Characteristics of microservices
The microservices definition discussed earlier in this chapter is arbitrary. Evangelists and practitioners have strong but sometimes different opinions on microservices. There is no single, concrete, and universally accepted definition for microservices. However, all successful microservices implementations exhibit a number of common characteristics. Therefore, it is important to understand these characteristics rather than sticking to theoretical definitions. Some of the common characteristics are detailed in this section.
Services are first-class citizens
In the microservices world, services are first-class citizens. Microservices expose service endpoints as APIs and abstract all their realization details. The internal implementation logic, architecture, and technologies (including programming language, database, quality of services mechanisms, and so on) are completely hidden behind the service API.
Moreover, in the microservices architecture, there is no more application development; instead, organizations focus on service development. In most enterprises, this requires a major cultural shift in the way that applications are built.
In a Customer Profile microservice, internals such as the data structure, technologies, business logic, and so on are hidden. They aren't exposed or visible to any external entities. Access is restricted through the service endpoints or APIs. For instance, Customer Profile microservices may expose Register Customer and Get Customer as two APIs for others to interact with.
Characteristics of services in a microservice
As microservices are more or less like a flavor of SOA, many of the service characteristics defined in the SOA are applicable to microservices as well.
The following are some of the characteristics of services that are applicable to microservices as well:
- Service contract: Similar to SOA, microservices are described through well-defined service contracts. In the microservices world, JSON and REST are universally accepted for service communication. In the case of JSON/REST, there are many techniques used to define service contracts. JSON Schema, WADL, Swagger, and RAML are a few examples.
- Loose coupling: Microservices are independent and loosely coupled. In most cases, microservices accept an event as input and respond with another event. Messaging, HTTP, and REST are commonly used for interaction between microservices. Message-based endpoints provide higher levels of decoupling.
- Service abstraction: In microservices, service abstraction is not just an abstraction of service realization, but it also provides a complete abstraction of all libraries and environment details, as discussed earlier.
- Service reuse: Microservices are course-grained reusable business services. These are accessed by mobile devices and desktop channels, other microservices, or even other systems.
- Statelessness: Well-designed microservices are stateless and share nothing with no shared state or conversational state maintained by the services. In case there is a requirement to maintain state, they are maintained in a database, perhaps in memory.
- Services are discoverable: Microservices are discoverable. In a typical microservices environment, microservices self-advertise their existence and make themselves available for discovery. When services die, they automatically take themselves out from the microservices ecosystem.
- Service interoperability: Services are interoperable as they use standard protocols and message exchange standards. Messaging, HTTP, and so on are used as transport mechanisms. REST/JSON is the most popular method for developing interoperable services in the microservices world. In cases where further optimization is required on communications, other protocols such as Protocol Buffers, Thrift, Avro, or Zero MQ could be used. However, the use of these protocols may limit the overall interoperability of the services.
- Service composeability: Microservices are composeable. Service composeability is achieved either through service orchestration or service choreography.
Tip
More detail on SOA principles can be found at:
Microservices are lightweight
Well-designed microservices are aligned to a single business capability, so they perform only one function. As a result, one of the common characteristics we see in most of the implementations are microservices with smaller footprints.
When selecting supporting technologies, such as web containers, we will have to ensure that they are also lightweight so that the overall footprint remains manageable. For example, Jetty or Tomcat are better choices as application containers for microservices compared to more complex traditional application servers such as WebLogic or WebSphere.
Container technologies such as Docker also help us keep the infrastructure footprint as minimal as possible compared to hypervisors such as VMWare or Hyper-V.
As shown in the preceding diagram, microservices are typically deployed in Docker containers, which encapsulate the business logic and needed libraries. This help us quickly replicate the entire setup on a new machine or on a completely different hosting environment or even to move across different cloud providers. As there is no physical infrastructure dependency, containerized microservices are easily portable.
Microservices with polyglot architecture
As microservices are autonomous and abstract everything behind service APIs, it is possible to have different architectures for different microservices. A few common characteristics that we see in microservices implementations are:
- Different services use different versions of the same technologies. One microservice may be written on Java 1.7, and another one could be on Java 1.8.
- Different languages are used to develop different microservices, such as one microservice is developed in Java and another one in Scala.
