Distributed caching is a very important aspect of cloud-based applications, be it for on-prem, public, or hybrid cloud environments. It facilitates incremental scaling allowing the cache to grow and incorporate the data growth. In this blog we will explore distributed caching on the cloud and why it is useful for environments with high data volume and load. This blog will cover,
Challenges with Traditional Caching
What is Distributed Caching
Benefits of distributed caching on the cloud
Recommended Distributed Caching Database Tools
Ways to Deploy Distributed Caching on the cloud
Traditional Distributed Caching Challenges
Traditional distributed caching servers are usually deployed with limited storage and CPU speed on a few limited dedicated servers or Virtual Machines (VMs). Often these caching infrastructures reside on data centers (DCs) that are on-prem or the cloud on VMs which are not resilient, not highly available, and fault-torent. . This kind of traditional caching comes with numerous challenges:
Traditional caching is called in-process caching which is at the instance server level. In-process caching stores data at the application level locally like storing in EhCache etc. It doesn’t provide accurate data consistency.
In-process cache creates performance issues, because they occupy extra memory, and due to garbage collection overhead.
It’s not reliable, because it uses the same heap memory which is used by the application. If an application got crashed due to memory or some other issues, cached data will be also wiped out.
Hard to scale cache storage and CPU speed on fewer servers because often these servers are not auto-scalable.
High operational cost to manage infrastructure and unutilized hardware resources. These servers are managed manually on traditional DevOps infrastructure.
Traditional distributed caching is not containerized (not deployed on Kubernetes/Docker containers). That’s why it is not easily scalable, resilient, and self-managed. Also, more possibilities of these fewer servers crashing if the client load is higher than the actual.
What is Distributed Caching
Caching is a technique to store the state of data outside of the main storage and store it in high-speed memory to improve performance. In a microservices environment, all apps are deployed with their multiple instances across various servers/containers on the hybrid cloud. A single caching source is needed in a multi-cluster Kubernetes environment on the cloud to persist data centrally and replicate it on its own caching cluster. It will serve as a single point of storage to cache data in a distributed environment.
Benefits of Distributed Caching on cloud
These are a few benefits of distributed caching:
Periodic caching of frequently used read REST API’s response ensures faster API read performance.
Reduced database network calls by accessing cached data directly from distributed caching databases.
Resilience and fault tolerance by maintaining multiple copies of data at various caching databases in a cluster.
High availability by auto-scaling the cache databases, based on load or client requests.
Storage of session secret tokens like JSON Web Token (ID/JWT) for authentication & authorization purposes for microservices apps containers.
Provide faster read and write access in-memory if it’s used as a dedicated database solution for high-load mission-critical applications.
Avoid unnecessary roundtrip data calls to persistent databases.
Auto-scalable cloud infrastructure deployment.
Containerization of Distributed caching libraries/solutions.
Provide consistent read data from any synchronized connected caching data centers (DC).
Minimal to no outage, high availability of caching data.
Faster data synchronization between caching data servers.
Recommended Distributed Caching Databases Tools
Following are popular industry-recognized caching servers:
Redis
Memcache
GemFire and
HazelCast databases
Redis: It’s one of the most popular distributed caching services. It supports different data structures. It’s an open-source, in-memory data store used by millions of developers as a database, cache, streaming engine, and message broker. It also has an enterprise version. It can be deployed in containers on private, public, and hybrid clouds etc. it provides consistent and faster data synchronization between different data centers (DC).
HazelCast: Hazelcast is a distributed computation and storage platform for consistent low-latency querying, aggregation, and stateful computation against event streams and traditional data sources. It allows you to quickly build resource-efficient, real-time applications. You can deploy it at any scale from small edge devices to a large cluster of cloud instances. A cluster of Hazelcast nodes share both the data storage and computational load which can dynamically scale up and down. When you add new nodes to the cluster, the data is automatically rebalanced across the cluster. The computational tasks (jobs) that are currently in a running state, snapshot their state and scale with a processing guarantee.
Memcached: It is an open-source, high-performance, distributed memory object caching system. It is generic in nature but intended for use in speeding up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load. Memcached is an in-memory key-value store for small chunks of arbitrary data (strings, objects) from the results of database calls, API calls, or page rendering. Memcached is simple yet powerful. Its simple design promotes easy, quick deployment and development. It solves many data caching problems and the API is available in various commonly used languages.
GemFire: It provides distributedin-memory data grid cache, powered by Apache Geode open source. It scales data services on demand to support high performance. It’s a key-value store that performs read and write operations at fast speeds. It offers highly available parallel message queues, continuous availability, and an event-driven architecture to scale dynamically, with no downtime.
It provides multi-site replication. As data size requirements increase to support high-performance, real-time apps, they can scale linearly with ease. Applications get low-latency responses to data access requests, and always return fresh data. Maintain transaction integrity across distributed nodes. It supports high-concurrency, low-latency data operations of applications. It also provides node failover and multi Geo (Cross Data Center or Multi Data Center) replication to ensure applications are resilient, whether on-premises or in the cloud.
Ways to Deploy Distributed Caching on Hybrid cloud
These are recommended ways to deploy and setup distributed caching be it public cloud or hybrid cloud:
Open source distributed caching on traditional VM instances.
Open source distributed caching on Kubernetes container. I would recommend deploying on a Kubernetes container for high availability, resiliency, scalable and faster performance.
Enterprise COTS distributed caching deployment on VM and Container. I would recommend the enterprise version because it will provide additional features and support.
The public cloud offers managed services of distributed caching open and enterprise sources like Redis, Hazelcast and Memcache, etc.
Caching servers can be deployed on multiple sources like on-prem and public cloud together, public servers, or only one public server in different availability zones.
Conclusion
Distributed caching is now a de-facto requirement for distributed microservices apps in a distributed deployment environment on a hybrid cloud. It addresses concerns in important use cases like maintaining user sessions when a cookie is disabled at the web browser side, improving API query read performance, avoiding operational cost and database hit for the same type of requests, managing secret tokens for authentication and authorization, etc.
Distributed cache syncs data on the hybrid cloud automatically without any manual operation and always gives the latest data. I would recommend industry-standard distributed caching solutions – Redis, Hazelcast, and Memcache. We need to choose a better distributed caching technology in the cloud based on use cases.
“Technical debt is a metaphor commonly used by software professionals in reference to short-term compromises made during the design, development, testing and deployment processes”.
In order to stay competitive, many organizations opt for software development methodologies like Agile, to accelerate the overall development processes. Cramped up release schedules often force teams to skip the standard practices, resulting in the accumulation of technical debt. Some technical debt is given less priority/importance during the rapid release cycles and is addressed post the production release.
