Microservices Tools

Introduction to Microservices Tools

Microservice is an architectural style pattern for developing large complex and simple application for the enterprise, in this architecture large complex application is decomposed into several small individual maintainable service, each service has a single responsibility and loosely coupled with other services which communicate with each other 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 in terms of 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 mostly divided into the following category, which plays an essential role in microservice development by increasing the developers’ productivity.

1. Programming Language
2. Architectural Frameworks
3. Build and assembly
4. Message queuing
5. Containerization
6. Cloud deployment
7. Application monitoring
8. API Testing and management
9. Team building

1. Programming Language

Microservice can be developed by using different programming languages and technology, which is the advantage of microservice development. which programming language should be chosen for the development is completely depends on the business function requirement, different service in the same application can use different programing language 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 itself is an architecture; hence architectural frameworks such as spring cloud, goa, kong are the important framework which is used with various technologies to build applications. There is various projects are 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 a various library which is used in configuration, development, 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 service which can be very large in numbers, each of the services is individual projects which require 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 the number of plug-ins to extends 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 the communication among the service, microservices use the 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. which is agile, scalable and distributed in nature which can handle a huge amount of data or transmit it through the streams. Apache Kafka is used by a large scalable project distributed stream processing platform, which is useful for data processing among the service and 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 maintain 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 in which the code runs 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 the microservice deployment; some famous AWS infrastructure is (AWS Lambda, AWS elastic beanstalk). These cloud service providers also offer scalability, integrated security, and improved operability.

7. Application Monitoring

Once the application is developed and deployed, it is very important to monitor applications’ working events in the production environment. The deployed service/application can be handled and monitored proactively and prevent the system from falling, which can impact the business. Some of the most famous monitoring tools are Logstash, ELK, Nagios, Prometheus, Prometheus grafana.

8. API Testing & Management

when start developing the applications using microservices, we also need to make sure that all the individual service can communicate with each other using API, for this we have to calibrate all the API while developing the application for API testing most famous tools is postman, apache JMeter (for testing the load balancing on the service/application).

9. Team Building

Application development teams have to deal with the requirement change regularly to add value in the microservices. Good cooperation needs to be accomplished between the teams 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.

Recommended Articles

This is a guide to Microservices Tools. Here we discuss the basic concept with some of the most commonly used tools like Programming Language, Architectural Frameworks, Build and Assembly respectively. You can also go through our other suggested articles to learn more –

1. What is Microservices?
2. Microservice vs Monolithic
3. Microservices Interview Questions
4. What is Microservices Architecture?