Python Technology to Build Microservices Architecture

Appendix of Content:?

1. What are Microservices??
2. Origins of (SOA) service-oriented architecture??
3. Monolithic Architecture??
4. Microservices Architecture??
5. Philosophy of Microservice?
6. Reasons to migrate monolithic Architecture to Microservices Architecture??
7. Principles of Microservices?
8. Benefits of Microservices??
9. Techniques that facilitate the development of a microservice architecture??
10. Python Technology for Microservices??

• Adapting Technology Stack?
• Python Language?
• List of Python Web Frameworks?
• Databases?

11. Ensar criteria for choosing Python Technology of Microservices??

What are Microservices??

Microservices are gaining popularity in the market as businesses work towards building complex and larger applications that can be segregated and handled as a compilation of smaller services. An increasing number of people have been looking to redesign their traditional monolithic systems into a sequence of single independent microservices.?

The natural question that comes to your mind is, which language/technology to be used while developing microservices for your next project??

You can use various technologies based on what best serves the purpose of your microservices. Let’s go through the python programming language that has features and libraries, which will help you in getting your job done. Why should we use python- because python is the most advanced technology nowadays and also python deals with AI, ML, IoT, Data Analysis & Data Visualization projects. First, let’s begin by understanding Microservices.?

Origins of (SOA) service-oriented architecture:?

When discussing microservices, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) is often used as a starting point. SOA is a way of thinking about software architecture that encourages reusable software components that provide well-defined interfaces. This allows those components to be reused and applied to new situations.?

SOA services could communicate via Inter-Process Communication (IPC) using sockets on the same machine, through shared memory, through indirect message queues, or even with Remote Procedure Calls (RPC).?

Monolithic Architecture:?

The monolith architecture is everything about the service in one place – the API, database, and all associated tools are managed as part of one code base.?

Microservices Architecture:?

The microservices architecture is a development methodology wherein you can fragment a single application into a series of smaller services, each executing in its own process and interacting with lightweight mechanisms. The microservices are developed around business capabilities, which are independently deployable with an automated deployment mechanism. The microservices architecture needs a bare minimum of management of these services, built-in different programming languages, and employs different data storage technologies.?

Philosophy of Microservices:?

The philosophy of microservice is similar to the Unix philosophy i.e. “Do one thing and do it well”. Characteristics are described as below…?

• Componentization to perform the single functionality?
• Organized as per business capabilities?
• Focuses on products not process?
• Decentralized governance and data management?
• Service is elastic, resilient, composable, minimal, and complete.?

Reasons to Migrate Monolithic Architecture to Microservices Architecture:?

?The monolithic approach makes it difficult for users to become agile as it consumes a lot of time and effort. Apart from it, there are several challenges and limitations of monolithic architecture that include:?

1. In a monolithic architecture, for a large application, it is hard to comprehend the complexity and sometimes it is tough to handle the code.?
2. Applications require extensive manual testing in order to comprehend the impact of alterations.?
3. Even for a small change, the entire application requires to be deployed again.?
4. The heavy application with monolithic architecture can slow down the start-up time. And more...?

• Lack of agility and innovation?
• Impossible to scale a part of the system?
• Problematic to apply new technology?
• Harder to make updates/changes?
• Interdependency of components.?

On the contrary, microservices architecture is rapidly evolving to address these challenges of monolithic systems. As the name suggests, microservices are micros, which break up a monolith app into a set of independent services. Unlike slow and heavy monolith architectures, microservices are faster to develop and deploy. Migrating from a monolithic application to microservices also enables you to optimize resources, enhance collaboration and streamline business processes.?

Microservices simplify app management, making it easier for you to build, deploy, update, test, and scale each service independently. It also makes it easier to collaborate and share data amongst different teams.?

Principles of Microservices:?

There are the following principles of Microservices:?

• Single Responsibility principle?
• Modelled around business domain?
• Isolate Failure?
• Infrastructure automation?
• Deploy independently?

Single Responsibility Principle:?

The single responsibility principle states that a class or a module in a program should have only one responsibility. Any microservice cannot serve more than one responsibility at a time.?

Modeled around business domain:?

Microservice never restricts itself from accepting appropriate technology stacks or databases. The stack or database is most suitable for solving the business purpose.?

Isolated Failure:?

The large application can remain mostly unaffected by the failure of a single module. It is possible that a service can fail at any time. So, it is important to detect failure quickly, if possible, automatically restore failure.?

Infrastructure Automation:?

