Key Takeaways

1. In comparison of staff augmentation vs managed services, Staff Augmentation Model mainly offers an extension to the existing team whereas in Managed Services, the company outsources certain functions or projects to an experienced third party organization.
2. Staff Augmentation is often utilized with Managed Services Model for specific services at certain points in time.
3. Staff Augmentation Model may become risky, costly, and less productive when the resources are inexperienced, and there is lack of time for training and development.
4. IT Companies utilizing Staff Augmentation Model eventually sourcing external resources for their work. Alternatively, They can also adopt an effective managed services model to maximize value.
5. For short term goals, it is advisable to go with Staff Augmentation Model whereas for long term initiatives and requirement of large team, Managed Services Model is preferable.

Today, more than before, businesses are looking for ways to outsource their IT operations. The process of finding and employing in-house IT personnel may be lengthy, difficult, and expensive, not to mention unpleasant in the case of a fast-growing business or a temporary project.

IT staff augmentation vs managed services has always been an evergreen debate in the IT industry and these are the two most common types of IT outsourcing models. Both approaches are viable substitutes for hiring employees full-time, but which one works best for you will depend on the nature and scope of your projects.

With the help of the staff augmentation model, you may outsource a variety of different jobs and responsibilities. Under the managed services model, the client gives the entire problem and its resolution to an outside company. While managed services excel at the long-term management of operations like architecture and security, staff augmentation is excellent for the short-term scaling of specific operations.

In order to establish which option is preferable, we will compare staff augmentation vs managed services and explore the benefits and drawbacks of each.

1. What is IT Staff Augmentation?

In this context, “staff augmentation” refers to the practice of adding a new member to an organization’s existing team. A remote worker or team is hired for a limited time and for specific tasks, rather than being hired full-time.

They are not fixed workers, but they are completely incorporated into the internal team. Companies interested in adopting this strategy for project development will save significant time and resources.

If a corporation wants to fire an employee, it must first formally register the worker, go through a lengthy onboarding procedure, pay taxes, and sit through extensive interviews.

You are correct; firing an employee is a complicated process in many Western nations. It is normal procedure in Europe to present evidence that an employee lacks the necessary degree of certification, and a specialized commission will rule on your ability to do so. Think about all the time and effort you may waste dealing with the typical bureaucratic system. Therefore, staff augmentation is used as it can be advantageous because of its features that enable you to satisfy your demands for a super-specialist with less effort and expense. Let’s take a closer look at its benefits and drawbacks now.

Further Reading on:
IT Staff Augmentation vs Offshoring

Staff Augmentation vs Outsourcing

1.1 Pros of IT Staff Augmentation

Effortless Teamwork
Your existing team will function normally with the additional “resources.” As a mechanism, they’re rock-solid reliable.

Staffing Adaptability
As needed, staffing levels may be quickly adjusted up or down. Furthermore, individuals sync up more efficiently and rapidly than disjointed teams.

High Proficiency at Low Cost
Adding new individuals to your team helps make up for any gaps in the expertise you may have. Because you are hiring people for their specialized expertise, you won’t have to spend time teaching them anything new.

In-house Specialist Expertise
You can put your attention where it belongs on growing your business and addressing IT needs by using staff augmentation to swiftly bridge skill shortages that arise while working on a software project that requires specialized knowledge and experience.

Reduce Management Issues
By using a staffing agency, you may reduce your risk and save money compared to hiring new employees. You have access to the big picture as well as any relevant details, are able to make decisions at any point in the procedure, and are kept in the loop the whole time.

Internal Acceptance
Permanent workers are more likely to swiftly adapt to working with temporary workers than they would be with an outsourced team, and they are less likely to worry about losing their employment as a result.

Keep to the Deadlines
When you need to get more tasks done in less time, but don’t have enough people to do it, staff augmentation can help. It can aid in the timely completion of tasks and the efficient execution of the project as a whole.

1.2 Cons of IT Staff Augmentation

Training is Essential
As a result, it is imperative that you familiarize your temporary workers with the company’s internal procedures, as they will likely vary from the methods they have used in the past.

Lack of Managerial Resources
Bringing new team members up to speed can be a drain on the existing team’s time and energy, but this is only a problem if you lack the means and foresight to effectively oversee your IT project.

Acclimatization of New Team Members
It’s possible that your team’s productivity will dip temporarily as new members learn the ropes of the business.

Temporary IT Assistance
Hiring an in-house staff may be more cost-effective if your business routinely requires extensive IT support.

1.3 Process of IT Staff Augmentation

In most organizations, there are three main phases to the staff augmentation process:

Determining the Skill Gap
You should now be able to see where your team is lacking in certain areas of expertise and have the hiring specialists to fill those voids with the appropriate programmers.

Onboarding Recruited Staff
Experts, once hired, need to be trained in-house to become acquainted with the fundamental technical ideas and the team. Additionally, they need to be included in the client’s working environment.

Adoption of Supplemental Staff
At this point, it’s crucial that the supplementary staff actively pursues professional growth. The goal of hiring new team members is to strengthen the organization as a whole so that they can contribute significantly to the success of your initiatives.

1.4 Types of Staff Augmentation

Let us delve into the various staff augmentation models and their potential advantages for companies of any size:

Project-Based Staff Augmentation 
Designed for businesses that have a sudden demand for a dedicated team of software engineers or developers to complete a single project.

Skill-Based Staff Augmentation 
Staffing shortages in any industries like healthcare and financial technology with temporary developers.

Time-Based Staff Augmentation 
The time-based approach is the best choice if you want the services of external developers for a specified duration.

Hybrid Staff Augmentation 
The goal is to provide a unique solution for augmenting staff and assets by integrating two or more of the primary methods.

Onshore Staff Augmentation 
Recruiting information technology experts from the same nation as the business is a part of this approach. If your team and the IT department need to communicate and work together closely, this is the way to go.

Nearshore Staff Augmentation 
Nearshore software development makes use of staff augmentation, which involves recruiting a development team from a neighboring nation that shares the same cultural and time zone characteristics.

Offshore Staff Augmentation 
This term describes collaborating with IT experts located in a faraway nation, usually one with an extensive time difference. The best way to save money while adding staff is to hire developers from outside the country.

Dedicated Team Augmentation 
If you want highly specialized knowledge and experience, it’s best to hire a Payroll & Staffing Services that works only for your company.

2. What is Managed Services?

With managed IT services, you contract out certain IT tasks to an outside company, known as a “managed service provider” (MSP). Almost any topic may be addressed with the help of a service, including cybersecurity issues, VoIP issues, backup and recovery, and more. When businesses don’t have the resources to build and run their own IT departments, they often turn to outsource for help.

Having a reliable MSP allows you to put your attention where it belongs on running your business rather than micromanaging its information technology systems.

Even so, if you pick the incorrect supplier, you may be stuck in a long-term service level  agreement that doesn’t meet your company’s demands, and that might cause a lot of trouble down the road. Therefore, it is quite important that you take the MSP screening procedure seriously.

2.1 Pros of Managed Services

Efficient Use of Time and Money
You don’t need to buy any new equipment and also no need to pay regular salaries. In this way, you can effectively use time and money. 

Skills and Knowledge
If you outsource your business’s demands to qualified individuals, you may take advantage of their unbounded knowledge and experience to give your company a leg up on the competition.

Security
If you outsource the Technology, the service provider will make sure your company is secure enough to prevent data breaches.

Flexibility
Managed IT service providers, in contrast to in-house teams, are available around the clock, which boosts efficiency.

Monitoring
The service assumes control of the entire project or any part of the project, and acts as project manager, keeping tabs on all project activities and securing all required resources.

Outcome
In most cases, the managed services provider will analyze the potential dangers and propose the best course of action.

2.2 Cons of Managed Services

Actual Presence
Due to the distant nature of the IT managed services organization, you will be responsible for resolving any issues that develop at the physical location.

Additional Expenditure
A complete set of low-cost tools and resources is not always available. There are those who charge more than others.

Security and Control
When you engage a service provider, you are essentially giving them permission to view your company’s most private files.

Inconvenient Costs of Switching
It might be detrimental to your organization if your managed IT services provider suddenly shuts down without warning.

Changing IT Needs
Your company’s productivity and expansion potential will be stunted if you have to work with an IT service provider that doesn’t care about what it requires.

2.3 Process of Managed Services

An attitude of partnership is essential to the success of the managed services (outsourcing) model. It’s noteworthy that the idea of long-term partnerships with excellent suppliers has been more easily accepted in other sectors of an organization than in IT. Managed service providers base their whole business models on providing exceptional service to their customers, which is why they put so much effort into developing and maintaining their service delivery capabilities.

Partnership with a reliable managed services provider frees up time and resources for IT management to concentrate on maximizing technology’s contribution to the company’s bottom line. The biggest obstacle is the mistaken belief that you have to give up control in order to delegate day-to-day operations when, in reality, you always do thanks to your relationships and contracts.

Those IT departments that have grown to rely on the staff augmentation firms  might reap substantial economic and service benefits by transitioning to a managed services (outsourcing) model.

Managed service (outsourcing) models emphasize delivering “outcomes” (service levels and particular services tied to a volume of activity) for a fixed fee rather than “inputs” (resources). The client benefits from the assurance of fixed costs, while the supplier takes on the risk involved with making good on the promise of delivery.

Given that the expenses of meeting service level responsibilities can outpace price if they are not properly approximated or managed, the outsourcing provider has a strong incentive to incorporate productivity tools and operational “hygienic” tools and practices that encourage the servicing and retention of operational health, each of which inevitably brings value to the consumer.

Managed services (outsourcing) models are advantageous to the provider because they allow for more time for long-term planning, resource management, workload balancing between employees, and job allocation across a global delivery model.

2.4 Types of Managed Services

Security and Networking Solutions
Here, a managed services company often handles all network-related duties, such as setting up your company’s local area network (LAN), wireless access points (WAPs), and other connections. Options for data backup and storage are also managed by the MSP. These firms also provide reliable and faster networking and security solutions.

Security Management
This remote security infrastructure service in managed services models includes backup and disaster recovery (BDR) tools and anti-malware software, and it updates all of these tools regularly.

Communication Services
Messaging, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), data, video, and other communication apps are all managed and monitored by this service. Providers can sometimes fill the role of a contact center in your stead.

Software as a Service
The service provider provides a software platform to businesses in exchange for a fee, typically in the form of a membership. Microsoft’s 365 suite of office applications, unified messaging and security programs are a few examples.

Data Analytics
Data analytics is a requirement if you’re seeking monitoring services for data management. This offering incorporates trend analysis and business analytics to plan for future success.

Support Services
In most circumstances, this choice includes everything from basic problem-solving to complex scenarios requiring IT support.

3. IT Staff Augmentation vs Managed Services

The contrasts between IT staff augmentation vs managed services are below in the following table.

4. Conclusion

Both staff augmentation vs managed service model may be disentangled into their constituent parts—out staffing for short-term services and outstaffing for long-term positions. 

Clearly, staff augmentation and managed services are the ideal solutions to implement your business ideas with a massive quantity of profit. However, there is a significant difference between the two approaches, making it challenging to tell which is the superior option simply by looking at them. The requirements are the primary factor in determining the response.

Staff augmentation is the way to go if you need a quick fix that involves bringing in skilled workers to fill in the gaps for a limited time. You may get the desired degree of adaptability and savings using this approach. The managed services approach is ideal if you want to outsource the entire project. Your project will be managed by a group of people who are solely responsible for it. You may save money in the long run by establishing a consistent budget for your IT outsourcing.

With the help of staff augmentation, you may outsource a variety of different jobs and responsibilities. Under the managed services model, the client gives the entire problem and its resolution to an outside company. While managed services excel at the long-term management of operations like architecture and security, staff augmentation is excellent for the short-term scaling of specific operations.

In a nutshell, it’s necessary to identify your needs before jumping to a suggested conclusion since every project has its own distinctive needs and objectives.

