Sleepless Dev: Java Microservices more random thoughts

Tool-stacks, polyglot programming languages

Standards are great that is why there are so many of them. Attempts to standardize on technology platforms are often thwarted by using vendor products, merging with other companies, buying companies, adopting new mobile platforms, constant churn of new client frameworks and platforms, etc. Microservices Architecture embraces polyglot programming languages and programming languages. This is where HTTP/WebSocket and JSON/tolerant readers come into play as it provides a minimal pipe and format to support change and polyglot of programming languages.

Services own their data

Databases are used for reporting and offline analysis. Service stores (which could use a database), is for a service or a service shard. Operational data and reporting / historical / backup data should be split up. Operation data for a service should only be editable by that service.

Microservices architecture is back to OOP basics. Objects, services, own their data and business logic. Each service stores data and models data in its view of the world. Data is specific for its service.

In addition of going back to OOP roots and domain objects, microservices own their data storage. This could mean a database or key value store on the same docker node as the JVM running the service. Microservices do not use a shared database for operational data. A micro-service might fallback to a shared database if data is not in the service, but this would be the exception not the rule.

Service Discovery - Design for Failure

In addition to automated deployment, virtualization, and cloud orchestration/automation, microservices use service discovery and service monitoring to recover from failure and to spread load across more nodes. The ability to discover service nodes, and adding them into the mix is called elasticity. This includes monitoring of services. Detecting failures. Removing unhealthy nodes out of the mix. Adding additional services into a running system. A key component of microservices architecture is reactive programming, which is an async programming mode, and the ability to use back pressure to fail gracefully if the load surpasses the capacity of a node rather than having a cascading failure.

In the mean time.. feel free to read about QBit the Java Microservice Lib that focuses on Microservices, WebSocket, JSON and HTTP using Active Objects and high-speed queueing, messaging and event bus for modern cloud and mobile applications back-ends.