Infrastructure automation is the process of scripting environments. With the help of a scripting environment, we can apply the same configuration to a single node or thousands of nodes. It is also known as configuration management, scripted infrastructures, and system configuration management.?

Deploy independently:?

Microservices are platform agnostic. It means we can design and deploy them independently without affecting the other services.?

Benefits of Microservices:?

1. Easier Process Adoption – With a microservices architecture, new technology, and process adoption becomes simple.?
2. Separation of concerns - Each microservice can be developed independently by a separate team. For instance, building a reservation service can be a full project on its own. The team in charge can code it in the programming language and database of their choice, as long as it has a well-documented HTTP API.?
3. Smaller projects to deal with - Breaking the complexity of the project, when you add a new feature to an application easily. Dealing with a smaller project also reduces risks when improving the application.?
4. Small Modules – As the application is broken into smaller chunks, it is easy for developers to develop and maintain.?
5. DURS - Each service in microservices architecture can be independently DURS (Deployed, Updated, Replaced & Scaled)?
6. Unaffected - Even the failure of a single module won’t affect the remaining part of applications.?
7. More scaling and deployment options - microservices are standalone applications, there's finer control over deployments, which makes scaling easier.?

Microservices guarantee increased autonomy of development teams (speed to market), better fault isolation (reliability), re-usability, and scalability.?

Techniques that facilitate the development of a microservice architecture :?

Microservices can be deployed using a variety of tools, platforms, and versions and some of which are:?

REST: It’s called Representational State Transfer, is a communication protocol that allows microservices to be used for interaction or communication with others. The REST microservice can communicate directly via HTTP using this architectural design approach. It works with standard formats like JSON, XML, and HTML for responses and queries.?

AWS Lambda: Aws Lambda Provides infrastructure-less servers for your microservices build and you’re charged on a pay-per-use rate. Lambda can also be used in combination with AWS API Gateway which lets you host a REST or API service. The two together allows your API to serve any requests made by users.?

Apache Kafka: Message queuing is necessary within microservices architecture to handle all the inter-microservice and microservices-external-source communications. Whether this is for intensive data processing or API calls, etc. Apache Kafka is a distributed stream processing platform with high fault tolerance and resilience.?

Docker and Kubernetes: Docker is a container management technique that aids in the development, testing, and deployment of software systems as self-contained packages within a container. Kubernetes, on the other hand, is a technology designed to automate the manual labor involved in setting up and maintaining containerized applications. Docker makes it simple to deploy software since you have to use Docker files to deploy Docker images. Further, it works with various operating systems, has several available plugins to enhance its capabilities, and can be integrated with various complex tools and services.?

Consul: In Consul, the microservices can communicate with others because of Consul technology. This has a lot of unique features. Consul can also be used with different technologies thanks to the DNS interface and the Consul Template.?

Apache Openwhisk: As well as being an event-based programming service, Apache Open whisk is a readily extensible serverless computing platform that supports devs in creating, testing and connecting actions to others as well as helping with debugging. Use OpenWhisk through a Docker installation on Mac, Windows or Linux.?

Serverless: This tool does exactly what it says; a console that combines FaaS/serverless technology with other cloud services to help devs build complicated systems. Serverless also offers scalability, integrated security, and improved operability.?

Redis: One of Redis many advantages is that it may be used in a broad variety of contexts. It’s a faultless NoSQL database that allows elastic data structures and speedy replies to solve complex coding challenges with simple instructions. Redis supports Streams, Hashes, and other forms of values in addition to a core data model.?

Logstash: You’ve got the microservice deployed, and now you have to monitor it. Many elements go into monitoring though. For example, is a particular microservice responding well or are tweaks needed? Are other system parts working correctly, such as the databases? You'll want to check the logs and to do that, Logstash is a great tool. It’s an open-source platform where you can centralize, stash, and transform data.?

Python Technology for Microservices:?

Microservices can be implemented with a horde of python frameworks, versions, and tools. Let us explore the python language that supports microservices development in detail:?

Adapting Technology Stack:?

We are going to Adapting Technology Stack and implement possible Technology choices.?

Microservices are polyglot environments. You can pick any Python tech stack(framework), UI (React, Angular, Vue), and Database as per microservices. Communication will be handled via REST APIs and gRPCs.?

• Basic Architecture of Microservices with Python:?

Python Language:?

