Building Microservices, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Build

We’ve spent a lot of time covering the design aspects of microservices, but we need to start getting a bit deeper into how your development process may need to change to accommodate this new style of architecture. In the following chapters, we’ll look at how we deploy and test our microservices, but before that we need to look at what comes first—what happens when a developer has a change ready to check in?

We’ll start this exploration by reviewing some foundational concepts—continuous integration and continuous delivery. They’re important concepts no matter what kind of systems architecture you might be using, but microservices open up a host of unique questions. From there we’ll look at pipelines and at different ways of managing source code for your services.

A Brief Introduction to Continuous Integration

Continuous integration (CI) has been around for a number of years. However, it’s worth spending a bit of time going over the basics, as there are some different options to consider, especially when we think about the mapping between microservices, builds, and version control repositories.

With CI, the core goal is to keep everyone in sync with each other, which we achieve by frequently making sure that newly checked-in code properly integrates with existing code. To do this, a CI server detects that the code has been committed, checks it out, and carries out some verification such as making sure that the code compiles and that tests pass. As a bare minimum, ...