How to split a traditional server into multiple microservices

Around 10 years ago, developers used to use the Apache web server with a scripting programming language to create web applications, rendering the views on the server-side. This meant that there was no need to split applications into pieces and it was simpler to keep the code together. With the emergence of Single-Page Applications (SPAs), we only needed server-side rendering for special cases and applications were divided into two parts: frontend and backend. Another tendency was that servers changed processing method from synchronous (where every client interaction lives in a separate thread) to asynchronous (where one thread processes many clients simultaneously using non-blocking, input-output operations). This trend promotes the better performance of single server units, meaning they can serve thousands of clients. This means that we don't need special hardware, proprietary software, or a special toolchain or compiler to write a tiny server with great performance.

The invasion of microservices happened when scripting programming languages become popular. By this, we are not only referring to languages for server-side scripting, but general-purpose high-level programming languages such as Python or Ruby. The adoption of JavaScript for backend needs, which had previously always been asynchronous, was particularly influential.

If writing your own server wasn't hard enough, you could create a separate server for special cases and use them directly from the frontend application. This would not require rendering procedures on the server. This section has provided a short description of the evolution from monolithic servers to microservices. We are now going to examine how to break a monolithic server into small pieces.

Reasons to avoid monoliths

If you already have a single server that includes all backend features, you have a monolithic service, even if you start two or more instances of this service. A monolithic service has a few disadvantages—it is impossible to scale vertically, it is impossible to update and deploy one feature without interrupting all the running instances, and if the server fails, it affects all features. Let's discuss these disadvantages a little further. This might help you to convince your manager to break your service down into microservices.

Impossible to scale vertically

There are two common approaches to scaling an application:

• Horizontally: Where you start a new instance of application
• Vertically: Where you improve an independent application layer that has a bottleneck

The simplest way to scale a backend is to start another instance of the server. This will solve the issue, but in many cases it is a waste of hardware resources. For example, imagine you have a bottleneck in an application that collects or logs statistics. This might only use 15% of your CPU, because logging might include multiple IO operations but no intensive CPU operations. However, to scale this auxiliary function, you will have to pay for the whole instance.

Impossible to update and deploy only one feature

If your backend works as a monolith, you can't update only a small part of it. Every time you add or change a feature, you have to stop, update, and start the service again, which causes interruptions.

When you have a microservice and you have find a bug, you can stop and update only this microservice without affecting the others. As I mentioned before, it can also be useful to split a product into separate development teams.

The failure of one server affects all features

Another reason to avoid monoliths is that every server crash also crashes all of the features, which causes the application to stop working completely, even though not every feature is needed for it to work. If your application can't load new user interface themes, the error is not critical, as long as you don't work in the fashion or design industry, and your application should still be able to provide the vital functions to users. If you split your monolith into independent microservices, you will reduce the impact of crashes.

Breaking a monolithic service into pieces

Let's look an example of an e-commerce monolith server that provides the following features:

• User registration
• Product catalog
• Shopping cart
• Payment integration
• E-mail notifications
• Statistics collecting

Old-fashioned servers developed years ago would include all of these features together. Even if you split it into separate application modules, they would still work on the same server. You can see an example structure of a monolithic service here:

In reality, the real server contains more modules than this, but we have separated them into logical groups based on the tasks they perform. This is a good starting point to breaking your monolith into multiple, loosely coupled microservices. In this example, we can break it further into the pieces represented in the following diagram:

As you can see, we use a balancer to route requests to microservices. You can actually connect to microservices directly from the frontend application.

Shown in the preceding diagram is the potential communication that occurs between services. For simple cases, you can use direct connections. If the interaction is more complex, you can use message queues. However, you should avoid using a shared state such as a central database and interacting through records, because this can cause a bottleneck for the whole application. We will discuss how to scale microservices in Chapter 12, Scalable Microservices Architecture. For now, we will explore REST API, which will be partially implemented in a few examples throughout this book. We will also discuss why Rust is a great choice for implementing microservices.

Definition of a REST API

Let's define the APIs that we will use in our microservice infrastructure using the REST methodology. In this example, our microservices will have minimal APIs for demonstration purposes; real microservices might not be quite so "micro". Let's explore the REST specifications of the microservices of our application. We will start by looking at a microservice for user registration and go through every part of the application.

