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In this article by Rajesh RV, the author of Spring Microservices, you will learn aboutthe concepts of microservices. More than sticking to definitions, it is better to understand microservices by examining some common characteristics of microservices that are seen across many successful microservices implementations. Spring Boot is an ideal framework to implement microservices. In this article, we will examine how to implement microservices using Spring Boot with an example use case. Beyond services, we will have to be aware of the challenges around microservices implementation. This article will also talk about some of the common challenges around microservices.

A successful microservices implementation has to have some set of common capabilities. In this article, we will establish a microservices capability model that can be used in a technology-neutral framework to implement large-scale microservices.

What are microservices?

Microservices is an architecture style used by many organizations today as a game changer to achieve a high degree of agility, speed of delivery, and scale. Microservices give us a way to develop more physically separated modular applications.

Microservices are not invented. Many organizations, such as Netflix, Amazon, and eBay, successfully used the divide-and-conquer technique to functionally partition their monolithic applications into smaller atomic units, and each performs a single function. These organizations solved a number of prevailing issues they experienced with their monolithic application. Following the success of these organizations, many other organizations started adopting this as a common pattern to refactor their monolithic applications. Later, evangelists termed this pattern microservices architecture.

Microservices originated from the idea of Hexagonal Architecture coined by Alister Cockburn. Hexagonal Architecture is also known as thePorts and Adapters pattern.

Microservices is an architectural style or an approach to building IT systems as aset of business capabilities that are autonomous, self-contained, and loosely coupled.

The preceding diagram depicts a traditional N-tier application architecture having a presentation layer, business layer, and database layer. Modules A, B, and C represents three different business capabilities. The layers in the diagram represent a separation of architecture concerns. Each layer holds all three business capabilities pertaining to this layer. The presentation layer has the web components of all three modules, the business layer has the business components of all the three modules, and the database layer hosts tables of all the three modules. In most cases, layers are physically spreadable, whereas modules within a layer are hardwired.

Let’s now examine a microservices-based architecture, as follows:

As we can note in the diagram, the boundaries are inverted in the microservices architecture. Each vertical slice represents a microservice. Each microservice has its own presentation layer, business layer, and database layer. Microservices are aligned toward business capabilities. By doing so, changes to one microservice do not impact others.

There is no standard for communication or transport mechanisms for microservices. In general, microservices communicate with each other using widely adopted lightweight protocols such as HTTP and REST or messaging protocols such as JMS or AMQP. In specific cases, one might choose more optimized communication protocols such as Thrift, ZeroMQ, Protocol Buffers, or Avro.

As microservices are more aligned to the business capabilities and have independently manageable lifecycles, they are the ideal choice for enterprises embarking on DevOps and cloud. DevOps and cloud are two other facets of microservices.

Microservices are self-contained, independently deployable, and autonomous services that take full responsibility of a business capability and its execution. They bundle all dependencies, including library dependencies and execution environments such as web servers and containers or virtual machines that abstract physical resources. These self-contained services assume single responsibility and are well enclosed with in a bounded context.

Microservices – The honeycomb analogy

The honeycomb is an ideal analogy to represent the evolutionary microservices architecture.

In the real world, bees build a honeycomb by aligning hexagonal wax cells. They start small, using different materials to build the cells. Construction is based on what is available at the time of building. Repetitive cells form a pattern and result in a strong fabric structure. Each cell in the honeycomb is independent but also integrated with other cells. By adding new cells, the honeycomb grows organically to a big solid structure. The content inside each cell is abstracted and is not visible outside. Damage to one cell does not damage other cells, and bees can reconstruct these cells without impacting the overall honeycomb.

