Every business and enterprise has its share of benefits from using microservices. However, Microservices will always be helpful to enterprises only if they can quickly and adequately communicate with each other. Proper communication between them makes it possible to reap its benefits to enterprises. This piece looks more into how microservices communicate. It is also essential to understand how they relate to native cloud applications as they are part of microservice communication.

It is essential to ensure excellent scalability levels when developing any application. Doing so will help address most scalability challenges when dealing with cloud-based applications.

In achieving such levels of scalability, microservices need to be in play. But first, let’s dive into a fundamental understanding of Microservices.

Understanding Microservices

Microservices is a software development architecture involving smaller modules and elements that independently link up to form a unique approach for developing software. The elements may be independent of other microservices or even databases. The smaller components or elements within the architecture try to establish greater scalability. They are also essential in achieving the efficiency desired in the development structure.

In the Microservices architecture, the deployment of each small entity occurs independently in different repositories. There is also an independent pipeline that delivers continuously, and such a pipeline is allocated to unique microservices.

Understanding the working of Microservices

In the Microservices architecture, it is possible to break down the service-oriented architecture approach into more minor functional elements. Macroservices stand in as an umbrella of these microservices. Therefore, a wide range of related Microservices form a Macroservice where it is easy to initiate code updates. Developers can easily modify their code without necessarily affecting the functional workflow of the system.

Microservices are meant to address an issue at a time and support developers to achieve scalability quickly. Modifying a single functional unit in the code is always easier than changing the whole unit. With the microservices architecture, failures will only affect parts of the system rather than the entire system. Therefore, the advantage of this architecture is that you’ll always have the system running regardless of failures in other parts of the system. Microservices are also autonomous, which gives developers a significant reason to adopt the architecture. The architecture is transparent and automatic to the users.

Docker containers and Microservices

The Microservices architecture adopts containerization. Docker containers are used in this case. A Docker container is simply a packaging and deployment set-up used during development. With containerization, the code and its related libraries can be supported on various systems as long as they support Docker containerization. Therefore, using containers as the best integration practice is essential if you adopt the Microservice architecture.

Why Microservices?

With the continued growth in technology, it is a culture that most developers and organizations prefer having most development done on the cloud. It is thus for this reason that most cloud-native architectures and practices occur on in-premise data centers. The continued adoption of Microservice architectures and containerization approaches has seen a growth in practices on developing cloud-based systems that are reliable and appealing.

Communication between Microservices

As stated initially, microservices need to communicate with each other smoothly and adequately so it is easy to reap its benefits. In the Microservice architecture, building an application involves a collection of services. However, it is essential to ensure that the services are loosely coupled, support independent deployment, and are easy to test and manage. In a Microservices architecture, it is necessary to understand that each service is meant to provide a solution to a particular problem. Therefore, developers are assigned to develop each unit separately and integrate it with other units to form a functional system, hence the need to support loose coupling and independent deployment.

Let’s dive right into understanding how the microservices communicate in the architecture.

How Microservices Communicate with each other

There are different ways in which Microservices communicate in the architecture. Communication is essential as it is the main reason that makes the whole unit system functional. The following are some of the common ways in which communication is enabled in the Microservices architecture.

• Message communication

Another form of communication among microservices is message communication. With this type of communication, the services involved don’t communicate directly. A message broker stands in between the services. The services are, therefore, responsible for sending or pushing messages to the broker. The message broker here is thus the channel of communication between the services. It is the center of communication and helps reduce the complexity of directly communicating services. It also improves the efficiency of communication between the services.

All services, however, must agree on the message structure and components to be involved in the communication before the workflow.

• HTTP communication

One of the major approaches to implementing service-service communication is HTTP. HTTP is a powerful communication channel that defines how you choose services to communicate among themselves. Communication through HTTP is always possible through HTTP calls. Therefore, calls and requests are made for services to perform related functionalities. For instance, dependent services can complete tasks in turn while meeting requests made from concurrent services. With Synchronous HTTP calls, there is no coupling between the services. Services initiate requests to perform a specific action and then wait for other services to perform or act on the request and provide a response so that they can perform a desired action.

Services can also communicate through HTTP asynchronous calls. HTTP asynchronous calls occur so that one service takes a request from the first service when multiple requests arise. It then provides an immediate URL response to the requesting service. With the URL response, the request-initiating service can check the progress of the request being handled by another service. It allows for loose coupling, and services don’t have to wait to get responses to their requests. Service isolation is familiar with HTTP asynchronous calls.

• Event-driven communication

Another approach to support communication between microservices is event-driven communication. With this type of communication, there is no coupling between the services. With this type of communication, services don’t need to understand the typical message structure. Communication mainly occurs through events generated or actualized by independent services. Just like message communication, event-driven communication requires a message broker. Independent services write their events to the message broker. Involved services don’t necessarily have to know the information about events on the message broker. Services only respond to events occurring rather than messages sent by events.

Conclusion

There are different approaches in which microservices can communicate. Services follow specific patterns and guidelines to enable successful communication. Communication can either be asynchronous or synchronous. Microservices allow you to focus on more minor elements within the system, thus simplifying tasks. It is essential to ensure all the guidelines are followed to enable communication through even-driven approaches, message communication, and HTTP communication. Also, it is necessary to understand that there are different architectures that developers can adopt during development, and Microservices is among them. It comes with many benefits, especially when developing an application. For instance, services occur independently, and a failure in a unit of the entire system doesn’t affect the whole system entirely. It would help if you also dived into understanding these architectures, especially the Microservices architecture. It will help you know more about how services communicate.

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