Mahipal Nehra July 27, 2021 The term Microservice Architecture has been around for a few years to describe a specific way to design a software application as a set of independently deployable services. These services communicate with each other with the help of APIs. Some of the common characteristics found in a microservice architecture include:
- Design for failure
- Organized around business capabilities
- Decentralized Data Management
- Decentralized Governance
- Evolutionary Design
- Infrastructure Automation
- Products not Projects
- Componentization via Services
Why Use Microservice-Based Web Application?
Microservices was designed to address problems caused by gigantic applications based on monolithic architecture. It is widely used by large-scale websites to gain the following advantages:
- Developers can work on a smaller codebase compared to a large and complex monolithic application.
- Highly defined responsibilities for developers i.e. a team can assign components of the app to make code review faster and make quick updates.
- The microservices-based web app will no longer be dependent on one library or programming language. So, the developers can choose the one that seems to fit the most according to their requirements.
- It will be easier to scale each service independently without making multiple instances for everything.
- Using microservices, continuous delivery will become easier.
- You can choose different databases or storage for microservice architecture to make data decentralized.
- An error or bug in one service will not bring the entire system down as each component or service remains in its containers.
How to Design Microservice Based Web App
When you design a microservice architecture-based web application you need to consider a few key points. These key points include the application specification, best practices for microservice designing, twelve-factor methodology, the value of deploying services in containers and orchestrating using Kubernetes. So let’s get started!
Application Specification
The postulated web application will handle requests by executing business logic, accessing databases and then returning JSON, XML or HTML responses. So the application must support multiple clients consisting of traditional web apps, mobile web apps, Single Page Applications, and native mobile applications. It should also have APIs to consume data from third-party websites or applications.
Majorly the application should contain, User Interface (UI) components, business logic or domain, database access components, and application integration logic. Moreover, the application must have high scalability and deployability in multiple infrastructure environments.
Best Practices For Microservices Designing
By following best practices to design microservices you can easily maintain, scale and deploy your application. Keep in mind not all the given best practices will be relevant to the requirement of your application.
Every microservice should have a single bit of application functionality. The team must define the responsibilities and limitations of each service. Apart from that, you need to consider the given requirements for your web application.
- The microservice should answer the requesting clients, even if the service fails.
- As you update or add functionality on the microservice, the changes must not affect the client and the Rest-API abides by backward compatibility.
- The design must facilitate easy troubleshooting and monitoring.
- Microservice must specify protocols for communication between API gateway, clients and microservices.
Understand Twelve-Factor App Methodology
The 12-factor application methodology for developing applications is a set of guidelines and rules for creating cloud-native and Software-as-a-Service applications. According to the 12-factor methodology, a microservice should adhere to the subsequent guidelines. The rules here consist of the codebase, dependencies, configuration, backing services, processes, port binding, concurrency, build, release & run, disability, logs, admin processes, and development & production parity.
Importance of Deploying Microservices in Containers
After the development of the microservice, it should be containerized. A microservice running in its individual container will not affect the microservices deployed in the separate containers.
Now you might be thinking what a container is, right?
A container is a standard unit of software that is used to develop, ship and deploy an application. Container engines like Docker are used to manage containers. These container engines offer the tools that are needed to bundle application dependencies as containers.
Docker can be used to develop, deploy and run a microservice application in the container. Dockers having microservices will consist of the following characteristics.
- Lightweight: As docker shares its operating system kernel and doesn’t need an OS for instances, microservices run as a lightweight process.
- Portable: With docker, microservices become portable and can run anywhere.
- Secure: The isolation of each process secures the microservices.
To containerize a microservice, you should create a Dockerfile, a container image that contains all the environmental configurations and dependencies, then deploying the image into the Docker engine and uploading the image to the container registry for data storage and retrieval.
Orchestrating Microservices
Microservices need to interact and integrate and provide the required functionality to the application while running in containers. This integration can be acquired by using the orchestration of the containers.
Container orchestration allows a developer to spring, suspend and group containers in clusters. Orchestration also enables high scalability and availability of the microservices. To fulfill the task of container orchestration, we use the Kubernetes platform. It will help in managing your containers in one place.
Conclusion
I hope this was helpful for you to understand how microservice architecture-based web applications for your business are developed. Having microservice will help you in achieving higher scalability, independent development and deployment, reduced chances of system failure and so on.
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