Understanding and Deploying Microservices
Tags: azure, cloud, microservices, programming
Published: 2022-11-15 13:30:10

Are you ready for the challenge of deploying and managing microservices? Microservices are a powerful new way to build applications, but they also come with serious technical challenges.


This guide will help you understand what it takes to deploy and manage microservice-based applications on Azure so that you can get the most out of this new architecture style.


**Microservices do not require a Microservices platform.**

Microservices are not a platform. Microservices are a software development discipline that creates highly scalable and loosely coupled applications.

A microservice platform is simply an environment where you can deploy and run those microservices.

That said, there are advantages to running your platform versus renting one from a cloud provider like Microsoft Azure or Amazon Web Services (AWS).

You can run microservices on your hardware or in AWS, but if you run them on your hardware and use something like Kubernetes for container orchestration, then you get some extra benefits:

    • You have complete control over the infrastructure, so you don't have to rely on someone else's roadmap for upgrades/features.

    • You can customize installation procedures or modify the runtime environment (e.g., adding custom libraries) without negotiating with anyone else.

**Microservices platforms are not all the same.**

Microservice platforms are not all the same. They may use different types of servers or even different languages. Some have better support for containers than others; some are more focused on working with other services in Azure; some have cost advantages over others.

Depending on your specific needs, it's worth doing a little research before you decide which platform to use.

**Set up before you scale out**

Before you scale out, it is important to understand the requirements of your system. How many instances do you need? What operations will be required to deploy these instances and update them as they change over time? In addition, it's advisable to understand what operations will be required to migrate between infrastructure providers.

As an example, let's consider the scenario where we are building a microservices application with three tiers:
    • Front-end web applications that communicate with a REST API running on multiple web servers.
    • An enterprise business logic layer is running within Azure SQL Database.
    • A data analytics tier using Power BI Embedded Analysis Services models hosted within Azure Databricks clusters.
The front-end web applications are deployed using Docker containers from GitHub repositories, while the two other tiers require manual setup using Terraform scripts based on Microsoft's guidance documentation for each platform (SQL Server and Azure Databricks).

When deploying new versions of the application or making changes that affect all tiers at once (such as adding additional domains), we might want everything deployed simultaneously so that there is no downtime during deployment time, so we'll need an automated way of performing this task.

**Understand what operations you will need to perform**

It's important to understand the operations you will need to perform for each microservice. For example, you may need to interact with a custom API endpoint or webhook to get data into your system. There are many different options for this, so be sure you know what they are before beginning development on your application.

You'll also want to know how each operation should be performed and which libraries or tools should be used. This information can often be found in the documentation associated with the microservice itself or by searching online resources like Stack Overflow or GitHub Gist.

It's also useful to write down any common error messages encountered during testing and research ways of resolving them before starting work on deployment scripts or automated tests that will enable continuous integration (CI) practices later on down the road; you'll have valuable insight into what might go wrong when trying these types of tasks over time.

Provide documentation about troubleshooting any issues that arise as well; having an open-source repository like this one means anyone can access it from anywhere around the globe, so keep things simple enough, so users have no trouble reading through all those lines of code if needed.
Be prepared to migrate between infrastructure providers.

**Choose your microservice infrastructure wisely.**

As a developer, you want to be able to focus on building your application and not worry about infrastructure. But as you scale out, you will need to consider how each component in your system is configured and how the infrastructure will work together. When choosing your microservice infrastructure, it's important to think about the following:

    • What operations do I need? Do I need additional monitoring tools? Are there any special security requirements for my system? This can help you determine which provider is best for your needs and whether it's worth spinning up new services or migrating existing ones from another provider before scaling out further.

    • Can I easily migrate between providers if needed? If one provider doesn't meet all of my needs, can another provide what I need, or can they easily integrate with other providers?

Conclusion
We know that deploying and managing microservices can be a daunting task. Fortunately, there are plenty of options for developers to choose from when it comes to deploying their microservices.
As we have seen in this post, many factors are involved in choosing your infrastructure provider and how much control you want over your infrastructure.