97 Things Every Cloud Engineer Should Know

Chapter 13. Integrating Microservices in Cloud Native Architecture

Kasun Indrasiri

Product Manager and Senior Director at WSO2

When we construct cloud-based applications, we embrace cloud native architecture in the design to meet agility, scalability, and resiliency requirements. A cloud native application is designed as a collection of microservices that are built around business capabilities.

These microservices interact with each other and with external applications through interprocess communication techniques. These interactions can range from invoking other microservices to creating composite microservices by combining multiple microservices and other systems, building an event consumer or producer service leveraging an event/message broker, creating a microservice facade for a legacy monolithic system, and so on. The process of building the interactions between these microservices is known as microservices integration.

The integration of services, data, and systems has long been a challenging yet essential requirement in the context of enterprise software application development. In the past, we used to integrate all of these disparate applications using a point-to-point style, which was later replaced by a centralized integration middleware layer known as an enterprise service bus (ESB) with service-oriented architecture (SOA). Here the ESB acts as the middleware layer ...