Last Updated on October 6, 2023 by KnownSense
In this article we will be introducing 6 core design principles in terms of implementing a successful microservices architecture. A successful implementation is a software system which is flexible, scalable, reliable, and gives you that competitive edge in your marketplace. People who are normally new to this style of architecture are sometimes overwhelmed by all the concepts, terminology, and technology that claim to support and implement a microservices system.
We’re going to give you the ability to recognize and understand what actually contributes to a successful implementation by giving you a deep understanding of the six core design principles that we believe leads to a successful implementation of a microservices system.
Below are the six fundamental principles of microservice design, each of which we will discuss in more detail:
Autonomy
Autonomy in microservices refers to the degree of independence and self-sufficiency that each individual microservice possesses within a microservices architecture. This enhances the performance and reliability of the service and gives consumers more guarantees about the quality of service they can expect from it. Coupled with statelessness, autonomy also contributes to the overall availability and scalability of the service. With increased autonomy, the microservices architecture is less likely to experience failures or performance issues because of another microservice.
The key concepts in terms of autonomous design are loose coupling, honoring contracts and interfaces, concurrent development, as well as supporting backwards compatibility, and having stateless services to ensure that all our services are independently modifiable and deployable.
Loose coupling is a fundamental concept in microservices architecture, and it refers to the degree of independence and independence between different microservices within a system. In a loosely coupled microservices architecture, each microservice is designed to be as independent as possible from other services. This means that changes or updates to one microservice should have minimal or no impact on other services.
To read more about autonomy and how to achieve autonomy in detail, please refer the page: Microservices Design Principle: Autonomy
Here’s a table that summarizes the key aspects of Autonomy in microservices:
| Aspect | Details |
|---|---|
| Focus | Emphasizes the independence and self-sufficiency of individual microservices and development teams. |
| Key Aspects | – Independent operation of each microservice. – Development teams have autonomy. – Independent development, deployment, and scaling. – Technology diversity. – Minimizing dependencies. – Technology independence. – Isolation of data. – Independence of scaling. – API contracts for versioning. |
| Goal | Empower teams to work independently, make decisions, and innovate while fostering agility. Reduce the impact of changes on other services. |
| Benefits | Speeds up development and deployment cycles. Minimizes cascading changes and disruptions. Simplifies system maintenance and evolution. Promotes system reliability and resilience. |
Domain-driven Cohesion
Domain-driven cohesion refers to the concept of organizing microservices based on the domain-driven design (DDD) principles. Domain-driven cohesion emphasizes that microservices should align with the boundaries and logic of specific business domains or subdomains within an application.
Not only does each service need to represent a business domain in terms of data and functionality, but that service also must only have one reason for change, i.e. it must have focused cohesion. One way of tightly scoping these microservices is to use a technique of identifying bounded context. For existing large applications we need to identify existing seams and boundaries that could be identified as bounded context that we could convert into microservices.
This approach aims to improve the maintainability, scalability, and understandability of a microservices architecture by ensuring that each microservice is focused on a well-defined business domain or subdomain.
To know more about it please refer: Microservices Design Principle: Domain-driven Cohesion
Ownership Culture
Ownership culture design principle emphasized that each service should be treated as a product with a team behind it and additional teams for any cross‑cutting concerns. This is only possible if we treat each one of our microservices as a premium product with a product owner behind it, and with a business and a development team behind it.
We should catalog all the functionality in the data that each one of our microservices provides as part of an API catalog that’s available to our organization. This kind of visibility of our microservices will lead to a ubiquitous language across our organization where everybody is using the correct and the right terminology to refer to data and functionality provided by our microservices architecture.
To know how to adopt this culture plese refer: Microservices Design Principle: Ownership Culture
Resiliency
Resiliency in microservices refers to the system’s ability to withstand and recover from failures or disruptions gracefully while maintaining essential functionality and service quality. It is a crucial aspect of designing and operating microservices architectures, which are inherently distributed and complex systems. Resiliency ensures that a microservices-based application can continue to function even when individual components or services encounter issues or fail.
To know more read: Microservices Design Principle: Resiliency
Observability
Observability is a design principle which ensure that our workflows, i.e. our logical transactions and our component health, is both visible and traceable. As part of this, implement central logging and central monitoring to ensure that all our workflows are traceable so that our transactions that are made up of many parts can be traced as they work through our software architecture. The same applies for errors when they happen within our microservices architecture. We need the ability to trace where these errors happened, with what microservice and what data, and exactly when, where, and how. All this investigation needs to happen in a central place. We can’t be running around our distributed microservices architecture in order to find exactly where what happened, with what instance, with what data. This design principle show the importance of central monitoring where we monitors key metrics within our microservices architecture so that we can do things like capacity planning, i.e. when we need performance and we can scale out the relevant parts of our microservices architecture. As part of this monitoring, not only are we monitoring performance, but we’re also monitoring general health. So if something dies or something goes wrong, we’ve got alerting capabilities that will inform us that something has gone wrong so that we can react immediately and resolve that issue.
To read about this in more details please refer: Microservices Design Principle: Observability
Automation
Automation design principle is all about having automation tools in order to provide on‑demand hosting, and automated building of our software of our microservices, and the automated testing and deployment of our microservices into our microservices environment. With the consistency and reliability of automated testing, we want to reduce the need to manually regression test our entire software architecture every time we want to change because manual testing is prone to errors and inconsistencies, whereas automated tests are consistent and always reliable. By using these automation tools, we want to centralize the configuration for our environments, for our releases, for our versions of our microservices in one place so that we can consistently and reliably deploy our microservices into our microservices environment, something which is highly risk prone when we’re relying on somebody to manually do this without automation tooling.
Read the benefits of automation in more detail: Microservices Design Principle: Automation
Conclusion
In this article, we’ve delved into the six core design principles essential for implementing a successful microservices architecture. These principles form the bedrock of a flexible, scalable, and reliable software system that can give you a competitive edge in your market. Microservices architecture can initially appear overwhelming, with its multitude of concepts, terminology, and supporting technologies.
Each principle contributes to building a robust and efficient microservices ecosystem, ensuring that your architecture aligns with business goals and delivers superior performance. By embracing these principles, you can navigate the intricacies of microservices architecture and create a software system that excels in flexibility, scalability, and reliability.