What are Microservices?

In simple words, a Microservice can be defined as an autonomous software service which is built to perform a single, specific, and granular task.

The word autonomous in the preceding definition stands for the ability of the Microservice to execute within isolated process boundaries. Every Microservice is a separate entity which can be developed, deployed, instantiated, scaled, and managed discretely.

The language, framework, or platform used for developing a Microservice should not impact its invocation. This is achieved by defining communication contracts which adhere to industry standards. Commonly, Microservices are invoked using network calls over popular internet protocols such as REST.

On cloud platforms, Microservices are usually deployed on a Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) stack. It is recommended to employ a management software to regulate the lifecycle of Microservices on a cloud stack. This is especially desirable in solutions which require high density deployment, automatic failover, predictive healing, and rolling updates. Microsoft Azure Service Fabric is a good example of a distributed cluster management software which can be used for this purpose. More about this is covered in later sections of this book.

Microservices are also highly decoupled by nature and follow the principle of minimum knowledge. The details about the implementation of the service and the business logic used to achieve the task are abstracted from the consuming application. This property of the service enables it to be independently updated without impacting dependent applications or services. Decoupling also empowers distributed development as separate teams can focus on delivering separate Microservices simultaneously with minimal interdependency.

It is critical for a Microservice to focus on the task it is responsible for. This property is popularly known as the Single Responsibility Principle (SRP) in software engineering. This task ideally should be elementary by nature. Defining the term elementary is a key challenge involved in designing a Microservice. There is more than one way of doing this:

• Restricting the cyclomatic complexity of the code module defining the Microservice is one way of achieving this. Cyclomatic complexity indicates the complexity of a code block by measuring the linear independent paths of execution within it.
• Logical isolation of functionality based on the bounded context that the Microservice is a part of.
• Another simpler way is to estimate the duration of delivering a Microservice.

Irrespective of the approach, it is also important to set both minimum and maximum complexity for Microservices before designing them. Services which are too small, also known as Nanoservices, can also introduce crucial performance and maintenance hurdles.

Microservices can be developed using any programming language or framework driven by the skills of the development team and the capability of the tools. Developers can choose a performance-driven programming language such as C or C++ or pick a modern managed programming language such as C# or Java. Cloud hosting providers such as Azure and Amazon offer native support for most of the popular tools and frameworks for developing Microservices.

A Microservice typically has three building blocks – code, state, and configuration. The ability to independently deploy, scale, and upgrade them is critical for the scalability and maintainability of the system. This can be a challenging problem to solve. The choice of technology used to host each of these blocks will play an important role in addressing this complexity. For instance, if the code is developed using .NET Web API and the state is externalized on an Azure SQL Database, the scripts used for upgrading or scaling will have to handle compute, storage, and network capabilities on both these platforms simultaneously. Modern Microservice platforms such as Azure Service Fabric offer solutions by co-locating state and code for the ease of management, which simplifies this problem to a great extent.

Co-location, or having code and state exist together, for a Microservice has many advantages. Support for versioning is one of them. In a typical enterprise environment, it's a common requirement to have side-by-side deployments of services serving in parallel. Every upgrade to a service is usually treated as a different version which can be deployed and managed separately. Co-locating code and state helps build a clear logical and physical separation across multiple versions of Microservices. This will simplify the tasks around managing and troubleshooting services.

A Microservice is always associated with a unique address. In the case of a web-hosted Microservice, this address is usually a URL. This unique address is required for discovering and invoking a Microservice. The discoverability of a Microservice must be independent of the infrastructure hosting it. This calls for a requirement of a service registry which keeps track of where each service is hosted and how it can be reached. Modern registry services also capture health information of Microservices, acting like a circuit breaker for the consuming applications.

Microservices natively demands hyperscale deployments. In simpler words, Microservices should scale to handle increasing demands. This involves seamless provisioning of compute, storage, and network infrastructure. It also involves challenges around lifecycle management and cluster management. A Microservices hosting platform typically has the features to address these challenges.

Microservices hosting platform

The primary objective of a Microservices hosting platform is to simplify the tasks around developing, deploying, and maintaining Microservices while optimizing the infrastructure resource consumption. Together, these tasks can be called Microservice lifecycle management tasks.

The journey starts with the hosting platform supporting development of the Microservices by providing means for integrating with platform features and application framework. This is critical to enable the hosting platform to manage the lifecycle of a service hosted on it. Integration is usually achieved by the hosting platform exposing APIs (application programming interfaces) which can be consumed by the development team. These APIs are generally compatible with popular programming languages.