Organizations often push large, complex changes to speed up the release process. Short-term compromises are acceptable to a certain extent, however, long-term debt can damage an organization’s IT infrastructure and reputation. Sometimes, it comes with a heavy penalty of re-engineering and post-release fixes. These damages could be in the form of high costs for:
Remediating pending technical debt
Customer dissatisfaction due to scalability and performance issues
Increased hiring and training
Increased modernization time
The cost of refactoring, re-engineering, re-base, and re-platform could be much higher than the original cost during initial development. These compromises should be thoroughly analyzed and approved by IT stakeholders and CXOs. This involves looking at future tradeoffs, risk appetite (risk capacity), and cost. Organizations also need to evaluate the pros and cons of taking technical debt decisions.
Taking on technical debt can be both tricky and risky for organizations. Hence organizations must factor in associated risks and operational costs. One of the consequences of Technical debt is the implied cost of reworking on applications and their architecture. Hence, organizations should choose easy development paths and limited solutions to shorten the production time.
If these technical debts are not addressed over time, the accrued interest makes it more challenging to implement changes, resulting in business and technical challenges.
A Scandinavian study reveals that developers waste, on average, 23% of their time due to technical debt.
As if that wasn’t alarming enough, Stripe published data that shows that software developers on an average spend 42% of their workweek dealing with technical debt and bad code
Major Drivers of Technical Debt
Faster solution design process
Faster development of source code
Quick releases
Cut throat business competition to release new and unique features early in market
Impact of accumulating Technical Debt
It results in daily operational costs to accommodate remediation.
A longer development cycle leads to slower application releases.
It incurs long term financial loss due to technical debt accumulation.
It may result in compliance issues and lack of proper standards.
Code quality and design gets compromised.
More time is spent on debugging rather than development.
Failures that can put an organization’s reputation at risk.
It can be a cause of security breaches and hefty fines.
It can potentially lead to Loss of agility, lower productivity due to outages.
Types of Technical Debt
Design/Architecture Debt:
It represents a design work with backlogs which may include a lack of design thinking processes, UI bugs, and other design flaws that were neglected. Most organizations do follow standard design practices like The Open Group Architecture Framework(TOGAF) due to the agile way of designing. Tools and techniques like the ADM and TOGAF implementation governance, provide the required format and standard of solution design.
Code Debt:
It is the most common debt, which is skipped due to speedy agile delivery, complexity, or lack of subject knowledge. In some cases, new features are added in the latest version, which the dev team may not be aware of. This might result in the dev team working on the same feature again, resulting in unnecessary cost and time investment. Sometimes, the development team doesn’t follow standard best practices for coding or use quick workarounds or they do not refactor code because of time-bound release cycles.
NFR/Infrastructure Debt
Introduced during designing and implementing Non Functional Requirements (NFR) such as:
Inaccurate scalability configuration may crash applications on high load.
Improper availability planning leads to outage issues when any data center is down.
Inaccurate caching, logging leads to slower application performance.
Repetitive code of error/exception handling may create refactoring and performance issues.
Additional auditing and tracing may lead to performance issues and occupy unnecessary database storage.
Ignorance of security may lead to serious data breaches and financial loss.
Improper observability and monitoring may not give an alert on time for any major issues in application and infrastructure.
Testing Debt
The pressure of quick agile releases may force organizations to miss out on most of the manual and automated testing scenarios. Frequent unit and detailed end-to-end integration testing can detect major production issues. Sometimes, these detailed testings are skipped during the development phase which leads to major production bugs.
Process Debt
It is introduced when a few less important business and technical process flow steps are skipped. In agile development, there are many processes that are followed like sprint planning, Kanban, Scrum, retro meetings, and some other project management processes such as Capability Maturity Model(CMM) and Project Management Institute(PMI), etc. Sometimes these processes are not followed religiously due to time constraint pressure, which may have a severe impact later.
Defect Debt
It is introduced when minor technical bugs are skipped during the testing phase like frontend UI cosmetic bugs, etc. These low severity bugs are deferred to the following releases, which may later have an impact in the form of production bugs. These production bugs spoil an organization’s reputation and profit margin.
Documentation Debt
It is introduced when some of the less important technical contents in the document are skipped. Improper documentation always creates an issue for customers and developers to understand and operate after the release. The engineering team may not properly document the release and feature/fix details due to quick release schedules. As a result, users find it difficult to test and use new features.
Known or Deliberate Debt
Known or deliberate debt is injected on purpose to accelerate releases. This acceleration is achieved by workarounds or alternate methods or technologies that use simple algorithms. For example, sometimes the dev team does not evaluate and consider better algorithms to avoid cyclomatic code complexity in the source code. As a result, it reduces the performance of the code.
Unknown Outdated/Accidental Debt
It is introduced unknowingly by developers/designers and other stakeholders. It is sometimes introduced by regression of other related code changes, independent applications and libraries. For example, if all applications use the same error handling library code and if there is a regression issue in that error handling library, it may impact all dependent applications.
Bit Rot Technical Debt
According to Wired, it involves, “a component or system slowly devolving into unnecessary complexity through lots of incremental changes, often exacerbated when worked upon by several people who might not fully understand the original design.” In practice, many old and new engineers work on the same module code without knowing the background details of the code. New engineers may rewrite or redesign code without understanding the initial design and background. It may create issues like regression issues, etc. This happens over time, and it should be avoided.
Causes of Technical Debt
Business competition
Competitive business markets may force organizations to roll out frequent feature releases to better/surpass/overtake their competitors and keep the customers interested.
Time constraints due to agile releases
With tighter deadlines, the development team doesn’t have enough time to follow all coding/design standards such as language-specific coding standards, TOGAF enterprise design, suitable design patterns, review, testing/validation, and other best development practices.
Save short-term cost
Some organizations want to develop and release features faster to save additional development costs on coding and design effort. They may prefer employing a small development team for faster releases with minimal short-term cost. These organizations may also hire junior or unskilled developers for more profit margin.
Lack of knowledge and training
The development team may change very frequently during exit, internal movement, and new hiring. Faster release cycles may result in undertrained resources due to lack of functional or technical training and little to no knowledge transfers about product and design.
Improper project planning
Tighter release schedules may result in improper project planning which plays a major role in introducing technical debt. For example, skipping important meetings with all business stakeholders or project planning phases such as agile retro, scrum, and sprint plan meetings, etc.
Complex technical design and technical solution
The development teams prefer simple technical design and solution over a complex one, because they don’t want to spend more time and effort understanding complex algorithms and technical solutions. Complex solutions take more time to understand and implement. They also need more POC evaluation and effort.
Poor development practices
Most development teams prefer shortcuts by following poor development practices. Due to aggressive release timelines and lack of knowledge, dev teams don’t follow standard coding and design practices.
Insufficient testing
It is a major contributor to technical debt. Regular unit and integration testing for even a small code change are very important. Testing and validation are the only mechanisms to identify bugs and shortfalls in software applications. They also find technical and functional bugs. Insufficient testing can lead to the introduction of technical debt.
