We have a huge monolithic application which talks to multiple providers for content.
Each of these providers have different API contracts but the overall schema is almost similar.
Right now we are using command design pattern and transforming responses from each provider into a common schema for our frontend.
What should be the right approach is deciding modules for our microservices.
As should we break them down via business logic or per provider or both business logic + provider.
Help please.
I consider individual deployability to be corner-stone of the microservices. All features of microservices can be traced back to individual deployability.
That being said the idea is to decompose business functions in such a way that each of the module remains individual deployable. A module in my opinion should own all interaction with all possible vendors - encompassing its complete business domain.
Second chapter of Sam Newman's book Monolith to Microservices expands on this area.
Related
I'm new to microservice architecture.
I want to build microservices based on aws lambda.
Example:
I have two tables with posts and comments on them
How to properly build a microservices
I see it in this way:
Create the first service with crud(create, update, delete, show) posts and comments from the database
The second service will filter of posts and comments by specific parameters
If this arhitecture of services correct?
Thank you
Microservices are reusable services. In general, they do a "thing", and do it well. For example, a microservice can be generating a unique partition key for a table so there is no collision upon insert.
Your approach to microservices is fine. The objective is to decouple these microservices so that can be deployed independent of each other, and REUSE them as much as possible. Microservices begin to fail when people duplicate the core microservice (such as CRUD DB accessors) because they did not do their due diligence to discover what may already be available.
In good domain driven design, understanding ownership and responsibility of microservices is blatantly clear; so before jumping into microservices, I would look at doing a domain driven design activity.
I just finished reading Uncle Bob's "Clean Architecture" and now wondering how to apply it in the context of microservices!
On one hand, I think that microservices fall in the "Framework-Drivers" layer since it's an implementation on top of use-cases (they are ways to serve use-cases.) This way, we focus on the core of the app (Entities and Use-cases) and stay flexible in the implementation of the outer layers (including microservices). But since each microservice can be maintained by a different developer/team of developers, they will have a bad time when use-cases change (harder to predict who will be impacted).
On the other hand, we can split our app into multiple microservices, decoupled from each other, and apply Clean Architecture inside each microservice. The pro of this approach is that we can focus on each microservice doing one thing, and doing it well. But the problem is that we started designing using technical separations (microservices) which violates the main Clean Architecture principle of focusing on the business. Also, it will be hard to not duplicate code if two microservices uses the same entity or use-case!
I think the first scenario is the best, but I would like to have feedback from fellow developers on the long-term benefits of both scenarios, and potential troubles.
My two cents:
From Uncle Bob's words, "Micro-services are deployment option, not an architecture". Each micro-service should be deployable, maintainable by different teams (which can be in different geographical locations). Each team can choose their own architecture, programming language, tools, frameworks etc... And forcing each team to use single/same programming language or tool or architecture does not sound good. So each micro-service team must be able to pick their architecture.
How can each team code/maintain/deploy their own micro-service without conflicting with other teams code? This question brings us to how to separate micro-services. IMHO it should be separated on feature based (same principle applies to modularization of mobile application projects where independent teams should be able to work on separate modules/micro-services).
After separating micro-services, the communication between them is implementation detail. It can be done through web-socket/REST API etc... Inside each micro-service, if team decides to follow Clean Architecture, they can have multiple layers based on Clean Arch Principles (Domain/Core - Interface Adapters - Presentation/API & Data & Infrastructure). There can/will be duplicate codes on micro-services, which are OK for micro-services.
As #lww-pai-long said in his answer here splitting based on the Domain responsibilities and DDD is in most cases the best solution.
Still if you worked with a system using micro-services you soon realize that there are other things involved here as well.
DDD Bounded Context as base for micro-services
In most cases splitting your application to micro-services based on Bounded Context is the safe way to go here. From experience I would even say that in some parts of Domain you could go even further and have multiple micro-services per Bounded Context. Example would be if you have quite big part of Domain which represents one Bounded Context. Other example would be if you use CQRS for a particular Domain. Then you can end up having a Write/Domain and Views/Read micro-service.
You can read in this answer how you can split your Domain to micro-services.
It would be advisable as you said to "apply Clean Architecture inside each microservice".
Also, it will be hard to not duplicate code if two microservices uses
the same entity or use-case!
This is something that you have to deal with when working with micro-services in most cases. Duplicating code and/or data across multiple micro-service is common drawback of working with micro-services. You have to take this into account as you on the other hand get isolation and independence of the micro-service and its database. This problem can be partly solved by using shared libraries as some sort of packages. Be careful this is not the best approach for all cases. Here you can read about using common code and libraries across micro-services. Unfortunately not all advice's and principles from Uncle Bob's "Clean Architecture" can be applied when using micro-services.
