Development
- Single responsibility- One Task per Microservice
- Strangler Fig Pattern: https://martinfowler.com/bliki/StranglerFigApplication.html
- API Gateway: API Gateway should provide Routing, Aggregating, and SSL Offloading
- Offload Non-core responsibilities: Non-core responsibilities including – Security, logging, tracking, etc., should be offloaded to Sidecar or Libraries.
Design for Failure
- Fail fast: Patterns like Circuit breaker Pattern, time out Pattern, rate limit Pattern, etc, help applications fail fast
- Isolate Failure: A failure should not propagate and impact other services. Bulkhead Pattern helps maintain such a configuration.
- Self-healing system: Health checkpoints and scalability settings will help make sure that system is able to manage a server or pod failure.
Monitoring
- Health Monitoring: Applications should expose health endpoint (e.g. actuator in Java), which is used by Load balancers to keep a check.
- Golden Signals: Every application should monitor latency, traffic, and error rate https://sre.google/sre-book/monitoring-distributed-systems/
- Distributed Tracing: Distributed tracing to check downstream and upstream dependencies.
- Infrastructure Monitoring: Monitor CPU and Memory usage.
Performance
- Stateless: Keep APIs stateless
- Asynchronous: Asynchronous communication wherever possible.
- Caching: Cache data for better performance wherever possible.
- Connection Pool: Database and HTTP connection pools should be enabled wherever possible.
Good to have
- Separate Datastores: This is a double-edged sword, we need to be careful in separating data stores.
- SAGA for Transaction Management: Commonly used pattern for transaction management in microservices.
- 12 Factor App: Generic best practices for developing a web application https://12factor.net/