This blog aims to give an overview of Microservices. Microservices an engineering approach, which is based on building an app as a collection of small services. Main advantage is the maintainability of code. It is a surrogate method to a serverless approach. Microservices developed in Node.js is most appropriate for enterprise-level projects for improving maintainability. The enterprise level product engineering services developed here at Perfomatix by our dedicated and talented team of technical experts serves as the best in class business solutions for the problem statements of our clients
The microservices method allows for independent scalability, development & deployment, and reusability. Node.js supports several Microservices framework which enables development of applications based on microservice. Most popular among them are Senaca js. Senaca js provides a complete environment for the development of the microservice applications.
Microservices – The next emerging trend
Microservices are a single self-functional system which, along with other units, form a complex system. Each small unit of the system is a fully functional, scalable, and deployable system. Each unit can be written in different programming languages and tested separately without causing an impact on other parts of the system. Microservices are the big block made up of smaller sub-blocks (Services), with each sub-block being an independent operating unit. If any of the unit (services) goes wrong, it will not take long to replace that service, which in turn reduces the risk of development and the costs involved in the operation of the infrastructure.
Before we discuss microservice we have to know about the traditional method used before microservices. In monolithic engineering they are built as one large system and are usually one code-base. A monolith is often deployed all at once, both front and end code together, regardless of what was changed. Microservices architecture is where an app is built as a suite of small services, each with its own code-base.
Some differences are listed down:-
Monolithic
- Understanding a huge code base becomes difficult, especially for new developers.
- Large code files make the development environment slow, like IDE.
- Changing technology or language becomes complicated as the code base is tightly coupled.
- CI/CD becomes challenging and time-consuming and needs a dedicated team to manage it.
Microservices
- They are small and specific to business requirement
- Loosely coupled and can be easily developed and deployed.
- Development can be done using different technologies.
- Microservices can be built with new technology stack enabling faster development cycles.
- Can be easily scaled on demand.
Compared to monolithic architecture, microservices are hands down more beneficial. You don’t need to stuff all software components and services in one big container and pack them tightly.
With microservices, you can build an app with:
- Greater flexibility,
- High scalability,
- Continuous development,
- Systematic data organization,
- Time optimization, and
- Reliability.
Building JavaScript applications on microservices help you focus on developing monofunctional modules with clearly defined operations and precise interfaces. The application development process becomes more agile, and the challenges of continuous testing are mitigated. When you build applications on a monolithic architecture, the entire application needs to be deployed with every update.
On the other hand, microservices have no dependency on the type of framework, technique, or programming language being used to build them. Your ability to release REST-ful APIs for communication and other services is the only requisite for microservice architecture.
Why Microservices with Node.JS?
A rich database of multiple JavaScript modules provided by Node.js simplifies the application development significantly. Software architects prefer Node.js as a technology partner for developing JSON API-based applications, I/O bound applications, data streaming applications, single-page applications, and data-intensive real-time applications. Some of the benefits are listed below.
Productivity – Node.js uses NPM (node package manager) which comes up with tons of ready to use modules which speed up the development process. Node.js uses javascript as interface language so that the same language can be used for back end and front end. This saves lots of development time.
Performance – Node.js event driven I/O model along with microservices strategy which can handle an extreme amount of load with lesser response time.
Friendly to Developer – Node.js has vast community support and is backed by millions of developers across the globe. Node package manager (NPM) contains more than 4 million ready to use modules which serve as heaven for developers. Node.js enables faster development of applications which are easily scalable, thereby making the developer happy throughout the application development life cycle.
Different enterprises like Go Daddy ,Paypal, Netflix have used this strategy to create scalable applications.
Rules of Microservices:
Before developing an application using microservices we have to understand the 5 rules of microservices:-
Zero-configuration: microservices system has hundreds of services making a manual configuration of IP addresses, ports and API capabilities simply impossible.
Highly-redundant: service failures are common in this scenario. So it should be very cheap to have copies of such services at disposal with proper fail-over mechanisms.
Fault-tolerant: the system should tolerate and gracefully handle miscommunication, errors in message processing, timeouts and more. Even if certain services are down, all the other unrelated services should still function.
Self-healing: it’s normal for outages and failures to occur. The implementation should automatically recover any lost service and functionality.
Auto-discovery: the services should automatically identify new services that are introduced to the system to start communication without manual intervention or downtime.
Summing up,
Node.js is a good choice for microservices because it offers:
- Superior performance.
- Faster execution.
- Cost-effective and scalable.
- Easy to maintain and update.
- Simplified, modular development.
- API support.
- Wider community support.
- Easily available frameworks.
- Easy learning curve.
In microservices, every single service is independently deployable, scalable and updatable, this is what makes it such an appealing architectural approach to the industry. A microservice is loosely coupled and interacts with other microservices for well-defined interfaces using protocols like http, they remain consistent and available in the presence of failure, meaning even if the machine goes down that host a microservice, the functionality provided by the service should still be offered by the application.
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