Microservices is an architectural style with the help of which, you can build small to complex business applications. To build applications with this architectural style developers need tools and technologies to build and monitor these services. So, in this article on Microservices Tools, I will discuss the various tools you can use to build these autonomous services.
The following topics will be covered in this article:
Before, we begin discussing the tools and technologies used to build an application using microservices, let me tell you what are microservices.
What are microservices?
Microservices, aka microservice architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services, modeled around a business domain. So, you can understand microservices as small individual services communicating with each other around the single business logic. If you wish to know more about microservices in-depth, then you can refer my article.
Now, that you have an idea of microservices, let us look into the tools used in microservices.
Microservices Tools
Microservices tools are a collection of various tools and technologies having various functionalities. These tools are used in various stages of building an application and help the developer to work with ease. They come with pre-defined functions, algorithms, and a very user-friendly GUI. Also, several start-ups and tech giants have been working on developing such user-friendly microservices tools. However, since microservices is an architectural style, it is often never enough to use one tool for the entire workflow.
Therefore, we’ll be looking at microservices tools used for the different, i.e.
- Operating System
- Programming Languages
- Tools for API Management & Testing
- Tools for Messaging
- Toolkits
- Architectural Frameworks
- Tools for Orchestration
- Tools for Monitoring
- Serverless Tools
Operating System
Programming Languages
The main advantage of microservices is that different languages and technologies can be used to build different services of the same application. So, it gives the developers the freedom to choose their technology stack and build the application. But, the most popular programming languages used in microservices are Spring Boot and Elixir.
Spring Boot
- Provides auto-configuration to load a set of default configuration for a quick start of the application
- It comes with embedded tomcat, servlet containers jetty to avoid the usage of WAR files
- Spring Boot provides an opinionated view to reduce the developer effort and simplify maven configurations
- Consists a wide range of APIs for monitoring and managing applications in dev and prod.
Elixir
- Developers can easily write the code in a short, fast, and maintainable manner.
- The Elixir code runs inside isolated lightweight processes which can be scaled individually.
- Elixir makes sure that the application never goes down, by providing supervisors. These supervisors describe how different parts of the system can be restarted if something goes wrong.
- This programming language comes with its own build tools to create projects, manage tasks and run the required tests.
Tools for API Management & Testing
While you start building applications using microservices, you also have to make sure that all the individual services communicate with each other using APIs’. Each microservice can have its own API to communicate with the other service. This is where API management and testing comes into the picture, as all the APIs present in the system, must be properly managed and tested to get the desired results.
The tools used for API Management and Testing are as follows:
Postman
- Postman integrates with your software development life-cycle in ease.
- It provides features to design APIs and maintain multiple versions of API with support.
- This tool can work for a small application to a big application.
- It supports collaboration of work by allowing you to save related API endpoints into a collection. Then you can go forward and share the entire collection to other developers.
API Fortress
This tool is highly interoperable with any platform that you choose in your toolchain and validates APIs built-in API management platforms
It simplifies API Test creation and execution by providing a drag-drop GUI.
This tool also simplifies end-to-end testing by providing easy generation of functional tests.
API Fortress also aims to simplify collaboration by storing the tests and reports in a collaborative environment, to make sure that teams validate their APIs; if it satisfies the business case.
Tools for Messaging
Microservices are a system, where autonomous services, communicate with each other or within themselves. To communicate with each other, microservices use the messaging queues. So, the tools used for messaging are as follows:
Apache Kafka
- Kafka has high throughput for publishing and subscribing messages, to maintain stable performance.
- This tool also guarantees zero downtime and zero data loss.
- Messages persist on disk as fast as possible
- Many applications can plugin and make use of Kafka as it offers to write new connectors.
RabbitMQ
- This tool offers a variety of features such as reliability, delivery acknowledgments, including persistence, publisher confirms, and high availability.
- By using this tool, messages are routed through exchanges before arriving at queues.
- RabbitMQ comes with the federation model and allows the servers that need to be more loosely and unreliably connected
- This tool supports messaging over multiple messaging protocols.