The post Staff Augmentation vs Managed Services appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

Key Takeaways

1. Challenges like Reliability, complexity, scalability, data integrity, versioning, and many others can be solved by Azure. It simplifies the microservices application development process.
2. The serverless solution, Azure Functions, enables you to write less code and eventually it saves cost.
3. Azure manages the K8s (Kubernetes) API services. AKS (Azure Kubernetes Services) is a managed K8s cluster hosted on the Azure Cloud. So, agent nodes are the only thing you need to manage.
4. Azure also provides services like Azure DevOps Services, AKS, Azure Monitor, Azure API Management, etc. to automate build, test, and deployment tasks.

Nowadays, the usage of Microservices architectures is widely increasing and it is replacing the traditional monolithic application architecture. This approach is generally used by software development companies to develop large-scale applications with the use of public cloud infrastructure such as Azure. This infrastructure offers various services like Azure Functions, Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), Azure Service Fabric, and many more. To know more about microservices, their implementation benefits, and how cloud infrastructure like Azure help businesses implement the microservices architecture, let’s go through this blog.

1. What are Microservices?

Microservices are known as one of the best-fit architectural styles for creating highly scalable, resilient, modern, large scale and independently deployable applications. There are various approaches available by which one can design and create microservices architecture. Microservice architecture can consist of autonomous and smaller services. And here each service is self-contained which means that it helps in implementing a single business capability within a defined bounded context. Here a bounded context means a natural division within a business that offers boundaries within each business domain.

Basically, microservices are easy to develop and maintain the developers as they are independent, small, and loosely coupled. Each service has its own separate codebase which can be easily maintained by a small development team. Besides this, when it is time to deploy services, it can be done independently. In addition to this, services are also responsible for persisting external or their own data which differs from the traditional method of app development.

Further Reading on: Microservices Best Practices
Microservices vs Monolithic Architecture

2. How can Azure be the Most Beneficial for Microservices Development and Deployment?

Here are some of the reasons that prove that Azure is very beneficial for the implementation of Microservices architectures –

2.1 Creates and Deploys Microservices with Agility

Microsoft Azure enables effortless management of newly released features, bug fixes, and other updates in individual components without forcing them to redeploy the entire application. This means that it enables continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) with the help of automated software delivery workflow.

2.2 Makes Applications Resilient

Azure microservices help replace an individual service or retire the services without affecting the entire software application. The reason behind this is that microservices platforms enable developers to use patterns like circuit breaking to handle the failure of individual services, their reliability, and security, unlike the traditional monolithic model. 

Build resilient, highly-scalable, independently deployable, and easily-evolved applications with #Azure microservices. A successful microservices architecture requires a different approach to designing and building applications. Read more here:https://t.co/pjCFEDnYvq pic.twitter.com/D6k2dkNiN7

— Azure Support (@AzureSupport) October 26, 2020

2.3 Microservices Scale with Demand

Microservices on Azure enables the developers to scale individual services based on the requirement of the resources without scaling out the entire application. For this, the developers have to gather the higher density of services into an individual host with the use of a container orchestrator such as Azure Red Hat OpenShift or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS).

2.4 Finds the Best Approach for the Team

Another benefit of Azure Microservices is that it enables dedicated software development teams to select their preferred language, deployment approach, microservices platform, and programming model for each microservice. Besides, Azure API management enables the developers to publish microservice APIs for both external and internal consumption while maintaining crosscutting concerns like caching, monitoring, authentication, throttling, and authorization.

3. Building Microservices Architecture on Azure

Here are some steps that will help developers to create microservices architecture on Azure –

Step 1: Domain Analysis

When it comes to microservices, developers generally face issues related to defining the boundaries of each service in the system. And doing so becomes a priority according to the rule which states that each microservices should have a single responsibility. Therefore, by following this rule and putting it into consideration, microservices should be designed only after  understanding  the client’s business domain, requirements, and goals. If this is not the case, the design of the microservice will be haphazard with undesirable characteristics like tight coupling, hidden dependencies, and poorly designed interfaces. Therefore, it is necessary to design the microservices properly and for that analyzing the domain is the best first step. 

In addition to this, Domain-Driven Design (DDD) approach is used as it offers a framework that can help developers create a well-designed service. This approach comes in two different phases: strategic and tactical. In this method, strategic DDD ensures that the service architecture is created in such a way that it focuses on the business capabilities, while tactical DDD offers a set of design patterns for services. To apply Domain-Driven Design, there are some steps that the developers need to follow and they are – 

• The very first step is to analyze the business domain in order to get a proper understanding of the application’s functional requirements. Once this step is performed, as a result, the software engineers will get an informal description of the domain which can be reframed and converted into a formal set of service domain models.
• The next step is to define the domain’s bounded contexts. Here, each bounded context holds one domain model that represents a subdomain of an app. 
• After this, tactical DDD patterns must be applied within the bounded context, so that they can be helpful in defining patterns, aggregations, and domain services.
• The last step is to use the outcome from the previously performed step to identify the app’s microservices.

This shows that the use of the DDD approach enables the developers to design every microservice within a particular boundary and also helps in avoiding the trap that creates boundaries for business organizations or enables them to choose the designs. It enables the development team to keep a close observation of code creation. 

Step 2: Identify Boundaries and Define the Microservices

After setting the bounded contexts for the application and analyzing the domain model in the first step, now is the time to jump from the domain model to the application model. And for this, there are some steps that are required to be followed in order to derive services from the domain model. The below-listed steps help the development team to identify the microservices from the domain model. 

• To start with this process, first, one needs to check the functionalities required in the service and must confirm that it doesn’t span more than one bounded context. And as per the definition, the bounded context marks any particular domain model’s boundary. This basically talks about whether the software development teams want to find out that the microservices used in the system are able to mix different domain models or not. If yes, then domain analysis must be refined in order to make the microservices carry on their tasks easily.
• After that, the team needs to look at the domain’s aggregates. Generally, aggregates are known as good applicants for services and when they are well-defined, they have different characteristics –
  1. High functional cohesion
  2. Derived from business requirements and not technical concerns
  3. Loosely coupled
  4. Boundary of persistence
• Then the team needs to check domain services. These services are stateless operations that are carried out across various aggregates.
• The last step is to consider non-functional requirements. Here, one needs to check factors like data types, team size, technologies, requirements, scalability, and more. The reason behind checking these factors is that they lead to the further decomposition of microservices into smaller versions.

After checking and identifying the microservices, the next thing to do is validate the design of microservices against some criteria to set boundaries. For that, check out the below aspects – 

• Every service must have a single responsibility.
• There should not be any chatty calls between the microservices.
• In lock-step, no inter-dependencies require the deployment of two or more services.
• Small independent teams can create a service as it is small and simple.
  1. Services can evolve independently as they are not tightly coupled.

Step 3: Approaches to Build Microservices

The next step is to use any of the two widely used approaches to create microservices. Let’s go through both these approaches.

Service Orchestrators

Service orchestrator is an approach that helps in handling tasks that are related to managing and deploying a set of services. These tasks include: 

• Health monitoring of the services 
• Placing services on nodes 
• Load balancing 
• Restarting unhealthy services 
• Service discovery 
• Applying configuration updates
• Scaling the number of service instances. 

Some of the most popular orchestrators that one can use are Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, DC/OS, and Azure Service Fabric.

When the developer is working on the Microsoft Azure platform for microservices, consider the following options: 

Serverless

Serverless architecture is a concept that makes it easier for the developers to deploy code and host service that can handle putting and executing that code onto a VM. Basically, it is an approach that helps coordinated functions of the application to handle the events with the use of event-based triggers. For instance, when a message is placed in a queue the function that reads from the queue and carries out the messages might get triggered.

In this case, Azure Functions are serverless compute services and enable support to various function triggers such as Event Hubs Events, HTTP request, and  Service Bus queues.

Orchestrator or Serverless?

Some of the factors that give a clear idea of the differences between an orchestrator approach and a serverless approach are –

Step 4: Establish Communication between Microservices

When it comes to building stateful services or other microservices applications architecture, communication plays an important role. The reason behind it is that the communication between microservices must be robust and efficient in order to make the microservices application run smoothly. And in such types of applications, unlike traditional monolithic applications, various small and granular services interact to complete a single business activity, and it can be challenging. A few of these challenges are – resiliency, load balancing, service versioning, distributed applications tracing, and more. To know more about these challenges and possible solutions, Let’s go  through the following table –

But with the right use of Azure and Azure SQL databases, strong communication can be established without any issue. And for this, there are two basic messaging patterns with microservices that can be used. 

• Asynchronous communication: In this type of pattern, a microservice sends a message without getting any response. Here, more than one service processes messages asynchronously. 
• Synchronous Communication: Another type of pattern is synchronous communication where the service calls an API that another microservice exposes with the use of protocols like gRPC and HTTP. Also the caller service waits for the response of the receiver service to proceed further.  

Step 5: Design APIs for Microservices

 Designing good APIs for microservices is very important because all data exchange that happens between services is either through API calls or messages. Here, the APIs have to be efficient and effective to avoid the creation of chatty I/O. 

Besides this, as the microservices are designed by the teams that are working independently, the APIs created for them must consist of versioning and semantic schemes as these updates should not break any other service.

Here the two different types of APIs that are widely designed –

• Public APIs: A public API must be compatible with client apps which can be either the native mobile app or browser app. This means that the public APIs will mostly use REST over HTTP.
• Backend APIs: Another type of API designed for microservices is backend API which depends on network performance and completely depends on the granularity of the key services. Here interservice communication plays a vital role and it can also result in network traffic.

Here are some things to think about when choosing how to implement an API.

Step 6: Use API Gateways in Microservices

In microservices architecture, it generally happens that a client might interact more with the front-end service to know how a client identifies which endpoints to call or what might happen if existing services are re-engineered or new services are introduced. For all these things, an API gateway can be really helpful as it helps in addressing the defined challenges. An API gateway resides between the services and the clients which enables it to act like a reverse proxy for routing requests from the client side of the application to the services side. Here, it also performs many cross-cutting tasks like rate limiting, SSL termination, and authentication.

Basically, by using an API gateway in the microservices architectural approach, clients will have to send requests directly to front-end services if there is no deployment of a gateway. Here are some of the issues that might occur while exposing services directly to the application’s client-side –

• There can be complexity in the client code for which the client will have to keep a track of various endpoints and also resiliently handle failures.
• When a single operation is carried out, it might require various calls for multiple services and this can result in round trips of multiple networks between the server and the client. 
• Exposing services can create coupling between the front end (client-side) and the back end. And in this case, the client requires to have knowledge about the process of individual services being decomposed. This makes it difficult to handle the client and refactor services. 
• Services that have public endpoints are at the attack surface and require to be hardened. 
• Services must expose protocols like WebSocket or HTTP that are client-friendly and this limits the communication protocol choices. 

But with the right API gateway usage in services, the team can achieve business needs. The reason behind this is that a gateway can help in addressing these issues from services by decoupling the clients. Gateways have the capability to perform various functions and they can be grouped into the following design patterns – 

Some of the major examples of functionalities that can be offloaded by the development team to a gateway are – 

• Authentication
• SSL termination
• Client rate limiting (throttling)
• IP allow list or blocklist
• Response caching
• Logging and monitoring
• GZIP compression
• Web application firewall

For implementing an API gateway to the application, here are some major options – 

Step 7: Managing Data in Microservices Architecture

The next step is managing the data centers in service architecture. Here one can use the single responsibility principle.  This means that each service is responsible for its own data store which is private and cannot be accessed by other services. The main reason behind this rule is to avoid unintentional coupling in microservices as it can result in underlying data schemas. And when a change occurs to the data schema, it must be coordinated across each service that depends on that database.

Basically, if there is isolation between the service’s data store, the team can limit the scope of change and also safeguard the agility of independent deployments. Besides this, each microservice might have its own queries, patterns, and data models which cannot be shared if one wants to have an efficient service approach.

