Micro-services Best Practices for Developers

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Introduction

In the modern era of Software Development, you have probably heard people using the praises of microservices.

Micro services are agile, simple, and an overall improvement on the monolith and service-oriented architecture. But of course, with all the benefits of microservices comes a new set of challenges.

We will also look at some microservices best practices and I will discuss a few proven ways to help you design, orchestrate, and secure your microservices architecture. By understanding these practices, you’ll have a head start on a successful project.

Micro-service design has a direct impact on the network resilience of modern architectures. When organizations build microservices (whether in hybrid cloud, multi-cloud, or on-prem environments), it’s important to develop them, so they efficiently and effectively operate over the network, without causing excess latency, packet loss, and bandwidth consumption.

Advantages and Challenges of Microservices

Before we discuss microservices best practices, let’s first talk about some of the benefits and challenges of microservices and why you would want to use them in the first place.

In-short, microservices are an improved software architecture that allow you to:

1. Deploy and scale faster : Smaller application domain responsibility allows for automation, leading to faster deployments and faster scaling.
2. Reduce Downtime: Limit the impact that one unavailable service has on your primary business function, improving your overall business uptime.
3. Ensure availability: Keep functionality between microservices discrete, limiting the impact when an instance goes down.

With these benefits, we have a new set of challenges

Inter-service communication

With a monolithic application, all of the modules can inherently talk to one another. You have one certificate to manage, and once a request is authenticated and authorized, it can traverse the code paths without issue.

When you extract a function out of the monolith architecture to a microservices application, what was once an internal function call becomes an external API call requiring authentication and authorization for that outside micro-service.

Security Layer

Authentication and authorization, in the monolith application, can be handled one time at the point of entry. With the transition to microservices, every micro-service needs to perform some authentication and authorization to enforce access controls.

It’s not realistic to ask users to log in every time they use a different micro-service, so a comprehensive authentication strategy needs to be established.

Scalability

Although microservices allow you to scale independent functionality quickly, doing so effectively requires good app management and even better tooling. Platforms such as Bit allow for infinite scaleability when building composable microservices.

The effectiveness of your scalability hinges on your micro-service orchestration platform, which we’ll talk about in more detail below.

Microservices Best Practices

Below listed best practices will make the most of your microservices migration and tap into all the benefits a distributed system has to offer.

Try event storming

Playing off the practices of domain-driven design, event storming is a group activity that helps improve understanding of the various user activities, information, what their needs might be, and how the service responds.

This can dramatically streamline microservices communications using a simple approach that includes all stakeholders

Implement scenario mapping

Scenario mapping helps the design team think about how various personas might approach a service and imagine the type of experience they want them to have.

The persona experiences are run against service concepts with the workflow steps mapped, and then the successful ones are applied to the production environment.

Prioritize the network from the beginning

Prioritizing the network is one of the most important parts of a microservices architecture.

Choosing the right tools and processes and aligning them with the network will ensure network resilience is a fundamental part of the micro-service developments.

Automate as much as possible

Without automation, you have no chance of deploying and operating services at scale.

Establish communication protocols among stakeholders with the right processes and workflow steps to ensure automated functions meet all business requirements.

Know why you are migrating to microservices

Is it for scalability, cost-efficiency, security, or resilience? Whatever your primary reason, align your migration strategy around it.

Ensure interoperability

Make sure your tools (e.g., orchestration, ingress controller, engineering tools, monitoring, service mesh, API gateway, etc.) and processes work together to prevent the architecture from becoming too complex and fragmented.

Build in resilience

Defining microservices should involve an architecture that supports domain-driven design.

This approach, together with the right technology and processes, will help you migrate and deploy a highly available, scalable, and resilient microservices platform.

Consider Chaos Engineering

When developing a microservices based architecture, and designing the network to support the services, consider Chaos Engineering. It tests distributed systems and the network through random disruptions.

Chaos Engineering stress tests the network to discover problems and prepare it against failures using a toolset that deliberately tries to break it.

You should chaos engineer various parts of your network, including your ingress solution. This will result in you learning more about your microservices and network and resolving problems before going into production.

It is not easy to maintain a resilient network in microservices based architectures. With so many services communicating with each other across such a broad surface, there are many things that can go wrong.

Build resilience into the network by optimizing your architecture from the beginning with these best practices. Select the technology stack that will fill the gaps and is right for your use case.

Microservices Security

As your application comprises more and more microservices, ensuring proper security can become a complicated beast.

A centralized system for enforcing security policies is vital to protecting your overall application from malicious users, invasive bots, and faulty code.

However, building microservices means that teams can isolate each microservice away from the application, meaning that security issues, too, are isolated away. Granular permissions can be given on a per-microservice basis.

Build microservices with reusable components, just like Lego

Bit’s open-source tool help 250,000+ devs to build apps with components.

Turn any UI, feature, or page into a reusable component — and share it across your applications. It’s easier to collaborate and build faster.

→ Learn more

Split apps into components to make app development easier, and enjoy the best experience for the workflows you want:

→ Micro-Frontends

→ Design System

→ Code-Sharing and reuse

→ Monorepo