Building Microservices

Chapter 4. Integration

Getting integration right is the single most important aspect of the technology associated with microservices in my opinion. Do it well, and your microservices retain their autonomy, allowing you to change and release them independent of the whole. Get it wrong, and disaster awaits. Hopefully once you’ve read this chapter you’ll learn how to avoid some of the biggest pitfalls that have plagued other attempts at SOA and could yet await you in your journey to microservices.

Looking for the Ideal Integration Technology

There is a bewildering array of options out there for how one microservice can talk to another. But which is the right one: SOAP? XML-RPC? REST? Protocol buffers? We’ll dive into those in a moment, but before we do, let’s think about what we want out of whatever technology we pick.

Avoid Breaking Changes

Every now and then, we may make a change that requires our consumers to also change. We’ll discuss how to handle this later, but we want to pick technology that ensures this happens as rarely as possible. For example, if a microservice adds new fields to a piece of data it sends out, existing consumers shouldn’t be impacted.

Keep Your APIs Technology-Agnostic

If you have been in the IT industry for more than 15 minutes, you don’t need me to tell you that we work in a space that is changing rapidly. The one certainty is change. New tools, frameworks, and languages are coming out all the time, implementing new ideas that can help us work faster ...