Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

Summary So again we return to a core theme of the book — that having a system decomposed into finer-grained services gives us many more options as to how to solve a problem. Not only can having microservices potentially reduce the impact of any given breach, but it also gives us more ability to trade off the overhead of more complex and secure approaches where data is sensitive, and a lighter-weight approach when the risks are lower. Once you understand the threat levels of different parts of your system, you should start to get a sense of when to consider security during transit, at rest, or not at all. Finally, understand the importance of defense in depth, make sure you patch your operating systems, and even if you consider yourself a rock star, don’t try to implement your own cryptography! If you want a general overview of security for browser-based applications, a great place to start is the excellent Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) nonprofit, whose regularly updated Top 10 Security Risk document should be considered essential reading for any developer. Finally, if you want a more general discussion of cryptography, check out the book Cryptography Engineering by Niels Ferguson, Bruce Schneier, and Tadayoshi Kohno (Wiley). Getting to grips with security is often about understanding people and how they work with our systems. One human-related aspect we haven’t yet discussed in terms of microservices is the interplay between organizational structures and th...

Summary Of security chapter