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

Advanced NATS concepts

Using NATS in production-grade systems requires advanced capabilities such as clustering, monitoring, and security. We will cover these advanced concepts in this section.

Clustering the NATS server

NATS is designed to support complex distributed systems at a global scale. NATS supports clustering to deploy multiple NATS-server nodes connected in a full mesh topology to provide improved reliability and failure handling. If a server goes down for some reason, the client can automatically connect to a different server that contains a replica of the message. NATS servers form a mesh dynamically by gossiping and connecting to all the known servers without needing to preconfigure the nodes. Hence, clusters can grow, shrink, and self-heal.

Once the cluster has been set up, the NATS servers replicate messages by forwarding the messages to connected servers. It has a forwarding limit of 1 node. Every server on the cluster forwards the messages to one of the...