- Different architectures are used, such as one microservice using the Redis cache to serve data, while another microservice could use MySQL as a persistent data store.
In the preceding example, as Hotel Search is expected to have high transaction volumes with stringent performance requirements, it is implemented using Erlang. In order to support predictive searching, Elasticsearch is used as the data store. At the same time, Hotel Booking needs more ACID transactional characteristics. Therefore, it is implemented using MySQL and Java. The internal implementations are hidden behind service endpoints defined as REST/JSON over HTTP.
Automation in a microservices environment
Most of the microservices implementations are automated to a maximum from development to production.
As microservices break monolithic applications into a number of smaller services, large enterprises may see a proliferation of microservices. A large number of microservices is hard to manage until and unless automation is in place. The smaller footprint of microservices also helps us automate the microservices development to the deployment life cycle. In general, microservices are automated end to end—for example, automated builds, automated testing, automated deployment, and elastic scaling.
As indicated in the preceding diagram, automations are typically applied during the development, test, release, and deployment phases:
- The development phase is automated using version control tools such as Git together with Continuous Integration (CI) tools such as Jenkins, Travis CI, and so on. This may also include code quality checks and automation of unit testing. Automation of a full build on every code check-in is also achievable with microservices.
- The testing phase will be automated using testing tools such as Selenium, Cucumber, and other AB testing strategies. As microservices are aligned to business capabilities, the number of test cases to automate is fewer compared to monolithic applications, hence regression testing on every build also becomes possible.
- Infrastructure provisioning is done through container technologies such as Docker, together with release management tools such as Chef or Puppet, and configuration management tools such as Ansible. Automated deployments are handled using tools such as Spring Cloud, Kubernetes, Mesos, and Marathon.
Microservices with a supporting ecosystem
Most of the large-scale microservices implementations have a supporting ecosystem in place. The ecosystem capabilities include DevOps processes, centralized log management, service registry, API gateways, extensive monitoring, service routing, and flow control mechanisms.
Microservices work well when supporting capabilities are in place, as represented in the preceding diagram.
Microservices are distributed and dynamic
Successful microservices implementations encapsulate logic and data within the service. This results in two unconventional situations: distributed data and logic and decentralized governance.
Compared to traditional applications, which consolidate all logic and data into one application boundary, microservices decentralize data and logic. Each service, aligned to a specific business capability, owns its data and logic.
The dotted line in the preceding diagram implies the logical monolithic application boundary. When we migrate this to microservices, each microservice A, B, and C creates its own physical boundaries.
Microservices don't typically use centralized governance mechanisms the way they are used in SOA. One of the common characteristics of microservices implementations is that they do not relay on heavyweight enterprise-level products, such as Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). Instead, the business logic and intelligence are embedded as a part of the services themselves.
A typical SOA implementation is shown in the preceding diagram. Shopping logic is fully implemented in ESB by orchestrating different services exposed by Customer, Order, and Product. In the microservices approach, on the other hand, Shopping itself will run as a separate microservice, which interacts with Customer, Product, and Order in a fairly decoupled way.
SOA implementations heavily relay on static registry and repository configurations to manage services and other artifacts. Microservices bring a more dynamic nature into this. Hence, a static governance approach is seen as an overhead in maintaining up-to-date information. This is why most of the microservices implementations use automated mechanisms to build registry information dynamically from the runtime topologies.
Antifragility, fail fast, and self-healing
Antifragility is a technique successfully experimented at Netflix. It is one of the most powerful approaches to building fail-safe systems in modern software development.
Tip
The antifragility concept is introduced by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder.
In the antifragility practice, software systems are consistently challenged. Software systems evolve through these challenges and, over a period of time, get better and better at withstanding these challenges. Amazon's GameDay exercise and Netflix' Simian Army are good examples of such antifragility experiments.
Fail fast is another concept used to build fault-tolerant, resilient systems. This philosophy advocates systems that expect failures versus building systems that never fail. Importance should be given to how quickly the system can fail and if it fails, how quickly it can recover from this failure. With this approach, the focus is shifted from Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) to Mean Time To Recover (MTTR). A key advantage of this approach is that if something goes wrong, it kills itself, and downstream functions aren't stressed.
Self-healing is commonly used in microservices deployments, where the system automatically learns from failures and adjusts itself. These systems also prevent future failures.