Delayed refactoring
Tight deadlines may force developments in giving less priority to refactoring code in the early stages. Hence they defer and delay code refactoring to prioritize quick releases
Due to high pressure, development teams defer and delay code refactoring to release software products early, or they don’t give priority to refactor code during initial development. Sometimes they backtrack, review and refactor with a delayed path with low priority.
Constant change
‘Change is the only constant.’ Software applications evolve and adopt new designs and technologies over time. It’s hard to cope with these constant changes in parallel. It takes time to revisit the source code, design and then implements the latest design and technologies.
Outdated technology
Most traditional organizations use outdated technologies. They make late decisions to upgrade or defer modernization with modern technologies. They miss a lot of new modern features which are considered to be technical debt. This debt can be mitigated only by shifting to modern technologies.
No involvement and mentoring by senior developer and architect
It’s very common to have less or no involvement of senior developers and architects during design and development. It’s very important to have senior mentors who can review and guide the development team to avoid technical debt. Those senior developers/architects might have a better understanding and experience of working on the same project or software applications.
Identifying and Analyzing Technical Debt
User feedback
User feedback/reviews are very important in identifying technical debt and mitigating it. Organizations should listen and act on users’ feedback for improvement and handling bugs. These feedbacks and bugs are considered to be technical debt.
Analyze bad code smell
Use manual and automated code review to understand bad code smell like memory leakage of JVM Java applications. There are many code analyzers or tools like SonarQube, PMD, FindBug, Checkstyle, etc, that can help. It could be integrated with automated build and deployment of CI/CD pipelines for every release.
Monitoring and observability tools
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) tools are the best tools to monitor software applications continuously, for example, VMware Wavefront/Tanzu observability, Dynatrace, DataDog, etc. They have special algorithms to check the performance of applications and underlying infrastructure. They also analyze application logs and generate failure reasons reports. These reports are a great source of identifying technical debt.
Manual and automated code review
Continuous, manual, and automated code review processes definitely help to identify technical debt using static and automated code analyzers.
Operational profit and loss analysis
It’s done through business and senior CxO people by analyzing operational cost (Opex) and loss analysis reports. These reports give a fair idea of improvement and address important technical debt quickly. Addressing this technical debt is very important for any organization because it impacts their business revenue.
Performance metrics
Application Performance Monitoring (APM) and load testing tools also generate performance reports of the software application on high load. This is the best way to identify and mitigate technical debt of Non-functional requirements (NFR) configurations like the performance of application and infrastructure, read caching availability, scalability, etc.
Understand long-term or short-term requirement
Organizations identify technical debt by understanding long-term and short-term technical requirements. Accordingly, they prioritize, plan and remediate. These requirements are prioritized based on business criticality and urgency.
Review with latest industry-standard best practices
Some technical debt can be analyzed by comparing with the latest industry-standard software application design and development such as Agile, TDD, BDD, Scrum, Kanban, Cloud-native, microservices, micro frontends, TOGAF, and latest technology trends like Cloud, etc.
Code refactoring tools and techniques
There are modern tools available that are capable of analyzing legacy monolithic apps and providing suggestions or refactoring partially to modern cloud-native microservices design. They also provide tools to migrate on-prem VM (Virtual Machine) to cloud VM with easy lift and shift rebase.
Security analysis
Some security-related technical debt is identified during the security analysis phase. There are some security analysis tools available like CheckMarx, SonarQube which generate security reports for applications. There are many other infrastructure security tools like Vmware Carbon black endpoint in security, RSA, Aquasec, Claire aqua security etc.
Best Practices to Avoid Technical Debt
To reduce technical debt, it’s essential to analyze and measure it. You can calculate technical debt by using remediation and development costs as parameters. These are a few techniques to avoid technical debt:
Listen to user feedback comments and remediate application technical debt.
Religiously follow consistent code review practices. Have multiple rounds of manual code and design reviews by senior peers and architects.
Do automated testing after every build and release.
Monitor and analyze reports based on observability and monitoring tools.
Analyze and evaluate the performance and business impact of any new code and design change before implementing.
Follow standard coding best practices.
Follow the manual and automated static code review for any release.
Use incident management and issue tracker to report and track bugs.
Always review and validate solution architecture before implementation.
Follow static and dynamic code analysis using code analyzer tools like Somarqube, PMD, FindBug, etc.
Follow agile iterative development approach and regularly do retrospective meetings. Also, measure technical debt/TDR in each iteration.
Use project management tools like Jira, Trello, etc.
Do code refactoring of legacy code. Always revisit code and modularize common code components.
Strictly follow test-driven development (TDD) and Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) approach for every module of code.
Follow continuous build, integration, test, and validate the approach on all releases.
Last but not the least, technical debt should be documented, measured, and prioritized.
Estimating Technical Debt Cost
It’s very important to measure technical debt cost as it helps stakeholders and senior management to analyze and prioritize remediation costs. This should be a measurable number to make business decisions. It also helps to track the technical debt remediation status. There are so many measurable variables to measure code and constraints to calculate technical debt.
There are various tools available like SonarQube to check code quality, code complexities, lines of code, etc.
We can calculate technical debt as a ratio of the cost to fix a software system [Remediation Cost] to the cost of developing it [Development Cost]. This ratio is called the Technical Debt Ratio [TDR]:
Technical Debt Ratio (TDR) = (Remediation Cost / Development Cost) x 100%
Good TDR should be <=5%. High TDR shows bad code quality, which involves more remediation costs.
Optionally, remediation cost (RC) and Development cost (DC) could be also replaced by hours, which will help to calculate remediation time in terms of total efforts in hours.
Key Takeaways
These are some key points about technical debt cost:
The average organization wastes 25% to 45% of its development cost.
Hiring and training new engineers involve additional costs and an increase in coordination costs.
Operational overhead cost by spending 15 to 20% on unplanned work.
Impacts organizations’ revenue for additional and unplanned work.
Waste of time in analyzing improvement of source code and design.
Lower productivity rate around 60 to 70%.
Cost of project management and modern tooling.
Conclusion
Technical Debt can impact different factors like overall operations cost, velocity, quality of the product and can easily end up impacting teams’ productivity and morale. Hence avoiding technical debt or addressing it at the right intervals during the development process is the best way forward. We hope this blog helps you have a better understanding of Technical debt and best practices of their remediation.
The Spring Cloud Gateway (SCG) is an API gateway proxy. It’s open-source based on the Java language. It has tons of features and can be embedded with code and can also be deployed as a separate service and scaled easily on Kubernetes containers.
The SCG is capable of handling client requests traffic by routing to desired microservices using the gateway handler mapping and aggregate responses of different back-end REST API endpoints of microservices.
SCG runs on Netty the non-blocking web server which provides asynchronous request processing for faster non-blocking processing of client requests.
It’s based on the following three major pillars:
Route traffic to microservices: It handles routing client requests to designated REST API endpoint destinations. Imagine a use case where only the /catalogue API is being called. In this use case, the API gateway forwards client requests with payload to the Catalogue microservice. We will see this in our next source code example in the next section.
