I am developing a microservice that accepts x-www-form-urlencoded content type and has some redirects to external URLs, is this a bad practice to have a redirection?
The motive behind Microservices is to decentralize and decouple the program so that they can operate independently !
Redirection may be a bad thing here as it would be simple to just call that Microservice end points rather than redirecting from another microservice (Unless you want to main abstractions and avoid direct calling , which you can still do via Async communication for e.g. via MQs such as RabbitMQ or Apache Kafka )
Re-direction would ultimately increase the HTTP calls eventually increasing unwanted traffic which you won't want !
I'd suggest to go through some theory which might be helpful for you to design & decide well
https://microservices.io/
It dependens. Redirection is not a bad practice by itself. A microservice can perfectly communicates with either other microservices or external services if needed. It depends of your achitecture.
Related
When doing microservices it's quite a common and good practice to have a top layer called API-Gateway, that sits in front of a group of microservices, to facilitate requests and delivery of data and services.
When using MicroFrontends to compose an UI app from multiple sub-apps (MFE), I cannot really see a benefit about still using an API gateway to communicate between each MFE and its corresponding Microservice.
In many schemas, an API-Gateway is still used in front of the microservices
Example here :
But the fact that each microfrontend is its own app also probably means it will communicate with its own API. In this case I would either use a thin API layer over each microservice, and then make each MFE communicate directly with this layer, because a MFE probably won't ever need to read data from another MFE (this would go against the spirit of MFE, or am I wrong ?).
What kind of approach would you use in your projects ?
I am developing web application backend with Spring where client and server talk through Restful APIs. There is a specific API where I assume the hit will be much. Is there any way to scale this specific API?( Like, assigning more threads)
In this application everything is interdependent. So, microservice wont be best approach I guess.
There are two possible ways, i can think of
Use Load Balancer, this will help you to add multiple application instances of Rest API. This is classical approach in such cases.
This depends upon existing implementation, API can be refactor to just receive the message and decouple the processing thread.
The your suggested way of increasing thread has limitation and more fine tuning require. If the use case is just to support limited user, following configure can be use. tomcat thread pool.
Just have multiple instances of the same service. REST has a statelessness constraint, so it is easy to do it.
I'm trying to start a little microservice application, but I'm a little bit stuck on some technicalities.
I'm trying to build an issue tracker application as an example.
It has 2 database tables, issues and comments. These will also be separate microservices, for the sake of the example.
It has to be a separate API that can be consumed by multiple types of clients e.g. mobile, web etc..
When using a monolitic approach, all the codebase is coupled together, and when making a request to let's say the REST API, I would handle for example the '/issues/19' request
to fetch the issue with the id '19' and it's corresponding comments by means of the following pseudocode.
on_request_issue(id) # handler for the route '/issues/<id>'
issue = IssuesModel.findById(id)
issue.comments = CommentsModel.findByIssueId(id)
return issue
But I'm not sure on how I should approach this with microservices. Let's say that we have microservice-issues and microservice-comments.
I could either let the client send a request to both '/issues/19' and '/comments/byissueid/19'. But that doesn't work nice in my point of view, since if we're having multiple things
we're sending alot of requests for one page.
I could also make a request to the microservice-issues and in that one also make a request to the microservice-comments, but that looks even worse to me than the above, since from what
I've read microservices should not be coupled, and this couples them pretty hard.
So then I read about API gateways, that they could/should receive a request and fan out to the other microservices but then I couldn't really figure out how to use an API gateway. Should
I write code in there for example to catch the '/issues/19' request, then fan out to both the microservice-issues and microservice-commetns, assemble the stuff and return it?
In that case, I'm feeling I'm doing the work double, won't the API gateway become a new monolith then?
Thank you for your time
API gateway sounds like what you need.
If you'll keep it simple, just to trigger internal API, it will not become your new monolith.
It will allow you do even better processing when your application grows with new microservices, or when you have to support different clients (browser, mobile apps, watch, IOT, etc)
BTW, the example you show sounds like a good exercise, in reality, for most webapps, it looks like over design. I would not break every DB call to its own microservices.