Characteristics of microservices

The microservices definition discussed at the beginning of this article is arbitrary. Evangelists and practitioners have strong but sometimes different opinions on microservices. There is no single, concrete, and universally accepted definition for microservices. However, all successful microservices implementations exhibit a number of common characteristics. Some of these characteristics are explained as follows:

  • Since microservices are more or less similar to a flavor of SOA, many of the service characteristics of SOA are applicable to microservices, as well.
  • In the microservices world, services are first-class citizens. Microservices expose service endpoints as APIs and abstract all their realization details. The APIs could be synchronous or asynchronous. HTTP/REST is the popular choice for APIs.
  • As microservices are autonomous and abstract everything behind service APIs, it is possible to have different architectures for different microservices. The internal implementation logic, architecture, and technologies, including programming language, database, quality of service mechanisms,and so on, are completely hidden behind the service API.
  • Well-designed microservices are aligned to a single business capability, so they perform only one function. As a result, one of the common characteristics we see in most of the implementations are microservices with smaller footprints.
  • Most of the microservices implementations are automated to the maximum extent possible, from development to production.
  • Most large-scale microservices implementations have a supporting ecosystem in place. The ecosystem’s capabilities include DevOps processes, centralized log management, service registry, API gateways, extensive monitoring, service routing and flow control mechanisms, and so on.
  • Successful microservices implementations encapsulate logic and data within the service. This results in two unconventional situations: a distributed data and logic and decentralized governance.

A microservice example

The Customer profile microservice exampleexplained here demonstrates the implementation of microservice and interaction between different microservices.

In this example, two microservices, Customer Profile and Customer Notification, will be developed.

As shown in the diagram, the Customer Profile microservice exposes methods to create, read, update, and delete a customer and a registration service to register a customer. The registration process applies a certain business logic, saves the customer profile, and sends a message to the CustomerNotification microservice. The CustomerNotification microservice accepts the message send by the registration service and sends an e-mail message to the customer using an SMTP server. Asynchronous messaging is used to integrate CustomerProfile with the CustomerNotification service.

The customer microservices class domain model diagram is as shown here:

Implementing this Customer Profile microservice is not a big deal. The Spring framework, together with Spring Boot, provides all the necessary capabilities to implement this microservice without much hassle. The key is CustomerController in the diagram, which exposes the REST endpoint for our microservice. It is also possible to use HATEOAS to explore the repository’s REST services directly using the @RepositoryRestResource annotation. The following code sample shows the Spring Boot main class called Application and theREST endpoint definition for theregistration of a new customer:

@SpringBootApplication

public class Application {

public static void main(String[] args) {

SpringApplication.run(Application.class, args);

 }

}

 

@RestController

class CustomerController{

//other code here

@RequestMapping( path="/register", method = RequestMethod.POST)

Customer register(@RequestBody Customer customer){

returncustomerComponent.register(customer);

}

}

CustomerControllerinvokes a component class, CustomerComponent. The component class/bean handles all the business logic. CustomerRepository is a Spring data JPA repository defined to handlethe persistence of the Customer entity.

The whole application will then be deployed as a Spring Boot application by building a standalone jar rather than using the conventional war file. Spring Boot encapsulates the server runtime along with the fat jar it produces. By default, it is an instance of the Tomcat server.

CustomerComponent, in addition to calling the CustomerRepository class, sends a message to the RabbitMQ queue, where the CustomerNotification component is listening. This can be easily achieved in Spring using the RabbitMessagingTemplate class as shown in the following Sender implementation:

@Component

class CustomerComponent {

//other code here

 

Customer register(Customer customer){

customerRespository.save(customer);

sender.send(customer.getEmail());

return customer;

}

}

 

@Component

@Lazy

class Sender {

RabbitMessagingTemplate template;

 

@Autowired

Sender(RabbitMessagingTemplate template){

this.template = template;

}

 

@Bean

Queue queue() {

return new Queue("CustomerQ", false);

}

 

public void send(String message){

template.convertAndSend("CustomerQ", message);

}

}

The receiver on the other sideconsumes the message using RabbitListener and sends out an e-mail using theJavaMailSender component. Execute the following code:

@Component

class Receiver {

@Autowired

private  JavaMailSenderjavaMailService;

 

@Bean

Queue queue() {

return new Queue("CustomerQ", false);

}

 

@RabbitListener(queues = "CustomerQ")

public void processMessage(String email) {

System.out.println(email);

SimpleMailMessagemailMessage=new SimpleMailMessage();

mailMessage.setTo(email);

mailMessage.setSubject("Registration");

mailMessage.setText("Successfully Registered");

javaMailService.send(mailMessage);

 

    }

 

}

In this case,CustomerNotification isour secondSpring Boot microservice. In this case, instead of the REST endpoint, it only exposes a message listener end point.

