Microservice Architecture

Part III. Microservices in Practice

The Microservices Way at Hootsuite

Vancouver-based Hootsuite is a pioneer in social media for business. The company was formed by members of Invoke Media who built a platform to manage their own social network interactions and then realized that other companies had the same need. As the company grew, so did their monolithic, PHP-based platform. In order to meet the demands of their market through a 100+ team of developers, they are evolving their application to a collection of product-oriented microservices.

Hootsuite took a design-based approach to their microservice migration from the outset. They recognized that defining the right logic boundaries can be a harder problem than introducing new technology. They use what they call “distributed domain-driven design” as a means of breaking services out of their monolith. API definitions and associated contracts provide a means of describing service scope and function, and API consumers are involved in the creation of both. The Hootsuite team found that API design guidelines helped to create a common language for this process. Over time, Hootsuite has classified their microservices into three categories: data services that encapsulate key business entities and ensure scalability, functional services that combine data services with business logic to execute core business logic, and facade services that decouple consumer contracts from core functional logic. Hootsuite’s design approach continues ...