Now let’s go through some tools that are used to make data management in microservices architecture an easy task with Azure –

Step 8: Microservices Design Patterns

The last step in creating microservice architecture using Azure is design patterns that help in increasing the velocity of application releases and this can be done by decomposing the app into various small services which are autonomous & deployed independently. This process might come with some challenges but the design patterns defined here can help mitigate them –

• Anti-Corruption Layer: It can help in implementing a facade between legacy and new apps to ensure that the new design is not dependent on the limitations of legacy systems.
• Ambassador: It can help in offloading common client connectivity tasks like routing, monitoring, logging, and more.
• Bulkhead: It can isolate critical resources like CPU, memory, and connection pool for each service and this helps in increasing the resiliency of the system.
• Backends for Frontends: It helps in creating separate backend services for various clients like mobile or desktop.
• Gateway Offloading: It helps each microservice to offload the service functionalities that are shared.
• Gateway Aggregation: It aggregates single service requests to various individual microservices so that chattiness can be reduced.
• Gateway Routing: It helps in routing requests to various microservices with the use of a single endpoint.
• Strangler Fig: It enables incremental refactoring by slowly replacing the functionalities of an application.
• Sidecar: It helps in deploying components to offer encapsulation and isolation.

4. Conclusion

As seen in this blog, microservices architecture is very beneficial to develop large applications by accommodating various business needs, and using cloud infrastructure like Azure can enable easy migration from legacy applications. Azure and various tools can help companies to create and manage well-designed microservices applications in the competitive market.

5. Frequently Asked Questions about Azure Microservices:

1. What are Azure Microservices?

Microservices refers to the architectural methodology employed in the development of a decentralized application, wherein multiple services that execute specific business operations and interact over web interfaces are developed and deployed independently.

2. What are the Different Types of Microservices in Azure?

• Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS): The Kubernetes control plane is hosted and maintained by the Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), which is a governed Kubernetes service.
• Azure Container Apps: The Azure Container Apps service simplifies the often-tricky processes of container orchestration and other forms of administration.
• Service Fabric: Microservices can be put together, deployed, and managed with the help of Service Fabric, which is a distributed systems platform. 

3. How do I Use Microservices in Azure?

Step-1: Domain analysis

The use of domain analysis to create microservice boundaries helps designers avoid several errors. 

Step-2: Design the services

To properly support microservices, application development must shift gears. Check out Microservices architecture design to learn more.

Step-3: Operate in production

Distributed microservices architectures need dependable delivery and monitoring mechanisms.

4. Is an Azure Function a Microservice?

Azure functions have the capability to be employed within a microservices architectural framework; however, it is important to note that Azure functions do not inherently possess the characteristics of microservices.

5. How Microservices are Deployed in Azure?

Build an Azure Container Registry in a similar place as your microservices and connect it to a resource group for deploying them. Deployed container instances from your registry will run on a Kubernetes cluster.

The post Building Microservices Architecture Design on Azure appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

1. What is a Monolith?

Monolithic Application, also referred as “Monolith”, is an application that is built using a single code base that contains all the functionalities. This single codebase includes all the components such as backend code, frontend code, configuration files, and everything. These apps are primarily developed to perform a number of interconnected functions. 

Monolithic architecture is a traditional approach for developing an application. Many businesses moved from Monolith to the modern Microservices architecture pattern but some businesses still benefit by using the Monolith pattern. For example, if the project has small team size, or the scope of the application is limited, then Monoliths suits best as it’s easy to develop and deploy. However, there are many challenges one can face like scalability, difficulty in debugging, etc. while using this pattern.

2. What is Microservices Architecture?

Microservices architecture is an alternative to monolithic design. In this pattern, the entire codebase is splitted into smaller and independent components that perform a single specific task. Each component here can be developed, tested, deployed, and scaled independently. These components can also communicate with one another using Application Programming Interface (APIs). 

Microservices are easier to create and test from a software engineering point of view. Development teams can make faster progress due to continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD). 

Further Reading on: Microservices Best Practices

3. Monolithic vs Microservices: Key Differences

3.1 Architecture

Let’s have a grasp on Microservices vs. Monolithic architectures before we get further into the other components of these two practices.

A monolith is a single, homogeneous construct of software. There are typically three components: client side user interface, a database, and server-side program. All HTTP requests and the actual processing of business logic are typically handled by the server-side application. Server-side logic, user interface logic, batch tasks, etc. are all included within a single EAR, WAR, or JAR file in monolithic architectures.

Whereas, a microservices architecture separates broad categories of functionality and business operations into micro, and more manageable components. Each service may be built separately from the rest, has its own database, and interacts with other services via API endpoints.

The goal of this architectural approach is to construct a complex system out of smaller service suites. To make this work, each microservice runs its own processes and makes use of lightweight communication channels, such as APIs for accessing resources through the HTTP protocol. These microservices are deployed and managed separately from one another, and each is created separately around the business logic.

3.2 Use Cases

Monolithic Architecture

Microservices Architecture 

3.3 Deployment Strategies

The scalability of software at the enterprise level is well-known to be a strength of any  architecture. While the monolithic architecture  pattern has seen widespread adoption, many businesses are having trouble devising a plan to overcome significant obstacles, such as deconstructing it into a microservices-based application. 

For the Monolithic application deployment, multiple identical copies of the application run on multiple servers. It can be done by equipping N number of virtual or physical servers and executing all the instances of an application. There might be hundreds of services in a microservices application, all of which were developed using different programming languages and tools. Each service acts like a standalone program and has its own set of requirements for things like deployment, scalability, and monitoring.

Although still in its infancy, the microservice architecture offers a promising new approach to app development. When building a microservices-based application, you’ll need in-depth knowledge of the several microservices frameworks and programming languages used by the individual services. It’s a significant obstacle because every service has its own requirements for deployment, resources, scalability, and monitoring.

Services for deployment should be efficient in time and money invested. In order to cope with a flood of requests from several interconnected parts, most microservice deployment techniques are readily scalable. Various options for deploying microservices are outlined here so that you may select the best fit for your company’s needs.

1. Multiple Service Instances Per Host

Deploy Multiple Services or multiple instances of different services on a single host. Host can be either a physical or a virtual machine. 

There are various ways for the deployment of service instances:

1. Deploy every individual microservice instance as a JVM process. 
2. Deploy multiple microservice instances in the same JVM. 

2. Single Service Per Host

Deploy each microservice on its own host.

The key benefits one can get using this approach are:

1. Each service is isolated from another one. 
2. Rare possibility of conflicting dependency and resource requirements. 
3. Easy to Manage, test, monitor, and redeploy each service. 

3. Serverless Deployment

Deploy each microservice directly on the deployment infrastructure. This method hides the concept of deployment on physical or virtual hosts or containers. The deployment infrastructure is mainly operated by a cloud service provider. It uses inbuilt containers or virtual machines to isolate the microservices. For this kind of deployment, one is not required to manage physical hosts, virtual servers, operating systems, etc. 

Some examples of serverless deployment environments are:

1. AWS Lambda
2. Azure Functions
3. Google Cloud Functions

4. One Service per Container

Deploy each service as a container by packaging it as a docker (container) image. 

Key benefits: 

1. Containers are fast to build and run. 
2. By changing the number of container instances, one can easily scale up or down any microservice. 
3. Each service is isolated from another one.
4. Internal details of the microservice are encapsulated by the container. 

3.4 Cost

The term “cost” encompasses several different considerations. The total cost of ownership includes the initial investment, as well as the costs of maintenance, progression, durability, performance, and productivity. When making the ultimate choice to implement any software design, cost is a major element that comes to the minds of executives.

Monolithic architecture would cost less in case of MVP (Minimum Viable Product) development, small applications creation, initial phase of an application, smaller team size, limited technical expertise, etc. while Microservices architecture would cost comparatively less in case of complex application development.  

3.5 Scalability

There are a number of different techniques to adjust the size of a monolith. Using a load balancer to send requests to various virtual machines is one option.

By decomposing the entire application into smaller services, microservices architecture provides more flexibility and scalability. Each service can be scaled vertically as well as horizontally. There are a variety of methods and tools available to scale the microservice in both ways. Amazon Elastic Container Service, Docker, Kubernetes, and Amazon Elastic Container Service are just a few of the widely used tools out there. Microservices are the best option for exact scaling and efficient resource use.

3.6 Monolithic vs Microservices Architecture: Advantages and Disadvantages

Let’s first go through the advantages of both the architectures: 

Monolithic Architecture:

Microservices Architecture: 

Now, let’s see the disadvantages of both the architectures: 

Monolithic Architecture: 

Microservices Architecture: 

Below is the Statista survey report for the Microservices architecture: 

4. When to Use the Microservice Architecture?

Knowing when it’s appropriate to employ this architecture is difficult. The issues that this method addresses are not always present while creating the initial version of an app. More so, development time will increase when a complex distributed architecture is used. Startups frequently have the greatest obstacle in fast evolving the business model and supporting applications, therefore this might be a serious issue for them. 

While vertically decomposing the monolith application, quick iterations can be more difficult. Therefore, when the problem is how to scale while employing functional decomposition, you may find it challenging to break down your monolithic application into a collection of services due to the complexity introduced by the intertwined dependencies. The founder of Microservices.io Chris Richardson is adding more value to it via his tweet.

Monolith First is generally good advice. But it’s not universally applicable. Sometimes it might make sense to start with microservices. To understand why, let’s analyze the trade-offs using dark energy and dark matter. pic.twitter.com/zrXfy13DMH

— Chris Richardson (@crichardson) November 29, 2022

5. Tips to Migrate From Monolithic Architecture to Microservice Architecture

The process of transferring or refactoring the monolithic application into Microservices based application is called Application Modernization. First, verify that your software delivery issues are caused by outgrowing your monolithic design before making the switch to a microservices model. If you can enhance your software development process, you may be able to shorten the time it takes to release.

The monolith may be strangled and replaced by microservices in three basic ways:

1. Add functionalities as a service.

2. Divide the front-end from the back-end.

3. Remove the complexity of the monolith by splitting features into separate services.

The first tactic is used to halt the expansion of the monolith. It’s a fast approach to proving microservices’ worth and winning over skeptics ahead of a larger move. Other two methods dismantle the giant structure. The third technique, in which a feature is transferred from the monolith into the strangler application, is the one you will always employ when reworking your monolith. You can get clear picture from Bilgin Ibryam‘s tweet.

[Video] AWS Serverless architectural patterns and best practices (ARC307-R3) https://t.co/jAs5tTHpoh pic.twitter.com/Xw9Aaq3fyW

— Bilgin Ibryam (@bibryam) November 19, 2022

Subsequently moving the monolith’s functions into separate services is the primary strategy for decomposing it. Getting the most valuable services out of a system should be a top priority. Whenever a new service is created, it will inevitably have to communicate with the monolith. 

Supporting both the in-memory session-based network security of the monolithic application and the token-based system security of the services is required during remodeling to a microservice architecture.

 An easy workaround is to have the API gateway send security tokens included in cookies generated by the monolith’s login handler.

Here are some of the most followed considerations to keep in mind while in the migration phase.

5.1 Build Optimization

Time and space have been occupied by monoliths. The first thing to do is simplify your development process. The build will be more stable if you take off the external elements and dependencies that are causing problems.

5.2 Decouple the Dependencies

The modular dependencies of the monoliths should be eliminated once the build process has been simplified. If you want to reach such a level of separation in your code, you might need to rework it.

5.3 Enhance Regional Growth

The development, deployment, and testing processes on the local development environment should go more quickly. It’s important to adopt Docker and similar tools at the neighborhood level as well. Tasks like installing a local database, etc., are sped up as a result.

5.4 Expanding in a Concurrent Manner

It is recommended to split the code repository into multiple branches, one for each microservice. Because of this configuration, all monoliths may be developed simultaneously, which will boost the agility of software development lifecycle (SDLC).

5.5 Adopt Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

A more standardized and reliable infrastructure is made possible by IaC adoption. With the support of a realistic approach to environment construction, developers may bring the cloud closer to their computers. 

While introducing new features as services is tremendously valuable, the only means of eradicating the monolith is to systematically remove modules from the monolith and transform them into services. 

For example, let’s say that your team wishes to increase the productivity of the company and client happiness by swiftly repeating the courier scheduling algorithm. It will be a way simpler for them to concentrate on the delivery management logic if it’s a distinct Delivery Service. To achieve that, the team needs to decouple delivery management from order management and transform it into operation.