Predicates: It helps to add the condition on incoming client requests like checking request URI, parameter, or assigning weight.
Filters: It helps to implement the Spring framework web filters. Developers can modify the request and response based on the client’s preferences or security reasons. Developers can also add their custom filtering logic to filter incoming client requests and outgoing responses with no source code changes.
Spring Cloud Gateway Implementation Step by Step
In this section, we will implement the Spring Cloud Gateway routing features. In this coding exercise, we will cover major API gateway features route traffic, filters, and predicates.
We will use the dynamic routing configuration by making changes in application properties files. It will make changes applied dynamically without restarting microservices web apps. It will be deployed as a separate microservice on the Kubernetes container and can be deployed on multiple containers to provide HA
Prerequisite
These are basic installation requirements to build:
Let’s create a simple Spring Boot Java microservice using the Spring Cloud Gateway:
1. Create the catalogue-cache-service project using the SprCreate the spring-gateway-demo project using the Spring Initializer web portal: https://start.spring.io/
2. Now, we will define Spring Cloud Gateway routes, predicates, and filters in the application.yaml file.
3. We will configure API gateway routing for two separate microservices customer-management-service and catalogue-service. We will test and verify these in the upcoming points.
5. If the client goes to http://localhost:8080/customers, then it will route to the customer-management-service microservice REST API http://localhost:8011/customers which is running as a separate web service on a different container and port number:
6. If a client click to http://localhost:8080/catalogue, then it will route to the customer-management-service microservice REST API http://localhost:8010/catalogue which is running as a separate web service on a different container and port number:
When there is a need to improve the performance of web applications/microservices every millisecond counts. API gateway provides a powerful feature of distributed caching where API responses can be cached and be available for all distributed microservices. It may span multiple servers on separate Kubernetes containers. In caching, objects/data are stored in high-speed static RAM memory for faster access. Memory caching is effective because all microservices apps access the same set of cached data. The objective of distributed cached memory is to store program instructions and data that are used repeatedly by clients.
Distributed caching is an important caching strategy for decreasing a distributed microservices apps latency and improving its concurrency and scalability for better performance. Cache eviction strategy should be also configured regularly to replace it with the latest fresh data. According to a research by http://www.marketingdive.com:
New research by Google has found that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t load within 3 seconds.
The average load time for sites is 19 seconds on a 3G connection and 14 seconds on a 4G connection.
API Caching with Redis distributed caching
Redis is an open-source in-memory data structure project implementing a distributed caching, in-memory key-value database. Redis supports different kinds of abstract data structures, such as strings, lists, maps, sets, sorted sets, hyper log, bitmaps, streams, and spatial indexes.
Redis is a high-performance, in-memory, data structure server (not just a key-value store). On large-scale distributed systems with a high number of API calls per second, Redis is a perfect distributed caching solution for this kind of distributed enterprise microservice architecture. It’s faster than usual database calls because Redis serves data from static RAM cache memory.
Apps are responsible to fetch data from the database and push to the Redis cluster on a master node that updates/writes all new cache data entries into the Redis cluster. Redis master writes/updates data to Redis slave nodes. Redis server run in two modes:
Master Mode (Redis Master) ∙
Slave Mode (Redis Slave/Redis Replica)
We can configure Redis to choose a mode to write and read from. It is recommended to serve writes through the Redis leader and reads through the Redis follower.
Redis cluster architecture for high availability (HA)
Every leader should have one follower minimum; certainly can have more followers than leaders, which would be preferable to having a single follower per leader so that you can have one fail and still have a backup follower for some redundancy post failover.
Clients write on the leader node and read from follower nodes. Clients can directly connect with leader nodes for reads if followers are not available or down. Every leader node replicates the cached data to its follower. It could be one or many followers. They are all configurable.
All leaders and followers check the health status of every node by using the gossip protocol.
Design enterprise level system architecture to support email, SMS, Chat and other public social app integrations using API:
Email
SMS/OTP
Push notifications (Mobile and Web browser)
Chat – Whatsapp/Telegram
It’s a generic feature of all kind of web and mobile applications, which is required for all modern distributed applications regardless of using any programming languages and technologies. You can customize based on your business use cases.
I have tried to simplify this design concept to fulfil common use case requirements with high availability, high perfromance and analytical services. It’s a very important medium of communication with customers/users thru their desktop/mobile devices. I would recommend to implement using microservice architecture and deploy ion Kubernetes containers to make it fully cloud native modern system. Let’s get started!
Functional Requirement:
Send notifications
Prioritize notifications
Send notifications based on customer’s saved preferences
Single/simple and bulk notification messages
Analytics use cases for various notifications
Reporting of notification messages
Non-functional requirements (NFR):
High perfromance
Highly available (HA)
Low latency
Extendable/Pluggable design to add more clients, adapters and vendors.
Support Android/iOS mobile and desktop/laptop web browsers.
API integration with all notification modules and external integrations wth clients and service providers/vendors.
Scalable for higher load on-prem (VMware Tanzu) and on public cloud services like AWS, GCP, or Azure etc.
System Design Architecture:
Note: Please click on the image to see clear view!
These are the solution design considerations and components:
1. Notification clients:
These clients will request for single and bulk messages using API calls. These clients will send notification messages to simple and bulk notification services:
Bulk Notification clients: These clients send bulk notification(s).
Simple Notification clients: These clients send single notification(s).
2. Notification Services:
These services are entry services which will expose REST APIs to clients and interact with the clients. They are responsible to build notification messages by consuming Template Service. These messages will be also validated using Validation Service.
Simple Notification Service: This service will expose APIs to integrate client with backend services. It’s a main service, which will handle simple notification request.
Bulk Notification Service: This service will expose APIs to integrate client with backend services. It’s a main service, which will handle bulk notification request.
This service will also manage notification messages. It wills persist sent messages to databases and maintain activity log. Same message can be resent using APIs of these services. It will provide APIs to add/update/delete and view old and new messages. It will also provide web dashboard which should have filter option to filter messages based on different criteria like date range, priority, module user, user groups etc.
3. Template Service:
This service manages all ready-to use templates for OTP, SMS, Email,chat and other push notification messages. It also provides REST APIs to create, update, delete and manage templates. It will also provide an UI dashboard page to check and manage message templates from web console.
4. User Selection Service:
This service will provide services to choose target users and various application modules. There could be use cases to send bulk messages to specific group of users or different application modules. It could be also AD/IAM/eDirectory/user database/ user groups based on customer’s preferences. Internally, it will consume API services of User Profile Service APIs and check customers notification preferences.
5. UserProfile Service:
This service will provide various features including managing users profile and their preferences . It will also provide feature to unsubscribe for notifications and also notification receiving frequency etc. Notification Service will be dependent on this service.
6. Common Notification Service
Scheduling Service:
This service will provide APIs to schedule notifications like immediate or any given time. It could be any of these followings:
Second
Minute
Hourly
Daily
Weekly
Monthly
Yearly
Custom frequency etc.
