Microservices are a hot topic in software development, and for good reason. By splitting a monolithic application into smaller, independently deployable services, teams can increase the speed and flexibility of their development process. However, deploying and managing microservices in a production environment is a challenge. Therefore, it is important to follow best practices to ensure the stability and reliability of your microservices-based system.
Leading companies have tested these practices and significantly improved the performance and reliability of microservices-based systems. So read on if you want to get the most out of your microservices!
Table of Contents
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- Why Microservices
- Best Practice No. 1: Define clear responsibilities and ownership for each microservice
- Best Practice No. 2: Use versioning and semantic versioning for all microservices
- Best Practice No. 3: Use a CI/CD pipeline for automated testing and deployment
- Best Practice No. 4: Use containers and container orchestration tools:
- Best Practice No. 5: Use an API gateway to manage external access to microservices
- Best Practice No. 6: Monitor the state and performance of microservices:
- Best Practice No. 7: Implement a rolling deployment strategy:
- Best Practice No. 8: Use a central logging and monitoring system
- Best Practice No. 9: Use circuit breakers and bulkheads to prevent cascading failures
- Best Practice No. 10: Implement an appropriate testing strategy
- Conclusion
Why Microservices
Microservices are used by companies transitioning from traditional licensing to subscription models, such as SaaS solutions. This is often necessary when moving from an on-premise deployment to a global, public cloud deployment with elastic capabilities. Companies like Atlassian have converted their products into microservices and deployed them in the cloud to make their applications available worldwide. However, microservices are complex and not suitable for every company, especially not for startups in the early stages.
For companies, the transition from a traditional licensing model to a subscription-based model is crucial to survive in today's digital landscape. The benefits of this shift can be seen in the success of SaaS solutions like Google Mail, where customers pay only a small monthly fee for access to a wide range of features.
This concept can also be applied to microservices, making them an essential tool for companies looking to undergo this transformation. Take Atlassian and its product Jira, for example. Jira has traditionally been used in on-premise environments, but to switch to a subscription-based model, the company needed a global reach that can only be achieved in the public cloud. This step enabled elasticity, allowing the application to scale horizontally as needed and adapt to load changes without restrictions.
Best Practice No. 1: Define clear responsibilities and ownership for each microservice
One of the main advantages of microservices is that they allow teams to work more independently and move faster. However, this independence can also lead to confusion about who is responsible for individual services.
Therefore, it is important to define the responsibility for each microservice. This means that ownership is assigned to a specific team or person, and that team or person is responsible for the development, maintenance, and support of the service.
By establishing clear responsibilities and accountability, you can ensure that each microservice is maintained by a dedicated team focused on its success. Furthermore, this helps avoid issues such as delays in fixing bugs or implementing new features, as it is clear who is responsible for resolving these problems.
But how do you define the responsibilities for your microservices?
Option 1: Individual responsibility for a set of services
One approach is to use a service ownership model, where each team or individual is responsible for a specific group of services. Each SCRUM team delivers a solution, a set of components (microservices). Option 1 ensures that every service has its own owner who is accountable for its success.
Option 2: Individual responsibility for a set of features
Another option is to use a feature ownership model, where each team or individual is responsible for developing and maintaining a specific set of features across multiple services. Option 2 can be a good approach if you have only a small number of services or if the features you are developing span multiple services.
Regardless of which approach you choose, you must ensure that responsibilities and accountability are clearly defined and communicated to all team members. For example, each developer should be responsible for a feature, its deployment, and hypercare support. This ensures that everyone knows who is responsible for each microservice, thereby avoiding confusion and delays in the development process.
Best Practice No. 2: Use versioning and semantic versioning for all microservices
When working with microservices, it is important to keep track of the different versions of individual services. This allows you to roll back to a previous version if problems arise with a new one and ensures that the correct version of each service is used throughout the system.
One way to achieve this is by using versioning for your microservices. Versioning assigns a version number to each version of a microservice, such as 1.0, 1.1, etc. This makes it easy to track the different versions of your microservices.