Microservices challenges

In the previous section,you learned about the right design decisions to be made and the trade-offs to be applied. In this section, we will review some of the challenges with microservices. Take a look at the following list:

  • Data islands: Microservices abstract their own local transactional store, which is used for their own transactional purposes. The type of store and the data structure will be optimized for the services offered by the microservice. This can lead to data islands and, hence, challenges around aggregating data from different transactional stores to derive meaningful information.
  • Logging and monitoring: Log files are a good piece of information for analysis and debugging. As each microservice is deployed independently, they emit separate logs, maybe to a local disk. This will result in fragmented logs. When we scale services across multiple machines, each service instance would produce separate log files. This makes it extremely difficult to debug and understand the behavior of the services through log mining.
  • Dependency management: Dependency management is one of the key issues in large microservices deployments. How do we ensure the chattiness between services is manageable?How do we identify and reduce the impact of a change? How do we know whether all the dependent services are up and running? How will the service behave if one of the dependent services is not available?
  • Organization’s culture: One of the biggest challenges in microservices implementation is the organization’s culture. An organization following waterfall development or heavyweight release management processes with infrequent release cycles is a challenge for microservices development. Insufficient automation is also a challenge for microservices deployments.
  • Governance challenges: Microservices impose decentralized governance, and this is quite in contrast to the traditional SOA governance. Organizations may find it hard to come up with this change, and this could negatively impact microservices development. How can we know who is consuming service? How do we ensure service reuse? How do we define which services are available in the organization? How do we ensure that the enterprise polices are enforced?
  • Operation overheads: Microservices deployments generally increases the number of deployable units and virtual machines (or containers). This adds significant management overheads and cost of operations.With a single application, a dedicated number of containers or virtual machines in an on-premises data center may not make much sense unless the business benefit is high. With many microservices, the number of Configurable Items (CIs) is too high, and the number of servers in which these CIs are deployed might also be unpredictable. This makes it extremely difficult to manage data in a traditional Configuration Management Database (CMDB).
  • Testing microservices: Microservices also pose a challenge for the testability of services. In order to achieve full service functionality, one service may rely on another service, and this, in turn, may rely on another service, either synchronously or asynchronously. The issue is how we test an end-to-end service to evaluate its behavior. Dependent services may or may not be available at the time of testing.
  • Infrastructure provisioning: As briefly touched upon under operation overheads, manual deployment can severely challenge microservices rollouts. If a deployment has manual elements, the deployer or operational administrators should know the running topology, manually reroute traffic, and then deploy the application one by one until all the services are upgraded. With many server instances running, this could lead to significant operational overheads. Moreover, the chance of error is high in this manual approach.

Beyond just services– The microservices capability model

Microservice are not as simple as the Customer Profile implementation we discussedearlier. This is specifically true when deploying hundreds or thousands of services. In many cases, an improper microservices implementation may lead to a number of challenges, as mentioned before.Any successful Internet-scale microservices deployment requires a number of additional surrounding capabilities.

