Updated July 1, 2023
Introduction to Microservices Tools
Microservice is an architectural style pattern for developing large complex and simple applications for the enterprise; In this architecture, we decompose a large complex application into several small individual maintainable services.; each service has a single responsibility and is loosely coupled with other services that communicate using the HTTP/HTTPS/WebSocket protocols. For developing the applications by using this pattern, developers need tools and technologies to build and monitor these microservices.
These services are small, manageable, independent, and unique, which follows the single service, single responsibility principle. But the architecture can be difficult or complex regarding development and maintenance.
To meet the business target and goals, microservices communicate with each other by utilizing synchronous protocols such as HTTP/HTTPS/REST or asynchronous protocols such as HTTP/REST/MCQs(message queuing such as Kafka, Rabbit MQ); these technologies are used for collaboration among microservice that implement a business function which is related to each other to accomplish the business work as much as possible.
Top 9 Microservice Tools
Tools for microservice development are mostly divided into the following category, which plays an essential role in microservice development by increasing the developers’ productivity.
- Programming Language
- Architectural Frameworks
- Build and Assembly
- Message Queuing
- Containerization
- Cloud Deployment
- Application Monitoring
- API Testing and Management
- Team Building
1. Programming Language
Microservice can be developed using different programming languages and technology, which is the advantage of microservice development. Which programming language should be chosen for the development completely depends on the business function requirement; different services in the same application can use different programming languages and technology, which gives freedom to the developers, most popular JDK (Java) based programing language, which is used in microservice development in spring boot and Elixir(based on Erlang virtual machine). Spring boot provides many in-built features that make the business function easy to develop and understand.
2. Architectural Frameworks
Microservice is an architecture; hence, architectural frameworks such as spring cloud, goa, and kong are the important framework used with various technologies to build applications. There are various projects listed in spring pivotal as Spring could framework, such as Spring Cloud Netflix, Spring Cloud Cloudfoundry (href=”https://spring.io/projects/spring-cloud”), etc.; these projects provide various library which is used in the configuration, development, and deployment application effectively this framework work well in the developer machine and distributed hosting environment as well.
3. Build & Assembly
Microservice architecture refers to a group/collection of services that can be very large in numbers; each of the services is an individual project which requires separate build and deployment in the form of the jar, for creating a deployable jar/war/ear from the project developers need to use a build tool such as maven, ant, Gradle. Which provides several plug-ins to extend its features and customize the build, known as an assembly. Using the maven assembly plugin, we can also externalize the properties outside the jar to change the configuration directly from the properties file (without rebuilding the jar again); it facilitates the dynamic configuration and deployment.
4. Message Queuing
Application builds by using microservice is a system where each independent services communicate with each other or within themselves synchronously and asynchronously. To accomplish communication among the service, microservices use messaging queues.
Some of the most widely used messaging tools are as follows:
- Apache Kafka: It is a distributed publish-subscribe type of messaging system. It is agile, scalable, and distributed and can handle a huge amount of data or transmit it through streams. A large scalable project distributed stream processing platform utilizes Apache Kafka, which is useful for data processing among services and facilitating inter-application communication or API calls.
- RabbitMQ: This messaging tool analyzes and utilizes patterns to communicate among microservices/inter-application communication and scale the applications parallelly. By using this tool, microservice can asynchronously communicate with each other to solve the problem in a distributed environment. Also, this can generate/exchange the events between the individual services or maintain the data queue to protect the data from loss in the asynchronous communication environment.
5. Containerization
Containerization involves developing an application with all its dependencies and configuration files required to run it in a different computing environment through developer machine to across servers (which might have a different operating system); it works on the principle of build, ship, Run any app anywhere across the different environment. Containerization eliminates the problem of the code running in the developer’s machine but not in the production live environment.
Some of the most widely used containerization technologies are Docker and Kubernetes, Docker is used to create the container for application/service, and Kubernetes is used for application/service-container deployment, scaling & descaling of containers & container load balancing.
6. Cloud Deployment
Cloud service providers such as Amazon and Azure provide infrastructure as a service for microservice deployment; some famous AWS infrastructure is (AWS Lambda and AWS elastic beanstalk). These cloud service providers offer scalability, integrated security, and improved operability.
7. Application Monitoring
After developing and deploying the application, monitoring the working events in the production environment becomes very important. Handling and proactively monitoring the deployed service/application can prevent the system from experiencing failures that could negatively impact the business. Logstash, ELK, Nagios, Prometheus, and Grafana are the most famous monitoring tools.
8. API Testing & Management
when start developing the applications using microservices, we also need to make sure that all the individual services can communicate with each other using API; for this, we have to calibrate all the APIs while developing the application for API testing most famous tool is Postman, apache JMeter (for testing the load balancing on the service/application).
9. Team Building
Application development teams must regularly deal with the required change to add value to the microservices. The teams must cooperate well to achieve common business goals or targets. Some of the most famous team management tools are Jira, Slack, etc.
Conclusion
It always depends on the requirement to decide which tools we need to use to meet the business goals; there are no recommended tools for development, but this article refers to explain the importance and feature of the tools so the developer can decide the tool need to be used according to their understanding, capabilities, and requirement.
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