There could be other services also, which can be auto-triggered messages based on the scheduled times.
Validation Service:
This service solely responsible for validating notification messages against business rules and expected format. Bulk messages should be approved by authorized system admin only.
Validation Service:
It will also prioritize notification based on high, medium and low priorities. OTP notification messages have higher priority with a time-bound expiry time, they will always be sent in higher priority. Common Outbound Handler will consume messages and process and send based on the same priorities from reading in three different queues high, medium and low. Another use case of bulk messages can be send using low priority during off hours. Application notifications during transactions could be sent to medium priority like email etc. Business will decide priority based on criticality of the notifications.
7. Event Priority Queues (Event Hub):
It will provide event hub service which will consume messages from notification services in high, medium and low topics. It sends processed and validated messages to Notification Handler Service which internally uses Notification Preferences Service to check users personal preferences.
It will have these three topics, which will be used to consume/send messages based on business priority:
High
Medium
Low
8. Common Outbound Handler:
This service will consume notification messages from Event Hub by polling event priority queues based on their priority. High precedence will be given to “High” queue and so on so forth. Finally It will send notification messages to message specific adapter thru Event Hub.
This service will also fetch target user/applications from User Selection Service.
9. Notification DB
It will persist all notification messages with their delivery time, status etc. It will have a cluster of databases with a leader which will be used to perform all write operations and read will be on read replica/followers. It should be No-SQL database.
10. Outbound Event Hub:
It finally transmits message to various supported adapters. These adapters will be based on different devices (desktop/mobile) and notification types( sms/OTP/Email/Chat/Push notifications).
11. Notification Adapters:
These are adapters which will transform incoming messages from event hub (Kafka) and send to external vendors according to their supported format. These are a few adapters, we can add more based on use case requirements:
OTP Adapter Service
SMS Adapter Service
Email Adapter Service
In-App Notification Adapter Service
WhatsApp Chat Notification Adapter Service
Telegram Notification Adapter Service
12. Notification Vendors:
These are the external SAAS (on cloud/on-prem) vendors, which provide actual notification transmission using their infrastructure and technologies. They maybe paid enterprise services like AWS SNS, MailChimp etc.
SMS Vendor Integration Service
Email Vendor Integration Service
App Push Notification Vendor Integration Service
WhatsApp Vendor Integration Service
Telegram Vendor Integration Service
13. Notification Analytical Service
This service will do all analytics and identify notification usage, trends and do a reporting on top of that. It will pull all final notifications messages from analytical database (Cassandra) and Notification databases for analytics and reporting purpose.
These are a few use cases:
Total number of notifications per day/per sec.
Which is highly used notification system.
What’s average size and frequency of messages.
Filter out messages based on their priorities and many more…
14. Notification Tracker
This service will continuously read Event hub queues and track all sent notifications. It captures metadata of the notifications like transmission time delivery status, communication channel, message type etc.
15. Cassandra Database Cluster
This database cluster will persist all notifications for analytics and reporting purpose. It’s based on write more and read less concept.
This will provide good performance and low latency for high number of notifications, because it internally manages high number of write operations and sync up with other database nodes and keep duplicate data/messages for high availability and reliability. Messages will be always available in case of any node get crashed.
Please share feedback and let me know if you have any suggestion to make this design better!
15. Inbound Notification Service
This service will expose API endpoint to external clients and applications to send inbound messages.
16. INBOUND event Hub
This topic will be used to queue and process all incoming notification messages from Inbound notification clients.
17. Inbound Handler
This will consume all incoming notification messages from INBOUND topic.
18. Inbound Notification Clients
These inbound notification messages will come from internal and external sources/applications.
Application Programming Interface (API) allows two apps/resources to talk to each other and is mostly referred for Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)
API is gaining more popularity when microservices development is booming for modern cloud-native applications or app modernization. We can’t imagine microservices without APIs, because there are so many distributed services in a microservice architecture, which can’t be easily integrated without the help of API. So, both Microservices and API compliments each other!
It’s an architectural design specification, a set of protocols that provides an interface to integrate and talk different microservices/monolithic apps and databases with each other. API does talk about how external services can communicate with apps, not how it works!
It creates an integration contract between different apps/external clients with a standard set of rules and specifications. It’s followed as a development practice for external clients/apps.
API is based on a contract first design pattern of development, where all developments happen around APIs specifications and protocols. Developers use the same standard practices across different microservices agile development teams.
API best practices
Now, we will discuss a few best API practices in detail:
Follow OpenAPI standard: Modern apps API should follow OpenAPI specification to make it compatible and portable for all kinds of apps.
API web dashboard support: It should be developer-friendly with the API management dashboard, which helps to create, manage, and monitor APIs in large systems or microservices environments. There are many API open source and enterprise solutions like OpenAPI based SwaggerHub, Google Apigee, and so on. They provide a web-based dashboard to manage APIs dynamically and can be exported as source code and shared with development teams.
Web-based HTTP with REST: Most of the apps, databases, and messaging systems use REST over HTTP protocol communication over the internet. REST is widely accepted, supported by most of the clients and logical integration apps, and so on. It’s more flexible, has rich features. If you are building an API then you should know the basics about HTTP web protocol and its methods, attributes, and status codes. Also, you should have a good understanding of the REST style of API interfaces, because REST is resource oriented architectural style.
Return valid structured JSON response: Don’t return plain text message. It should be well-structured JSON, XML, or a similar response. Example is as follows:
{
“sku”: 101,
“pInfo”: {
“fullProductName”: “LG 50B6000FHD 127 Fridge”,
“brand”: “LG”,
“model”: “50B6000FHD”,
“category”: “Fridge”,
}
}
Maintain status codes: API must return HTTP status codes because when a client sends a request to server through REST API, it expects response from the server, if it’s a success or failure. There are standard pre-defined error codes for this purpose:
Status codes
Descriptions
2xx
Success category, for example, 200 – Ok
3xx
Redirection category, for example, 304 – Not modified
4xx
Client error category, for example, 404 – Not found
5xx
Server errors category, for example, 500 – Internal server error
API Endpoint naming standard: Name the collections using plural nouns. The reason behind this, the same resource can return a single record or multiple records. It’s not recommended to have two separate resources URIs for these two resources. For example, /orders is a valid URI name for API, which serves both purposes.
Use nouns instead of verbs. It will be a standard naming convention, because multiple operations can be done on a single resource or object. For example, /orders is a noun and correct way because order can be created, updated, deleted, and fetched. It’s not recommended to use / createOrder, /updateOrder, /deleteOrder, and so on.
Error handling, return error details with error code: Server resource should always returns appropriate error code, internal error code and simple human-readable error message for better error and exception handling at client-side apps, for example:
{
“status”: “400”,
“erroCode”: “2200”
“errorDetail”: “Connection refused”
}
Return appropriate HTTP response status code: Every REST endpoint should return a meaningful HTTP response code to handle server responses in a better way like:
200 for success.
