Ready To Migrate From Traditional Application Development Strategies To The Powerful Microservices Paradigm?

We suggest that you don’t work in haste and take steps based on the strategic plan introduced in this article so that you can gradually move from an integrated development strategy to microservice design.

Microservices architecture gives developers enough time to work on modules by providing functional capabilities such as flexible scaling, independent feature updates, and execution of specialized tasks by small modules. However, some teams still prefer to use old development paradigms due to a lack of familiarity with these paradigms, which increases the side costs of building and deploying software. Typically, legacy applications are mainly developed based on integrated architecture. Also, when software teams decide to start working on an application, they prefer to go for integrated architecture from the very beginning.

Software based on integrated architecture has an almost simple structure, but this is true only at the beginning of the development process. For example, when Google Cloud engineers decided to work on the development process within the cloud technology organization for two internal Google units, they decided to use an integrated architecture to speed up the build process. Still, time showed that maintaining and managing a considerable amount of The codes are complex, challenging, and time-consuming, and gradually, as the volume of principles increased, the complexity doubled.

In addition, the code maintenance process was difficult and time-consuming because new developers who were added to the team had to review all the code to understand the logic and functionality of the code.

Migrating to the world of microservices-based development, clear boundaries between the features of an application enable more straightforward updates over time and make changes without affecting the performance of other parts of an application.

However, to turn an integrated application into a microservice, starting with a comprehensive application and working with the source code and technology stack is necessary. Next, begin developing services and microservices modules by focusing on the communication mechanism between services and taking the precautions required to deal with failures.

Planning for Immigration

Before starting to migrate to the world of microservices, first assess the situation so that you can adopt a suitable strategic plan. For this purpose, there are some essential key points that you should pay attention to.

Focusing on the details needed in services

You can create multiple small or extensive services to break a software architecture into smaller parts. Here, there is no clear policy. The critical thing to pay attention to is that each service has the right size because the more the number of services, the more the cost and complexity increase. However, if the services are too large, you face the problem of components not communicating not and adequately updating independent properties correctly and promptly.

The best solution in this field is to review the program’s source code and related design documents so that you can separate the services more efficiently and provide detailed documentation. To facilitate collaboration between teams, share service source code repositories and allow teams to access code based on a simple solution.

Use a diverse technology stack.

Microservices require a specific architecture that can isolate the front-end part of an application from the back-end infrastructure. Accordingly, it is better to use a multilingual development approach. So that you use appropriate programming languages ​​to develop each service, for example, consider a framework like Polymer that allows you to manage different front-end components independently.

Real immigration

To have a careful and calculated migration from the monolithic world to microservices, you must use techniques to decompose monolithic code gradually. For example, Google engineers use the Strangler pattern. The above mechanism means that a proxy is defined to direct the traffic toward the integrated architecture.

Next, the team will focus on developing the simplest parts of the integrated architecture and gradually move on to the more complex functions. As services are built one by one, traffic is cascaded to new microservices. The mentioned strategy minimizes the disruption of the users’ performance. It gives the architect and developers of the integrated architecture enough time to migrate to the microservices architecture and rebuild the software.

Implementation of regulatory mechanisms

Migrating to microservices does not make sense without using an effective solution to monitor and manage the application. For example, microservices not communicating correctly will cause the program to show unexpected reactions; you will have to spend a lot of time identifying broken links and the reason for services not sharing. Therefore, these processes must be carried out in the shortest possible time.

She manages the communication mechanisms of services to optimize an application’s performance and communicate seamlessly. For services to share with external channels, it is necessary to implement an API gateway or a Kafka-like message management service. These message gateways must handle routing, rate limiting, and request filtering. Also, it is essential to establish a mechanism in the application that can store the data related to the requests and repeat the process in case of failure to respond to the request twice.

Establishing service-to-service internal communications, tracking the status of distributed services, and how to handle requests should be defined in the plan based on which the project is to be implemented. Various open-source tools, such as Jaeger and Zipkin, can handle this process. Mesh service technology such as Istio has an acceptable performance in this field, which can integrate with Jaeger and Zipkin. As an inter-service communication mechanism, mesh service plays a significant role in service discovery and monitoring service-to-service communication.

