This is continuation of previous article Mastering Microservices: Your Comprehensive Guide to Modern Software Design, which I had left in middle because of it's length. We will be talking about the proven strategies of using Microservices architecture, which worked for us. Definitely we did not introduced all from start of the project, but recommend you to use since start if you are going to start new development using this architecture.
1. Clear Service Boundaries:
You should define clear and well documented boundaries for your each microservice, consider it like a sellable service to another organisation. Do documentations like you see on paid APIs or services. This will avoid future ambiguity and streamline the process and team communications.
2. Use API Gateways:
Implement an API gateway as single entry point for all clients, this streamlines client interactions and guarantees a standard interface for all services. Apart of this major task of API gateway is to keep track of callee and maintaining ids in header, most important for request tracing. Which will later help us to easy and quick debugging.
3. Decentralised Data Management:
As discussed already consider each microservice is identity of unique organisation, we should make individual microservice responsible to manage its own decentralised data store to reduce dependency and avoid conflicts. To keep data synchronised, use event sourcing and publish-subscribe methods. Ultimately we have to move it towards observability so keep that in mind since start.
4. Service Discovery and Load Balancing:
Setting up an automatic service registration and load balancing is critical. This simplifies service management and assures even traffic distribution. You can use tools like Consul or Eureka. If you are in Java ecosystem Netflix Eureka or ZooKeeper(by Apache) would be your best companion.
5. Containerisation and Orchestration:
We use Docker for containerisation and Kubernetes (K8) as orchestration tools to manage microservices efficiently since start. These technologies simplified deployment and scaling processes, so did not tried or researches another. They helped us to develop and test environment specific, which is cool to use different versions of common library for different services when needed.
6. Monitoring and Logging:
Implementing comprehensive monitoring and logging solutions for each microservice is important. Prometheus and Grafana are two tools that can help you track performance, spot problems, and troubleshoot quickly.
7. Automated Testing and Continuous Integration:
How can someone missed automated test case in era of TDD, you can choose any framework of your choice. Continuous Integration helps a lot for fast deployments and re-deployment if needed any.
For new Architects
If you are an architect for your project I have few more gems for you next, keep focus on them too.
1. Scalability by Design:
Try to design your microservices stateless and horizontally scalable. This will help easy scaling by adding more instances of services whenever needed.
2. Versioning:
Plan for API versioning from the beginning to ensure backward compatibility. This helps clients to avoid disruptions when new versions are released.
3. Error Handling and re-try mechanism:
Implement robust error handling and resilience measures to architect for failure. To reduce service disruptions, use mechanisms such as circuit breakers and retries.
4. Security:
Prioritise security in the architecture, ensuring that sensitive data is safeguarded and services are properly verified and authorised. Only external APIs should exposed through gateway to public IP.
5. Microservices Governance:
Develop governance policies and procedures to guarantee that microservices principles are consistently applied throughout the organisation.
6. Continuous Health Check:
Maintain a mechanism for continuous health check and alert, to keep them up and working all time.
Apart of these team collaboration, documentation, DevOps practices, setting code quality rules are similar as other architectures.
Moreover microservices architecture is a philosophy, so implementation will always differ you just need to decide based on your own requirements and resources. Microservices architecture provides considerable benefits in terms of scalability and agility, but it also introduces new challenges. You might create easily maintainable and scalable
microservices environment with the help of following above mentioned best practices and considering crucial architectural criteria. Your carefully planned microservices architecture can enable your firm to survive in a dynamic and ever-changing technology landscape with minimal efforts.
Thoughts or questions, are welcome in comment box...
Till the next time keep Learning-Coding-and-Growing.
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