Best practices that make microservices integration easy
Running Microservices in isolation does not make any sense; it is natural for them to work together and solve a bigger problem. This would require each microservice to expose a well-defined API interface simplifying others to talk to it.
The following are the best practices that we should follow that would make interfacing and integration easy.
Forward and Backward Compatability
While rolling out any changes in a microservice, we need to ensure they are both forward and backward compatible. If not, it would break the consumers or interfacing microservices.
Three key places where we need to be extra careful are
while changing the database schema
while changing the API response body
while changing the message format in async communication
We can ensure forward and backward compatibility if we
never abruptly delete any column/attribute
never abruptly change the type of the column/attribute
We should always roll out breaking changes in phases ensuring the dependent services remain unaffected.
Make APIs tech-agnostic
Tech evolves quickly in the world of software engineering, and hence we would always feel like using the new shiny thing available. While having that urge, we should always ensure we are not picking the technology that would induce tight coupling.
For example, we should not pick a framework that would require the interfacing services to be written in a particular language or require them to use a specific tech stack. This would take away autonomity from the interfacing services as we are dictating which stack to use.
Dead simple consumption
Microservices are built to interact with other services and get things done. So, the core focus should be to make things super simple for anyone to integrate.
It does not matter how good your LLD is if the API interface is hard to integrate. Be consumer-centric while desinging the interface of a microservice and ensure you have
simple API
simple data format
use common protocols
Hide internal implementation details
Never let other microservice learn about the internal implementation detail of your service. If they interact using internal details this would create a tight coupling between the two services.
Internal details could be
broker for internal communication
building dependency on transitive dependencies
allowing directly connecting to the private database
It is always safe to hide the internal implementation details and expose a strict interface to interact with the service. The interface could be REST, gRPC, or anything that your org uses.
Here's the video of my explaining this in-depth 👇 do check it out
Running microservices in isolation does not make any sense. To get something done, multiple microservices need to talk to each other and put a task to completion. This requires the services to interface with each other.
How would the services interface and integrate? is there a common way to do it?
In this video, we talk about 4 best practices we should follow while designing microservices to encourage inter-service integration. These practices would help us keep interfacing simple, easy, and intuitive.
Outline:
00:00 Agenda
02:36 Introduction
03:00 Backward and Forward Compatability
06:29 Make API interface tech agnostic
09:01 Dead simple consumption
11:00 Hide internal implementation details
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Yours truly,
Arpit
arpitbhayani.me
Until next time, stay awesome :)