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

Using NATS observability in a microservices architecture

So far, we have discussed microservice observability and NATS observability as two separate topics. Let's aggregate these topics and produce a common approach to implement observability for a microservices-based platform. The best way to learn a concept is to try with a practical example. Let's build a simple application that has two microservices written in Go. These microservices are called publisher and subscriber. We are going to use the open source observability tools Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki in this example.

The following figure shows the example application that we are going to build:

Figure 8.6 – Microservices observability example with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki

The preceding figure depicts a simple application, consisting of a publisher microservice and a subscriber microservice interacting with each other using the NATS server. We have set up our monitoring ecosystem...