The following diagram depicts the microservices capability model:

The capability model is broadly classified in to four areas, as follows:

  • Core capabilities, which are part of the microservices themselves
  • Supporting capabilities, which are software solutions supporting core microservice implementations
  • Infrastructure capabilities, which are infrastructure-level expectations for a successful microservices implementation
  • Governance capabilities, which are more of process, people, and reference information

Core capabilities

The core capabilities are explained here:

  • Service listeners (HTTP/Messaging): If microservices are enabled for HTTP-based service endpoints, then the HTTP listener will be embedded within the microservices, thereby eliminating the need to have any external application server requirement. The HTTP listener will be started at the time of the application startup. If the microservice is based on asynchronous communication, then instead of an HTTP listener, a message listener will be stated. Optionally, other protocols could also be considered. There may not be any listeners if the microservices is a scheduled service. Spring Boot and Spring Cloud Streams provide this capability.
  • Storage capability: Microservices have storage mechanisms to store state or transactional data pertaining to the business capability. This is optional, depending on the capabilities that are implemented. The storage could be either a physical storage (RDBMS,such as MySQL, and NoSQL,such as Hadoop, Cassandra, Neo4J, Elasticsearch,and so on), or it could be an in-memory store (cache,such as Ehcache and Data grids,such as Hazelcast, Infinispan,and so on).
  • Business capability definition: This is the core of microservices, in which the business logic is implemented. This could be implemented in any applicable language, such as Java, Scala, Conjure, Erlang, and so on. All required business logic to fulfil the function is embedded within the microservices itself.
  • Event sourcing: Microservices send out state changes to the external world without really worrying about the targeted consumers of these events. They could be consumed by other microservices, supporting services such as audit by replication, external applications,and so on. This will allow other microservices and applications to respond to state changes.
  • Service endpoints and communication protocols: This defines the APIs for external consumers to consume. These could be synchronous endpoints or asynchronous endpoints. Synchronous endpoints could be based on REST/JSON or other protocols such as Avro, Thrift, protocol buffers, and so on. Asynchronous endpoints will be through Spring Cloud Streams backed by RabbitMQ or any other messaging servers or other messaging style implementations, such as Zero MQ.
  • The API gateway: The API gateway provides a level of indirection by either proxying service endpoints or composing multiple service endpoints. The API gateway is also useful for policy enforcements. It may also provide real-time load balancing capabilities. There are many API gateways available in the market. Spring Cloud Zuul, Mashery, Apigee, and 3 Scale are some examples of API gateway providers.
  • User interfaces: Generally, user interfaces are also part of microservices for users to interact with the business capabilities realized by the microservices. These could be implemented in any technology and is channel and device agnostic.

Infrastructure capabilities

Certain infrastructure capabilities are required for a successful deployment and to manage large-scale microservices. When deploying microservices at scale, not having proper infrastructure capabilities can be challenging and can lead to failures.

  • Cloud: Microservices implementation is difficult in a traditional data center environment with a long lead time to provision infrastructures. Even a large number of infrastructure dedicated per microservice may not be very cost effective. Managing them internally in a data center may increase the cost of ownership and of operations. A cloud-like infrastructure is better for microservices deployment.
  • Containers or virtual machines: Managing large physical machines is not cost effective and is also hard to manage. With physical machines, it is also hard to handle automatic fault tolerance. Virtualization is adopted by many organizations because of its ability to provide an optimal use of physical resources, and it provides resource isolation. It also reduces the overheads in managing large physical infrastructure components. Containers are the next generation of virtual machines. VMWare, Citrix,and so on provide virtual machine technologies. Docker, Drawbridge, Rocket, and LXD are some containerizing technologies.
  • Cluster control and provisioning: Once we have a large number of containers or virtual machines, it is hard to manage and maintain them automatically. Cluster control tools provide a uniform operating environment on top of the containers and share the available capacity across multiple services. Apache Mesos and Kubernetes are examples of cluster control systems.
  • Application lifecycle management: Application lifecycle management tools help to invoke applications when a new container is launched or kill the application when the container shuts down. Application lifecycle management allows to script application deployments and releases. It automatically detects failure scenarios and responds to them, thereby ensuring the availability of the application. This works in conjunction with the cluster control software. Marathon partially address this capability.

Supporting capabilities

Supporting capabilities are not directly linked to microservices, but these are essential for large-scale microservices development.