Co-locating code and state is desirable for improving the efficiency of a Microservice. While this is true, storing state locally introduces challenges around maintaining the integrity of data across multiple instances of a service. Hosting platforms such as Service Fabric come with rich features for maintaining consistency of state across multiple instances of a Microservice there by abstracting the complexity of synchronizing state from the developer.

The hosting platform is also responsible for abstracting the complexity around physical deployment of Microservices from the development team. One way this is achieved is by containerizing the deployment. Containers are operating system-level virtualized environments. This means that the kernel of the operating system is shared across multiple isolated virtual environments. Container-based deployment makes possible an order-of-magnitude increase in density of the Microservice deployed. This is aligned with the recommended cloud design pattern called compute resource consolidation. A good example to discuss in this context, as mentioned by Mark Fussell from Microsoft, is the deployment model for Azure SQL Databases hosted on Azure Service Fabric. A SQL Azure Database cluster comprises hundreds of machines running tens of thousands of containers hosting a total of hundreds of thousands of databases. Each of these containers hosts code and state associated with multiple Microservices. This is an inspiring example of how a good hosting platform can handle hyperscale deployment of Microservices.

A good hosting platform will also support deployment of services across heterogeneous hardware configurations and operating systems. This is significant for meeting demands of services which have specific requirements around high-performance hardware. An example would be a service which performs GPU (graphics processing unit) intensive tasks.

Once the Microservices are deployed, management overhead should be delegated to the hosting platform. This includes reliability management, health monitoring, managing updates, and so on. The hosting platform is responsible for the placement of a Microservice on a cluster of virtual machines. The placement is driven by a highly optimized algorithm which considers multiple constraints at runtime to efficiently pick the right host virtual machine for a Microservice.

The following diagram illustrates a sample placement strategy of Microservices in a cluster:

Microservice placement strategy

As the number of Microservices grows, so does the demand for automating monitoring, and diagnostics systems which takes care of the health of these services. The hosting platform is responsible for capturing the monitoring information from every Microservice and then aggregating it and storing it in a centralized health store. The health information is then exposed to the consumers and also ingested by the hosting platform itself, to take corrective measures. Modern hosting platforms support features such as preventive healing, which uses machine learning to predict future failures of a virtual machine and take preventive actions to avoid service outages. This information is also used by the failover manager subsystem of the hosting platform to identify failure of a virtual machine and to automatically reconfigure the service replicas to maintain availability. The failover manager also ensures that when nodes are added or removed from the cluster, the load is automatically redistributed across the available nodes. This is a critical feature of a hosting platform considering the nature of the cloud resources to fail, as they are running on commodity hardware.

Considering the fact that migrating to a Microservices architecture can be a significant change in terms of the programming paradigm, deployment model, and operational strategy, a question which usually rises is why adopt a Microservice architecture?

The Microservice advantage

Every application has a shelf life, after which it is either upgraded or replaced with another application with evolved capabilities or which is a better fit for changing business needs. The agility in businesses has reduced this shelf life further by a significant factor. For instance, if you are building an application for distributing news feeds among employees within a company, you would want to build quicker prototypes and get feedback on the application sooner than executing an elaborate design and plan phase. This, of course, will be with the cognizance that the application can be further optimized and revised iteratively. This technique also comes in handy when you are building a consumer application where you are unsure of the scale of growth in the user base. An application such as Facebook, which grew its user base from a couple of million to 1,500 million in a few years would have been impossible to plan for, if the architecture was not well architected to accommodate future needs. In short, modern-day applications demand architectural patterns which can adapt, scale and gracefully handle changes in workload.

To understand the benefits of Microservices architecture for such systems, we will require a brief peek at its predecessor, monolithic architecture. The term monolith stands for a single large structure. A typical client-server application for the previous era would use a tiered architecture. Tiers would be decoupled from one another and would use contracts to communicate with each other. Within a tier, components or services would be packed with high cohesion, making them interdependent on each other.

The following diagram illustrates a typical monolithic application architecture:

Monolithic application deployment topology

This works fine in simpler systems which are aimed to solve a static problem catering to a constant user base. The downside is that the components within a tier cannot scale independently, neither can they be upgraded or deployed separately. The tight coupling also prevents the components from being reused across tiers. These limitations introduce major roadblocks when a solution is expected to be agile by nature.