However, it is also a good idea to use semantic versioning for your microservices. Semantic versioning uses a three-part version number (e.g., 1.2.3), where the parts represent the major version, minor version, and patch number, respectively. The major version is incremented for significant changes, the minor version for new backward-compatible features, and the patch number for bug fixes and other minor changes.
Semantic versioning can make it easier to understand the impact of a new version and can also help ensure that the correct version of each service is used throughout the system. Therefore, it is a good idea to use both versioning and semantic versioning for your microservices to ensure you have a clear and comprehensive understanding of the different versions of individual services.
For example, the entire mono-repository containing a set of microservices for a business domain should be versioned with a semver2 tag. This tag could take the form of a git annotated tag, which is an object in Git.
Best Practice No. 3: Use a CI/CD pipeline for automated testing and deployment
Tired of manually testing and deploying your microservices? It is time to consider implementing a CI/CD pipeline (Continuous Integration and Delivery).
A CI/CD pipeline is a series of automated processes that handle the testing, deployment, and release of your microservices. It allows you to automate many tasks in the development and deployment process, such as building, testing, and deploying your code. This way, you can accelerate the development process and improve the reliability of your microservices-based system.
Several tools and platforms are available for setting up a CI/CD pipeline, including Jenkins, CircleCI, and AWS CodePipeline. Each application has specific features and capabilities, so it is important to choose the one that best meets your requirements.
The deployment logic should be prepared alongside the mono-repository from day one. The workflow is such that when a developer makes a handover, they trigger the project build (compiling the artifact and publishing the image to Docker Hub) in CI. Finally, the project is deployed on the hosting platform, such as EKS, allowing you to verify that the code can be deployed, get a REPL feel, and show the results to the product owners.
By implementing a CI/CD pipeline, you can automate the testing and deployment of your microservices, freeing up your teams to focus on developing and improving your services.
Best Practice No. 4: Use containers and container orchestration tools:
Tired of manually deploying and scaling your microservices? It is time to consider using containers and container orchestration tools.
With containers, you can package your microservices and their dependencies into a single unit, making deployment and execution in different environments easier. This reduces the time and effort required to deploy and scale your microservices and improves their reliability.
In addition to using containers, it is also recommended to use a container orchestration tool to manage the deployment and scaling of your microservices. With these tools, you can automate the deployment, scaling, and management of your containers, thereby simplifying the operation and maintenance of your microservices-based system.
Furthermore, each microservice should be containerized and published in a Docker Hub with an appropriate semver2 tag.
Some popular tools for container orchestration are Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, and Mesos.
By using containers and container orchestration tools, you can streamline the deployment and management of your microservices, freeing up your teams to focus on developing and improving your services.
Best Practice No. 5: Use an API gateway to manage external access to microservices
When external clients, such as mobile applications or web clients, access your microservices-based system, use an API gateway to manage access to your microservices. If your microservices (mostly REST APIs) expose models that are insufficient to create your model, then a GraphQL API should be presented, a kind of facade known as Backed for Frontend (BFF).
What is an API gateway?
An API gateway is a layer that sits between your clients and your microservices, responsible for routing requests from clients to the appropriate microservice and returning the response to the client. It can also handle authentication, rate limiting, and caching tasks.
By using an API gateway, you can improve the security and performance of your system. It acts as a central entry point for external traffic and can offload certain tasks from your microservices. Additionally, external access to your microservices is easier to manage and monitor, as you can track and log all requests and responses through the gateway.
Several options for implementing an API gateway include using a third-party service or creating your own gateway with tools like Kong or Tyk.
If you also want to address security-related issues such as Keycloak and IDS, you should pay particular attention to API gateway components like Kong
By using an API gateway, you can improve the security and performance of your microservices-based system and facilitate the management of external access to your services.
Best Practice No. 6: Monitor the state and performance of microservices:
When working with microservices, it is crucial to monitor the state and performance of individual services to ensure they function smoothly and meet your system's requirements.
There are various tools and techniques you can use to monitor the state and performance of your microservices, including:
- Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools: These tools track the performance of your microservices and provide insight into potential issues or bottlenecks.
- Log analysis tools: With these tools, you can analyse the logs generated by your microservices to identify errors, performance issues, and other important information.