  • Software-defined load balancer: The load balancer should be smart enough to understand the changes in deployment topology and respond accordingly. This moves away from the traditional approach of configuring static IP addresses, domain aliases, or cluster address in the load balancer. When new servers are added to the environment, it should automatically detect this and include them in the logical cluster by avoiding any manual interactions. Similarly, if a service instance is unavailable, it should take it out of the load balancer. A combination of Ribbon, Eureka, and Zuul provides this capability in Spring Cloud Netflix.
  • Central log management: As explored earlier in this article, a capability is required to centralize all the logs emitted by service instances with correlation IDs. This helps debug, identify performances bottlenecks, and in predictive analysis. The result of this could feedback into the lifecycle manager to take corrective actions.
  • Service registry: A service registry provides a runtime environment for services to automatically publish their availability at runtime. A registry will be a good source of information to understand the services topology at any point. Eureka from Spring Cloud, ZooKeeper, and Etcd are some of the service registry tools available.
  • Security service: The distributed microservices ecosystem requires a central server to manage service security. This includes service authentication and token services. OAuth2-based services are widely used for microservices security. Spring Security and Spring Security OAuth are good candidates to build this capability.
  • Service configuration: All service configurations should be externalized, as discussed in the Twelve-Factor application principles. A central service for all configurations could be a good choice. The Spring Cloud Config server and Archaius are out-of-the-box configuration servers.
  • Testing tools (Anti-Fragile, RUM, and so on): Netflix uses Simian Army for antifragile testing. Mature services need consistent challenges to see the reliability of the services and how good fallback mechanisms are. Simian Army components create various error scenarios to explore the behavior of the system under failure scenarios.
  • Monitoring and dashboards: Microservices also require a strong monitoring mechanism. This monitoring is not just at the infrastructurelevel but also at the service level. Spring Cloud Netflix Turbine, the Hysterix dashboard,and others provide service-level information. End-to-end monitoring tools,such as AppDynamic, NewRelic, Dynatrace, and other tools such as Statd, Sensu, and Spigo, could add value in microservices monitoring.
  • Dependency and CI management: We also need tools to discover runtime topologies, to find service dependencies, and to manage configurable items (CIs). A graph-based CMDB is more obvious to manage these scenarios.
  • Data lakes: As discussed earlier in this article, we need a mechanism to combine data stored in different microservices and perform near real-time analytics. Data lakesare a good choice to achieve this. Data ingestion tools such as Spring Cloud Data Flow, Flume, and Kafka are used to consume data. HDFS, Cassandra,and others are used to store data.
  • Reliable messaging: If the communication is asynchronous, we may need a reliable messaging infrastructure service, such as RabbitMQ or any other reliable messaging service. Cloud messaging or messaging as service is a popular choice in Internet-scale message-based service endpoints.

Process and governance capabilities

The last in the puzzle are the process and governance capabilities required for microservices, which are:

  • DevOps: Key in successful implementation is to adopt DevOps. DevOps complements microservices development by supporting agile development, high-velocity delivery, automation, and better change management.
  • DevOps tools: DevOps tools for agile development, continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment are essential for a successful delivery of microservices. A lot of emphasis is required in automated, functional, and real user testing as well as synthetic, integration, release, and performance testing.
  • Microservices repository: A microservices repository is where the versioned binaries of microservices are placed. These could be a simple Nexus repository or container repositories such as the Docker registry.
  • Microservice documentation: It is important to have all microservices properly documented. Swagger or API blueprint are helpful in achieving good microservices documentation.
  • Reference architecture and libraries: Reference architecture provides a blueprint at the organization level to ensure that services are developed according to certain standards and guidelines in a consistent manner. Many of these could then be translated to a number of reusable libraries that enforce service development philosophies.

Summary

In this article,you learned the concepts and characteristics of microservices. We took as example a holiday portal to understand the concept of microservices better. We also examined some of the common challenges in large-scale microservice implementation. Finally, we established a microservices capability model in this article that can be used to deliver successful Internet-scale microservices.

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