Best practices for Microservice Architecture -Web Application Developers.
In this article, we are going to discuss the best practices of microservices architecture, we must follow in our project. Knowing about these practices will help to avoid common mistakes. So, let’s see one by one. You can refer to my previous article for getting an idea about the introduction of Microservice Architecture.
1 . Design should be the Domain-Driven Design
When we decide to start the project with microservices architecture, we should think about the project freshly, think about our domain, whether each service is able to work independently before starting the project.
And, when we want to migrate our existing application to microservices, we should rethink how to separate the entire application and how each domain are related to each other. It does not mean that we need to do everything from the beginning or recode the entire application. It is that just take time and rethink about our project services. Suppose, a module is in another module but they are not related to each other, then we can create them as separate services. In this case, we don’t need to redesign or rewrite the code.
At the same time, we should pay attention to the Domain. Just having two services where more services are possible is not a microservices architecture project. Therefore, we should give more time to analyse our project. Otherwise, It will be more complex and break the microservices architecture characteristics as well.
2. Hardcoded value
As we discuss microservices, the complexity of an application is distributed as some services. To implement a single business requirement, we must have communication between multiple services running on different machines.
Suppose we use the hardcoded URL and hostname to connect services A and B and the application is working successfully. But, one day our network team changes the URL or hostname, then we are in danger definitely, our application will not work more and we need to deploy again with a new URL or the hostname. Obviously, It will be not a best practice. So we must use the services discovery mechanism tools instead of hardcoding.
Service discovery is the process of automatically detecting devices and services on a network.
3. Logging.
Logging is an important part of microservices architecture, It helps us to detect the failure of our application. Having too many logs and not having any logs are not good practices. We need to have logs wherever we initialize the process, Do not have a log everywhere and at the same time do not be any log.
4. Versioning Microservices
Versioning is another important part of microservices to run our application without failure when two services are in different versions. The best versioning technique is symmetric versioning.
The semantic version has three parts, major, minor and patch respectively. The below image illustrates the parts of the semantic versioning concept.
5. Handling Authorization and Authentication
Having validation of the user at every service is the best practice for developing an application in a microservice architecture. For example, Let’s think about the vehicle renting application, there, When a vehicle is allocated to a customer, it may invoke three different services, all threes services must need to validate the customer.
6. Dependency
We should avoid any dependencies. Let’s assume, We have three services A, B and C where A is dependent on B, B is dependent on C. In this case, We can not deploy each server independently as much easy. And, It does not make any sense in microservice, So each and every service should be independent with each other services. We are able to deploy any served at any time without any conflict or breaking others.
7. Executable contracts
Make the servers are easy to use. If we take the monolithic application, we develop a user-friendly application as the same server also have consumer, so we have the responsibility to develop the services for easy use.
And the other hand, In a microservice architecture, there are more than two or three services, If anyone fails or take a long time to respond, the user can not use it successfully. So, we need to have a proper management system at this time to handle the mentioned problems.
8. Documentation
Documenting our work is a very important part of whether we like it or not. This is the only helpful way for others to understand our work in future. we must write a document in a technical way. The swagger is one of the best tools to write documents in a technical way. We can write technical terms and the swagger converts our technical terms into technical documents.