Handling micro services as a whole

Introduction

Laymen explanation

If you have used micro service architecture, you might be visualising that your solution is going to be complex. You are right. If fact, it is like jigsaw puzzle. Here, pieces of this jigsaw puzzle are micro services. They are scattered across multiple physical machines. Similar to jigsaw puzzle solving activity, you need to match pieces. Your situation is like solving hard jigsaw puzzle. You may ask why hard? It is due to followings reasons

1. Micro services can be in very large numbers. So, you need to solve jigsaw puzzle of thousands of pieces

2. Microservices can be distributed across multiple machines. So, now you have additional task of performing networking among jigsaw pieces

3. Location of micro-services can change dynamically. So, now you have additional task of tracking them.

Now you must be thinking, how to solve this puzzle. This article helps in this regard.

Technical explanation

Let us revisit above 3 points

• Micro services can be in very large numbers. So, you need to solve jigsaw puzzle of thousands of pieces

  • Load balancer glues similar micro services with single entry point. So, it helps to reduces the complexity in terms of number of pieces

• Microservices can be distributed across multiple machines. So, now you have additional task of performing networking among jigsaw pieces

  • Orchestration tools help in this regard

• Location of micro-services can change dynamically. So, now you have addtional task of tracking them.

  • Service discovery feature helps in this regard

Additionally, you need to handle following

• • Scaling as per load

    • Load balancer helps

  • Secure and authenticated access

    • Secure gateway points help

  • Ability to troubleshoot and debug

    • Visibility support specific to metric, alert, logs help. Orchestration tool helps in this regard.

Orchestration tools

• Kubernetes

• Istio

• Mesos marathon

• Docker swarm

Microservices based load balancers

• Citrix Netscaler (CPX)

• Envoy

• Haproxy

• Nginx

Visibility tool

• Riemann

• Splunk

• Prometheus

secure gateway points

• Istio

• Citrix Gateway

• Pulse secure gateway

Reference

https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/saturn/2015/11/defining-microservices.html

https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/saturn/2015/11/microservices-beyond-the-hype-what-you-gain-and-what-you-lose.html

https://kubernetes.io

https://istio.io

https://www.envoyproxy.io

http://riemann.io