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

Chapter 7: Securing a Microservices Architecture with NATS

Security is no longer an afterthought in information systems design—it is a fundamental requirement of any system that we design today. In a microservices architecture, security becomes increasingly important since it exposes a much larger surface area to consumers (both genuine users and non-genuine users) due to the increased number of independent services that are deployed as microservices. Some traditional security mechanisms used in the enterprise world will not work well in a microservices context. We will discuss the security of microservices by considering the following two traffic flow patterns we have looked at in previous chapters:

  • Security of North-South traffic
  • Security of East-West traffic

In Chapter 6, A Practical Example of Microservices with NATS, we briefly discussed how an application programming interface (API) gateway can provide security features to the microservices for North...