Non Domain or technical operation micro-services
Usually if your solution is using micro-services you will more or less have micro-services which are not Domain specific but rather some kind of technical task's or non business operations directly. Example could be something like:
micro-service for report generation
micro-service for email generation and forwarding
micro-service for authorization/permission management
micro-service for secret management
micro-service for notification management
These are not services which you will get by splitting your solution based on DDD principles but you still need them as general solution as they could be consumed by multiple other services.
Conclusion
When working with micro-services you will most of the time have a mixture of Domain specific and Domain agnostic micro-services. I think the Clean Architecture could be looked from a little different prospective when working with micro-services.
On one hand, I think that microservices fall in the
"Framework-Drivers" layer since it's an implementation on top of
use-cases (they are ways to serve use-cases.)
It kind of does but it also falls into the other layers like Entities and Use Cases. I think it goes in the direction that if you work on Domain specific services this Diagram becomes the Architecture of each micro-service but not a concept above all micro-services. In the applications where I worked with micro-services each micro-service(the ones which are based on the DDD Bounded Context) had most of this layers if not all of them. The Domain agnostic services are an exception to this as they are not based on Domain Entities but rather on some tasks or operations like 'Create an Email', 'Create a PDF report from html template' or similar'.
I think this question may be better on Sofware Engineering but I'll answer anyway.
My approach would be to use DDD and define each microservice as a Domain Services grouping Use Cases semantically, then link Domain Services with Bounded Context.
Sam newman talk about the importance of separating microservice by domain abraction and not technical one in Building Microservices
The point he makes basically is that defining scaling strategies for microservice based on subdomain will better match the "real live" constraints observed on the production system than using technically based microservice and try to defined a abstract strategy.
And if you look at how something like Kubernetes works it seems to push to that direction. A pod end up being a microservice with multiple containers defined as a complete stack matching a sub-domain if the overhaul application.
It then gets easier in an e-commerce application, for example, to scale the Payment service independently of the Cart service based on customer activity than to scale the web services independently of the job queues in an abstract way.
The way those Bounded Contexts will communicate, i.e request based or event based, depends on the the specific relation between them. To use the same example a Cart may generate an event that will trigger the Payment, while the same Cart may need to request the Inventory before validating the order.
And at the end of a day those Domain Services* and Bounded Contexts can be implemented the same when starting with a monolith, even the Bounded Contexts communication can be. The underlying communication protocol becomes an implementation detail that can easily(kinda) be switch when transitioning to a distributed a.k.a microservices architecture.
Are there any best practices or guidelines on how to share the domain model between two micro-services?
I have a micro-service (1) which provides end points to interact with a resource (e.g, Order) all CRUD and the other micro-service (2) which performs a specific non CRUD task on the resource (Order). The micro-service (2) almost needs all the order attributes to perform its operation. In this case, does it make sense to create a common shared lib of the domain model and share between the two services? I could technically combine 1 and 2 together but the micro-service (2) needs to support scalability as it is quite memory and CPU intensive.
As far as I can see it seems that these two services need to share the same data and you are thinking to share also the library that is used to read/modify this data.
They seem to belong to the same "bounded context" and so it would be ideal to consider them as a unique service.
If you really can't separate their data and their logic, it would be better to keep them together.
I do not think that components in the same microservices have to follow the same deployment pattern: they will be the same microservice, managed by the same team, deployed always together, sharing the same source repository, but they will be deployed with a different strategy because only the second component needs high scalability.
So same bounded context, same service, but different components.
I do not have a lot of experience and so take this as my personal thought.
To anyone with real world experience breaking a monolith into separate modules and services.
I am asking this question having already read the MonolithFirst blog entry by Martin Fowler. When taking a monolith and breaking it into microservices the "size" element of the equation is the one that I ponder over the most. Specifically, how to approach breaking a monolith application (we're talking 2001: A Space Oddessy; as in it is that old and that large) into micro services without getting overly fine grained or staying too monolithic. The end goal is creating separate modules that can be upgraded indepenently and scaled independently.
What are some recommended best practices based on personal experience of breaking a monolith into microservices?
The rule of thumb is breaking the monolith based on bounded context . The most common way of defining the bounded context is using BU ( Business Unit) . For example the module which does actual payment is mostly a separate BU .
The second thing to consider is the overhead micro-services bring. You should analyse the hardware , monitoring , infra pieces before completely breaking the service. What I have seen is people taking smaller microservices out of monolith instead of going and writing say 10 new service and depreciating the monolith.
My advice will be have an incremental approach . Take the first BU which is being worked upon out of monolith. This will also give a goos learning curve for the whole team.
