Open Source Solution for Building Invincible Apps

Introduction

I left Microsoft after 19 years, where I led teams that built system software for highly scalable cloud applications. This included leading development of the Microsoft Orleans framework from its inception at Microsoft Research until it became one of the most successful open-source projects within the .NET ecosystem. Orleans powers a number of large-scale Microsoft systems such as Xbox Game Services, Skype, Azure IoT, Azure ML, Azure Active Directory, and many more cloud services outside Microsoft. So if you’ve ever played online multiplayer games like Halo or Call of Duty, our team built much of the underlying infrastructure that supports it.

When I originally joined Orleans, cloud computing was still in its infancy. We had a 10,000-foot vision and not a single line of actual code. We needed to reimagine how cloud-scale applications should be coded because, at the time, available and high-performance scalable systems were only achievable by experts. And while everyone knew the cloud was coming, we had no idea how to build applications in a way that ensured they would be accessible and productive for millions of software engineers.

How to build better Infra Microservices?: 3 Key Architectural Guidelines

Microservices are great and powerful. Microservices always need not be business scenario specific. When building scalable, large platforms, it is important to build several infrastructure level microservices which can be used in building solution/business specific microservices. 

what Is an Infra Microservice?

A microservice which may not directly handle the business use case but helps in rapid development of other functional microservices by handling generic things like user profiles management, Clickstream data pipeline, role-based access control, etc. Compare this with functional microservices that will handle business-specific use cases for example – Product rating microservice, Order delivery microservice.

The Challenges of Using Microservices in Software Development

Businesses around the world rely on various software and IT products to help them achieve their business needs. In order to facilitate the development of such products, companies use a microservices architecture which simplifies a lot of processes across the board. Not only will this expedite time to market, but it also makes it easy for companies to test their products and provide maintenance as well. Still, companies will encounter many difficulties while working on microservices architecture and we would like to tell you about some of the most common issues you might encounter. 

Managing a Complex Infrastructure

One of the big advantages of microservices is the ability to deploy small independent units. However, as you start deploying more and more microservices, the entire system becomes more complex and you will need a lot of expertise to handle such complications. Also, even though each service is now smaller, it is not necessarily less complex, it simply shifted to the communication between each individual microservice. Therefore you will need to choose the service boundaries very carefully and have the necessary tools and expertise to handle such complexity. Most importantly, there needs to be good collaboration between everybody involved in the development process, otherwise the microservices will not be set up correctly.