One of the motivations for breaking something to small(er) services is service autonomy, in this case the question is, when the comments service is down should you display the issue or not- if they are always coupled anyway, they probably shouldn't reside in two services, if they aren't then making two calls will let you get this decoupling
That said, you may still need an API Gateway to solve CORS issues with your client
Lastly, comments/byissueid is not a good REST interface the issueId should be a parameter /comments/?issueId=..
Say we have following taxi-hailing application that is composed of loosely coupled microservices:
The example is taken from https://www.nginx.com/blog/introduction-to-microservices/
Each services has its own rest api and all services are combined in a single api gateway. The client does not talk to a single service but to the gateway. The gateway requests information from several services and combines them to a single response. For the client it looks like it is talking to a monolithic application.
I am trying to understand: where could we incorporate falcor into this application?
One Model Everywhere from http://netflix.github.io/falcor/
Falcor lets you represent all your remote data sources as a single
domain model via a virtual JSON graph. You code the same way no matter
where the data is, whether in memory on the client or over the network
on the server.
In this taxi-hailing application each microservice represents a single domain model already. Can you think of any benefit we could thrive by wrapping each microservice with falcor? I cannot.
However I think it is very convenient to incorporate falcor into the api gateway because we can abstract away the different domain models created by the microservices into one single or at least a few models.
What is your opinion?
You are right. This is how Netflix uses Falcor and what the Falcor router is designed for.
From the documentation:
The Router is appropriate as an abstraction over a service layer or REST API. Using a Router over these types of APIs provides just enough flexibility to avoid client round-trips without introducing heavy-weight abstractions. Service-oriented architectures are common in systems that are designed for scalability. These systems typically store data in different data sources and expose them through a variety of different services. For example, Netflix uses a Router in front of its Microservice architecture.
It is rarely ideal to use a Router to directly access a single SQL Database. Applications that use a single SQL store often attempt to build one SQL Query for every server request. Routers work by splitting up requests for different sections of the JSON Graph into separate handlers and sending individual requests to services to retrieve the requested data. As a consequence, individual Router handlers rarely have sufficient context to produce a single optimized SQL query. We are currently exploring different options for supporting this type of data access pattern with Falcor in future.
Falcor is really a great api if it is used in the correct way for very relevant use cases, like :
If your page has to make multiple REST end point calls
These calls don't depend on each other
All the REST calls happens on initial page load
Performance : If you want to cache the REST responses (for example, the microservice uses gemfire caching, you may not need falcor cache. You could still use falcor caching if you want to reduce the network latency)
Server requests batching : When running Falcor in node environment, you may want to cut down the amount of calls to node server from the client side.
Easier response parsing : If you don't want the client code to worry about extracting the data-points from REST response (Including error handling)
and so on ..
However, there are plenty of situations where falcor does not serve the purpose as much and feel that it is better off calling the end point directly :
If REST calls are dependent on one another
If you want to pass lot of parameters for calling the end point
If you don't intend to cache the response(s)
If you want to share some secure cookies (ex:XSRF tokens) with the REST web service
This is more a theoretical question than a practical one, but given I undestand the principles of SOA I am still a bit unsure about if this can be applied to any app.
The usual example is where a client wants to know something from a server thus we implement a service that can provide that information given a client request, it can be stateless or statefull, etc.
But what happens when we want to be notified when something happens on the server, maybe we call a service to register a search and want to be notified when a new item arrives to the server that matches or search.
Of course that can be implemented using polling and leverage that using long timeouts, but I can not see a way in the usual protocols to receive events from the server without making a call to ask.
If you can point me to an example, or tell me an architecture that could support then you have made my day.
Have you considered pub-sub (ie; WS-Eventing, WS-Notification)? These are the usual means to pushing "stuff" to interested consumers/subscribers.
You want to use a Publish-Subscribe design. If you are using WCF checkout Programming WCF by Juval Lowery. In the appdendix he shows how to build a Pub-Sub system that is actually fully Per-Call. It doesn't even rely on CallbackContracts and keeping long running Channels open and so doesn't require any reconnection logic when communication is broken...let alone the need for any polling.