User registration microservice

The first service is responsible for the registration of users. It has to contain methods to add, update, or delete users. We can cover all needs with the standard REST approach. We will use a combination of methods and paths to provide this user registration functionality:

• POST request to /user/ creates a new user and returns its id
• GET request to /user/id  returns information related to a user with id
• PUT request to /user/id  applies changes to a user with id
• DELETE request to /user/id  removes a user with id

This service can use the E-mail notifications microservice and call its methods to notify the user about registration.

E-mail notifications microservice

The E-mail notifications microservice can be extremely simple and contains only a single method:

• The POST request to /send_email/  sends an email to any address

This server can also count the sent emails to prevent spam or check that the email exists in the user's database by requesting it from the User registration microservice. This is done to prevent malicious use.

Product catalog  microservice

The Product catalog microservice tracks the available products and needs only weak relations with other microservices, except for the Shopping cart. This microservice can contain the following methods:

• POST request to /product/ creates a new product and returns its id
• GET request to /product/id  returns information about the product with id
• PUT request to /product/id  updates information about the product with id
• DELETE request to /product/id  marks the product with id as deleted
• GET request to /products/ returns a list of all products (can be paginated by extra parameters)

Shopping cart microservice

The Shopping cart microservice is closely integrated with the User registration and Product catalog microservices. It holds pending purchases and prepares invoices. It contains the following methods:

• POST request to /user/uid/cart/, which puts a product in the cart and returns the id of item in the user's cart with the uid
• GET request to /user/uid/cart/id, which returns information about the item with id
• PUT request to /user/uid/cart/id, which updates information about the item with id (alters the quantity of items)
• GET request to /user/uid/cart/, which returns a list of all the items in the cart

As you can see, we don't add an extra "s" to the /cart/ URL and we use the same path for creating items and to get a list, because the first handler reacts to the POST method, the second processes requests with the GET method, and so on. We also use the user's ID in the path. We can implement the nested REST functions in two ways:

• Use session information to get the user's id. In this case, the paths contain a single object, such as /cart/id . We can keep the user's id in session cookies, but this is not reliable.
• We can add the id of a user to a path explicitly.

Payment Integration microservice

In our example, this microservice will be a third-party service, which contains the following methods:

• POST request to /invoices  creates a new invoice and returns its id
• POST request to /invoices/id/pay  pays for the invoice

Statistics collecting microservice

This service collects usage statistics and logs a user's actions to later improve the application. This service exports API calls to collect the data and contains some internal APIs to read the data:

• POST request to /log  logs a user's actions (the id of a user is set in the body of the request)
  
• GET request to /log?from=?&to=?  works only from the internal network and returns the collected data for the period specified

This microservice doesn't conform clearly to the REST principles. It's useful for microservices that provide a full set of methods to add, modify, and remove the data, but for other services, it is excessively restrictive. You don't have follow a clear REST structure for all of your services, but it may be useful for some tools that expect it.

Transformation to microservices

If you already have a working application, you might transform it into a set of microservices, but you have to keep the application running at the highest rate and prevent any interruptions.

To do this, you can create microservices step by step, starting from the least important task. In our example, it's better to start from email activities and logging. This practice helps you to create a DevOps process from scratch and join it with the maintenance process of your app.

Reusing existing microservices

If your application is a monolith server, you don't need to turn all modules into microservices, because you can use existing third-party services and shrink the bulk of the code that needs rewriting. These services can help with many things, including storage, payments, logging, and transactional notifications that tell you whether an event has been delivered or not.

I recommend that you create and maintain services that determine your competitive advantage yourself and then use third-party services for other tasks. This can significantly shrink your expenses and the time to market.

In any case, remember the product that you are delivering and don't waste time on unnecessary units of your application. The microservices approach helps you to achieve this simply, unlike the tiresome coding of monoliths, which requires you to deal with numerous secondary tasks. Hopefully, you are now fully aware of the reasons why microservices can be useful. In the next section, we will look at why Rust is a promising tool for creating microservices.