Production-Ready Microservices

Chapter 2. Production-Readiness

While the adoption of microservice architecture brings considerable freedom to developers, ensuring availability across the microservice ecosystem requires holding individual microservices to high architectural, operational, and organizational standards. This chapter covers the challenges of microservice standardization, introduces availability as the goal of standardization, presents the eight production-readiness standards, and proposes strategies for implementing production-readiness standardization across an engineering organization.

The Challenges of Microservice Standardization

The architecture of a monolithic application is usually determined at the beginning of the application’s lifecycle. For many applications, the architecture is determined at the time a company begins. As the business grows, and the application scales, developers who are adding new features often find themselves constrained and limited by the choices made when the application was first designed. They are constrained by choice of language, by the libraries they are able to use, by the development tools they can work with, and by the need for extensive regression testing to ensure that every new feature they add does not disturb or compromise the entirety of the application. Any refactoring that happens to the standalone, monolithic application is still essentially constrained by initial architectural decisions: initial conditions exclusively determine the future of the ...