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

Advantages of using NATS for inter-service communication

NATS was designed with a purpose. That purpose is inter-service communication. All the design decisions and performance improvements that have been made to the NATS ecosystem were done while keeping this core feature in mind. Before NATS, message broker solutions were mainly used for asynchronous, semi real-time, batch-based use cases and were considered as legacy components. But with the introduction of NATS, these traditional views on the message broker solutions were dismantled and people started utilizing it for their main real-time applications and use cases. The following is a list of advantages that NATS provides that can be utilized in a microservice architecture for inter-service communication:

  • NATS supports both request-reply and event-based communication models to support designing applications for both real-time and semi-real-time use cases.
  • Support for 40+ client types allows microservices to follow the...