Here’s a graphical representation of how your team can ace the process:

6. Top Tech Companies that Migrated From Monolithic to Microservices

Numerous leading tech firms have migrated from monolithic to microservices and there are many reasons for it. Here are the top three examples: 

6.1 Amazon

The retail website of Amazon had a monolithic architecture with multi-tiered services and tightly interwoven connections. With the increase in their customer base, their development team became bigger and so did their codebase. But the upgrades and modifications kept getting complicated. Adding overheads to the process slowed down the SDLC. 

Moreover, the service interdependencies and coding challenges were restraining Amazon’s ability to scale up to keep up with its expanding user base and its requirements. That’s when Amazon decided to split its monolithic app into a set of small and independent services. 

They started by analyzing and isolating the source code into a single unit function. Then a web service interface was used to wrap those units. After separating and forming independent services, a developer team was assigned to each service. It helps get a granular view of the development process and swiftly removes the bottlenecks. 

Adopting the microservices architecture made it easy for them to develop and deliver solutions such as Apollo and AWS to other organizations.

6.2 Twitter

Twitter has one of the largest codebases in the world and it ran all its public APIs on a monolithic RoR app. The company was facing challenges in updating the Twitter teams so they migrated to 14 microservices running on Macaw which is an internal JVM-based framework. It did improve their deployment time but the public API was scattered and disjointed. 

The app’s decoupled architecture where teams worked separately and services were created individually with little coordination resulted in fragmentation and slowed productivity. As a solution, Twitter released a new public API and built a new architecture that can use GraphQL-based internal APIs. This makes it easy to iterate and scale quickly to large endpoints. 

The development of pluggable platform components made Twitter’s architecture more efficient. They help with the APIs’ HTTP requirements so that developers can release new APIs quickly without constructing new HTTP services.

6.3 Netflix

Similar to Amazon, Netflix is also a pioneer in microservices and opted to migrate from a monolithic architecture when faced with service outages and scaling issues. They started by moving from their data centers’ relational databases and other vertically scaled single points of failure. 

Netflix later adopted horizontally scalable cloud-based distributed systems that were very reliable. The streaming platform picked AWS as its cloud provider. One by one Netflix refactored all services and moved them on to operate on the AWS cloud using a standalone microservices architecture. 

Adopting microservices helped Netflix reduce its costs significantly and overcome many challenges. Nowadays, Netflix offers streaming services to hundreds of millions of subscribers worldwide and they can do it without any operational challenges, thanks to microservices architecture. 

7. Conclusion

Adopting a microservices architecture is a challenging move. Not all architectures are same. The same is true for software, which can vary widely. The idea is to gradually implement microservices and the related technologies and techniques. Microservice architectures shine when used with advanced software that is constantly changing. Adopting microservices, however, will be an immense challenge without the necessary knowledge and experience with these tools. 

This article compares two common types of software architectures, microservices and monoliths, to help you decide which is best for your needs. In the end, you’ll need to settle on a strategy that’s most effective in your particular setting. But have no worry; that’s exactly why we exist! Never hesitate to call upon us for assistance.

FAQs

What is Difference between Microservices and Monolithic?

The key difference between monolithic and microservices architecture is that a monolithic app functions as a centralized unit with a single codebase. Meanwhile, microservices architecture is an integration of multiple small and independent services. 

Is Netflix a Monolithic or Microservices?

Initially, Netflix was hosted on a monolithic architecture, but it was not able to keep up with the growing demand for its streaming services. To resolve all the growing issues, Netflix migrated entirely to a horizontally scalable cloud-based microservices architecture. The company currently boasts over a thousand microservices. 

Are Microservices Faster than Monolithic?

An API performs the same function in a centralized codebase as it does in microservices. But because a monolithic app is a single unit, it can work faster in comparison to distributed microservices apps. 

The post Monolithic vs Microservices Architecture appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

Nowadays, companies are embracing digital transformation, this means that they have started adopting modern technologies and cultures such as DevOps. It enables software development companies to produce new applications and services at a higher level. Besides, this culture also encourages shared responsibility, fast feedback, and transparency that helps in filling the gaps between different teams in the firm & speed up the process. Besides this, to increase the level of innovation, GitOps was launched in the market. It is a set of practices that enables developers to perform IT operations in a faster and more efficient manner. Basically, GitOps offers tools to take DevOps practices into consideration. To know more about these technologies, we will go through their definitions, history, and the differences between GitOps vs DevOps.

2. What is GitOps?

Introduction

GitOps is an open-source control system that can be used to manage infrastructure automation, provisioning, deployment, and application configurations for any project or product. GitOps is a popular operational framework that developers use to utilize Git. With the help of GitOps, developers can be sure that Git is the key source that can be used for application source code, configuration and infrastructure management. The name GitOps means Git (the version control system) + operations (software development’s operations management aspect).

“In the DevOps world, #GitOps is perhaps unique in that it can potentially benefit both operations team members and developers.”

Learn more from @TechBradD and @pritianka. https://t.co/Eg1VJl0Bf2

— GitLab (@gitlab) October 10, 2019

Besides this, Git is a technology that developers use to manage the deployment automation of the application. The Git repository enables retaining the entire state of the system while maintaining a detailed history of all the changes made by the developers in the system. Besides this, GitOps is a special framework designed to help developers perform management activities while they are using software development tools, processes, and techniques.

History

In the year 2017, Weaveworks focused on Kubernetes solutions and introduced the concept of ‘GitOps’. It was a set of best practices for application management and deployment by leveraging cloud services as an extension of the DevOps approach.

GitOps is a very useful, popular, and mission-critical tool for software development. It enables the developers to pull requests and code review workflows. Pull requests make the visibility of incoming changes clear to a codebase and also encourage discussion, communication, and review of changes. Pull requests are known as the pivotal feature of Git. They help developers collaborate on software development tasks and handle the changed way teams and businesses create a software solution. Besides this, pull requests have the capability to offer transparency and measurability to previous opaque processes. GitOps pull requests also enable the evolution of DevOps processes and because of all these things that GitOps started to offer, the system admins who were hesitant to make changes are now embracing this new practice of software development.

Before GitOps was launched in the market, the systems administration was managing the software development process manually by either connecting to the machine and provisioning IT infrastructure in a physical server rack or by provisioning it on the cloud. This process required large amounts of manual configuration and admins would have to keep custom collections of imperative scripts and configurations. But with GitOps coming into the picture, everything got automated. Now, collaborating on the tasks, infrastructure configuration, managing the app development process, and deploying the solutions can all be done easily with the GitOps workflow approach.

Besides this, when the GitOps idea was initially hatched and shared by WeaveWorks, the entire Kubernetes management firm has since proliferated throughout the DevOps community. The reason behind it is that GitOps has the capability to add some magic to the pull request workflow that synchronizes the live system to the static configuration repository.

“GitOps is game-changing for the industry. It is a replicable, automated, immutable construct where your change management, everything happens in Git.” – Nicolas Chaillan, Chief Software Officer of the U.S. Air Force

3. How does GitOps Work?

IaC is handled the same as the app code in GitOps. This means that you use the same tools and processes as app code to manage configurations. You have to save these infrastructure configurations in the Git version and repositories. It gives you plenty of opportunity to test and review the changes before deploying them. 

The GitOps workflow consists of a DevOps pipeline as well as a Git repository for the IaC project. To give you a general idea of how a GitOps workflow looks: 

1. Build a Git repository that can store both application code and IaC and can serve as the SSOT. 
2. Before you push back to the repository’s main branch, make changes or collaborate through the generation of pull/merge requests. 
3. Running a CI pipeline enables you to perform automated tests, validate configuration files, and integrate changes. 
4. Before applying the changes to the environment, ensure that they are tested thoroughly. You can review the changes and approve them if everything seems good. 
5. For the continuous deployment of your app infrastructure, you have to run a CD pipeline.

4. What is DevOps?

Introduction

DevOps is one of the most popular practices that is a combination of cultural philosophies and tools used to increase any company’s ability to deliver software solutions and services at high velocity. DevOps benefits the software development lifecycle of any organization in a great way as it enables the development team to evolve and improve the products at a faster pace than before. This is done by modernizing the traditional development and infrastructure management processes. DevOps offers quick solutions which enable organizations to provide better service to their customers. Besides this, the development and operations teams of the firm can collaborate well, create solutions faster and launch them more effectively in the market.

History

The use of DevOps was started in the years 2007 and 2008. During this time, the IT operations and software development communities had raised concerns about this technology and its fatal effect on the industry. They wanted to stick up to the traditional software development model in which the code was written at the organizational level and the deployment & support were considered to be a part of the functional level. During those times, the developers and operation professionals had separate objectives, department leadership, and key performance indicators. As per these factors they were judged and different floors were allocated to them in the company’s building and because of all these things, the teams had to work for long hours. The separated work departments also caused issues in creating software which lead to unhappy customers.

But after DevOps came into the practice, the companies started to work on modern cloud infrastructure which centralized the entire app development process of the company. The developers started using agile methodologies for software planning and development after adopting DevOps. DevOps offers an approach that helps developers in managing modern cloud infrastructure, create and update code confidently without any issues, and have a unique transformation in the company’s system infrastructure modifications.

Basically, DevOps methodologies enable the development teams to work efficiently and offer the best results to their clients. Before going through the major differences between GitOps and DevOps, let’s have a look at some statistics. As per Statista, both DevOps and GitOps are the most important practices for open-source professionals in the year 2022 by 45%.

5. How does DevOps Work?

When every stage of the software development lifecycle including development, testing, and deployment is seamlessly integrated to create a continuous process, it is known as DevOps. In addition to that, tools like CI/CD pipelines, version control systems, and automated testing frameworks are used to automate the entire process. The stages of a DevOps process are as mentioned below: 

• Plan: In this stage, the development team gets clarity on the project requirements and objectives and comes up with an appropriate plan for how to move forward. 
• Code: the development team uses Subversion, Mercurial, Git, and other version control tools for collaboration on the code. 
• The development team works on the code using version control tools such as Git, Mercurial, and Subversion for collaboration.
• Build: After writing the code, it is compiled and prepared for deployment. 
• Test: Running automated tests on the code to check if it works as per expectation or if it consists of any errors or bugs. 
• Deploy: The frequent releases of the features into production or software deployment are carried out using a CD pipeline. 
• Operate: This stage is about testing the software in a production environment. It helps the operation team to validate whether the software is the right fit for end users or not.
• Observe and monitor: Both development and operations teams continuously monitor the software and receive feedback. It enables them to find and fix the issues quickly.

6. GitOps vs DevOps: How is GitOps different from DevOps?

Here are the major differences between GitOps vs DevOps –

Approach

GitOps: The main approach that GitOps uses is utilizing the Git tools that can manage software deployment and infrastructure provisioning.

DevOps: DevOps follows an approach that focuses on Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery and isn’t tied to specific tools.

Focus

GitOps: The main focus of GitOps is on correctness which means doing DevOps correctly.

DevOps: The main focus of DevOps is on automation and frequent software changes and deployments.

Flexibility

GitOps: GitOps is a bit stricter and less open.

DevOps: DevOps is less strict and more open.

Main tool

GitOps: This technology uses all Git tools available in the market.

DevOps: This technology uses CI/CD pipeline.

Other tools

GitOps: Some tools that GitOps uses are Kubernetes, Infrastructure as Code, and separate CI/CD pipelines.

DevOps: Some tools that DevOps uses are cloud configuration as code and supply chain management.

Correctness

GitOps: GitOps is designed by keeping correctness in mind.

DevOps: DevOps is designed to maximize automation.

7. What are the Similarities between GitOps and DevOps?

In addition to the differences, there are many similarities between the DevOps concepts and GitOps principles. Let us explore a few: 

1. Both DevOps and GitOps are about improving the efficiency of SDLC. 

The SDLC or software development life cycle is about building software from beginning to end. It includes everything from designing to deployment. 

DevOps focuses on the importance of communication between teams and automating the operations to shorten the SDLC. Similarly, GitOps also presses on using code repositories such as GitHub that act as a single source of truth. It helps the teams stay clear of any sort of confusion and effectively manage the SDLC. 

2. To improve communication and efficiency, both concepts advocate in favor of automation.

The primary goal of both these approaches has always been to automate the software development tasks to enhance efficiency. The number of errors is reduced when the process is automated.

