Book Image

Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS

By : Chanaka Fernando
5 (1)
Book Image

Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS

5 (1)
By: Chanaka Fernando

Overview of this book

Building a scalable microservices platform that caters to business demands is critical to the success of that platform. In a microservices architecture, inter-service communication becomes a bottleneck when the platform scales. This book provides a reference architecture along with a practical example of how to implement it for building microservices-based platforms with NATS as the messaging backbone for inter-service communication. In Designing Microservices Platforms with NATS, you’ll learn how to build a scalable and manageable microservices platform with NATS. The book starts by introducing concepts relating to microservices architecture, inter-service communication, messaging backbones, and the basics of NATS messaging. You’ll be introduced to a reference architecture that uses these concepts to build a scalable microservices platform and guided through its implementation. Later, the book touches on important aspects of platform securing and monitoring with the help of the reference implementation. Finally, the book concludes with a chapter on best practices to follow when integrating with existing platforms and the future direction of microservices architecture and NATS messaging as a whole. By the end of this microservices book, you’ll have developed the skills to design and implement microservices platforms with NATS.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
1
Section 1: The Basics of Microservices Architecture and NATS
5
Section 2: Building Microservices with NATS
11
Section 3: Best Practices and Future Developments

Communication requirements of a microservice architecture

The microservice architecture is a distributed system. The communication from and to these individual services plays a pivotal role in the overall design and implementation of the platform. Before discussing any particular messaging model for the microservice architecture, let's try to understand the communication requirements of a microservice architecture.

Let's start with the example use case we discussed in the previous chapter, where we started designing a solution for a hospital outward patient division (OPD) using the microservice architecture. Four major functional units operate within the OPD, and each of these functional units can operate independently while communicating with each other. In addition to the functional unit-based definitions of microservices, we also derived two additional microservices for authentication and data sharing, as depicted in the following diagram:

Figure...