What are 10 Microservices Best Practices?

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Microservices Implementation best practices

We will discuss below the following microservice development best practices:

1. Find the best microservices architecture
2. Outline your microservices
3. Domain-Driven Design
4. Get everyone onboard
5. Utilize RESTful APIs
6. Build teams for specific microservices
7. Setup server and data storage environment
8. Document API’s
9. Use the best DevOps toolkit
10. Monitoring is key

Microservices Best practice #1: Determine if the microservices architecture fits your requirements

Amazon, Twitter, eBay, and PayPal are examples of organizations that have successfully implemented the microservices architecture design. It’s a popular pattern, however, that doesn’t mean it will work for you.

If you can’t break down your web app into functions that provide value then the microservices architecture won’t make sense for you. Read “Pattern: Decompose by business capability” for more insights.

Best practice #2: Define your microservices

You need to make a clear differentiation between your business functions, your services, and microservices. Without this, there is a possibility that you will build microservices that are too large.

This is a form of under-fragmentation, and you will see no benefits from using the microservices approach.

At the other end of the spectrum lies the possibility of creating too many microservices. This will result in the over-fragmentation of your architecture. Remember that to manage a microservices architecture, you need a matured operations team.

Read about it in “Microservice Trade-Offs”.

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If you have too many microservices, the operational management cost will be high. You will see the surge in operational cost overshadowing the benefits you accrue from microservices.

Best practice #3: Use ‘Domain-Driven Design’ (DDD) to design microservices

While this step is closely related to the exercise of defining your microservices, it goes one step further. Here, you design your microservices around your business domains. Let’s review the Netflix example. They run their content delivery and different tracking services from separate servers.

‘Domain-Driven Design’ (DDD) is a design principle that expresses an object-oriented model using practical rules and ideas. It helps software architects to understand the different business domains, therefore, they can focus on building microservices architecture that the business can understand well.

Read more about it in “DDD 101 — the 5-Minute tour”.

#4 in Microservices Best practices: Get early buy-in from the organizational leaders and the team

Implementing the microservice architecture design isn’t simply a technical decision. Such a transformation is expensive, moreover, the impact goes beyond just the in-house development team. The transition from a monolithic architecture is a long-drawn-out project. The senior management in the organization must commit the funds for it.

The impact on your development team will be significant. Your team will have so far been using an end-to-end testing process to test the entire system in case of an enhancement. You will now need to modularize the system around microservices. This requires a cultural transformation.

The transformation will help your business agility since it will facilitate continuous delivery. However, the team must fully buy into the transformation. Read our guide “5 ways Agile can help with change management” to learn how you can effectively aid this transformation.

#5 in Microservices Best practices: Use RESTful APIs optimally

The microservices architecture pattern can deliver a significant value if you make optimal use of RESTful APIs. RESTful APIs offer numerous advantages, e.g., you don’t need to install anything on the client-side. You don’t need SDKs or frameworks since HTTP requests to consume the API gateway service is sufficient.

Read more about the advantages of RESTful APIs in this Quora Q&A thread.

Leonard Richardson, an expert in the subject of RESTful APIs, has propounded a maturity model for REST API usage. To realize the best value from your microservices architecture, you should try to reach the highest level in this maturity model.

Read “10 best practices for microservice architectures” for more insights.

Best practice #6: Organize your team around microservices

You need to build separate teams to tackle different microservices. These teams should be empowered sufficiently to work on their microservice. However, all teams should be cross-functional and aware of the overall project plan.

Each team should have the necessary skills to build cloud-native applications. You need business analysts, developers, testers, and DevOps engineers in each team. Each team should have its’ own project manager (PM). Our guide “How to build a scrum development team?” can help you with organizing these teams.

#7 in Microservices Best practices: Provision of separate data storage for each microservice

Each microservice should have provision for its’ data storage. Each microservice should fully own its’ data. Of course, data can be shared between microservices, however, this should happen via APIs.

If multiple microservices share the same data storage, this will lead to coupling between services. This will defeat the purpose of the microservices architecture considerably. Read more about it in “Top 5+ microservices architecture and design best practices”.

Best practice #8: Design APIs based on domain and document them well

Take adequate care to design your APIs based on business domains. Document APIs well. Consider using tools like Swagger. We have a guide “How to Build RESTful API for Your Mobile App?” which you can consult.