3. Both DevOps and Git Ops aim to reduce errors and increase transparency.

Both approaches advocate for automation with the goal of reducing the errors in the process. They also try to avoid unexpected issues and surprises down the road by increasing transparency in the process as much as possible.

8. How can GitOps benefit you?

Any company can easily integrate GitOps with DevOps, and because Git is the standard tool for the software team, the majority of the developers are familiar with it which allows them to be a part of various processes that happen in the organization. GitOps is a process that allows any changes that are made in the firm’s system to be tracked and monitored. Besides this, with GitOps locating the source of the issues, creating a culture of transparency in system architecture is easy, and it also helps in complying with the security regulations. In addition to this, GitOps also offers continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) on top of declarative infrastructure which helps developers not worry about scripting and start the deployment process quickly, says Kelsey Hightower a famous American software engineer who works on Kubernetes and cloud computing.

Basically, when any organization adopts GitOps, it can easily increase the team’s productivity by enabling the developers to experiment with new infrastructure configurations freely. This is possible because Git comes with a history of functions that enables the teams to revert changes that don’t help the system’s improvement. This is why GitOps is the best and most handy tool for developers who want to work with complex infrastructure in an easy way.

9. Benefits of DevOps over GitOps

Using DevOps over GitOps in your software development lifecycle can provide you with certain benefits like:  

Increased Productivity, Faster Delivery

In DevOps, the process is continuous from development to deployment. This helps increase the speed of the development process and improve productivity along the way. Moreover, the implementation of DevOps practices accelerates the testing process and makes it more efficient.

Renews focus on customers

One of the major reasons why DevOps is a preferred approach to software development is because it shifts the focus back to the customers. A common mistake developers tend to make while building software is that amidst all the development tasks, their focus slides off from the customer to the development side. 

Software development is for the betterment of the customer. So, instead of developing for the sake of completing the task or building the product, DevOps practices help development teams focus on addressing the specific requirements of the customers.

Supports end-to-end responsibility

Both development and operations are included in DevOps. It emphasizes the collaboration and support between teams to foster end-to-end responsibility-sharing for every task including specification gathering, programming, testing, validating, deployment, customer education, and feedback. 

Stable Operating Environments

DevOps aims to provide a collaborative and supportive environment to both teams. With continuous integration and continuous testing in a shared codebase between the teams, if there are any problems in the code, configuration, or infrastructure, they can be found and fixed in the early stages.

You can handle the issues well when detected earlier in the process. This also lays the foundation for a stable and productive operating environment. 

Cost Reduction

Strategic implementation of DevOps can save a lot of money for your business. Some of the costs that DevOps can help you save include:

1. Software Release Costs

You can automate the entire software deployment cycle using DevOps. Automation leads to reduced iterations and faster releases. You will need less workforce and your software deployment costs will be reduced drastically.

2. Network Downtime Costs

Chaos ensues during network downtime. It results in a loss of both money as well as customers. But DevOps offers CI/CD practices that make your code more efficient and fix bugs in real-time.

Moreover, you can constantly monitor the performance of your software application using its Application Performance Monitoring tools. It helps businesses reduce network downtime costs. ‍

10. GitOps Use Cases

GitOps Use Case!#GitOps #GitHub #Git #DevOps #AIOps #DevSecOps #Kubernetes #Dockers #100DaysOfCode #code #CodeNewbie #Developers #OpenSource #Python #Java #tech #API #technology #Data #AWS #cloud #Hadoop #BigData #microservices #design #architecture #Engineering #AI #RT #bot pic.twitter.com/haaMQpLm2V

— 𝔸𝕞𝕚𝕥𝕒𝕧 𝔹𝕙𝕒𝕥𝕥𝕒𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕣𝕛𝕖𝕖 (@bamitav) November 20, 2021

Here are some of the major use cases of GitOps –

• Network slicing – GitOps helps the software development services providers to differentiate service tiers and users to pay only for the required bandwidth. This includes a premium subscription for any video streaming application and lower prices for IoT-based devices connected to it.
• Smart city services – When it comes to implementing the services related to the smart city, there are many challenges that the developers face like roll-out or managing complex platforms. In this case, GitOps can help in handling all the difficult systems and operations.
• Addressing network congestion – In big cities, users face network congestion issues while being connected to a 4G network. But with 5G coming into the market, this problem seems to have lessened still it requires cloud-native principles to manage various edge nodes. To solve this issue, network-providing companies use GitOps.

11. DevOps Use Cases

Here are some of the major use cases of DevOps –

• Online Financial Trading Company: DevOps methodologies can be useful in creating and testing applications in the financial trading company. The use of DevOps while deployment makes the process faster and the clients can get the product features implemented quicker.
• Car Manufacturing Industries: Car manufacturing industries use DevOps to help employees catch errors easily while scaling production.
• Early Defects Detection: Any type of organization can use DevOps to detect errors efficiently at the earliest stage possible.

12. Conclusion

As mentioned in this blog, GitOps has offered real value to many organizations by being a powerful tool that helps in managing system’s cloud infrastructure which offers a lot of benefits to the software service provider companies without blocking the developer out with too many tooling choices, and by increasing the productivity of a devops team. DevOps brings a cultural change in the way any company’s development or operational team works in a much collaborative way. Also both these technologies offer benefits like communication, stability, visibility, and system reliability. Adopting these approaches can be beneficial but which to use is dependent on type of operations the firm carries out.

FAQs

Is GitOps a subset of DevOps?

GitOps is optional. A DevOps team does not necessarily have to incorporate it. In comparison to DevOps, GitOps is a narrower practice whereas the scope of DevOps includes every aspect of SDLC. 

What is the purpose of GitOps?

GitOps aims to automate the process of provisioning infrastructure. With GitOps, the operations teams use configuration files stored as the app source code. Whenever you deploy, the GitOps configuration files can create the same infrastructure environment as the app code creates the same app binaries. 

How are GitOps and DevOps related?

DevOps practices provide an opportunity for teams to work collaboratively and more efficiently. GitOps, sharing the same objective, offers CI/CD and version control tools to automate infrastructure and app deployment. 

What are the 7Cs in DevOps?

The 7 Cs in DevOps are continuous operations, continuous planning, continuous integration, continuous testing, continuous monitoring, continuous delivery, and continuous feedback. 

The post GitOps vs DevOps: In-depth Comparison appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

Many software development companies utilize NoSQL databases to keep track of information like operational parameters, functionalities sets and models’ metadata. However, they are useful to data engineers for archiving and recovering data.

Before delving into NoSQL’s significance, let’s discuss the types of NoSQL, its features, benefits and drawbacks so that you can divide them appropriately according to your project objectives and needs.

1. What is NoSQL Database?

In lieu of rows and columns, the NoSQL database systems store data as JSON files. To clarify, NoSQL stands for “Not only SQL”. It refers to any “non-relational database”.  This implies that a NoSQL database may keep and access data without utilizing SQL or you may mix the flexibility of JSON with the capability of SQL. NoSQL databases are therefore designed to be adaptable, accessible, and adept at swiftly reacting to the data management needs of modern enterprises. Traditional Relational database uses SQL syntax to store, manage, and retrieve data while NoSQL database system uses wide range of database technologies that can access structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data with equal effect.

2. Types of NoSQL Database

Following are descriptions of the four most common NoSQL database kinds:

• Document databases
• Key-value stores
• Column-oriented databases
• Graph databases

2.1 Document Databases

A document database holds information in a document format such as JSON, BSON, or XML (not Word documents or Google Docs). In a document database, files can be stacked. Certain items can be indexed to facilitate speedier querying.

Documents may be saved and accessed in a manner that is far nearer to the data items used in software, requiring less interpretation to utilize the information in an application. Frequently, SQL data must be constructed and dismantled while traveling across apps and storage.

Document databases are preferred with engineers since their document formats may be reworked as required to fit the program, and their data structures can be shaped as prerequisites that evolve over time. This flexibility accelerates the software development process since data are effectively treated as code and are under the command of developers. To modify the structure of a SQL database, database administrators may be necessary to intervene.

The most extensively used document databases often have a scale-out design, which provides a clear route to flexibility in terms of both data capacity and traffic.

Industry-specific use cases comprise ecommerce systems, online trading, and mobile application development.

1. Key Features of Document Databases:

• Configurational pliability : The database’s documents follow an adaptable structure which essentially means that the documents in the database might have different schemas.

• Minimize the time required for both development and maintenance : Once a document has been created, there is very little work involved in keeping it up to date.

• No foreign keys : Because papers are not bound to one another in any way, they can exist independently of one another. Foreign keys are thus unnecessary in a document database.

• Freely available formats : Documents are created with XML, JSON, and other forms.

2. Advantages of Document Databases

• Open and scalable data model, and without any “foreign keys”

3. Disadvantages of Document Databases

• Limiting searches to primary keys and indexes is a drawback, and you’ll need to use MapReduce for complex inquiries.

Example:

JSON 
[
    {
        "year" : 2021,
        "title" : "Eternals",
        "info" : {
            "director" : "Chloé Zhao",
            "IMDB" : 6.3,
            "genres" : ["Science Fiction", "Action"]
        }
    },
    {
        "year": 2022,
        "title": "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness",
        "info": {
            "director" : "Sam Raimi",
            "IMDB" : 7.0,
            "genres" : ["Science Fiction", "Action", "Superhero"]
        }
    }
]

2.2 Key-Value Stores

A key-value store database is the most elementary form of NoSQL database. Attribute names (or “keys”) and their associated values (or “values”) are used to represent each and every piece of information in the database. In the Key-value stores database, every element is stored as a key value pair. For Example, the key or attribute name like “city” and the data or value like “Bangalore”.  Ecommerce carts, user information, and choices are some of the  examples of possible applications.

1. Key Features of the Key-Value Store

• Easily scalable
• Mobility
• Rapidity

2. Advantages of Key-Value Store

• Value may be expressed in a variety of formats, such as JSON, XML, and flexible schemas, and the underlying data model is simple, scalable, and easily understood.
• Because of its ease of use, it can process data quickly, and it works best when the underlying information is not closely connected.

3. Disadvantages of Key-Value Store

• There are no connections; you must generate your own foreign keys.
• Lacks scanning abilities; not great for anything but CRUD; not suited for complicated data (create, read, update, Delete )

Example:

2.3 Column-Oriented Databases

A column store, in contrast to a relational database, is structured as a series of columns, rather than rows. This allows you to execute analytics on a subset of columns without worrying about the rest of the data eating up storage. Read speeds are improved due to the fact that columns of the same kind may be compressed more effectively. The value of a column may be easily aggregated in columnar databases. Analytics is a common application of column-oriented databases.

Whereas columnar databases excel at analytics, its inability to be firmly consistent is a major drawback due to the fact that updating all columns necessitates numerous writes to disk. Due to the row data being copied sequentially to disk, relational databases are immune to this issue. Column oriented databases are widely used to manage data warehouses, CRM, business intelligence data, etc. Some of the column oriented database examples are Hbase, Cassandra, and Hypertable.

Further Reading on Hbase vs Cassandra

1. Key Features of Columnar Oriented Database

• Extensibility
• Flexion
• Receptive to the slightest of prompts

2. Advantages of Columnar Oriented Database

• Scalability
• Natural indexing
• Support for semi-structured data
• Access time

3. Disadvantages  of Columnar Oriented Database

• Cannot be used with relational data

Example:

Suppose, A database has a table like this:

2.4 Graph Databases

A graph database is designed to highlight the connections between data points. An individual “node” represents each piece of information.  Links or relations are the interconnections across multiple elements of a total. Connections are directly recorded as first-class items in a graph database. Data connections are expressed through the data itself in relational databases, thus ties are assumed rather than explicitly written.

Because of the inefficiency of joining many tables in SQL, a graph database is better suited to storing and retrieving the relationships between data items.

In practice, only a small handful of enterprise-level systems can function well using only graph queries. Consequently, graph databases typically coexist with other, more conventional types of NoSQL databases. Cybercrime, social media, and knowledge graphs are some of the applications of it.

Even though they share a name, NoSQL databases are quite different from one another in terms of their underlying data structures and potential uses.

