Microservices Best Practicies
In recent years, microservices architectures have become extremely popular, and for good reason. When managed properly, they improve scalability, foster faster development and deployment, and reduce data and domain coupling. Companies of all sizes—from small startups to large enterprises—have been migrating their monolithic applications to microservices and service-oriented architectures.
However, transitioning from a monolith to microservices is a significant step. Your team needs to be prepared for this change both technically and organizationally. Without careful planning, an improper migration can lead to serious issues in the future.
We are no exception and have also migrated to a microservices architecture. I’ll try to describe the best practices we used or should be considered during the transition to a microservices architecture.
All advice and practices are purely recommendatory and are not the only correct ones. Everything depends on your project and your team. But I hope these tips will help you avoid some mistakes we made.
TL;DR
- Determine the need for transitioning to a microservices architecture
- Do not transition to microservices if you lack company-wide support
- Plan the transition to microservices in advance
- Establish transparent logging and monitoring across the entire system
- After building the first microservice, create a template based on it
- Assign responsibility for each microservice
- Organize a developer portal
Now let’s take a closer look at each point.
Why Microservices?
Before embarking on the transition to a microservices architecture, it is necessary to ensure that your organization truly needs it. There are many articles on the internet discussing the pros and cons of monolithic architectures compared to microservices. I won’t repeat them, but I’ll highlight the key points that formed the basis of our decision to transition to microservices. And if companies like Amazon and Netflix have found value in microservices, it doesn’t necessarily mean that your team will also benefit from such an approach. In some cases and for certain teams, monolithic architectures can provide advantages with their simplicity, and the adoption of microservices may introduce unnecessary complexity that won’t pay off in the future.
However, as many teams have already realized, monolithic architectures can lead to serious problems. Monoliths can become barriers to scalability, as launching multiple instances of the application requires replicating the entire codebase. Microservices, on the other hand, allow you to optimize resource usage by deploying only the necessary services. Thanks to Docker and Kubernetes, horizontal scaling becomes simple and efficient.
Another problem with monolithic architectures is the emergence of organizational complexities. Unclear boundaries between different functional areas make it difficult to write code without unwanted interactions with other parts of the system. Coordination and coordination between different development teams can slow down the development process, as they are forced to wait for other teams’ deployments to finish. Also, the large size of monolith codebases can significantly slow down the testing and release process. In turn, effective microservice management allows you to decouple functional areas, simplifies debugging, and allows you to release only small code fragments with each update. Additionally, microservices provide the opportunity to use different programming languages and tools for each service, which improves development productivity and efficiency. We have services written in JavaScript and Go. And it doesn’t hinder us from developing them simultaneously.
Finally, microservices help improve system reliability. If one service stops working, the others can continue to operate. Additionally, microservices allow the use of different databases for each service, reducing data and functional area coupling.
Gain Organizational Support
Migrations—and especially transitioning to a microservices architecture—are complex processes. If you launch one service and your team doesn’t support it, you’ll simply end up with two monoliths.
To truly create a service-oriented architecture, relying solely on one team is impossible. You need top-down support. The entire organization must rethink its application, and teams should be empowered to manage their own services.
A key point for successfully navigating this process is clear justification that meets the team’s needs, as this ensures support and maintains morale throughout the process.
As it is known, the architecture of an application should reflect the organizational structure. Therefore, if you want to transition to a new architecture, you need to rethink the organizational structure. In our case, we decided to redistribute vertical responsibility for various functional areas. Each team member or team is responsible for their own service and can develop and deploy it independently of others. Additionally, we identified a new DevOps role responsible for infrastructure and tools used by all teams.
Plan and Stick to It
Despite the inspiration and vision of a bright future where teams work at high speed and automation takes care of scalability, remember that you must first go through this path. This journey may take longer than expected. Along the way, you will encounter unexpected problems, and transitioning to a distributed system, even if team members have experience with microservices, will require the development of skills across the entire organization. It will take time for your organization to adapt to these changes and understand their implications in order to operate effectively in the new architecture.
Therefore, prepare your system for the implementation of the first microservices and be ready to implement new ones later. Have an idea of where you are headed. It’s better to lay the foundation in advance to facilitate the migration process when you begin.