Toolkits
Toolkits in layman terms is a set of tools used for a specific purpose. In a microservice architecture, you can build various kinds of applications. So, you may have various toolkits used for a different purpose. The various tools you can consider in this section are as follows:
fabric8
Here are a few features of this tool:
- Provides a set of wizards to create applications faster and setup continuous delivery pipelines.
- fabric8 comes with on-premise Git repository hosting
- This tool provides maven repository manager for promoted releases along with a mirror of central maven repositories.
- It provides the developer console to create, build, manage microservices with deep visualization into projects, apps, and environments
Seneca
- Seneca provides plugins which look after the foundations of the application.
- You do not have to worry about which database has to be used and how to structure your components
- In Seneca, everything is written as a command. These commands get called whenever they match a set of properties.
- The code that you call, does not know which command gets the work done.
Architectural Frameworks
Since microservices itself is an architectural style, the architectural framework is an important factor. These frameworks are used with various technologies to build applications.
The two popular architectural frameworks are as follows:
goa
- This tool lets you describe the endpoints, global points to make a service API.
- Goa lets you generate the data structures, validation code and handlers once the design of API is set.
- Has a decoupled engine.
- Provides plugins which can implement custom DSLs and also generate arbitrary outputs.
Kong
- Provides plugins to extend and connect services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
- Analyzes real-time data and leverages ecosystems to deploy Kong with Kubernetes
- Kong connects with automation tools to improve efficiency and reduce errors.
- Provides role-based access control and encrypts end-to-end to comply with industry regulations.
Tools for Orchestration
As microservices work with respect to containers, container orchestration is an important aspect which needs to be considered. In today’s market, there are various tools regarding the container orchestration for microservices, but the top tools are as follows:
Kubernetes
- Kubernetes can help you to deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your image and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.
- In addition to managing services, Kubernetes can also manage your batch and CI workloads, thus replacing containers that fail, if desired.
- Kubernetes needs only 1 command to scale up the containers or to scale them down when using the CLI. Else, scaling can also be done via the Dashboard (Kubernetes UI).
- With Kubernetes, you can mount the storage system of your choice. You can either opt for local storage, or choose a public cloud provider such as GCP or AWS, or perhaps use a shared network storage system such as NFS, iSCSI, etc.
Istio
- Performs automatic tracing, monitoring, and logging of the services.
- This tool automatically secures services, through managed authorization, authentication, and encryption of communication between services.
- Istio controls the flow of traffic and API calls between services, conducts a range of tests and upgrades with red or black deployments
- It also applies policies and ensures that they’re enforced, and resources are fairly distributed among consumers.
Tools for Monitoring
Once the application, is built, it is very important, to monitor the working of applications. So, to monitor applications, you can use the following tools:
Prometheus
- Provides a flexible query language.
- Comes with distributed storage and single server nodes which are autonomous
- Discovers targets via service discovery or static configuration
- Provides dashboarding and graphing support.
Log stash
- Logstash supports a variety of inputs which pull in events from a multitude of common sources, all at the same time.
- This tool aims to transform and prepare data regardless of its complexity
- Log stash allows you to choose your own stash and transport data
- It is a pluggable framework consisting over 200 plugins to create and configure pipeline as you want.
Serverless Tools
These tools are a part of microservices, which optimize the methodology of breaking stuff into small functions. Few of the serverless tools are as follows:
Claudia
The features of this tool are as follows:
- Claudia lets you deploy and update using a single command
- It reduces the boilerplate code
- With the help of this tool, you can manage multiple versions
- You can use standard NPM packages and do not have to learn Swagger
AWS Lambda
- This tool enables you to run your code in response to events and automatically manages the dependent compute resources.
- AWS lets you run the code without managing the servers. It a pay as you use to service and you pay only for the compute time consumed.
- This tool scales an application automatically by running a code for each trigger.
- AWS Lambda can also be used to build a serverless backend for processing mobile, API and web requests.
If you wish to learn Microservices and build your own applications, then check out our Microservices Certification Training which comes with instructor-led live training and real-life project experience. This training will help you understand Microservices in-depth and help you achieve mastery over the subject.
Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section of ” Microservice Tools” and I will get back to you.