404 for not found.
201 resource is created.
304 not modified. Response already in its cache.
400 bad request. The client request was not processed, as the server could not understand what the client was asking for.
401 unauthorized. Not allowed to access resources, and should re-request with the required credentials.
403 forbidden. Client is authenticated, but the client is not allowed access to the page or resource for some reason.
503 services unavailable. The server is down or unavailable to receive and process the request.
Avoid nesting of related resources: Sometimes, resources are related to each other like /orders resource object is related to catalogue category and user ID. We should not nest resources like: GET /orders/mobile/111
It’s recommended to use top-level resource and make other related resources as a query parameter like this:
GET /orders?ctg=mobile&userid=111
Handle trailing slashes: It’s always advisable to use only one approach either with trailing spaces like /orders/ or without it /orders to avoid any confusion.
Use sorting, filtering, querying, pagination: In many use cases, a simple resource name won’t work.
Sorting: You need to request server API resources to sort data in ascending or descending order: GET /orders?sort=asc
Filtering: Filter on some business conditions like return product catalog responses based on price range: GET /orders?minprice=100&maxprice=500
Querying: Use cases where you want to query products based on their category like searching electronics products based on mobile category, for example: GET /orders?ctg=mobile&userid=111
Pagination: To improve performance and reduce latency on API calls over the internet, the client requests a subset of records at a single request like 10 records at a time for a given page. It’s called pagination: GET /orders?page=1&page_size=10
Versioning: Versioning is a very important concept of API, which helps consumers to migrate to newer versions without any outage. In this scenario, some clients can access newer versions, and others can still use older versions. There are various ways of API versioning:
Using URI path: It’s a standard technique to maintain different versions of the same APIs to support older versions of API resources, if the server-side API resource is upgraded to a newer version. Clients take some time to migrate and use the latest version of API. A new version to the same API resource can be changed, for example, /order/v1, / order/v2. The internal version of the API uses the 1.2.3 format like this: MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH.
Major version: It contains major code changes in business logic or other components. A new major version is added to the new API and the version number is used to route to the correct host.
Minor and patch versions: These are used internally for backwardcompatible updates. They are usually communicated in changelogs to inform clients about new functionality or a bug fix. The minor version represents minor changes and the patch contains break-fixes or security patches, and so on.
Using query parameters: In this method, version number is added into query parameters in key and value. It’s simple to use, however not recommended because it’s difficult to route requests to APIs. For example: /orders?version=1.
Using custom headers: In this method, version number can be added in HTTP request header. It avoids the clutter of URI versions; however, we need to create and manage new headers. For example: Accepts-version: 1.0.
Using content negotiation: It’s also added in the header, allows a single resource representation instead of versioning the entire API which gives us more granular control over versioning. In this method, no need to create routing rules at the source API codes of different versions. This approach is not very popular, because it’s difficult to test and verify changes in browsers. For example: Accept: application/json; version=1
Caching: API caching is a very much needed feature to improve API read (GET) performance. It caches responses from the API and for the same set of data and makes it available for other similar client requests. It’s recommended to use distributed caching techniques in a distributed microservices environment so that the same cached response should be available for multiple instances of the same microservice app.
Rate limiting and throttling: Rate limiting is a technique of counting client requests with counter and limit based on the subscription or maximumallowed limit to control traffic on the server, also it is useful for security reasons to avoid hackers to hit continuously and bring the system down by consuming all the memory and compute resources.
API throttling controls the way API is being consumed by external apps/ or clients. It also indicates a temporary state and is used to control the data that external clients can access through a REST API. When a throttle is triggered, we can disconnect client requests, client apps, device ID, a user or just reduce the response rate. You can define a throttle at the application, API or user level.
There are multiple ways to implement rate-limiting. Spring Cloud Gateway provides rate limiting wrapper using distributed caching such as Redis or a similar caching tool.
API gateway support: It’s recommended to expose APIs using API gateway tools to external apps. API gateway takes care of routing and orchestrating to designated server-side API, filtering, rate limiting, throttling, circuit breaker, API, authentication, authorization, and so on out of the box. It makes your API configuration outside of the business logic source code. It makes actual business logic code lighter and easy to debug and maintain.
I am happy to announce release of my first book “Cloud Native Microservices with Spring and Kubernetes” with BPB Publications!! It’s all about design, build and deploy scalable cloud native microservices on container using the Spring framework and Kubernetes. Need your support! Please buy and review this book on Amazon. Also, share book detail with your IT software engineers colleagues and friends.
The main objective of this book is to give an overview of cloud native microservices, their architecture, design patterns, best practices, use cases and practical coverage of modern applications. This book covers a strong understanding of microservices, API first approach, Testing, Observability, API Gateway, Service Mesh and Kubernetes alternatives of Spring Cloud. This book covers the implementation of various design patterns of developing cloud native microservices using Spring framework, docker and Kubernetes. It also covers containerization concepts and hands-on code exercises.
After reading this book, the readers will have a holistic understanding of building, running, and managing cloud native microservices applications on Kubernetes containers.
It’s the first book on this subject in India by any Indian writer, which is also economical than foreign publications. This book is about learning of software application design and development using Microservices, Spring and Kubernetes based technologies. It’s useful for software developers, cloud engineers, DevOps and technical architects.
This book is available in paperback and Kindle (eBook on free Kindle app on Android/iOS/Laptop/Desktop) edition on amazon and BPB in most of the countries of North America, Europe, Middle East, Asia and Africa.
Learn fundamentals of microservice and design patterns.
Perform end-to-end microservices testing using Cucumber.
Learn microservices development using Spring Boot and Kubernetes.
Learn to develop reactive, event-driven, and batch microservices.
Perform end-to-end microservices testing using Cucumber.
Implement API gateway,authentication & authorization,load balancing, caching, rate limiting.
Learn observability and monitoring techniques of microservices
Who this book is for: This book is for the Spring Developers, Microservice Developers, Cloud Engineers, DevOps Consultants, Technical Architect and Solution Architects.
Table of Contents (Chapters): 1. Overview of Cloud Native microservices 2. Microservice design patterns 3. API first approach 4. Build microservices using the Spring Framework 5. Batch microservices 6. Build reactive and event-driven microservices 7. The API gateway, security, and distributed caching with Redis 8. Microservices testing and API mocking 9. Microservices observability 10. Containers and Kubernetes overview and architecture 11. Run microservices on Kubernetes 12. Service Mesh and Kubernetes alternatives of Spring Cloud
KEY FEATURES:
Complete coverage on how to design, build, run, and deploy modern cloud native microservices.
Includes numerous sample code exercises on microservices, Spring and Kubernetes.
Develop a stronghold on Kubernetes, Spring, and the microservices architecture.
Complete guide of application containerization on Kubernetes containers.
Coverage on managing modern applications and infrastructure using observability tools.