1. Key Features of Graph Database

• One of the main features of a graph database is that it is straightforward to see how various pieces of information are connected to one another by way of the hypertext connections between them.
• The output of the Query is current, up-to-the-moment information.
• How quickly anything happens is proportional to the complexity of the interconnections between the various parts of the database.

2. Advantages of Graph Database

• Super-effective
• Locally-indexed connected data 
• ACID support
• Instantaneous output
• Flexible architecture

3. Disadvantages of Graph Database

• Scaling out is challenging, however scaling up is possible

Example:

Employee Table:

Employee Connections Table:

3. When to Use Which Type of NoSQL Database?

If you need to store and represent a wide variety of data types—including structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data—in a single database, you should look into a NoSQL database. In addition, NoSQL databases are more adaptable since the data we keep in them does not require a pre-established structure, as is the situation with SQL databases. Choosing the right NoSQL database for a given application can be challenging because each kind has its own unique characteristics. Consequently, it is important to get a sense of typical applications before making a database choice.

Please get in touch with our technical team if you need any assistance on that.

The post Types of NoSQL Databases appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

At its primitive phase, each of these microservices acts as an individual app in itself. In the past few years, microservices architecture has gained immense popularity as it offers several benefits over monolithic architectures such as:

• Higher scalability
• Faster time to market
• Higher maintainability
• Easy and faster deployment
• Increased modularity
• Easy and quick troubleshooting turnaround times

For all these benefits, you might wonder what challenges you’re going to face. You’ll face challenges such as security, testing, design, and operational complexity. But you’re not required to worry about these challenges as we have the best solution available. Just by adhering to some of the below microservices best practices, you can create a whole microservices ecosystem that is more effective, improves productivity and free of unwanted architectural complexity.

Phase 1: Planning and Organizing

1.1 Check Whether Microservices Architecture Best Fits the Requirements

Microservices architecture should be planned and designed based on the custom business requirements. The first step in the process is to decide whether Microservices architecture will best fit for the custom requirements or not. So, make sure to study your requirements carefully. It will help you to decide which architecture pattern you must follow. Also, don’t forget to determine that your program can be segmented into value-added operations while maintaining its key features and functionalities by executing the necessary research. 

Let’s understand this through an example where you want to build  a server-side enterprise application which has the below mentioned requirements :

• Supports various clients including native mobile applications, desktop browsers, and mobile browsers. 
• Allows 3rd party application integration.
• It should be capable of handling requests by executing the business logic, accessing databases, sending/receiving messages with other systems, and returning an HTML/XML/JSON response.
• Includes all the necessary business operations and services. They are complex in nature.

To develop an application that follows above requirements, illustrate an architecture that structures the application as a coordinated group of loosely coupled, and collaborating services.  And each Service should be: 

• Highly maintainable and testable – For faster development and deployment.
• Loosely coupled with other services –  So, it won’t affect other services and allows each team to work independently on their separate service(s).
• Independently deployable –  To deploy services without coordinating with and impacting other team members.
• Have the ability to be developed by a small team – which is important for better productivity.

These we can achieve through Microservices architecture as it offers numerous benefits such as:

• Enhanced maintainability – each service is somewhat small which can be easily understood and changed.
• Better testability – as we mentioned, the services are smaller, so they can be tested thoroughly and quickly.
• Better deployability – you can independently deploy each service.
• It allows you to manage development efforts around autonomous teams. Each team has the ability to develop, test, deploy and scale its services without depending on other teams.

Now, let’s see when not to use microservices architecture. Monolithic architecture can be a better alternative when

• The application complexity is less. It should have a small number of functionalities to include and be simple to develop. 
• The development team size is small. 

1.2 Define Microservices

You must draw a precise difference between your company operations, services, and microservices. Without this, you may develop large microservices. Because of this under-fragmentation, the microservices methodology will not be useful.

On the opposite side of the table is the prospect of developing an intense number of microservices. This will lead to an excessively fragmented architecture. Note that in order to operate and maintain a microservices architecture, an experienced operational staff is required.

Another challenge that you might face while using such services is deciding how to partition the system into microservices. We can say that it is an art, but you can find several strategies that can help you with this:

• Decompose using business capability
  • Define microservices using business capabilities. A business capability often refers to business objectives like,
    • Customers Management (Responsible for Customers)
    • Supplier Management (Responsible for Suppliers)
    • Order Management (Responsible for Orders)
• Decompose using domain-driven design subdomains.
  • Domain Driven Design refers to the app’s problem space- the entire business as the domain. 
  • A domain includes multiple sub-domains and each one of them is related to different functions of the business. 
  • Identifying subdomains requires proper knowledge of the business and its structure. It can be best identified using an iterative approach. One can start from
    • Organization structure: Different groups or departments in the organization 
    • Key objective: Every subdomain has a key objective to follow. 
  • Example: Sub-domains for an education platform are
    • Lecture Management
    • Schedule Management
    • Payment Management 
    • Attendance Management
    • Exam Management, etc.
• Decompose using a use case or verb and determine services responsible for certain actions such as a Shipping Service that’s responsible for complete shipping of orders.
• Decompose using  resources by determining a service responsible for all functions on resources of a given type such as an Account Service responsible for handling user accounts.

1.3 Build Teams around Microservices

Creating separate teams to manage multiple microservices entails that these teams have the required expertise and tools to develop, implement, and maintain a given service. Make sure that the teams should be adaptable and strong enough to manage their activities independently without spending much time in communicating. 

Here are a few factors and challenges that you need to consider while building teams around microservices.

• Each team should have clear objectives. 
• Developers should be aware of the partial rework that they need to face while executing the inter-service communication mechanism.
• Implementing requests that span more than one service can be more challenging.
• Testing the interactions that take place between services can be complicated.
• Implementing requests that span numerous services demands more coordination between the teams.

Phase 2: Designing

2.1 Adopt Single Responsibility Principle

As we all know, Microservices have focused responsibilities that help to investigate incidents and monitor the status of each service that connects to a particular database. You might first not consider the Single Responsibility Principle while designing microservices but it should be applied to the various levels of software programming such as methods, classes, modules, and services where each of these levels states that they must have a single responsibility component. This phrase is concrete but it still doesn’t explain how large or small the responsibility should be or what the responsibility is for each method, service, class, or module. Apart from this, you’ll get various benefits by implementing SRP such as:

1. Understandability and learning curve: While splitting the responsibilities not just among microservices but also between smaller methods and classes, the entire system becomes easier to learn and understand. 
2. Flexibility: It provides flexibility to combine independent microservices  in various ways depending on the configuration.
3. Reusability: It allows you to reuse the microservices and their components having a single, narrow responsibility.
4. Testability: You can write and maintain test cases easily for each microservices, classes and methods with independent concerns.
5. Debuggability: If the tests fail while obscuring a single production method or class, we can immediately detect where the bug is and thus it accelerates the process of software development.
6. Observability and Operability: If the microservice has only one responsibility, the performance issues become easier to detect as the profiling results become more informative. As microservices are decentralized, it can run on different servers and still work together for an application. If any microservice gets a higher number of hits than others, we can allocate a larger server for that specific microservice. 
7. Reliability: Microservices architecture designed using SRP can increase reliability. If any microservice is under maintenance, others can still serve their responsibilities. 

So, to sum up, we have an interesting quote from O’reilly that says:

“Gather together those things that change for the same reason, and separate those things that change for different reasons.”

This is one of the best fundamental principles to create a good architectural design.  It signifies that a microservice, class, function, subsystem, or module should not have multiple reasons to change.

Let’s understand it with an example: 

An online store can have a microservices architecture like this:

Here, all the services (i.e. Catalog Service, Cart Service, Order Service, Payment Service, etc.) have individual and single responsibilities. One should not merge order service with payment service or any other services as it can make the architecture more complex to program, maintain, and test.

2.2 Use REST APIs and Events Optimally & Make Proper Version Control Strategy

If you’re using RESTful APIs optimally, the microservices architecture pattern delivers significant value and numerous advantages, e.g., you’re not required to install anything on the client side. You don’t need to worry about choosing frameworks since HTTP requests consuming the API gateway service is acceptable. To know the best value of microservices architecture, you must reach the highest level in this model.

To easily access provisioning, ensure each service has its repository while keeping version control logs clean. This can be handy if you’re implementing any change that can break other services.

Let’s discuss this through an example where you’re creating an online store using the Microservice architecture pattern and executing the product details page. For this, you need to develop more than one version of the product details user interface:

• HTML5/JavaScript-based user interface used for browsers (desktop and mobile) – HTML is rendered by a server-side application
• Native Android and iPhone clients – both these clients communicate with the server through REST APIs

Additionally, the online store must uncover product details through a REST API for use by third-party apps. A product details interface (UI) displays various information related to the product. For instance, a clothing product related page displays:

• Basic information related to clothing such as price, size, brand, etc.
• Product purchase history
• Seller ranking
• Availability
• Customer ranking
• Buying options
• Other frequently purchased products with this item

So, in the Microservice architecture pattern, product information is spread over multiple services. Like,

• Pricing Service – Price of the product 
• Product Details Service – basic details about the product such as brand, size, color
• Inventory service – Availability of the product 
• Review service – Feedback of the customers
• Order service – purchase history for the product

Therefore, the code that demonstrates product details needs to fetch required information from various available services.

Now you may be thinking, how to access individual microservices?

• Microservices provide the granularity of APIs that might change depending on the requirements of the clients. It provides fine-grained APIs so that clients can communicate with more than one service.
• The data for the same page will vary as per the client requirement. Let’s take an example: For a product details page, desktop browser and mobile app’s interfaces and details may differ.
• The total number of service instances and their locations can change dynamically
• These services use a wide range of protocols where some of which are not web-friendly

And to overcome such problems, you should implement an API gateway that has a single entry point for each client so that it can easily handle all the access requests in one of two ways. Here you’ll find that some requests are routed to the particular service and handle other requests by fanning out to various services.

Phase 3: Development

3.1 Keep Consistent Development Environment

Set up the development environment of your microservice as VM(virtual machines) as it allows developers to adopt the framework and initiate the development quickly. Also, the virtual machine emulates the functionality of a computing system and physical hardware that runs on top of emulating software. The physical hardware resources available in the hypervisor replicates the functionality that is referred to as the host machine. It also offers various benefits such as:

• Easy provisioning
• Increased productivity
• Efficient DevOps
• Excellent storage and computing power
• Environment-friendly IT operations

3.2 Keep Asynchronous Communication between Microservices

Have you ever wondered how these services communicate with one another? While interacting with each other, a single unavailable service can lead to a miscommunication which can collapse the entire application. For instance, you have developed a system with microservices for an ecommerce store where one microservice sends the text notification to the customer when their order is placed. The other microservices take orders placed on the website. The third microservice notifies the warehouse when to courier the product. And the last microservice updates the inventory. 

Synchronous and Asynchronous: basically, these are the two types of communication among microservices. First, let’s try to understand the above example using synchronous communication. When any customer creates an order, the web server will process the order and send a request to the notification service to send a text notification for the status of the order (either confirmed or failed). After receiving the response, the web server will send the request to the delivery service for the delivery date and time.  

To stay away from all the complications of tightly coupled components, try using asynchronous communication among microservices. There are several practices for asynchronous communication: 

• Request/response – when a service sends a request message to any recipient, it expects to get a response promptly
• Notifications –  here a sender, without waiting for a response, sends a message to the recipient 
• Request/asynchronous response – a service sends a request message and waits to receive a reply message at the end
• Publish/subscribe – a service publicizes a message to zero or more recipients
• Publish/asynchronous response – a service publishes a request to multiple recipients from which some of them might send a response

3.3 Use the Right Tools and Frameworks

If you’re using the right frameworks, libraries and tools, you can easily implement the microservice architecture. But it is a challenging task to select the right tools and frameworks as it requires you to invest a lot of time and effort. So before you choose any tools and technologies, make sure to always put across the below-mentioned questions for yourself or your team:

• What  tools and technology-related challenges current  teams are facing?
• Why does our team need any new tools/technology?
• How will any new tool or framework benefit the team?
• What challenges that you may face while using this new tool/technology?
• When and Where can we use this new tool and technology in the current technology stack?
• Is the new tool compatible with our workflow and architecture?

