Microservice Orchestration Best Practices
When you think about it, we’ve made great strides in software development, but each step has brought new and exciting challenges. We started with big clunky monolithic systems, then advanced to tinier pieces called Microservices to promote greater flexibility, scalability, and resilience.
However, with great power comes great responsibility, and now we have to manage these tiny microservices in our distributed system. This is where microservice orchestration swoops in to save the day (Yes, I just did a Tobey-Andrew-Tom Spider-man marathon! My web developer arc is complete 🕺).
In this article, we will briefly look at what a microservice is, why microservice orchestration is essential, and then dive into nine microservice orchestration best practices that can make the deployment of microservices much smoother.
What is a microservice?
A microservice is a small, modular, and independently deployable component of a larger software application designed to perform a business-specific task or functionality. It communicates with other microservices through well-defined APIs or protocols, such as HTTP/REST or messaging systems.
Remember when we used to build big Lego castles with smaller Lego pieces? Each piece could have a specific function: a Lego door, window, or roof, and together they make up what we proudly show off as our castles filled with all the action our wildest imagination could conceive. Now imagine that castle as a complete architecture, with each Lego piece as a microservice.
Microservices are typically designed to be loosely coupled, meaning that they are not dependent on each other and can be changed or updated without affecting the rest of the application. They are usually organized around business capabilities, such as handling user authentication, processing orders, or managing inventory, rather than technical concerns like databases or servers.
What is microservice orchestration?
Microservice orchestration is the process of managing and coordinating individual microservices to work together to deliver a larger application or service within a distributed architecture. It involves managing microservices’ deployment, communication, and scaling to ensure they function correctly and efficiently.
So why is this necessary?
Imagine a company is building a ride-sharing app that requires user authentication, ride requests, driver matching, payment processing, and ride tracking. And for each feature, they create a microservice to handle the individual operations. For a seamless user experience, these microservices need to communicate with each other efficiently and to do this, some form of orchestration is required.
Apart from efficient communication, other benefits of microservice orchestration include improved scalability, better fault tolerance, greater flexibility, improved collaboration, and simplified management.
Microservice orchestration deployment best practices
Microservice orchestration can be a complex and challenging task, especially as the number of microservices and the complexity of the architecture increase. While there are several tools and approaches for orchestration, it is helpful to follow certain best practices to ensure the smooth deployment of microservices. Let us look into some recommended best practices to follow:
1. Use containers for packaging and deployment
2. Implement a monitoring and logging service for your microservices
3. Use asynchronous communication
4. Separate your microservice data storage
5. Implement service discovery
6. Use an API Gateway for routing and authentication
7. Use a configuration management system for consistency
8. Design for failure to ensure fault tolerance and resiliency
9. Use the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)
1. Use containers for packaging and deployment
This is an obvious and highly recommended practice. Containers are a popular way to package and deploy microservices because they provide isolation, portability, high availability, scalability, and improved security through features like network segmentation, secrets management, and container isolation.
Each microservice can be packaged in its own container with all of the necessary dependencies, configuration, and code. They can then be deployed to any environment that supports containerization, thereby making it easier to move microservices between different environments, such as development, staging, and production.
Container orchestration tools like Kubernetes or Docker Swarm optimize resource utilization, improve performance and automate tasks such as container creation, configuration, and scaling, thereby saving time and reducing the risk of errors.
2. Implement a monitoring and logging service for your microservices
Microservices generate a large amount of data and events, making it challenging to identify issues quickly.
Monitoring and logging microservices help track the performance and health of microservices, which is crucial for maintaining the stability and reliability of the system. When you monitor the performance of your microservices, you can identify bottlenecks and optimize resource allocation. You can also identify trends and adjust scaling accordingly when you monitor the usage of your microservices.
I recommend using Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack, or other log aggregators and metrics collectors to provide monitoring and logging capabilities for your microservices.
3. Use asynchronous communication
Effective communication between microservices is essential for a cloud-native application to function effectively. The best approach to this is asynchronous communication. This type of communication allows microservices to send and receive information independently without having to wait for an immediate response from other microservice.
One simple but effective approach to asynchronous communication is to adopt the publish-subscribe pattern. In this approach, when an event of interest occurs, the producer — in this case, the microservice — publishes a record of that event to a message queue service. Any other microservices that are interested in that type of event can subscribe to the message queue service as a consumer of that event.
