Microservices and DevOps with MULE

Microservices and DevOps are trending and have emerged in the enterprise. Both practices are designed to offer greater agility and operational efficiency for enterprise.

Microservice Architecture emerged from DevOps Ideologies that came being at companies like Amazon, Netflix, Facebook and Google etc. All those companies had monolithic applications which evolved into decomposed services, which then communicated via RESTful APIs to become the announcer of Microservice Architecture.

What is a Microservice Architecture?

James Lewis and Martin Fowler gave us the best definition of microservice architectures:

The Microservice architecture style provides an approach to building larger application as a suite of smaller services, where each service:

·        Is built around business capability

·        Runs its own process

·        Communicate via lightweight mechanism,

·         Is independently deployable by automated deployment machinery

As a result, microservice promote business flexibility, which is achieved If new feature requests have maximum probability of impacting only one microservice, using DevOps team to fix the problem quickly, fast re test with automation, and redeploy the microservice.

Microservices and DevOps changing the world of IT together:

Microservices driven architecture introduces change, which is often well received by those creating modern applications and those embracing that change are finding productivity is increasing at an astonishing rate. Solutions can be delivered in a quickly way to those requesting flexible, scalable applications. For DeveOps fields, microservices bring some significant benefits, including:

·        Deployability: Microservice fuels the ability to roll out new versions of a service. That is due to shorter build, test and deploy cycles. Microservice can also incorporate flexibility needed to employ service-specific persistence, replication, security and monitoring configuration.

·        Availability: To release a new version of a particular service need very little downtime, on other hand rolling out a new version of a service in the monolithic application normally requires a full restart of the entire monolith.

·        Scalability: We can scale microservices easily using pools, clusters, grids. Because of that deployment characteristic, microservices is a great match for the elasticity of the cloud.

·        Reliability: If there is fault in a microservice it only affects microservice and its consumers. When monolithic applications experience a fault, the entire monolith may fail.

·        Management: Microservices can use the agile methodology, where the application development effort is divided across teams that are smaller and work more independently.

DevOps and API Life Capabilities on Anypoint Platform

Anypoint Platform provides a unified suite of design, management and runtime capabilities to make easy for organizations to address the full API lifecycle. Anypoint Platform's component guide developers from design to implementation to production and beyond—enabling discovery and self-service. Each of the steps mentioned above has certain aspects that can be automated. Most developers are familiar with the build stage; work done in Anypoint Studio can be easily plugged into your continuous integration pipeline, leveraging some of the technologies that were mentioned earlier: GitHub for version control, Maven for dependencies management and build automation, JUnit and MUnit for test automation, and JIRA or ServiceNow for issue and service management.

When the code is ready to be shipped, MuleSoft customers often use Jenkins, Puppet, Chef, or HP ALM for both deployment automation and the orchestration of release processes across a number of different environments: dev, test, stage, and production. Docker is quickly gaining popularity to reduce the complexities of continuous deployment, and the Mule runtime can be shipped in a Docker container. And through the management agent, Anypoint Platform for APIs and Anypoint Platform CLI, users can further automate processes using configuration automation and management tools such as Puppet, Chef, Ansible, and Salt, instead of the Anypoint Platform user interface.

DevOps and APIs –the perfect partners

With API-led connectivity approach, every asset becomes a managed API, discoverable through self-service with no loss of control. Organizations are already embracing this approach to become more agile, efficient and innovative.

The marriage of API-led connectivity with DevOps will not necessarily be easy, requiring a change in mind-set to one where assets are produced with the intent that they will be consumed by others in the business. As such, central IT needs to change culturally to become an enabler of reusable, self-service consumption.