe for disaster.

3. Use lightweight communication protocols.

   • Communication between the Microservices is fundamentally crucial.

   • Protocols such as REST, GRPC, or Messaging Queues should be used.

   • Communication overhead should be reduced as much as possible and the performance improved.

4. Implement service discovery.

   • For effective communication, Microservices need to be able to identify each other, therefore, Service discovery should be implemented from the start.

   • Tools such as Eureka or Consul can be used.

5. Data management should be distributed.

   • Data should be owned by individual services.

   • Any piece of data should be managed by the owner service.

   • The ultimate goal should be to reduce coupling between services so that they can evolve independently.

1. Implement resiliency patterns.

   • To increase system availability, resiliency patterns should be implemented.

   • The use of retry policies, caching and rate limiting is encouraged.

2. Proactive monitoring of the Services.

   • In any distributed system, a service that will go down will ultimately go down.

   • To keep up with the services, the issues need to be identified promptly, and the metrics collected, and analyzed.

   • Tools such as Prometheus, and Grafana help monitor the System as a whole and identify potential issues as early as possible.

3. Security should be employed at all levels.

   • Microservices have a large attack surface and therefore security within the smallest possible units is important.

   • Security must be implemented from the infrastructure level to the service level, and to the communication layer too.

   • Proper privileges with the most up-to-date security protocols and tools should be used.

4. Centralized logging.

   • Logs are important when understanding what is happening with the system.

   • However, to make sure that the logs are meaningful, logs from all the services must be aggregated in a centralized location for easy analysis.

   • Using tools such as ELK to build a robust logging setup.

5. Use containerization techniques.

   • To deploy the Microservices in an isolated manner, containerization and orchestration tools such as Docker and Kubernetes should be used.

   • They are meant to simplify the deployment and scaling requirements of a service.

   • Ample time should also be allocated to managing these resources.

1. Use automated testing and deployment.

   • Microservices should be thoroughly tested to ensure reliability.

   • Automating test cases as part of the CI/CD processes should be used to ensure a seamless experience.

Thank you for your time and see you in the next.

Credits: @ProgressiveCod2 on X(Formerly Twitter).