Microservices

I am very excited to share with you my mini video course on “Code Sharing in Microservices Architecture”. The course consist of 5 videos: Microservices – Code Sharing Microservices – Sharing Libraries Microservices – Sharing Integration Code Microservices – Sharing Domain Objects Microservices – Code Sharing Summary This is the first time I have ever done anything like this, so I am looking forward to the feedback. Do you enjoy these kind of videos, would you like to see more? Which video did you like the most/the least? ...

Working for consultancy, I already had a chance to build microservice based systems in large financial organisations as well as public sector ones. When sharing my experience with other developers, there is one topic that often comes up- many people wished that they had a service mesh from the start! In this article, I will explain what a service mesh is and why is it so useful! Service mesh defined A service mesh is a dedicated infrastructure layer that helps with managing your service to service communication. It is often implemented as a lightweight reverse-proxy using the sidecar pattern, deployed in a separate container. The two most popular implementations are currently Istio and Linkerd (which absorbed Conduit). ...

The topic of software architecture comes up often when discussing microservices. Many newcomers to microservices are not sure how to handle discussing architecture and how to make decisions. Should they bring the more traditional role of the software architect, or should everyone just do what they think makes sense? In this article, I will give you my answers to these questions and share some additional advice. The high-level view of the entire system First of all, regardless of what you decide is a good approach to handling architectural decisions, you need to know what your system looks like. ...

Today I want to talk to you about technical debt. This is a topic that comes up a lot and often generates some emotions. Developers often want to have a minimal amount of technical debt. Some will go through great efforts to eliminate any technical debt they see. Let me tell you what I think about it all. Different type of technical debt First of all, it is a bit simplistic to just classify all technical debt as the same thing. I have read a few attempts at classifying it- Types of Technical Debt by Agile Mike and There are 3 main types of technical debt. Here’s how to manage them. FirstMark make for interesting reading. ...

Single Responsibility Principle, as defined in the very famous set of SOLID principles, is often misunderstood. When asked what it means, most developers go with- “a class should do only one thing”, or something along these lines. This is simplistic and frankly- wrong! Intrigued? Read on! Single Responsibility Principle – the real definition Single Responsibility Principle (SRP), as defined by Robert C. Martin states: “A class should have only one reason to change.” ...

Spring Boot is enjoying, a seemingly never-ending growth of popularity. While only released in 2014, it has managed to overtake the Java serverside in less than five years. When starting a new project, a sensible question to ask is- “should I use a Spring Boot?”. In this article, I will help you answer this question! Every project is different, but we can use some characteristics with which we can compare them. Based on these characteristics I will advise you if Spring Boot is generally a good idea. ...

When thinking about microservices, we mostly imagine autonomous teams working on independent services. Despite all that independence, things such as log aggregation and security benefit from a system level thinking. In this article, I will discuss these concerns and give my advice on how to approach them. There are different kinds of microservices systems. Some of them are truly independent when every microservice is nearly indistinguishable from a third-party API, other- because of either necessity or practicality, rely on shared infrastructure or concepts. ...

In the past three years, I was involved in developing microservices architectures. In Java, with Spring Boot and in Groovy with Grails. Perhaps risking some outrage, I will compare my experience in Java and Groovy, Spring Boot and Grails and give my opinion on what works best. I will start looking purely at languages, as Spring Boot will work happily with Groovy and Java alike. What I like in Java-based microservices ...

Spring Boot is the most popular Java framework for developing microservices. In this article, I will share with you the best practices for working with Spring Boot that I have gathered by using it in professional development since 2016. I base these on my personal experience and writings of recognized Spring Boot experts. In this article, I focus on practices specific to Spring Boot (most of the time, also applicable to Spring projects). If you want to learn about the Java best practices, I recommend “Effective Java” which I review in a separate article. ...

In this article, we will look closer at a fascinating open source project. Meet Redis! You may be familiar with Redis already, in that case, you may be interested in the different use cases it has for microservices architecture. Read on to see how this “in-memory data structure store, database, cache, and message broker” can make your system better! What is Redis? I already revealed that in the introduction. To repeat (using redis.io own words): ...