Building Microservices: Designing Fine-Grained Systems

by Sam Newman

Exemplars Written documentation is good, and useful. I clearly see the value; after all, I’ve written this book. But developers also like code, and code they can run and explore. If you have a set of standards or best practices you would like to encourage, then having exemplars that you can point people to is useful. The idea is that people can’t go far wrong just by imitating some of the better parts of your system. Ideally, these should be real-world services you have that get things right, rather than isolated services that are just implemented to be perfect examples. By ensuring your exemplars are actually being used, you ensure that all the principles you have actually make sense. Tailored Service Template Wouldn’t it be great if you could make it really easy for all developers to follow most of the guidelines you have with very little work? What if, out of the box, the developers had most of the code in place to implement the core attributes that each service needs? Dropwizard and Karyon are two open source, JVM-based microcontainers. They work in similar ways, pulling together a set of libraries to provide features like health checking, serving HTTP, or exposing metrics. So, out of the box, you have a service complete with an embedded servlet container that can be launched from the command line. This is a great way to get going, but why stop there? While you’re at it, why not take something like a Dropwizard or Karyon, and add more features so that it becomes compli...

Governance techniques