What are microservices?
Microservices are a software development architecture that divides an application into small autonomous services, each of which executes a specific process and communicates with the others through lightweight communication mechanisms, such as APIs (Application Programming Interface) or messages.
Unlike traditional monolithic architectures, microservices allow you to separate the application into smaller, independent components that can be developed, deployed, and scaled separately. Each microservice is responsible for a specific functionality and can be developed using the programming language and technology most suitable for that task.
Microservices promote modularity, scalability, resilience, and maintainability of applications. Because the services are independent, they can be developed, tested, deployed, and scaled independently of each other.
It is important to note that the adoption of microservices also involves challenges, such as managing the complexity of communication between services and the need for adequate infrastructure and tools for monitoring and managing distributed services.
What are the advantages
- Scalability and flexibility: since each microservice is autonomous and independent of the others, it is possible to scale the services needed to meet the workload. This allows you to optimize resource usage and avoid the need to scale the entire application. In addition, microservices make it possible to introduce new services or modify existing ones without affecting the other components of the application, thus providing greater flexibility in the process of developing and updating the software.
- Easy development and maintenance: the microservices approach favors modularity and the separation of responsibilities. This makes it easier to develop and maintain applications, since each service can be managed independently. Development teams can focus on specific services without having to understand the full complexity of the application. In addition, thanks to the separation of services, it is possible to introduce new functionality or make changes without having to touch the entire system, thus reducing the risks of regression and simplifying the debugging process.
- Agility and speed of release: microservices allow for a more agile development and release approach. Because the services are independent, teams can work in parallel on different features or services without having to wait for the entire application to be ready. This reduces development and release times, allowing you to respond more quickly to changes in business needs or user requirements. In addition, thanks to the separation of services, it is possible to carry out the continuous release of individual microservices without having to interrupt the entire application, ensuring greater system availability.
How microservices and orchestration work
In the field of microservices, orchestration refers to the management and coordination of interactions between different microservices within a system. The goal of orchestration is to ensure that microservices collaborate effectively to perform a complex operation or satisfy a user request.
Microservice orchestration can be implemented using a variety of strategies and technologies, including the following common approaches:
- API Gateway that acts as the main entry point for requests from users or other services. It acts as an intermediary between clients and the various microservices behind the scenes. The API Gateway can manage authentication, authorization, load balancing, and other common functionality, as well as route requests to the appropriate microservices based on request data or other configured routing rules.
- Event choreography: In this approach, microservices communicate with each other by exchanging asynchronous events. Each microservice is responsible for reacting to the events it receives and can generate new events to notify other services of the actions taken. This model allows for greater decentralization and scalability, but requires more complex management of the consistency and flow of events across the entire system.
- Orchestration service: in this case, a dedicated orchestration service, also known as an “orchestrator”, is introduced. This service deals with managing the complex workflow, coordinating the execution of the various microservices involved. The orchestrator can make decisions based on the defined rules, call the appropriate microservices in the correct order, and handle any errors or exceptions that occur during the execution of the workflow.
- BFF (Backend For Frontend): the BFF pattern involves the implementation of a dedicated microservice to meet the specific needs of a client application or a particular user interface. This service acts as an intermediary between the client application and the various microservices that provide the necessary data. The BFF simplifies client application requests, reducing the complexity of direct interaction with the many underlying microservices.
The orchestration approach chosen depends on the specific needs of the system and the applications involved. It is important to consider factors such as the complexity of the interactions between microservices, the required performance, scalability, fault tolerance, and ease of development and maintenance.
In addition, it is possible to combine different orchestration approaches to achieve the best result for a specific system.
Why choose the Xacria solution
The Xacria solution uses the most advanced technologies for the development of microservices and their orchestration. In fact, microservices communicate through messages on a broker designed specifically to manage the streaming of data in real time in a light and distributed way.
The fundamental characteristics of this approach are:
- time-based data persistence: it is possible to configure the time the data stays on the platform
- scalability: the platform adapts to the evolution of the amount of data without particular efforts
In addition, the Xacria solution provides the developer with a suite of tools that help him in the development and containerization of the microservice.
In fact, with the presence of archetypes already provided, the solution offers the developer a simple and quick way to create all the microservice models supported by the platform.
In a few minutes, a new developer can have a working project to use as a starting point to introduce the specific logic of the microservice they are developing.
Within the structure created by the archetype, there are scripts that help with the compilation, testing and containerization of the application, which, at this point, becomes easily deployable on any service management platform such as Kubernetes.
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