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Microservices Best Practices

“Be agile in an ever-changing market with these microservice best practices to reduce efforts and maximize gains.”

Microservices have fundamentally changed the way server side engines are architected. Rather than a single giant monolithic codebase hosting all the business logic of your application, Microservices reflect the distributed systems model, where a group of application components work together to deliver the business needs.

Now that we’re familiar with how a Microservices Architecture works and its potential benefits for an organization, here are a few basic Microservices best practices, you can achieve an efficient Microservices ecosystem devoid of unnecessary architectural complexities.

Microservices Architecture Best Practices

1. Ensure relevant use case and stakeholder support

Start by determining whether your organization has a relevant use case for a microservices architecture. Even if you’re working with a digital-first company aiming to compete with Big Tech, do not opt for microservices just because they have done so. Instead, analyze your business requirements and see whether your application can be segmented into services that provide value. You should be able to divide your application into microservices without losing its core operability and features.

Also, just because you believe your application is ready to be split into microservices does not mean everybody will agree with you. The transition from monolith to microservices can be a long, tedious process with implications for all stakeholders.

Work with all stakeholders to set a proper timeline and budget. Also, gauge your organization’s level of technical expertise and assess whether it is sufficient for such an exercise. Your engineering team should be prepared for extensive infrastructural changes and other disruptions throughout the process. If required, consider hiring the services of an expert consultant.

Microservices are independent and work best when owned by independent teams. Be prepared to split your teams according to the microservices they will be responsible for. Each team should have the required tools and skills to develop, deploy, and operate their assigned microservice.

2. Adopt functional and secure design

Do not categorize microservices solely around business functions and services, as this could create microservices that are either too small or too large. The former can lead to an unnecessary increase in operational costs, while the latter will minimize the benefit of using microservices that are not so ‘micro’ anymore.

Instead, design specialized services according to in-application functions. Some business functions would probably have more in-application tasks than others. This would require in-depth planning with all stakeholders, covered in the previous step.

Once you know how to categorize your microservices, it’s time to begin the designing process. Microservices need to cover a single specialized process, have high cohesion, and exhibit minimal dependencies on each other.

Design your microservices in such a way that they are domain-specific and contain internal information of the domain as well as domain-specific models. This helps each microservice fulfill a specialized function and achieve a domain-driven design.

APIs and events should be used for communication between services. Do not set up services to call each other directly. Instead, adopt an API gateway that handles requests, responses, authentication, and throttling for services. Such an API gateway allows you to redirect traffic to updated versions of microservices whenever required quickly.

Finally, account for security vulnerabilities while designing microservices. Their distributed structure means that microservices generally have a broader attack surface. The DevSecOps model can help you ensure a secured framework for your microservices.

Create different databases and data management provisions for other microservices. Choose a database capable of fulfilling the specific requirements of each microservice. Optimize the storage and infrastructure according to the stored data and use it exclusively for that microservice. Doing so will enable you to create a robust microservices architectural framework where every service is managed independently while working cohesively with other services via a service mesh.

3. Centralize operations and adopt cutting-edge security

Finally, implement a centralized monitoring and logging system that ensures all microservices create standardized logs. This can help ensure swift root cause analysis and exception handling.

Advanced monitoring solutions allow you to monitor the availability of resources efficiently. They also maintain security levels by highlighting compromised components before they have a chance to bring the entire system down.

4. Have dedicated infrastructure hosting your Microservices

You can have the best designed Microservice meeting all the checks, but with a bad design of the hosting platform it would still behave poorly. Isolate your Microservice infrastructure from other components to get fault isolation and best performance. It is also important to isolate the infrastructure of the components that your microservice depends on.

5. Have a separate data store(s) for your Microservices

It defeats the purpose of having Microservices if you are using a monolithic database that all your microservices share. Any change or downtime to that database would then impact all the microservices that use the database. Choose the right database for your Microservice needs, customize the infrastructure and storage to the data that it maintains, and let it be exclusive to your microservice. Ideally, any other microservice that needs access to that data would only access it through the APIs that the Microservice with write access has exposed. 

6. Proxy your Microservice requests through an API Gateway

Instead of every microservice in the system performing the functions of API authentication, request / response logging, and throttling, having an API gateway doing these for you upfront will add a lot of value. Clients calling your microservices will connect to the API Gateway instead of directly calling your service. This way you will avoid making all those additional calls from your microservice and the internal URLs of your service would be hidden, giving you the flexibility to redirect the traffic from the API Gateway to a newer version of your service. This is even more necessary when a third party is accessing your service, as you can throttle the incoming traffic and reject unauthorized requests from the API gateway before they reach your Microservice. You can also choose to have a separate API gateway that accepts traffic from external networks. 

7. Create Organizational Efficiencies

While microservices give you the freedom to develop and release independently, certain standards need to be followed for cross cutting concerns so that every team doesn’t spend time creating unique solutions for these. This is very important in a distributed architecture such as microservices, where you need to be able to connect all the pieces of the puzzle to see a holistic picture. Hence, enterprise solutions are necessary for API security, log aggregation, monitoring, API documentation, secrets management, config management, distributed tracing, etc. 

8. Ensure your API changes are backwards compatible

You can safely introduce changes to your API and release them fast as long as they don’t break existing callers. One possible option is to notify your callers , have them provide a sign off for your changes by doing integration testing. However, this is expensive, as all the dependencies need to line up in an environment and it will slow you down with a lot of coordination . A better option is to adopt contract testing for your APIs. The consumers of your APIs provide contracts on their expected response from your API. You as a provider  would integrate those contract tests as part of your builds and these will safeguard against breaking changes. The consumer can test against the stubs that you publish as part of the consumer builds. This way you can go to production faster with independently testing your contract changes.

9. Version your Microservices for breaking changes

It’s not always possible to make backwards compatible changes. When you are making a breaking change, expose a new version of your endpoint while continuing to support older versions. Consumers can choose to use the new version at their convenience. However, having too many versions of your API can create a nightmare for those maintaining the code. Hence, have a disciplined approach to deprecate older versions by working with your clients or internally rerouting the traffic to the newer versions.

10. Increase delivery speeds with a DevOps culture

DevOps is a set of practices that breaks the siloed operational and development capabilities for enhanced interoperability. Adopting DevOps can help your organization with a cohesive strategy and efficient collaboration, among other benefits.

Final Thoughts

Microservice Architecture brings higher flexibility and ease of development through decoupled services. However, Microservice Architecture has specific challenges like efficiency, consistency, security, etc. So, follow some of the Microservice best practices, along with real-life usage accounts from leading companies.

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Interested in Management, Design or Technology Consulting, contact anil.kg.26@gmail.com
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