Microservices architecture addresses these problems by decomposing tightly coupled monolithic ties to smaller services. Every Microservice can be developed, tested, deployed, reused, scaled, and managed independently. Each of these services will align to a single business functionality. The development team authoring a service can work independently with the customer to elicit business requirements and build the service with the technology best suited to the implementation of that particular business scenario. This means that there are no overarching constraints around the choice of technology to be used or implementation patterns to be followed. This is perfect for an agile environment where the focus is more on delivering the business value over long-term architectural benefits. A typical set of enterprise applications may also share Microservices between them. The following diagram illustrates the architecture of such a Microservices-driven solution:

Microservice application deployment topology

The following are a few key advantages of a Microservice architecture:

Fault tolerance

As the system is decomposed to granular services, failure of a service will not impact other parts of the system. This is important for a large, business-critical application. For instance, if a service logging events of the system fails, it will not impact the functioning of the whole system.

The decomposed nature of the services also helps fault isolation and troubleshooting. With proper health monitoring systems in place, a failure of a Microservice can be easily identified and rectified without causing downtime to the rest of the application. This also applies to application upgrades. If a newer version of a service is not stable, it can be rolled back to an older version with minimal impact to the overall system. Advanced Microservice hosting platforms such as Service Fabric also come with features such as predictive healing, which uses machine learning to foresee failures and takes preventive measures to avoid service downtime.

Technology-agnostic

In today's world, when the technology is changing fast, eliminating long-term commitment to a single technology stack is a significant advantage. Every Microservice can be built on a separate technology stack and can be redesigned, replaced, or upgraded independently as they execute in isolation. This means that every Microservice can be built using a different programming language and use a different type of data store which best suits the solution. This decreases the dependency concerns compared to the monolithic designs, and makes replacing services much easier.

A good example where this ability of a Microservice maximizes its effect is a scenario where different data stores can be used by different services in alignment with the business scenario they address. A logging service can use a slower and cheaper data store, whereas a real-time service can use a faster and more performant data store. As the consuming services are abstracted from the implementation of the service, they are not concerned about the compatibility with the technology used to access the data.

Development agility

Microservices being handled by separate logical development streams makes it easier for a new developer to understand the functionality of a service and ramp up to speed. This is particularly useful in an agile environment where the team can constantly change and there is minimal dependency on an individual developer. It also makes code maintenance related tasks simpler as smaller services are much more readable and easily testable.

Often, large-scale systems have specific requirements which require specialized services. An example of this is a service which processes graphical data which requires specialized skills to build and test the service. If a development team does not have the domain knowledge to deliver this service, it can be easily outsourced or offloaded to a different team which has the required skill sets. This would be very hard in a monolithic system because of the interdependency of services.

Heterogeneous deployment

The ability of Microservices to be executed as an isolated process decouples it from the constraints around a specific hosting environment. For instance, services can be deployed across multiple cloud stacks such as IaaS and PaaS and across different operating systems such as Windows and Linux hosted on private data centers or on cloud. This decouples the technology limitations from the business requirements.

Most of the mid and large sized companies are now going through a cloud transformation. These companies have already invested significant resources on their on-premises data centers. This forces cloud vendors to support hybrid computing models where the IT infrastructure can coexist across cloud and on-premises data centers. In this case, the infrastructure configuration available on-premises may not match the one provisioned on cloud. The magnitude of application tiers in a monolithic architecture may prevent it from being deployed on less capable server machines, making efficient resource utilization a challenge. Microservices, on the other hand, being smaller, decoupled deployment units, can easily be deployed on heterogeneous environments.

Manageability

Each Microservice can be separately versioned, upgraded, and scaled without impacting the rest of the system. This enables running multiple development streams in parallel with independent delivery cycles aligned with the business demands. If we take a system which distributes news to the employees of a company as an example, and the notification service needs an upgrade to support push notifications to mobile phones, it can be upgraded without any downtime in the system and without impacting the rest of the application. The team delivering the notification service can function at its own pace without having a dependency on a big bang release or a product release cycle.

The ability to scale each service independently is also a key advantage in distributed systems. This lets the operations team increase or decrease the number of instances of a service dynamically to handle varying loads. A good example is systems which require batch processing. Batch jobs which run periodically, say once in a day, only require the batch processing service to be running for a few hours. This service can be turned on and scaled up for the duration of batch processing and then turned off to better utilize the computing resources among other services.

Reusability

Granularity is the key for reuse. Microservices, being small and focused on a specific business scenario, improve the opportunity for them to be reused across multiple subsystems within an organization. This in turn reflects as momentous cost savings.

The factor of reuse is proportional to the size of the organization and its IT applications. Bigger companies have more number of applications developed by multiple development teams, each of which may run their own delivery cycles. Often, the lack of ability to share code across these teams forces software components to be duplicated, causing a considerable impact on development and maintenance cost. Although service duplication across applications may not always be bad, with proper service cataloging and communication, Microservices can easily solve this problem by enabling service reuse across business units.