- Load testing tools: With these tools, you can simulate the load on your microservices to test their performance and identify potential issues.
With these and other tools and techniques, you can monitor the state and performance of your microservices and detect and resolve any issues that arise. This ensures that your microservices run smoothly and meet the requirements of your system.
Best Practice No. 7: Implement a rolling deployment strategy:
When deploying updates for your microservices, you should remember that it is important to minimise downtime and interruptions to your system. One way to achieve this is by implementing a rolling deployment strategy.
In a rolling deployment strategy, you deploy updates for multiple microservices simultaneously and then roll out the update gradually to the rest of the system. This allows you to test the update on a small scale before deploying it to the entire system, thereby minimising the risk of interruptions or issues.
There are the following approaches for implementing a gradual deployment strategy:
- Blue-Green deployment: In this approach, updates are deployed in a separate "green" environment, and traffic is switched from the "blue" environment once the update has been tested and is ready for production.
- Canary deployment: In this approach, updates are deployed to a small percentage of users, and the proportion is gradually increased over time while monitoring for issues.
By implementing a rolling deployment strategy, you can minimise downtime and interruptions during updates and ensure a smooth and reliable deployment process.
Best Practice No. 8: Use a central logging and monitoring system
When working with microservices, it is important to have a way to monitor the overall state and performance of your system. One way to do this is by using a centralised logging and monitoring system.
With a centralised logging and monitoring system, you can collect and analyse logs and other data from your microservices in a single location, making it easier to track the overall state and performance of your system. This allows you to detect and resolve issues more quickly, as you can see all relevant data in one place.
There are several options for implementing a central logging and monitoring system, including using a third-party service such as Splunk or building your own system with tools such as Elasticsearch and Logstash. It is important to choose the option that best fits your requirements and budget.
With a central logging and monitoring system, you can track the overall state and performance of your microservices-based system and detect and resolve any issues that arise. So why not give it a try?
Best Practice No. 9: Use circuit breakers and bulkheads to prevent cascading failures
When working with microservices, it is important to prevent issues in one service from affecting the entire system. One way to achieve this is by using circuit breakers and bulkheads.
A circuit breaker is a pattern that allows a service to fail fast and stop processing requests when an issue occurs, rather than attempting to continue processing and potentially causing further problems, in order to prevent cascading failures and protect the overall stability of the system.
A bulkhead is a pattern that allows you to isolate different parts of your system, so that problems in one part do not affect the rest of the system. In this way, you prevent cascading failures and increase the stability of the overall system.
By using circuit breakers and bulkheads, you can prevent problems in one service from affecting the entire system, ensuring the stability and reliability of your microservices-based system.
Best Practice No. 10: Implement an appropriate testing strategy
When working with microservices, you should ensure the stability and reliability of your system by properly testing your microservices. There are several types of tests you should consider, including:
- Unit tests: These test individual code units to ensure they function correctly.
- Integration tests: These test the integration between different microservices to ensure they work together correctly.
- Performance tests: These test the performance of your microservices under various loads and conditions to ensure they meet your system's requirements.
- Chaos tests: These intentionally introduce failures or other disruptions into your system to test its resilience and ensure it can recover from failures.
Conclusion
By implementing a suitable testing strategy and regularly testing your microservices, you can ensure the stability and reliability of your microservices-based system.
Companies that are able to deliver new features and functions quickly and reliably in today's fast-paced business world have a significant competitive advantage. Microservices can be a powerful tool for rapid development and deployment, but they also bring new challenges in terms of deployment and management.
The 10 best practices described in this article provide a roadmap for successfully deploying and managing microservices in a production environment. By following these best practices, companies can ensure that their microservices are stable and reliable and deliver optimal performance. In this way, they can deliver new features and functions faster and stay ahead of the competition.
In addition to improving the performance of microservices, these best practices also help reduce the risk of costly downtime and failures. They also improve the overall reliability and stability of the systems. This protects your company's reputation and customer satisfaction, which ultimately contributes to business success.
Therefore, these best practices are a must for any company that wants to get the most out of its microservices-based systems. Take the first step towards implementing these best practices and see the benefits for yourself.