Using asynchronous communication and the publish/subscribe pattern, each microservice can operate independently and asynchronously, without waiting for responses from other microservices. This can help reduce the risk of communication breakdowns leading to system failures. Another best practice related to communication channels is to use standardized communication protocols and formats because it helps to ensure compatibility between different microservices and makes it easier to integrate new microservices into the architecture.
4. Separate your microservice data storage
Separation of data storage is another best practice that can impact microservice orchestration. This principle suggests that each microservice should have its own dedicated data store rather than sharing a common data store with other microservices.
By separating data storage in this way, managing the data of each microservices can be more easily developed, deployed, and managed independently. It allows for more flexibility in scaling individual microservices, as each can have its dedicated database instance. It can also help you avoid dependencies between services and improve security by limiting access to data.
5. Implement service discovery
As the number of microservices in an application grows, it can become challenging to track which services are running and where they are located. This is where service discovery tools like an API gateway (e.g., Ambassador Edge Stack), service mesh (e.g., Consul), or service registry (e.g., Eureka) can help you locate and communicate with different services. By using a service discovery tool, there is no longer a requirement to develop discovery logic independently for every programming language and framework the service clients utilize.
6. Use an API Gateway for routing and authentication
An API gateway is a dedicated layer for managing incoming and outgoing traffic to microservices. It provides features such as routing, load balancing, and authentication. Using an API gateway simplifies microservice orchestration by providing a single entry point for all incoming and outgoing traffic. Since most API gateways provide load balancing, it will ensure that your microservices are highly available and can handle large traffic volumes. One example of an API gateway is the Ambassador Edge Stack — it offers load balancing and can distribute traffic evenly across microservices, ensuring high availability and scalability.
7. Use a configuration management system for consistency
Your microservice configuration is an important part of the entire architecture and will undergo many changes as you go from staging to production, etc. One critical best practice to implement is the third principle of the Twelve-Factor App, which recommends that your app’s configurations be kept separate from the application code and stored as environment variables. This makes managing and deploying applications across different environments and infrastructures easier.
To do this effectively, you need a configuration management system. If you don’t already know, configuration management systems are tools that help you manage the configuration of your infrastructure and applications to ensure the microservices are deployed consistently. The configuration is kept up to date. They also make it easier to roll back changes, troubleshoot issues, and improve security by keeping sensitive information, such as API keys or database credentials, out of the codebase or being accidentally exposed.
8. Design for failure to ensure fault tolerance and resiliency
Microservices should be designed to be fault tolerant and resilient so they can continue to function even if one or more services fail. Implementing features like circuit breakers, retries, timeouts, graceful degradation, and bulkhead will ensure this. Let’s take a closer look at each of these features:
- Circuit breakers are used to protect against cascading failures. When a microservice fails, the circuit breaker opens and stops the flow of traffic to that service, thereby allowing the system to recover and avoid a complete failure.
- Retries are used to handle temporary failures in microservices. When a request to a microservice fails, the client can retry the request after a short period. This can help mitigate issues caused by transient errors.
- Timeouts are used to prevent long-running requests from causing issues in the system. When a request takes too long to complete, a timeout can be triggered to prevent the request from blocking other requests.
- Graceful degradation is the practice of reducing functionality in the event of failure. For example, if a microservice that provides search functionality fails, the application could degrade gracefully by providing a reduced set of search results rather than completely failing.
- Bulkheads are used to isolate failures in microservices. By dividing the system into smaller sections, failures in one section can be isolated and contained, preventing them from affecting the entire system.
- Redundancy is the practice of replicating microservices to ensure a backup is always available in the event of a failure. The system can continue functioning with redundant microservices even if one or more services fail.
By implementing these practices, teams can ensure that their microservices are resilient to failures and can continue functioning despite unexpected issues.
9. Use the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)
The Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) is a software design principle that states that a class or module should have only one reason to change. While SRP is not directly related to microservice orchestration, it is still considered a best practice in software development.
In the context of microservices, SRP can be applied to individual microservices. Each microservice should have a clear and specific responsibility and should not have unnecessary dependencies on other microservices. This enables developers to create more cohesive and maintainable microservices and easily orchestrate the deployment and management of microservices, as each microservice is designed with a clear responsibility and a defined set of dependencies.
Conclusion
In conclusion, microservice orchestration can be complex, but by following these best practices, you can simplify the process and ensure a smooth deployment.
Special thanks to Jefferson for providing his expert technical insight.
Happy building!
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