Now, for instance, imagine that you’re creating microservices using “Spring Boot” which is a popular open-source framework, and implementing DevOps tools to automate the build and deployment process. Here are a few examples of tools and technologies that you can use:

• Github for source code management and version control
• Kubernetes for deployment
• Jira for issue tracking and project management
• Postman for API testing
• Logstash for monitoring
• Nagios to monitor your infrastructure to detect and fix problems
• SonarQube to check the code quality and security
• Docker for containerization
• Puppet enterprise for managing your infrastructure as code
• Ansible for managing your configuration
• Azure DevOps to manage your entire DevOps cycle from one integrated interface
• AWS DevOps to manage your entire software development lifecycle
• Amazon simple queue service for messaging
• Jenkins and Bamboo for deployment automation

3.4 Adopt the DevSecOps Model and Secure Microservices

When it comes to software development automation, DevSecOps (development, security, and operations) and Microservices both are very helpful. By combining  these two concepts, microservices security, software quality and deployment speed can be improved. DevSecOps is responsible for handling major security issues that might occur during the development, deployment, and production phase. Apart from this, it becomes easier to build independent microservices for software parallelly using Microservices and DevSecOps.

Despite this, the DevSecOps teams tend to use the microservice architecture when it comes to the development phase so that it makes sure that Continuous Integration is maintained with increased security measures. We know that Microservices are loosely coupled and not dependent on each other, the development becomes a little easier for developers who’re using the DevSecOps strategy. Also, Microservice architecture helps to increase the speed of DevSecOps-enabled applications and also offers several benefits when combined with Microservices:

• Reduction in errors
• Improved product quality
• Lower development costs and efforts required
• Increased productivity of Development teams

As we mentioned earlier, the combination of DevSecOps and microservices is beneficial and is becoming popular nowadays as more and more development teams have already started using this combination when it comes to Machine Learning and Artificial intelligence. Combining these two strategies helps to enhance the performance of technologies and it makes sure that the scalability of the software is maintained.

Phase 4: Data Management

4.1 Separate Data Store for Each Microservices

For managing the data, make sure you’re choosing a separate database, customize the infrastructure, and keep it only to your microservice. Instead, if you’re using a shared or monolithic database, then it won’t serve the purpose. Any change to that database would impact all the microservices that are used in that database. So make sure that the database you choose to store your data is exclusively for your microservice.If any other service wants to access the data, then it should only be done via APIs that have write access for the particular microservice. 

If you choose the same database for all microservices, you’re making it fragile, in essence, a monolithic architecture. So, each microservice must have its separate database specific to the responsibility.

Sometimes, it can be possible that various microservices need to access the same database to fetch the data. However, an in-depth examination helps you to reveal that one microservice works with a subset of database tables and on the other hand, a microservice only works with an entirely different subset of tables. The key reasons to separate the data of each microservices are: 

• Flexibility in storing and retrieving the data
• Reduced Complexity
• Lesser Dependence
• Cost optimization, etc.

Lastly, make sure to keep each microservice’s data private to that particular service. It must be accessible only via its API. If any service wants to access the data of any other service, it can also be done via service mesh and distributed hash table. 

Phase 5: Deployment

5.1 Deploy Every Microservice Separately

If you deploy each microservice separately, you’ll save a lot of time to coordinate with numerous teams while regularly maintaining or upgrading efforts. Also, if one or more microservices have similar resources, then it is highly recommended to use a dedicated infrastructure as it helps to isolate each microservice from faults and helps you to avoid a full-blown outage.

Here are several recommended patterns for deploying microservices:

Multiple Service Instances Per Host

It allows you to run multiple instances of different services on a host and provides many ways to deploy a service instance on a shared host which include:

• You can deploy every instance as a JVM process
• You can deploy multiple service instances simultaneously in the same JVM for instance, OSGI bundles.

Service Instance Per Container

After packaging the service as a Docker container image, deploy each service instance as a container. This service instance promotes easy deployment and scalability. 

Single Service Instance Per Host

You can also deploy every service instance on its host. 

Service Instance Per VM

This pattern offers numerous benefits and one of the main benefits of VMs is that it runs in a completely isolated manner and deploys each service instance as a separate VM.

5.2 Orchestrating Microservices

Orchestration is one of the most important factors for your microservices to gain success in both process and tooling. Technically, you can use Docker to run containers on a virtual machine, but make sure that it does not provide the same level of resiliency that a container orchestration platform offers. This means that it negatively affects the uptime that comes with adopting a microservices architecture. For effective microservice orchestration, you need to make sure that you’re dependent on a battle-tested container orchestration platform such as Kubernetes.

Kubernetes helps you to manage all your containers’ provisioning and deployment. Apart from this, it also handles load balancing, network communication concerns, scaling, and replica sets for high availability.

5.3 Automate the Deployment Process

An important factor in recognizing the DevOps model is to improve efficiency by facilitating automation. For this, you can use automation tools like Jenkins as it helps you automate DevOps workflows by enabling Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery.

Phase 6: Maintenance

6.1 Use an Effective Monitoring System

An architecture created with microservices helps you to lead the massive scaling of thousands of modular services. While that provokes potential for increased speed and systematic approach to monitoring. Make sure to have a look at all your microservices and check whether they are functioning as expected and are using resources efficiently or not. So, you can take proper actions if any of the expectations are not met. 

Let’s analyze a situation: You have applied the Microservice architecture pattern which is not capable of handling requests but they are still running. For instance, it might run out of database connections and when this happens, the monitoring system should be able to:

• Generate an alert when an instance fails
• Requests should be routed to working service instances

Fortunately, you’re not required to reinvent the wheel for monitoring. Instead, you can use monitoring solutions to integrate seamlessly within your infrastructure. You can find numerous monitoring solutions that allow you to integrate seamlessly within your infrastructure. 

Now that your monitoring tools assemble metrics, they can be used by visualization tools for beautiful dashboards using which you can see the numbers behind your microservices. Like: How many users were recently online at 9:00 PM on Friday? What is the latency between the invoicing API and product shipping API? How much CPU load has increased or decreased since the last features or updates were released? 

Monitoring microservices, and keeping these stats presented clearly, helps to make informed decisions on how to keep microservices available and where improvement is needed. 

7. Conclusion

So that’s it for the post. Microservices best practices that are  discussed here will help you achieve maximum gains and you’ll end up with a loosely coupled and independent microservice system. You’ll gain benefits of scalability, faster deployment, and overall improvement of your business functions. Before choosing a microservice best practice, make sure to consider your business requirements and use cases. Also, if you’re looking for the right microservice solution, make sure to invest a significant amount of time in searching for the best solution and then get in touch with them.

FAQs:

1. Which API used in microservices?

The most commonly used APIs in the microservices are REST APIs. They act as communication mechanisms in the app architecture between various microservices. The microservices or external systems can interact with each other leveraging functionalities known as RESTful APIs. 

2. Why are microservices faster?

In Microservices, every service is developed and deployed independently. This helps reduce the time and risks associated with coordinating changes throughout the entire application. That is why microservices have fast time-to-market. 

3. What are the 4 pillars of microservices?

Process, People, Platform, and Practice are the four pillars of microservices. 

4. Which database for microservices?

Because every service is independent in microservices, you can use a separate database for each of your microservices as per their requirements. It not only helps scale your database services but also helps in breaking down the monolith data store.

The post Microservices Best Practices appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

1. Successful DevOps Implementation Roadmap

DevOps implementation is a concept that integrates operations, development, and testing departments together in cross-functional software development teams. The main aim of this is to improve the agility of the IT services. Basically, the approach of DevOps implementation is categorized into three sections – DevOps Continuous Integration (build), DevOps Continuous Testing (test), and DevOps Continuous Delivery (release). And this helps companies to shift from the traditional approach and change the software development methods as per the DevOps concept. For this, a few steps must be taken into consideration and they are – 

1.1 Organize a DevOps Initiative

The first step to follow while shifting from the traditional software development method to DevOps is to organize a DevOps initiative for the IT department. By doing so, all the team members will get an opportunity to make necessary changes in the operational and development phase. In this initial phase, the CIO of the IT firm organizes everything and arranges financial investments in the best way possible. Besides this, the program manager will be responsible for designing and monitoring the DevOps implementation process. 

1.2 DevOps Strategy Creation

The next step is to start creating the DevOps strategy which means that the project manager will use DevOps tools, principles and best practices that can help in improving interdepartmental collaboration. Besides, it also includes coming up with new ways of software development & testing, and infrastructure provisioning. Some of such best practices are – 

• Automate software development, unit testing, software integrating, application testing via UI, deploying, and launching different processes to speed up the software development and testing releasing cycle.
• Another practice is to implement IaC that ensures the early provision of the IT infrastructure as per the request of software developers and testers. And this is required while developing a new build or checking its quality. This process enables the DevOps experts to get new software development & testing infrastructure and avoid human errors.

1.3 Containerizing

After creating the DevOps strategy, containerization is implemented. For this, tools like Docker are used to solve software reliability issues. In this process, containers come with everything that is needed to run an application. Here, various pieces of applications are put together into several containers and this makes it easier for the operations team to update an app as it doesn’t require rebuilding the entire application when there are only smaller changes.

1.4 Infrastructure Automation Integration with CI/CD Tools

When a software application is put into containers, managing the containerized application is very important. For this process, infrastructure automation tools like Puppet, Chef, Ansible, CloudFormation, and Kubernetes are used with CI/CD tools such as Azure DevOps, AWS Pipelines, GoCD, Jenkins, and Bamboo. This integration enables efficient software deployment and configuration management. 

Let’s make it more simple by having a look at an example. For instance, if the developer uses Kubernetes for large infrastructures and or Ansible for smaller app infrastructures, this enables the team to monitor the container’s health, manage containers for fault tolerance, and roll software updates. After that, when it comes to creating, testing, and deploying new builds in the Kubernetes tools, it can be done using Jenkins.

1.5 Test Automation and Aligning QA with Development

The next step is to achieve faster delivery with the help of DevOps. For this, software development teams need to carry out sufficient automated testing. But not each type of testing can be automated; therefore, the team needs to perform usability, exploratory, and security testing manually. This still depends on the efforts required for automated testing. Besides this, the DevOps experts must carry out development and testing activities in tandem to avoid bugs before releasing the build.

1.6 Performance Monitoring

The last step that comes in converting a firm’s traditional approach to DevOps, application performance monitoring, is required. It helps in offering transparency over various performance problems to the DevOps teams. And all these problems can be revealed during the processes like user experience monitoring, application server monitoring, and more. Here, application performance monitoring enables isolating, detecting, and prioritizing the defects of the app before the user finds them and for this tools like Nagios and Prometheus are used. 

2. Advantages of DevOps Implementation

DevOps is used by the developers to overcome the drawbacks that traditional software development methods had and to carry out modern IT operations. With a wide range of new technologies and practices available in the market, software development companies find it easier to implement DevOps and start developing, testing and deploying apps faster than organizations that are still utilizing traditional approaches. Here’s an example from an IT giant itself about the successful implementation of Devops.

Learn how Infosys helped one of the world's largest #banking organizations to increase productivity & enable enterprise agility on the #mainframe through #DevOps implementation. Read the story here: https://t.co/KJAtXZyHMZ #NavigateYourNext pic.twitter.com/trNls7xVJ8

— Infosys (@Infosys) April 30, 2019

To know more about this, here we will go through some of the main advantages of DevOps and see how it is changing the way software developers work – 

2.1 Constant Communication among All the Teams

When it comes to using DevOps, it is not just about picking the right methodologies and tools. It’s also about right and constant communication between the team members while implementing. This is why project managers say that there must be proper communication among team members at every stage of the software development.

And to achieve smooth communication during DevOps implementation, companies must introduce open-source communities like GitLab, to provide their teams with a platform that can help in planning, creating, verifying, and releasing the software while collaborating with other team members. In this case, the one thing that matters more is team members’ understanding behavior and mutual responsibility for each other. And this is essential as it enables the software development team members to realize the importance of faster releases. 

Basically, constant engagement between the team members enables them to have a common goal and focus completely on providing user satisfaction. In addition to this, organizations must also promote a knowledge-sharing environment which helps in improving the business perspective.