Develop a plan for which part of your monolith you will first implement microservices for. Understand how transforming these parts of your application into microservices will affect related services, both downstream and upstream.
You can start by allocating one team or functional area to a separate microservice. For example, a data collection and analysis team that wants to work in Go could be a good option. You can migrate their entire structure into a microservice, providing the opportunity to use all available tools and libraries. Alternatively, you can initially divide the monolith into larger macroservices, such as moving the entire authentication system to a separate service. This allows the team to define the necessary interfaces at the boundaries of areas, leaving more detailed work for a later stage. By spending time on initial preparation, you will avoid the need for changes and repeated migrations in the future.
However, don’t get caught up in optimization. Focus on launching core elements, leaving automation and orchestration for later.
Think About Monitoring in Advance
In addition to creating services, consider how you can add logging and monitoring to facilitate issue resolution. Transitioning to a microservices architecture introduces a new failure mode for your teams. Now, instead of functions calling other functions within the monolith, communication will occur via external API requests.
Requests may fail due to network connection issues. Services may become unavailable. Introducing delays and asynchronous calls may lead to unexpected behavior. Without proper handling of such situations, it will be difficult to understand what exactly is going wrong and why. Plan for these failure modes and ensure transparency to detect issues as they arise. Record metrics to understand the prevalence of problems.
Template Your Microservices
Templatizing microservices involves creating patterns or templates that can be reused for deploying and creating new microservices. This approach automates the process of creating services with pre-configured settings, simplifying and speeding up the development and deployment of new features.
With templates, you can standardize the settings, libraries, and dependencies of microservices, making them easier to manage and update. Additionally, templatization helps reduce the amount of repetitive code and lowers the likelihood of errors, as much of the configuration will already be predefined.
Applying templatization also promotes consistency and similarity between microservices, improving the overall structure and architecture of your system. You’ll be able to easily scale and manage your microservices, following the same standard and approach for each of them.
Track Responsibility for Microservices
It’s important to maintain a clear system for tracking responsibility for each microservice in your architecture. This means each microservice should be tied to a specific team or owner who is responsible for its development, maintenance, and upkeep.
Establishing clear ownership of microservices helps in the following aspects:
Clear Understanding of Responsibility: When each microservice has its owner, it becomes clear who is responsible for its functionality, bug fixes, and updates. This speeds up the development and deployment process and facilitates communication within the team.
Efficient Management: Tracking ownership of microservices helps control who makes decisions regarding its development and improvement. This allows for effective prioritization and resource allocation for each microservice.
Risk Reduction: When each microservice has a clearly defined owner, risks regarding unfinished tasks and issues are minimized. The owner’s team will be more inclined and responsible for their services and will strive to prevent potential issues.
Expertise Development: Each microservice owner can become an expert in their field, increasing overall team competence and efficiency.
To ensure successful implementation and ownership of microservices, clear communication and collaboration processes between microservice owners and other teams in the organization need to be defined. Ideally, each microservice should have its own team responsible for its development and support. Avoid dispersing responsibility for microservices among multiple teams, as this can lead to conflicts and inefficiencies.
Create a Developer Portal
Teams often worry about the growth of microservices as they develop them. Without proper management, developers can lose control over all microservices, and no one will know exactly what’s going on. Therefore, it’s essential to establish a strict mechanism for tracking your microservices.
You can create a developer portal that allows easy creation of new microservices, provides information about existing services, and offers insights into your services. This facilitates the support of all your services and ensures visibility into their performance, ownership, and metadata.
With such a portal in place, teams can more effectively manage microservices, quickly create them as needed, and access all necessary information about each service. This approach helps avoid unnecessary proliferation of microservices and ensures their transparent and efficient management.
Create an information page for the entire system, displaying general information about microservices, such as their number, status, owner data, metadata, etc. This will help you better understand your system and its performance.
Conclusion
Microservices architecture can be highly beneficial for your organization if implemented correctly. However, if you fail to follow best practices, you may encounter some issues that can negatively impact your system as a whole. Therefore, it’s crucial to adhere to rules and recommendations to maximize the benefits of this architecture. In this article, we have discussed some of these rules and recommendations that will help you migrate to or create a new microservices architecture.
I hope this article helps you avoid some common mistakes and make your system more efficient and scalable. If you have any questions or comments about this article, please feel free to reach out to me.