15 Best Practices for Building a Microservices Architecture

Microservices Architecture is an evolving architectural pattern in which an application is designed and developed to collect small, autonomous, loosely connected services that communicate with one another.

In this thread, we will be grouping these best practices into categories that help in reflecting the progression of the different phases of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle). These are some efficient tips, especially for the fresh adopters looking forward to transitioning integral to a microservice framework.

Here are 15 best practices for microservice success, which you should be aware of:

For organizing and arranging

1. Based on your requirements, determine if the microservices architecture is a good fit. Adopting a microservices architecture only because the big names are doing it is not a good reason. It would help if you examined your needs to determine where and how you might divide them into valuable functions. Make sure your application can be subdivided into microservices while still maintaining its basic functionality and operability.
2. Make sure everyone is on board with the plan. The transition from a monolithic architecture to microservices is a long and arduous process that affects more than just the development team. Therefore, stakeholders should examine the amount of time, money, and technical knowledge required to make the necessary infrastructure modifications.
3. Form microservices-focused teams. Teams should treat each microservice as though it were a separate application. Assign various microservices to various teams. This also necessitates that such teams possess the requisite skills and tools to create, deploy, and operate a service independently. Teams should be adaptable and large enough to conduct operations independently without wasting time talking.

When creating the microservice, keep the following in mind:

1. Make a clear distinction between your microservices and your business functions and services. You’ll be able to avoid creating microservices that are either too big or too little if you do this. If the former is the case, there are no advantages to employing the microservice architecture. The latter will result in a massive increase in operational costs that will outweigh any gains.
2. Create loosely linked services with excellent cohesion that cover a single constrained environment. A loosely connected service relies on other services as little as possible. To achieve high cohesiveness, the service’s design must adhere to the single responsibility principle, which states that it should fulfill only one primary purpose and execute it well. Finally, make your services domain-specific while still having internal domain details and domain-specific models. A Domain-Driven Design is achieved when a microservice supports a single-bounded context (DDD).
3. To communicate between services, use APIs and events. It is not a good idea for assistance to call each other directly. Instead, create an API gateway that manages authentication, requests, and answers for the services, as well as throttling. You may quickly redirect traffic from the API gateway to the updated version of your favor if you have an API gateway in place.
4. When designing a microservice architecture, keep security in mind. Adopt the DevSecOps approach as a recommended practice to provide a secure microservices framework. Because of their dispersed structure, microservices are more vulnerable to attack vectors in general. As a result, compared to a monolithic framework, provisioning security requires an entirely different approach—which is why DevSecOps is ideal.

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When it came to creating the microservice

1. Each service should have its version control strategy. For simplicity of access provisioning and clean version control logs, each service should have its repository. This is especially useful if you are making a modification that could potentially break other services.
2. The development environment should be the same on all machines. Set up the service’s development environment as virtual machines to allow developers to adjust the framework and get started swiftly.
3. Make the service endpoints you are exposing backward compatible. You don’t want to annoy any of your callers. To do so, use stringent contract tests to guard against unexpected changes. Backward compatibility is also possible thanks to the API calls made in response to each user query. This allows your company to develop production-ready applications more quickly.

For the storage and administration of data

1. Each microservice should have its database or data storage. Choose a database that meets your microservice’s requirements, tailor the architecture and storage to the data it will hold, and utilize it only for that microservice. This is still one of the most critical aspects of developing a robust microservice framework. The maintainance of each service is separate while cooperating with other services via a service mesh.

For Deployment and Hosting

1. Separately deploy your microservices. This saves time when communicating with numerous teams during routine maintenance or upgrades projects. You also don’t want a single service to consume an excessive amount of resources, causing other services to suffer as a result. This helps with fault tolerance and avoids a full-blown outage by isolating each microservice from problems in other components.
2. Make your microservices containerized. Containers and microservices are frequently used together. Individual services can be deployed and managed individually with containerized microservices, without affecting services hosted on other containers. Containers also provide platform independence and interoperability, which are ideal for microservice architecture goals.
3. Create a separate build for your microservices and use automation to deploy them.
   Enhancing efficiency through automation is an important part of implementing the DevOps methodology. You can automate DevOps workflows by enabling Constant Integration and Constant Delivery (CD/CI) with automation solutions like Jenkins.

For operations and maintenance:

1. Use an integrated system for monitoring and logging. An integrated logging system ensures that all microservices send logs in the same format while saving records separately for each of them. This, rather than a monolithic approach, allows for quicker error handling and root cause analysis.

Conclusion:

Microservices make it easier to maintain applications, but making the switch to a microservices design is complex. Although the methodology to adopt microservices varies depending on the use case, some basic best practices are constant.