5 best practices for Building and Deployment Microservices

Many organizations who are going to adopt or adopted Microservices culture they often think Microservices means breaking a big business functionality into small independent services, which can be scaled automatically. But this is the half part of the story, Another part is often ignored but the other part is equally important and if you do not implement the other part please go back and sit with your architects as you are not getting the full advantages of Microservice culture. The other part is an efficient way to handle build and Deployment so developer code is always production ready.

Today I will discuss 5 best practices for build and development for Microservices.

1. Independent Deployment : When an organization adopting a Microservice culture, The first rule has to be set is, each and every Microservices should be independent. Here what I mean by independent is, Each Microservice should have a separate code base, publish/consume well-defined API, Separate persistence layer, Separate build, and deployment script, and separate deployable artifacts.  So Developer of the Microservices own the process end to end, They must have complete control over their services in terms of technical and management, which help them to protect themselves from any external impediments. When you building a Microservice you should know Other Microservices API which you will go to consume, And also publish a API so that another Microservices Consumes your Service by doing that you can become independent as you know the request/response for the services you consume so you can MOCK them and work independently, also as you publish your API , there is well-defined method signature so unless you change the API signature, whatever you can do with your codebase, even you can deploy it thousand times in a day that will not affect others. Also in Management perspective Team must own the build and deployment pipeline, administrator access in each and every environment even production!!! Should have complete control everything related to Administration, If your organization does not allow this then you are not doing Microservice and not get its essence. Sometimes dependency with Other services is unavoidable( Not management related those are in our hand), or to cope future changes you need to revamp your API, But those are the Exception cases, in my previous article I had a talk about how to handle the same, But again that is exception, By rule every service is independent has its sole identity, Team related to this service owns everything they are all in all of this service. This brings the speed of development and as an organization, you can publish features to end user easily.

2. CI/CD : One of the main causes of slowness in publishing feature in production is dependency between Dev team and Ops team, Dev team holds the technical part and ops holds the environment for it , This causes a barrier like( communication, availability of environment/artifact etc) as they depend on each other, In a competitive market even a delay of one hour matters, This is not the way to adopt Microservice culture, Ideal Microservice environment would be anytime any code from developers environment  can be production ready , If developers code pass all criteria then it can be published to production within no time and there may be a manual intervention to publish it in production but else should be automated, Microservice culture welcomes DevOps culture automatically. Without DevOps Organisation not utilize the power of Microservice fullest. There should be a build pipeline whenever user checks in a code it will trigger a build then artifacts should be in UAT environment where unit testing will be done then it moves to SIT and integration testing will be fired at last it can publish to production with or without manual intervention.

3. Environment Replication : In Project Management lifecycle, our traditional approach is to create the different environments like UAT environment, SIT environment, PROD environment etc. This is really a good approach but the problem is that environments are not identical, In SIT we have few servers , A Load balancer manages them but in Production the Infrastructure is totally changed there may be a Primary and Secondary pool of servers for Blue/green deployment or they may have different data center based on geographical affinity. So one artifact different Topologies. One artifact tested against multiple environments, as a result,  we can’t predict how the artifacts behave in Production as we do not have production like infrastructure to test on. The most common bug comes from production is how artifacts behave when there is a heavy load. So to identify how exactly code behaves it needs an Identical environment like production with Load testing capability. It can be done if organization adopt IAAS, Where we can spawn machines seamlessly and clone the developer's environment. So our artifacts should not be only jar, war, gems. An Artifacts should contain the whole environment i.e the OS, Application server, persistence layer all ancillary settings. Nowadays we can achieve it through IAAS(Infrastructure As A Service). Also, Docker is a very popular option to spawn a container and by Docker file, we can instruct what should be packaged inside the container. Puppet and Chef also a good option to achieve that. If you want it should be managed by the third party you can go for AWS or Cloud Foundry, BlueMix etc.

4. Artifact Repository :  Although it comes with CI/CD I want to highlight this feature. Why is an Organization adopting Microservice architecture in terms of Business perspective?

The answers are

1. They want to release their feature quickly to end user to stay ahead of competitors.
2. No Downtime which increases reputation.

    To achieve this organization has to have a robust framework where it can store all the artifacts with its version number as if any production issues occur with current release either we can patch the fix and deploy it to production or if it takes time to fix we can easily revert the changes and deploy the old artifacts so user does not have to wait for fix for next release. So it is utmost important to maintains the artifact repository and it should be very easy to deploy in production, No cumbersome processes so that it needs a special expertise, anyone can do this it should be like a command in CLI.

Like deploy <ServiceName><Version ID><Environment> where

Service ID: Logical Name of the Microservice.

Version ID is the Version you want to deploy.

Environment: Which has a logical name like prod1,prod2,sit1 internally it contains all the information of the servers and apply artifacts to all servers.

5. Scrum of Scrums : We know that one Microservice holds one Domain information. So When an organization wants to build a feature which distributed over multiple domains naturally the work should be distributed in multiple Agile teams. Although in Microservice culture each Team is independent as they can mock the other services, but make functionality works fully it needs an Integration.  So it is utmost important every team's Work Item should be in Sync so that In a defined timeframe all teams did their jobs and all the works can be integrated and tested in the Integrated environment. So Organization must have to conduct a Scrum of Scrums where each team's Scrum master and Product owner sit together and decide the priority items so that business functionality published in production according to the announced release.

Conclusion : Breaking a Complex Business domain into small moving parts and each part work independent is just one side of the coin, To make and publish new features in a hassle-free manner we need to focus on the Management structure of the organization also.  

I am curious to know from The organization who adopted or about to adopt microservice culture how they change their Management policy or what are the other management related challenges they faced when they move into Microservice Culture.