Best Practices and Frameworks in Micro-services Design for Digital Transformation

Introduction

A lot of enterprises are switching to Micro-services development as part of the Digital Transformation efforts.  Many times the Microservices are being developed without an overall strategy of best practices and Frameworks to provide an easy-to-use, standardized method of developing Microservices.  This can result in development in a haphazard manner. This article describes the best practices and frameworks in Microservices development that can streamline the development.

There are a number of Microservices Frameworks.  They are mostly Libraries that facilitate interfacing to the communications layer, DB layer, UI layer, etc.  This work is an attempt to go beyond these frameworks to the next level where developer productivity and efficiency in development and maintenance are enhanced.

Architecture:

 The diagram below shows the architecture that facilitates the best practices in Microservices Development.

Infrastructure portion:

Infrastructure portions consist of Container design and implementation and Container management strategies. Most enterprises will have dedicated infrastructure teams which have standardized infrastructure processes that will help the development teams to design and deploy right configurations for their applications

Template Driven Microservices Framework:

This is the critical part of the Framework. Here Microservices architecture, detailed design, including monitoring, tracking, performance metrics are all built into the Framework.  This templated Framework generates shell code for developers to fill in the business logic.  This gives a standard way to develop microservices.  The code looks in a standardized fashion. It is easier to develop and maintain.  Monitoring, Tracking and performance metrics are also provided by Framework. Automatic test harness generation and test metrics can also be provided by the Framework.

This gives the ability to develop microservices quickly with monitoring, tracking and performance metrics built in. Maintenance of the Microservices will also be easier. Template and the production implementation will always be in sync.

Reusable services:

Set of reusable services libraries in the form of API is a powerful mechanism to reuse critical functions in an Enterprise organization.  There are many vendors that provide this function. Successful  implementation and reuse of these services will take the organization efficiency and rapid deployment of business functions.

Productivity Increase:

Having these template driven tools for speeding up development processes and having reusable services pre-built by the vendor can make the software development process really fast.