You should clearly distinguish sub-domain areas (bounded contexts) from you domain.
Usually (if everything is fine with your architecture) you already have some separate components in your monolith application which responsible for each sub-domain. These components interact with each other in one process
(in monolith application) and you should to think about how to put them into separate processes. Of course you need to produce a lot of refactoring when moving one by one parts of the monolith to microservices.
Always remember that every microservice is responsible for some sub-domain.
I strongly recommend you to learn Domain Driven Design.
Domain-Driven Design: Tackling Complexity in the Heart of Software by Eric Evans
Implementing Domain-Driven Design by Vaughn Vernon
Also learn CQRS pattern
At the beginning you also should decide how your micservices will interact with each other.
There are several options:
Direct calls from one service to another
Send messages through some dispatcher service
which abstracts the client service from the knowledge where the called (destination) services are located.
This approach is similar to how proxy server like NGINX works.
Interact through some messaging bus (middleware), like RabbitMQ
You can combine these options, for example Query requests can be processed through Dispatcher Service, Commands and Events through message bus.
From my experience the biggest problem will be to go away from a single database,
which monolith applications is usually used.
In addition some good practices:
Put each microservice in own repository - this isolates from the ability to directly use the code of one micro service in another.
You also get faster checkouts and builds of each microservice on CI.
Interactions with any service should occur only through its public contracts.
It is necessary to aspire that each microservice has its own database
Example of the sub-domains (bounded contexts) for some Tourism Industry application.
Each bounded context can be serviced by a microservice.
We also started our journey some time back and i started writing a blog series for exactly the same thing: https://dzone.com/articles/how-i-started-my-journey-in-micro-services-and-how
Basically what i understood is to break my problem in diff. microservices, i need a design framework which Domain Driven Design gives(Domain Driven Design Distilled Book by Vaugh Vernon).
Then to implement the design (using CQRS and Event Sourcing and ...) i need a framework which provides all the above support.
I found Lagom good for this.(Eventuate , Spring Microservices are some other choices).
Sample Microservices Domain analysis using Domain Driven Design by Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/architecture/microservices/domain-analysis
One more analysis is: http://cqrs.nu/tutorial/cs/01-design
After reading on Domain Driven Design i think lagom and above links will help you to build a end to end application. If still any doubts , please raise :)
Currently our service is implemented using a multilayer architecture dividing the whole service into three:
API
Business
Persistence
However this introduces a lot of redundancy within our system. A common adage in the industry is "DRY" (Don't Repeat Yourself). The redundancy has increased the development time, and made the system more fragile and cluttered our code with "copy" methods.
To give a better idea, say we have a Person service. This would require the following:
Person entity - JPA annotated class for ORM
Repository service request - contains field values to be persisted of the Person domain object with additional persistence options
Repository service response - contains field values of the Person entity
Person - class with business logic, domain fields and computed fields
Domain service request - contains field values of Person resource and additional business options
Domain service response - contains field values of Person business object excluding those that shouldn't be visible to API users
Person resource - class representing what should be viewable to the API users
And things get worse when taking nested objects into consideration.
The current design facilitates difference between concerns (business, API, persistence), however:
Currently, the differences are very small. This is causing us to have
very similar classes with only minor differences
Services returning
service response objects with fields instead of just the objects
itself hampers other services from depending on other services
Questions:
Is it worth it to go through with this design?
What are our alternatives?
What could we change to improve our situation?
I know where you're coming from. My shortest advice would be: read "Domain Driven Desing - Tackling Complexity Inside the Heart of Software" by Eric Evans.
A central part of the DDD is the domain: POJOs containing majority of the business logic.
The building blocks are more or less what you've already mentioned.
There are three kinds of services:
Application Services that are responsible for orchestration, transaction management and authorization
Domain Services contain business logic that doesn't fit other domain building blocks: entities, policies, factories, value objects. Create them only if you can't use other domain mechanisms.
Infrastructure Services. The most common are repositories which are responsible for persistence of root aggregates (this role play some of the entities), and only them. This is contrast with DAOs which are created for any entity. Other infrastructure services might be for instance clients of Web Services that are being used by the application.
This richness of different kinds of services together with the idea of pushing the logic down as far as possible, because the logic in the domain is the most easily reusable, gives the developers tools they need to build comprehensive and maintainable complex software. Note that DDD might be too heavy for simple CRUD apps.
The entry points to the system are either Web Services endpoints or controllers (for Web apps where UI is generated on the backend like in case of JSPs of JSFs).
For the middle sized systems I like to use approach inspired by CQRS, that is, in order to avoid inevitable slowness when loading multiple root aggregates for displaying purposes (read side) I write dedicated query services that return DTOs straight from the DB, in case of JPA using select new mechanism.