Python is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted object-oriented programming language that offers active support for integration with various technologies. Prototyping in Python is faster and easier when compared to other frameworks and languages. It includes powerful substitutes for heavy implementations like Flask, Django, Quart, CherryPy..etc. With all these benefits, Microservices Python is considered to have an edge over other languages.??

Developers who implement Microservices Python use a RESTful API approach - a comprehensive way of utilizing web protocols & software to remotely manipulate objects. With this technology, it becomes easier to monitor the application since it is now broken into components. There is a broad range of Python microservices frameworks to choose from for your web application development.?

List of Python Web Frameworks:?

1. Full-Stack Frameworks?

This type of framework acts as a one-stop solution for fulfilling all the developers’ necessary requirements. Form validation, form generators, and template layouts are the components that are commonly included in the full-stack frameworks.???

• Django?
• Cubic Web?
• Giotto?
• Pylons Framework?
• Pyramid?
• TurboGears?
• Web2Py?

2. Microframeworks?

These frameworks are also called non-full stack frameworks. These are lightweight in nature because they do not offer more components as a full-stack framework. The developers who want to use this framework must put a lot of effort in coding and also in adding additional requirements manually.??

• Bottle?
• CherryPy?
• Dash?
• Falcon?
• Flask?
• Hug?
• MorePath?
• Pycnic?

3. Asynchronous Framework?

It is also a microframework that mainly allows us to handle a huge set of concurrent connections. This asynchronous framework is mainly built for Python and it also uses the asyncio library.?

• AIOHTTP?
• Growler?
• Sanic?
• Tornado?

?Some of Python Web Frameworks are as follows in detail:?

• Django – It is a free and open-source web application with rapid web development and clean, pragmatic design.?
• Quart - Fast Python web microframework. Using Quart, you can, write JSON APIs e.g., a RESTful API, render and serve HTML e.g., a blog, serve WebSocket's e.g., a simple chat, stream responses e.g., serve video, all of the above in a single app, or do pretty much anything over the HTTP or WebSocket protocols.?
• Flask – Most popular Python Micro framework based on Jinja2 and Werkzeuge?
• Bottle – Simple, lightweight and fast WSGI micro framework?
• CherryPy – Mature, Python object-oriented web framework?
• Falcom – Create smart proxies, cloud APIs, and app back-ends?
• Nameko – Best among the Python Microservices frameworks that allow developers to concentrate on application logic.?

Databases:?

Now we can choose NoSQL DBs or relational DBs as per microservices persistence requirements.?

For No SQL Databases:?

• Mongo DB?
• NoSQL?
• Redis?
• Cassandra?

For Relational Databases:?

• MySQL?
• Oracle?
• PostgreSQL?
• SQL Server? ??

So, these are the options that we can use any one of the databases on our microservice architecture. We will decide on these tools as per our requirements and the company and its strategy.?

In conclusion, the future of microservices leads us closer to serverless architecture; particularly, the promise of cost savings by only paying the amount of computing utilized is even more appealing. Microservices is a broad concept that can be applied to transform apps, products, or solutions to a more granular and modular level. Keep in mind that it is not recommended to start microservices architecture from scratch since it is difficult to define the boundaries of each service at the beginning. There is no better way to choose the perfect technology for your microservices. Every technological decision depends on the tools you will use to develop other parts of your application. It also depends on the current knowledge of your development team.??

Ensar Criteria for Choosing Python technology of Microservices:?

Ensar Solutions will help in choosing the perfect microservices for your project, you can build a reliable platform to extend the business while taking advantage of diversity in python language. Of course, you can use different technologies or languages for different services, but it does not mean it is effective. The microservices architecture comes with lots of operational overhead; hence adding a diverse programming language on top of that can exponentially raise that performance overhead. To reduce that, you should standardize your microservices technology stack by choosing the python programming language based on your business needs. Here are the criteria to evaluate the python programming language for microservices development:?

1. Highly observable?
2. Support for automation?
3. Consumer-first approach?
4. Independent deployment?
5. Modelled around business domain?
6. Decentralization of components?
7. Support for continuous integration on cloud – AWS, Azure, GCP?

Microservices architecture is not new now and Python is the most advanced technology in the modern era. So, build a reliable platform to extend the business while taking advantage of diversity in python with microservices. But it is ever-evolving with advances in the development of APIs and secure container technologies. This opens new avenues of benefits in different functional areas of a business. If your business requires migration from monolithic architecture to microservices, get in touch with us ( Ensar Solutions ). Our Ensar team of experts can help you make a move swiftly and take your apps to the next level.?