Best practice #9: Use a good DevOps toolset

By now, you should have designed your microservices well enough to deploy them independently. To realize optimal value from these microservices, you need to automate build and deployment management. Therefore, you will need a good set of DevOps tools.

Jenkins for deployment automation and Docker for containerization are a good combination. However, if you want more examples, read “The 10 best DevOps tools”.

#10 in Microservices Best practices: Invest in monitoring

If you were using a monolithic architecture and are transitioning to a microservices architecture, you have to address increased complexity. Increased demand for performance and the dynamic environment requires more advanced monitoring.

A good monitoring solution should address ongoing changes to resource allocation. Such a solution should store data gathered from monitoring in a central database. The insights that it generates should throw light on the dynamic nature of the application.

Monitoring agents should be used for each microservice. The monitoring system should support root cause analysis. Read more about its’ importance in “5 fundamentals to a successful microservice design”.

Key considerations when deploying the microservices architecture

You can see that deploying microservices architecture can be an involved project. Keep the following considerations in mind when undertaking such a project:

1. Managing dependencies

You need to manage dependencies differently in microservice architecture than in a monolithic application. Microservice architecture involves each service operating on its own.

However, one microservice may need to access other parts of the system. This is where complexity arises. Think through the dependencies carefully.  

2. Finding an architect with the required knowledge

An architect will play a key role in implementing the microservice architecture. You need a competent architect. The architect might need to use event-driven aggregates to implement this architecture, which requires appropriate backend-related expertise.

Remember that microservices in a microservice architecture are distributed systems. Therefore, the architect needs good knowledge in this area.

Furthermore, the architect needs to implement queries that retrieve data from multiple data stores. That will be more complex in microservice architecture than a monolith.

The project might use the “event sourcing” pattern, which increases complexity. The architect might need to use the “Common Query Responsibility Segregation” (CQRS) pattern here. 

The architect might need to use the “circuit breaker” pattern in some cases. This can help where multiple services collaborate when servicing requests. One service might synchronously invoke another service. This other service might have a downtime, alternatively, it might experience high latency.

The “circuit breaker” pattern prevents such issues from impacting the other services.  

Load balancing happens to be another area where the architect needs enough experience. It helps microservices to maintain security and availability while managing the load on the system.

Developers might experience confusion about how many endpoints to implement when creating a microservice. A knowledgeable software architect can make a big difference here since he/she knows that the number of endpoints depends on the kind of service.

3. Using the right tools and frameworks like “Spring Boot”

Using the right open-source tools can significantly help to implement the microservice architecture. Thankfully, you can take the advantage of a rich open-source ecosystem of tools.

E.g., you can create microservices easily with “Spring Boot”, a popular open-source framework. The following are a few more examples of such tools:

• Postman for API development;
• Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) for messaging;
• Logstash for monitoring;
• Kubernetes for deployment.

GitHub deserves a mention here, although it’s not fully open-source. This helps you with version control and source code management.

4. Designing microservices for scalability

Scalability is a key factor when you design microservices. Whether you create a new service or enhance existing services, you need to pay attention to this. You need to consider various approaches and techniques for this.

A good example is caching. Remember to follow the right tutorials for implementing it in the microservice architecture. Asynchronous messaging enables you to offer better scalability when building microservices.

5. Handling authentication and authorization

Handling user authentication and authorization varies significantly between microservices and monolithic applications. You need architects and developers that know these differences well.

E.g., they need to define bounded contexts accurately. This will help them to define user authorization with plenty of granularities.

Take another example. Your team will need to use tokens for user authentication. Various types of tokens exist, such as the “JSON Web Token” (JWT). This open-standard token has gained popularity in recent years. You would want architects and developers with the knowledge of such modern standards.

6. Using a service mesh appropriately  

Sometimes you need to implement external configurations like credentials along with the microservice architecture pattern. You might need to monitor metrics to learn how the application performs. Consider using a service mesh to manage communications between services.

Planning to build a microservices architecture?

This guide discusses the best practices for implementing microservices architecture and covers the key elements. Note that this kind of project is complex and requires end-to-end project management in addition to microservices best practices.

If you need to engage a software development partner, consult our guide “How to find the best software development company?”. If still looking for experinced software developers, contact DevTeam.Space by sending your project requirements. We will get back to you to discuss in detail on how we can help.

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