Chapter 1: Overview of Cloud Native microservices, introduces cloud native modern applications, cloud first overview, benefits, types of clouds, classification, and the need for cloud native modern applications. It will cover detailed microservices (MSA ) overview, characteristics, motivations, benefits, best practices, architecture principles, challenges and solutions, application modernization spectrum, twelve-factor apps, and beyond twelve-factor apps.s
Chapter 2: Microservice design patterns,introduces various microservices design patterns with use cases, advantages, and disadvantages.
Chapter 3: API first approach, discusses fundamentals of the API first approach. It discusses details of the REST overview, API model, best practices, design principles, components, security, communication protocols, and how to document dynamically with OpenAPI Swagger. It discusses API design planning, specifications, API management tools, and testing API with SwaggerHub inspector and PostMan REST client.
Chapter 4: Build microservices using the Spring Framework, is a key chapter of Spring Boot and Spring Cloud components with hands-on lab exercises. It will cover steps to build microservice using the REST API framework. It covers the Spring Cloud config server and resiliency of microservices practical aspects.
Chapter 5: Batch microservices, introduces batch microservices, use cases, Spring Cloud Task, and Spring Batch. It discusses hands-on lab exercises using Spring Cloud Data Flow (SCDF) and Kafka. It also discusses a few Spring batch practices, auto-scaling techniques, batch orchestration, and compositions methods for sequential or parallel batch processing. Last but not the least; it talks about alerts and monitoring of Spring Cloud Task and Spring Batch.
Chapter 6: Build reactive and event-driven microservices, describes building of reactive microservices, non-blocking synchronous APIs, and event-driven asynchronous microservices. It covers steps to develop sample reactive microservices with Spring’s project Reactor, Spring WebFlux, and event-driven asynchronous microservices. It discusses Spring Cloud Stream, Zookeeper, SpringBoot, and overview of Kafka. It also covers hands-on lab exercises of event-driven asynchronous microservices using Spring Cloud Stream and Kafka.
Chapter 7:API gateway, security, and distributed caching with Redis, introduces the API Gateway overview, features, advantages, and best practices. It covers hands-on lab exercises to expose REST APIs of microservices externally with the Spring Cloud Gateway. It covers distributed caching overview and hands-on lab exercises using Redis. It discusses API gateway rate limiting and Implementation of API gateway rate limiting with Redis and Spring Boot. Last but not the least, it covers best practices of API Security. Implementation of SSO using Spring Cloud Gateway, Spring Security, Oauth2, Keycloak, OpenId, and JWT tokens.
Chapter 8: Microservices testing and API mocking, describes important aspects of microservices testing practices, challenges, benefits, testing strategy, testing pyramid, and different types of microservices testing. It covers implementation of the integration testing framework using Behavioral Driven Development (BDD) with hands-on code examples. It also discusses microservices testing tools and best practices of microservices testing. It covers the role of testing in the microservices CI/CD pipeline. Last but not the least; it talks about API mocking and hands-on lab implementation with the WireMock framework.
Chapter 9: Microservices observability, covers detail observability and monitoring overview and techniques of microservices with the Spring actuator, micrometer health APIs, and Wavefront APM. It covers application logging overview, best practices, simple logging, and log aggregation of distributed microservices with implementation using Elasticsearch, Fluentd, and Kibana (EFK) on the Kubernetes container. It discusses the need of APM performance and telemetry monitoring tools for distributed microservices and how to trace multiple microservices in a distributed environment. It also covers hands-on lab implementation of monitoring microservices with Prometheus and Grafana.
Chapter 10: Containers and Kubernetes overview and architecture, is a key chapter which introduces containers, docker, docker engine containerization, Buildpacks, components of docker files, build docker files, run docker files, and inspect docker images. It covers docker image registry and how to persist docker images in image container registries. It covers an overview of Kubernetes, need, and architecture. Last but not the least; it covers a detailed introduction of Kubernetes resources.
Chapter 11: Run microservices on Kubernetes, discusses practical aspects of Kubernetes, installation, and configuration with monitoring and visualization tools with Octant and Proxy. It discusses how to create and manage Kubernetes clusters in detail. It discusses hands-on exercises of creating docker images of Java microservices, pushing it to the Docker hub container image registry, and deploying to Kubernetes clusters. It covers hands-on lab examples of exposing API endpoints of microservices outside the Kubernetes cluster by using the Nginx ingress controller. Last but not the least; it covers various popular and useful Kubernetes application deployment and configuration of management tools.
Chapter 12: Service Mesh and Kubernetes alternatives of Spring Cloud, covers a detailed overview and benefits of GitOps and Service Mesh. It covers the Istio Service Mesh architecture and deployment of microservices on Kubernetes with Argo CD. Last but not the least; it discusses various Kubernetes alternatives of Spring Cloud projects and popular cloud buzzwords!
About the Author Rajiv Srivastava is the founder of cloudificationzone.com, which is a cloud native modern application tech blog site. He is a cloud solution architect and modern application specialist with 17+ years of work experience in software development and architectural design.
In this blog we will understand how multi Kubernetes clusters can be managed and orchestrated using the Cluster API control plane tool.
Cluster API
It’s a sub-project of Kubernetes which works on declarative API and provides support for CRD (Custom Resource Definition), which manages K8s and VMs based on CRD configuration. Cluster API always checks current K8s clusters on worker nodes status and compares them with desired state which is provided by DevOps team using CRD config files. It provides provisioning of multiple K8s clusters which could be spread to multiple nodes/hosts. It extends the functionality of K8s for multi-node cluster management with Kubeadm API.
Cluster API orchestrates and manages the lifecycle of worker nodes where K8s clusters are provisioned. Also, manages multiple K8s clusters upgrades, failover, rollback etc.
Tip: Cluster API manages K8s clusters of multi-cloud including on-prem and hybrid.
Started by the Kubernetes Special Interest Group (SIG) Cluster Lifecycle, the Cluster API project uses Kubernetes style APIs and patterns to automate cluster lifecycle management.
Cluster API cluster management reference architecture
These are important components of Cluster API:
Infrastructure provider
Basic hardware infrastructure providers such as Vmware, public infra providers such as AWS, GCP, Azure etc.
Bootstrap provider
It’s also called Cluster API bootstrap provider Kubeadm (CABPK). It generates cluster certificates, initialize/bootstrap control planes. It turns the Machine into a K8s Node. It uses the Kubeadm tool.
Kubeadm
It manages the lifecycle of K8s clusters on multiple nodes. Kubeadm is a tool built to provide best-practice “fast paths” for creating Kubernetes clusters. It performs the actions necessary to get a minimum viable, secure cluster up and running in a user friendly way.
Control plane is a set of services which manages multiple K8s clusters and scale on production environments. It manages and provisioned dedicated machines/VMs, running static pods for components such as kube-apiserver, kube-controller-manager and kube-scheduler.
The default provider uses kubeadm to bootstrap the control plane.
