Best Design Patterns In Microservices For Developers Success

By Priyanshu Piyush

August 5, 2023

Microservices have emerged as the most popular way to deploy applications in the market today. Most companies prefer a microservice pattern design rather than a monolithic design when developing business applications. That is why it is essential for the development team to understand how they can leverage this architectural approach to achieve the maximum benefit. This requires a complete understanding of the various design patterns in microservices and how they can be used effectively.

This article describes the top 5 design patterns that the development team should know. Highlights the advantages and challenges of each design pattern in the microservices and explains how to select the appropriate design pattern for your project.

What is microservice?

Microservices are the architecture style that consists of a small collection of services that are loosely coupled with applications and can be deployed independently. Each of these services can be deployed, developed, and extended independently for specific business functions. The basic concept of microservices is to divide large, monolithic applications into smaller, easier-to-manage defragment collections. Each microservice is a separate component that can be developed, tested, deployed, expanded, and updated independently of all other microservices. This approach is popular with organizations that want to improve application performance and maintenance by offering a variety of benefits, such as modular, flexible, and scalable improvements.

5 Best Design Patterns in Microservice to Become Master in Developing

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1. Agitator design pattern

The agitator design pattern is one of the basic microservice patterns. Serves as a system gateway for integrating multiple services' responses into one. This pattern is especially useful when multiple services are required to provide the response required for client requests. Agitators reduce the complexity of clients by orchestrating the interaction between services. This pattern also provides an integrated interface for the client, making the service easier for the client. However, careful design and management are required to avoid bottlenecks.

2. API Gateway Pattern

API Gateway Pattern acts as an entry point for accessing microservices from external customers. It provides a single interface to customers, processes query routing, and can address cross-cutting issues such as authentication, authorization, speed limitation, and response transformation.

API Gateway centralizes these features to simplify managing your microservices and ensure consistent behavior across services. Popular solutions for API gateways include Amazon API Gateway and Kong.

3. Soga Pattern

This microservice design pattern uses a series of local transactions to provide transaction management. Each working part of a company is guaranteed to ensure that all tasks are completed or that the compensation transaction is executed to undo previously performed. Also, in Saga, compensation transactions must be reversible and invalidated. These two principles ensure that you can manage transactions without manual intervention. The Soga pattern works by splitting a single transaction into several small transactions, also called &quote;compensation transactions.&quote; These compensating transactions are carried out in a specified order and are designed to reverse previous transaction effects in the event of a failure. The sequence of compensating transactions is crucial to confirm that the system remains consistent.

4. Event Sourcing

Event Sourcing is responsible for generating new sequential event sequences. The state of the application can be reproduced by querying the data, but this requires re-imaging every time the state of the program changes. The principle of event sourcing is that the system catches changes in the state of an entity.

The persistence of business items is achieved by storing state change events in succession. A new event is added to the event sequence each time an object's state changes. It's actually an atomic operation because it's a single operation.

5. CQRS

Command Query Response Segmentation (CQRS) is a design pattern that separates read (query) and write (command) operations, allowing these operations to be independently extended and optimized. Each microservice design has either a database model for each service or a shared database for each service. However, in a per-service database model, the query cannot be implemented because data access is limited to a single database. Therefore, the CQRS pattern is available in these scenarios. This pattern divides the application into two parts: commands and queries. The command part processes all requests related to creation, update, and deletion, and the query part processes the materialized view. The materialized view is updated by a set of events created using the event source pattern described above.

How to choose the best design pattern in Microservices?

Follow the following instructions to choose the best design pattern in Microservices.

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Understand Communication Requirements

The first step is to understand your communication requirements. Different microservice design patterns provide different communication styles. For example, if asynchronous, non-blocking communication is required, you can select an event-centric pattern. The service registry pattern may be appropriate if you need to balance the load between service instances. Understanding your communication requirements will help you find the right pattern.

Define technology stack

While microservices are not tech-savvy, all organizations use a limited set of technologies. Find out the programming languages, messaging systems, container orchestras such as Kubernetes, and cloud platforms such as AWS to use to build your microservices. The selected microservice pattern must match the available technologies and constraints.

Determine problem areas

Identify potential challenges and pain points that applications may face, such as data consistency, fault tolerance, and communication between services. This will assist you to determine the patterns that can detect these challenges.

Prioritize patterns based on goals

Focus on patterns that meet primary application goals. For example, if scalability is the highest priority, a pattern enabling horizontal scaling, such as load balancing and containerization, should be given priority.

Determine operational complexity

Lastly, consider the complexity of operations. Depending on the design pattern, it may add additional complexity to the system. Therefore, you must balance the benefits of the design pattern and the operational overhead that can be caused by it. Use design patterns only when the benefits exceed the potential complexity.

Conclusion

Microservice design patterns help you to design more scalable, serviceable, and reliable applications if you understand and apply these five key microservice design patterns. However, each pattern has its pros and cons, so it is important to remember that you have to be carefully applied to your application's specific requirements.

This guide has been created to help you understand, and We hope it will help you on your journey to master the pattern design in microservices.

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