Service failure handling

The critical thing to note about service failure is that failure at the level of service only prevents that service from working correctly and does not cause the program to stop working. Here, the developers use a technique called the circuit breaker pattern. A circuit breaker is a software module created by developers, similar to traditional electrical circuit breakers, that sits between the service request module and the endpoints receiving the services.

The above module uses a disconnection mechanism to disconnect any module with a communication channel that has an unstable state and causes an error. In this case, the developers will have enough time to re-test the connection and identify and fix the communication channel failure between the components.

Microservices architecture enables the activation of individual services and allows updating services without affecting different parts of an application. Of course, this does not mean that updates will be without problems, so technical testing is still necessary. For this reason, services must be configured to automatically revert to previous stable states in the event of a failure. To this end, each service must report its health regularly, so look for tools that provide service health monitoring and facilitate self-healing mechanisms.

Five principles of microservice design

Some developers think that microservices architecture is the only acceptable development option. Still, starting the development process with integrated architecture is not bad because it is always possible to migrate to microservices by making changes to the integrated architecture. Of course, we must not forget that the microservice architecture includes many details, and you must plan carefully to migrate it. Success in microservices architecture depends on how the services communicate with external applications and other services. Moreover, performance, fault tolerance, better visibility, multilingual programming, the more straightforward implementation of operations, and better user experience are not minor issues that can be quickly passed over.

When a developer decides to use microservices, he should be careful to develop unique services so that each service can provide its best performance. For this purpose, you should pay attention to the five basic principles of microservices design: single purpose, discreteness, data storage capability, data transfer capability, and ephemerality.

one goal

We can consider entry points to serve as a single target. For example, suppose a trading company active in the automotive industry is looking to build a program that connects potential dealers with the organization itself. The first goal of this program is to buy and sell cars.

The second point is paying for the purchase of a car. While these two microservices may be used together, they are not hybrid services. Each element handles a different task and should be written independently.

Discrete approach

Another term that you should pay attention to in the design field is the nature of discontinuity. All the logic and data a microservice needs to do its job is internal and separate from other microservice data.

A microservice has its configuration to achieve the best performance, and this configuration should not interfere with the structure of another microservice. This microservice design principle is fundamental when developers need to scale up or down services to meet workloads.

Data storage capability

A microservice must not only be able to maintain its data, but its data must be independent of other microservices. In most cases, developers prefer each microservice to have its database. However, sometimes, the situation requires some microservices to share their database. In such a situation, each microservice will have its tables in the database. Typically, developers use a shared database approach to reduce costs. However, this attitude violates the design philosophy of microservices.

Developers often need to consider data independence and redundancy in their designs. While developers often adhere to the principle that each microservice maintains its data, this creates data duplication at the application level. However, most have adopted data redundancy as part of the microservice design pattern.

Data transfer capability

Microservices based on the portability feature provides the process of deploying modules on servers in the simplest way. This concept is similar to a container image or serverless design pattern. In such a situation, based on the “Continuous Delivery and Deployment” (CI/CD) culture, it is possible to install a microservice on a specific target.

For example, a developer can deploy a portable microservice on a cloud provider such as Google Cloud. However, suppose it is necessary to install the microservice on another provider’s infrastructure. In that case, moving it to another cloud like AWS without extra effort is a process.

fleeting

The temporary nature of a container not only simplifies the application management process whenever a problem is detected in a container but also allows developers to quickly identify and fix the problem whenever a container goes offline. An ephemeral microservice can be removed anytime and immediately revert to the last stable state. Of course, in this context, one should pay attention to managing active threads and ensuring no thread-based dependencies in the codes.

These five principles of microservice design should be considered at the heart of any architecture based on microservices. It is enough to carefully monitor the details when designing each component so that you can create an efficient architecture that provides the application’s best performance.