Custom Resource Definitions (CRDs)
It’s a set of K8s YAML configuration files which maintain desired K8s cluster state. It can be persisted on Git server for platform automation for Cluster API based K8s clusters.
Machine
It defines configuration of machines like VM etc. It’s a declarative spec for an infrastructure component hosting a Kubernetes Node. It’s like POD on K8s.
MachineDeployment
It provides declarative updates for Machines and MachineSets.
MachineSet
It maintains a stable set of Machines running at any given time. It’s like a ReplicaSet of K8s.
MachineHealthCheck
It defines the conditions when a Node should be considered unhealthy. If the Node has any unhealthy conditions for a given user-configured time, the MachineHealthCheck initiates remediation of the Node. Remediation of Nodes is performed by deleting the corresponding Machine and creating a new one like ReplicaSet. It always maintains the same set of Machine configuration which has been provided in the CRD file.
BootstrapData
It contains the Machine or Node role-specific initialization data (usually cloud-init) used by the Infrastructure Provider to bootstrap a Machine into a Node.
I had been busy with my other work assignments. publishing this blog after a long interval. Hope you like it !
It’s important to understand benefits for the business who is planning to migrate to cloud and invest time and money. These are some generic and common benefits after adopting cloud technology using modern application approach:
Smoother and faster app user experience: Cloud provides faster, highly available app interfaces which improves rich user experience. For example, AWS stores static web pages and images at nearby CDN(Content Delivery Network) servers physically on cloud, which provides faster and smooth application response.
On demand scaling for infrastructure: Cloud provides on demand compute, memory and storage horizontal/vertical scaling. Organizations/customers should not bother about infra prediction for higher load and they also save money to use only required infrastructure resources.
No outage for users and clients: Cloud provides high availability, so whenever any app server is down, client load will be diverted to other app server or a new app server will be created. User and client sessions will also be managed automatically using internal load balancers.
Less operational cost (OPEX): Cloud manages most of the infra management operation automatically or by cloud providers. For example, PAAS (Platform as a service) automates entire platform automation with a smaller number of DevOps resources, which saves a lot operational cost.
Easy to manage: Cloud providers and PAAS platforms provides very easy and intuitive web, CLI and API based console or interface, which can be easily integrated with the CI/CD tools, IAAC (Infrastructure as a Code) and scripts. They can also be integrated with apps etc.
Release app features quickly to compete in market: Cloud provides a lot of ready-to use services on cloud, which takes lesser time to build and deploy apps to cloud quickly using microservices agile like development methodologies. It supports container-based orchestration services like Kubernetes, where smaller microservices can be deployed in quick time, which enables organizations to release new feature quickly.
Increased security: Cloud solutions provider out of the box intrinsic security features at various level of application, network, data and infra level. For example, AWS provides DDOS and OWASP security features with firewall etc.
Increase developer productivity: Cloud providers various tools and services to improve developer productivity like PAAS, Tanzu Build Service. Spring framework, AWS BeanStalk, GCP, OpenShift developer tools etc.
Modular Teams: Cloud migration motivates to follow modern applications microservice framework for dev and test teams to work in agile on independent modules or microservices independently.
Public cloud’s “pay as you go” usage policy: Customer has to pay for pay as you go usage of infra, so that no extra infra resources wasted. These public service providers pricing model saves a lot of cost.
Easy disaster recovery handling: Cloud deployed on multiple data centers (DCs) or availability zones (AZs) for disaster recovery (DR), so that if any site (DC/AZ) is down then client or application load will be automatically routed to other site using load balancers.
Business continuity: It provides all necessary processes and tools to manages business continuity (BC) for smooth and resilient business operations. They. Provide faster site recovery in case of disaster and data backup. Cloud also provides enterprise compliances for various industries like HIPAA for health insurance etc.
On this Covid weekend. I have tried to consolidate a few popular cloud native and microservices related acronyms and buzzwords. Hope it will be helpful for a quick reference for novice and pro professionals :
DDD: Domain Driven Design is used for microservices design based on closed context of independent business modules
DoS: A Denial-of-Service (DoS) is a cyber-attack to shut down a machine or network, making it inaccessible to its intended users. DoS attacks accomplish this by flooding the target with traffic, or sending it information that triggers a crash.
DDoS: It’s an extension DoS. he incoming traffic flooding the victim originates from many different sources. This effectively makes it impossible to stop the attack simply by blocking a single source.
API: Application Program Interface. It’s a computing interface which defines interactions between multiple software applications and can be interacted using REST.
REST: Representational state transfer (REST) is a software architectural style that defines a set of constraints to be used for creating Web services.
OWASP: The Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) is an online community that produces freely-available articles, methodologies, documentation, tools, and technologies in the field of web application security.
DC: Data Center. It’s a physical facility that organizations use to host their critical applications and data.
AZ: Availability Zones are isolated virtual locations within data center regions from which public cloud services originate and operate for HA, DR, backup.
HA: High Availability
DR: Disaster Recovery
A&A: Authorization & Authentication
BM : Bare Metal on plain OS.
OS: Operating system
SQL: Structured Query Language for RDBMS databases like MySQL, Oracle
No-SQL: No- Structured Query Language for Non-RDBMS databases like document based database MongoDB, or column based database HBase, GreenPlum etc.
BYO: Bring Your Own. Example: Bring your own software.
DIY: Do It Yourself. It’s used for mainly self-service management/operations.
TCP/IP: Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and the Internet Protocol (IP). The Internet protocol suite is the conceptual model and set of communications protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks. It works on handshaking dialogues.
UDP: User Datagram Protocol (UDP) is one of the core members of the Internet protocol suit. It has no handshaking dialogues.
DevOps: A set of practices that combines software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops). It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery and continuous integration with high software quality. DevOps is complementary with Agile software development.
DevSecOps: is the philosophy of integrating security practices within the DevOps process. DevSecOps involves creating a ‘Security as Code’ culture with ongoing, flexible collaboration between release engineers and security teams.
CI/CD: Continuous Delivery and Continuous Integration.
Agile software development: Iterative sprint based rapid development model.
H/W: Hardware
H/W: Software
CQRS: Command query responsibility segregation is microservice design pattern to separate read and write command responsibilities of data.
SAGA: Microservices architectural pattern to implement a transaction that spans across multiple microservices
HTTP: Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application-layer protocol for transmitting web-content
HTTPS: HTTP with SSL security
SSL & TSL: Secure Sockets Layer and its successor, TLS (Transport Layer Security), are protocols for establishing authenticated and encrypted links between networked computers or cloud appications/services.
Greenfield: New scratch application
Brownfield: Legacy or old application
MFA: Multi-factor authentication which involved more than one device to authenticate like login credentials with mobile based OTP confirmation.
OTP: One Time password
RBAC: Role-based access control (RBAC) is a method of restricting network access based on the roles of individual users within an enterprise.
AWS: Amazon Web services. A leading public cloud provider.
GCP: Google Cloud Platform. A leading public cloud provider
Modern Applications with Cloudification Zone 