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

Understanding security in the context of a microservices architecture

Microservices architectures encourage decomposing an application into small (in scope), autonomous units that can be managed and deployed independently. If we compare this with a traditional monolithic application, one major difference is that a microservices architecture opens the security of the platform to a wider surface area. In a monolithic application, most of the communication happens within the application itself inside the same server and runtime, hence it does not require any advanced security for internal communication. But in the world of microservices, we need to secure the communication coming into the services (North-South traffic) as well as within the services (East-West traffic). The following diagram depicts this concept of two types of security that need to be handled in a microservices architecture:

Figure 7.1 – Microservice security for North-South and East-West...