graph LR; p[Principles] business_domain[Modelled Around Business Domain] automation[Culture of Automation] hide_impl[Hide Implementation Details] decentralise[Decentralise All Things] independent[Independent Deploy] isolated_failure[Isolate Failure] observable[Highly Observable] p --> business_domain p --> automation p --> hide_impl p --> decentralise p --> independent p --> isolated_failure p --> observable

Modelled Around Business Domain Link to heading

A Business Domain represents part of the organisation, a capability which the business provides (be it supporting or customer facing). The boundaries are more clear, they usually don’t change.

For a business domain to change, the organisation itself would be going to a shift in the industry.

Teams will get to understand better the business since they directly own part of it.

This principle benefits quite a bit of Domain Driven Design.

Culture of Automation Link to heading

Breaking down the business domains into services will increase the number of deployables, therefore increase the operational overhead to deliver and maintain all the services.

In order to get into microservices, the organisation needs to automate things, all the steps to get a service working should be easy and reproducible.

Hide Implementation Details Link to heading

This is about focusing on modelling the services correctly, using the bounded contexts to understand what is important for each of the services.

With a solid internal model, the team knows what should be exposed to consumers.

The same thought applies when being the consumer, with a solid internal model, it should be easy to find what level of coupling exist between the upstream service and yours.

If two or more services have access to the same database, nothing is hidden.

Decentralise All Things Link to heading

Allow teams to have autonomy, freedom to do what they need to do. The team should be able to go from code to production by themselves.

Focus on self-service capabilities, shared governance.

The autonomy brings more responsibility to the team. They will need to think about the lifecycle of the application, support models and so on.

Besides autonomy, this also brings to attention the concept of smart endpoints, dumb pipes. No logic while communicating to other services.

The smart pipes are things like API Gateways which have business logics on them or the famous ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) that (usually) contains most of the business logic in older systems.

Independent Deploy Link to heading

A team should be able to deploy their service without the need of coordinate with others.

As a provider you need to ensure that new deployments don’t break anybody else. One way to guarantee this is using contract tests.

Besides ensuring that new deployments won’t break any of the existing consumers, there are couple other things to keep in mind:

  • One service per host

    Traditionally multiple services would be deployed in a single host, share the configuration and resources.

  • Co-existing endpoints

    The need to be backwards compatible or maintain multiple versions of an endpoint are very common and teams should build services with that in mind.

The traditional way of checking that a change in one service doesn’t break others is the “end-to-end” test. In a microservice architecture that model doesn’t work. In an organisation with 50 microservices, do you really want to run an “end-to-end” test every time any of those change?

Consumer First Link to heading

Following the first principle, the service will provide certain capabilities and the exposed API will be called by someone. The team should make it easier for any consumer to use the service.

For HTTP APIs, OpenAPI is a good option to capture and share what is possible to be done. Besides allowing consumers to easily interact with the service, they also need to find the service. This is where service discovery comes in.

Service Discovery makes it easier for services to register themselves as well as creating a place for consumers to find what is available.

Isolate Failure Link to heading

Failures will happen. And no team wants one microservice to bring the whole ecosystem down. Each team building a service need to understand the impact they would have as well as know the impact it would caused when the service fails.

After understanding the failure points, the team should evaluate what are tools which will help them on handling such scenarios.

A few buzzwords around this would be circuit breaker, graceful degradation, back-pressure.

High Observability Link to heading

A few years ago it was probably fine to login to the server to check the application logs but if you try to do this today you will be facing a much higher number of servers to check.

The times of sshing into a machine to check its state and logs are gone!

Everyone should focus in making it very easy to see what is happening in a service without the need of having access to the service itself.

Having a microservice architecture means that you will have a big number of services at some point. Understanding how each of them is doing is a must.

And the services are only one piece of the puzzle, besides those we should also ensure that the cluster, databases, kubernetes and so are healthy too.

Other Resources Link to heading

  1. Building Microservices