Building and Deploying Microservices!

When it comes to modern software development, microservices are one of the hottest trends. These small, standalone software services allow developers to build and deploy smaller code chunks that can be updated more frequently and respond faster to user needs. In addition, with microservices, teams can update individual services on their own schedule instead of waiting for a new version of the entire application or OS upgrade. Each service is also much smaller, making it easier to understand, test, document, and maintain. Moreover, microservices help you address any challenges that may arise during development.

This chart below, borrowed from Burr Sutter’s talk titled “9 Steps to Awesome with Kubernetes ,” explains Microservices evolution.

What is a Microservice?

A microservice is a small, autonomous software service inside a larger application. Traditional monolithic applications are comprised of modules built as one piece in a single codebase. In a microservices-based architecture, services are designed as independent and modular pieces and can be deployed separately. Each microservice typically handles one specific business function and is built, deployed, and managed independently.

Image credits:?microservices.io

While there are many different definitions of what a microservice is, there are a few characteristics they all possess:

• Decoupled and autonomous?-- It doesn’t rely on other services to do its job.
• Lightweight?-- It’s focused on doing one thing well so that it can be maintained and developed easily.
• Stateless?-- It doesn’t retain any data between requests.
• Loose coupling?– It doesn’t rely on other services to do its job
• Modular?– It can be used as a building block for other services.
• Scalable?– It can be scaled independently Shippable – You can build and deploy it independently from other services.

Why Use Microservices?

As we mentioned earlier, these small services can be updated more frequently. This is especially advantageous when the requirements often change, new features need to be added, or if a particular service becomes bogged down with lots of requests and needs an upgrade. With microservices, teams can update individual services on their own schedule instead of waiting for a new version of the entire application or OS upgrade.

Another reason to use microservices is that they help you address new challenges in software development, such as scalability, continuous integration (CI), deployment, and maintenance. Let’s look at each of these challenges in more detail.

Microservices Enable Scalability:

Scalability is the ability of a system, application, or process to handle increased amounts of work. When an application’s user base grows, you need to be able to add more servers to scale up the system so it can handle the increased load. You’ll need to add more servers when the application’s user base grows because the app can only handle so much work before it slows down or stops working completely.

With microservices, you can scale each service independently. You don’t have to add more servers to the entire application; you can just add more servers for the specific service that’s getting hit the hardest. This approach is known as sharding and is often used in database systems like Oracle, Postgres, and MySQL to scale out systems.

Microservices Support CI:

CI is the practice of building and testing new code regularly. When you’re consistently testing code, you can catch bugs and other issues before they release into production. The CI process often includes versioning, dependencies, code quality metrics, and other tools that help your team build software better and faster. microservices are best used to design your application so that you can easily integrate and test each service independently. This is often referred to as “service-driven development.”

Microservices Deployment:

Deployment is the process of moving your application from your development environment to your production environment. You should design your application with microservices in mind so that each service is easy to deploy. With microservices, you can easily move each service between environments or update one service without affecting other services.

Microservices and DevOps: Friends For Life

Microservices and DevOps complete each other Both microservices and DevOps aim to improve the agility and operational efficiency in an organization. Microservices architecture has emerged from a common set of DevOps principles and ideologies, then giants like Facebook, Google, Netflix adopted these principles to improve the organization's culture and increase productivity between teams by minimizing the conflicts between Devs and Ops. Neither microservices or DevOps are limited to transforming monolithic applications into decomposed services; they also aim to create?a healthy culture and environment within organizations. Both microservices and DevOps are definitely going to yield amazing results.

1. In microservices, we see shorter builds, test, and deploy cycles and this clearly indicates more agility which, in turn, is validated by DevOps principles.

2. Microservices embrace a common tool set for both development and operations hence ensuring proper communication between both parties and increasing productivity.

3. Containerization is another big revolution with microservices, isolating the applications environments for testing, therefore adding up to speed and agility again.

4. Microservices leverage agile methodology where the application and effort is divided across teams that are smaller and work more independently.

5. Both aim at increased deployment frequency and lead to faster time-to-market, hence making a great feedback loop so that any defects found can be noticed and addressed easily.

??????Tutorial Time??????

Let’s build a simple node.js microservices application?and see how we can deploy it onto Kubernetes. The complete step-by-step tutorial is HERE .

[We will be using Harness CI/CD to build and deploy our application in minutes]

A successful deployment is shown above for your reference.

Ultimately, the pros and cons of using microservices will depend on your particular situation. However, in general, microservices are excellent for large and complex applications that need to scale. Therefore, they are often used in conjunction with containers and service-oriented architecture. On the other hand, microservices are not always valid for small applications. However, microservices are suitable for both large and small applications, and their usefulness depends on how they are implemented.

Microservices are the new trend in modern software development. They allow developers to build and deploy smaller, more independent code chunks that can be updated more frequently and respond better to user needs. While there are many different types of microservice architectures, we recommend that you choose a microservices architecture that makes sense for your business and technology stack.

BTW, this might seem like a shameless plug but let me add it anyways.

We recently announced several new speed enhancements for the Harness Continuous Integration module. Our test data shows that Harness CI builds up to 4x faster than other leading solutions.?This will go a long way in helping developer productivity and companies remain competitive while saving resources — new data shows how businesses can save up to 300% in infrastructure costs as a result of these recent features.?

More details on this very exciting news in this blog post by?Harness’?Brad Rydzewski:?The Data is In: Harness CI is the Fastest on the Planet

In the unscripted conference, developers saw a live demo of head to head comparison between Harness CI and GitHub actions. The final time for the Kafka build was as below,

Harness: 1 minute 45 seconds and Github actions completing in 29 minutes.

[The above image is taken from Alex's post ]

Thanks!