What is a microservices architecture?

A typical microservices architecture consists of several components:

Microservices

The core of the architecture is the microservices themselves. Each microservice is a small, independent service that performs one specific task. Examples of microservices could be:

• User service: Handles all operations related to users - registration, login, profile updates, etc.

• Product service: Handles product information - fetching products, updating products, etc.

• Order service: Handles all order-related operations - placing orders, order status updates, etc.

The key characteristics of microservices are that they are:

• Small in size

• Independent - can be developed and deployed separately

• Use lightweight protocols to communicate (HTTP, messaging queues)

• Own their database

API Gateway

API Gateway is a single entry point for clients to access the microservices. It performs tasks like:

• Routing requests to the appropriate microservice

• Authentication and authorization

• Rate limiting

• Caching

• Logging

This decouples the clients from the internal microservice architecture.

Service Discovery

A service discovery mechanism is used to register and discover microservices dynamically. It allows microservices to find the location of other services at runtime.

Examples are Consul, Eureka, Zookeeper, etc.

Containers and orchestration

Microservices are typically packaged as containers (Docker, Kubernetes) and deployed on a container orchestration platform like Kubernetes, Docker Swarm, etc. This provides:

• Isolation

• Scalability

• Flexibility to choose programming languages and tools

Monitoring and logging

Tools monitor the health and performance of individual microservices and the overall system. Centralized logging is also important to correlate logs from different services.

API management

Tools are used to manage and monitor the APIs exposed by the microservices. This includes tools for API gateway management, API testing, etc.

So, in summary, a typical microservices architecture consists of independent microservices, an API gateway, service discovery, containers and orchestration, monitoring, logging, and API management tools. The architecture aims to provide agility, scalability, resilience, and flexibility.

Image credit - ByteByteGo