Building microservices is relatively easy. The hard part is teaching them to dance.
That’s the challenge software development teams now find themselves wrestling with as the number of microservices in an IT environment that need to be managed starts to exponentially increase, says Bernd Rücker, co-founder, chief technologist and developer advocate.
Speaking at CamundaCon 2019, Rücker says developers need to think of themselves as choreographers creating a dance where each precise step needs to be worked out to ensure optimal application performance.
In the absence of the carefully orchestrated application, Rücker says it’s only a matter of time before “pinball architecture” results in latency creep and application availability erosion.
“Services will start to crash at different times,” says Rücker.
To avoid what Rücker describes as Pain Driven Development (PDD), developers should quickly determine what capabilities they truly need to build versus relying on a managed service. The greater the number of managed services employed, the more time there is to focus on workflows and the building of software that adds value to the business, says Rücker.
The key to balancing that “cognitive load” is to eliminate all the heavy lifting associated with building anything resembling an undifferentiated service, adds Rücker.
Rücker says development teams should also embrace the Reactive Manifesto, which describes a programming model that makes it easier to provide a consistent user experience across multiple types of client devices regardless of what occurs on the network or IT infrastructure platforms being employed. Achieving that goal requires development teams to employ orchestration platforms that ensure elasticity, responsiveness, and resiliency, says Rücker.
Finally, Rücker advised developers to be wary of the Terrible Legacy Monolith (TLM), which usually raise their ugly head in the form of applications that don’t have an application programming interface (API). One way to get around this “final enemy” to layer a robotic process automation (RPA) solution on top of those legacy applications to make them accessible for the orchestration platform.
Not every developer might be a fan of the ballet but following the CamundaCon conference, many of them at the very least have a new appreciation for everything that goes into choreographing a multitude of (micro)services into a complete end-to-end business process.