2.2 Fewer Software Failures

One of the most important things about DevOps implementation is having a proper understanding of the application being developed and knowledge of its requirements. This helps in aligning the infrastructure design with the firm’s goals and making a business-dive DevOps implementation. Here, all the project’s release cycles are assessed and environments are tested to identify potential bottlenecks and areas for improvement. 

Basically, successful implementation of DevOps is incomplete without incorporating continuous deployment and integration into your workflow. And this is because when there is continuous integration, the development team gets a chance to create regular, small stages and identify the issues and resolve them early. Besides, the continuous delivery allows them to deploy all the changes in production frequently.

2.3 Fast Provision of New Infrastructure

When the DevOps team wants to quickly prepare and deliver new infrastructure for software development, designing, testing, and production, they apply the IaC approach. This means that when the infrastructure exists as a ready-made code phase, the DevOps developer would require new infrastructure for a new project, and for that, they won’t have to wait till the system administrators offer it. 

2.4 Test Automation

With the implementation of DevOps, continuous testing will be possible. And this is one of the biggest advantages of the DevOps approach. So to achieve it, the DevOps team uses specialized tools that test everything automatically. For instance, Zephyr, Selenium, and Tricentis Tosca are the tools that are designed to automatically perform different tests like functional testing, unit testing, and integration testing. These tools have the capability to notify the DevOps experts immediately when bugs are detected.

2.5 Quick and Reliable Delivery of Application Updates

Because of the collaboration between ARA (application release automation) and the DevOps-related teams, the software can be updated much faster than in the traditional method. ARA enables the deployment process to accelerate with minimal configuration errors and downtime that might occur when a new build is being deployed manually. 

Agility due to #DevOps implementation can lead to 30x faster deployments. http://t.co/5XfDZRYtVS #ALM #VMWorld

— Capgemini (@Capgemini) August 26, 2015

2.6 Reduced Number of Errors

With the DevOps implementation, when there is a continuous testing process going on and it is aligned with the production environments, the quality analysis team will have to spend less time in the testing process and still, no errors will be missed. 

2.7 Improvement in Users’ Trust

DevOps increases the rate of test automation and reduces the number of post-release errors. When any company is implementing DevOps, they can easily convince the business users of the software’s quality and for that, one thing that they can do is have excellent communication within the team and with the users. The development team can involve end-users in defining the tests to be automated, which ensures sufficient testing coverage. 

3. Conclusion

As seen in this blog, when any company decides to implement DevOps, they must consider various things like implementation time, new technologies, and organizational efforts that are required for the successful initiation of the DevOps. And this success of its implementation enables the development teams to deliver software more rapidly without compromising the quality of the software or the process. For all this to happen, the transformation of both IT infrastructure arrangement and the software development process is required. And DevOps can help in making the IT infrastructure of any firm reliable with the help of the strong collaboration between the DevOps-related teams.  

Basically, DevOps implementation and following DevOps principles and best practices like IaC, CI/CD, total application monitoring, testing automation, and others can help in changing the entire approach of the organization.

The post DevOps Implementation Roadmap and Advantages appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

Traditional databases whether it is SQL or No SQL databases, all of these have updated their conventional approach for data storage. You as a business will see how the data storing capabilities have evolved with time. Now, storages are no longer tabular-based. There are a plethora of ways through which you can execute, and manage your databases.

Apache Cassandra and Apache HBase are two popular database model types that can be used to store, manage and extract information making the best use of data. But if we are comparing Hbase vs Cassandra then, there is something they have in common. Not something, many things. They look identical and possess similar characters and functions. However, if you look at it deeply, you’ll find major differences in the way they function. That’s what we’ll discover here. Before going any where else lets see what professionals at Quora is recommending us.

Unlike Quora, users of Stackoverflow are discussing in more logical way about HBase and Cassandra.

Like some of the databases use big data applications and some of them use schemas, wide columns, graphs, and other documents from the stores. All this has now changed to a widely used in big data and real-time web applications. In this blog post, we aim to bring forward the difference between the two- Hbase and Cassandra databases and will be discussing a detailed comparison between them in terms of architecture, support, documentation, SQL Query language, and several other details. Motive of this post is to give more information and insights about these two databases so that software development companies and business owners can easily select between these two. So, without much ado, let’s get started.

2. What are Hbase and Cassandra?

To start with, Hbase has its renowned way to manage data. This model is popularly used to provide random access to a large amount of structured data. It is column-oriented and built on top of the Hadoop distributed file system. This application works in real time and can be used to store data in HDFS. Hbase is an open-source distributed database that allows for simpler ways to eliminate data replication. There are other essential components of Hbase which include HMaster, Region Server, and Zookeeper. According to GitHub data of HBase , Github Stars is 4.6K and GitHub Fork – 3.1K.

Let’s take a quick overview of Cassandra’s query language as well.

Cassandra is designed to handle large amounts of data across multiple commodity servers, ensuring high availability without failure. It has a distributed architecture that can handle large amounts of data. To achieve high availability without failure, data is distributed across multiple machines using multiple replication factors. According to GitHub data of Cassandra, GitHub Stars is 7.5K, GitHub Fork is 3.2K.

These were just some introductory aspects, we will now be discussing the actual difference between HBase and Cassandra.

2.1 Architecture

Of the many database management systems, HBase comes with master-based architecture, whereas Cassandra doesn’t have a master thus it is a masterless one. It means that HBase has a single point of failure, whereas Cassandra does not. The Apache HBase client communicates directly with the slave-server without contacting the master; this provides a working time when the master is unavailable.

The Hbase model is based on Master-Slave Architecture Model. While Cassandra is based on Active Node Architecture Model. Furthermore, in the Cassandra vs. HBase comparison, the former is great at supporting both the data storage part of architecture and the management. Whereas the latter’s architecture is only designed for data management, relying on other systems or technologies for storage, server status management, cache simultaneously, redundant nodes, and metadata.

2.2 Data Models

The dependent data models on which Hbase vs Cassandra works are slightly different. While it might sound the same for both the databases more or less, there are some primary differences between the two- HBase and Cassandra.

Hbase works on column families and there is a column qualifier that has one column and a number of row keys. When it comes to Cassandra query language, it also has columns just like the Hbase cell. Cassandra is also a column-oriented database.

One of the Cassandra key characteristics is that it only allows for a primary key to have multiple columns and HBase only comes with 1 column row keys and puts the responsibility of the row key design on the developers. Also, Cassandra’s primary key contains the partition key and the clustering columns in which the partition key might contain different columns.

2.3 Performance – Read and Write Operation

If it comes to performance and we are comparing Apache Cassandra and Apache HBase, then we must consider other points too. The read and write capability for both types of models is taken into account. According to a research conducted by Cloudera, here’s what they’ve found.

New Benchmark: Apache HBase vs Apache Cassandra on SSD in a #cloud environment https://t.co/d0pIHJSWKJ #AWS pic.twitter.com/2SYFe9pfzB

— Cloudera Community (@cldrcommunity) September 20, 2017

Write:

HBase and Cassandra on-server write paths are nearly identical. Cassandra has some advantages over HBase, such as different names for data structures and there are multiple servers for Cassandra to act and implement. The fact that HBase does not write to log and cache at the same time.

Read:

Secondly, when it comes to the option to read, Casandra is extremely fast and consistent as well, while HBase has a way to go and it is comparatively slow. Hbase is slow because it only writes into one server, and there is no facility for comparing the data versions of the various nodes. Even though Cassandra can handle a good amount of reads per second, the reads are targeted and have a high probability of being rejected.

In comparison to read and write operations, Cassandra has a winning hand.

2.4 Infrastructure

If we are talking about infrastructure then we are speaking of all the tools that play a pivotal role in maintaining high infrastructure. When we see HBase, it utilizes the Hadoop infrastructure, which includes all the moving parts such as the HBase master, Zookeeper, Name, and Data nodes.

When we see Cassandra, it comes with a variety of operations and infrastructure. In addition to the infrastructure, it employs various DBMS. Alongside this, we can find many Cassandra applications to make use of Storm or Hadoop. Furthermore, its infrastructure is built on a single node type structure.

2.5 Security

Security of the data is an important aspect for HBase as well as Cassandra. Unlike others, here all NoSQL databases have security issues. One of the main reasons for businesses to secure data is to make a performance at par so that the system doesn’t get heavy and inflexible.

However, it is safe to say that both databases have some features to ensure data security: authentication and authorization in both, and inter-node + client-to-node encryption in Cassandra. HBase, in turn, provides much-needed secure communication with the other technologies on which it is built.

2.6 Support

Access to each cell level is offered by Hbase. It majorly focuses on collaborating with administrators and taking charge of all visibility labels of sets of data. Concurrently, it will inform user groups about the labels that can be accessed at the row level. Cassandra access labels at row level and assigns responsibility and conditions.

2.7 Documentation

Documentation is an important part of any database process. For obvious reasons, it is not easy for developers. It is not as easy to learn Cassandra because documentation is not up to the mark. While in HBase, it is quite easy to learn because of better documentation.

2.8 Query Language

Both languages are JRuby-based, and the HBase shell is also no different. Cassandra as a query-based language is very specific. CQL is modeled in the same line of SQL. Compared to HBase query language, you will find more features in CQL and it is far richer in terms of functionalities.

3. Similarities Between the Two

Now that we have seen the difference between the two distributed databases, it is equally important to see what makes these two the same models. Yes, this comparison between HBase vs Cassandra query language was drawn to enlighten how they are different. Now, in the next section, we will see what makes them identical.

3.1 Database Similarity

HBase and Cassandra are both open-source NoSQL databases. Both these technologies can easily handle large data sets as well as non-relational data such as images, audio, and videos.

3.2 Flexibility

HBase and Cassandra both have high linear scalability. Users who want to handle more data can do so by increasing the number of nodes in the cluster. Since there is flexibility for both nodes, you can use any of them individually in different scenarios. The result will be the same, there won’t be any efficiency concerns.

3.3 Duplication

Both these types of models- HBase and Cassandra have robust security to prevent data loss even after the system fails. So to avoid duplication factors, there is a specific mode. Through the replication mode, this can be accomplished. Data written on one node is replicated across multiple nodes in a cluster.

3.4 Coding

Both databases are column-oriented and have similar writing paths. So, what acts as a primary source are Columns for primary storage units in a database. As users can freely add columns as per their needs. Also, the correct path begins with logging a write operation to a log file. It is primarily done to ensure durability.

4. Differentiating HBase vs Cassandra Table

5. Which One is the Best of the Two?

Can you choose between your two hands that look exactly the same? Well, they are definitely not twins. Hbase and Cassandra both non-relational databases are identical yet so different from each other. Though there are similar areas, many differences are there that make each one of them unique in its own way. Like both have their pros and cons. We know that Cassandra excels at writing, while HBase excels at intensive reading. If there is something Cassandra is weak at then it is data consistency, and HBase has an upper hand in data availability. We see both attempts to eliminate the negative consequences of these issues and stand together with the positive ones.

The post Hbase vs Cassandra: Key Comparison appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

To take on the task, a software development company must select a framework with all the interactive tools required to create a powerful and extremely performant application. Furthermore, these frameworks influence the capital costs, development period, handling simplicity, and long-term maintenance.

Microservices architecture is a method where monolithic single applications are fragmented into smaller apps. Different programming languages and frameworks are available to develop microservices. Their main goal is to create independent deployment models. 

In this article, you’ll learn more about common microservices frameworks that you can completely trust this 2022!

1. Top 12 Frameworks That Support Microservices Development Teams

Here is the list of 12 frameworks describing their own process, and business capabilities covering the benefits of microservices frameworks in order to make you more decisive when it’s time for you to choose a proper framework for your project.

Let’s start!

1. Spring Boot / Spring Boot with Spring Cloud

Spring Boot is a prominent Java framework for Microservices application development. It offers many add-on modules on Spring Cloud for developing microservices architecture. Spring Boot enables the construction of large distributed systems beginning with a basic design composed of several cooperating components. It may be used to construct both tiny and large-scale systems. Due to Reversal of Control, Spring boot is relatively easy to combine with other popular frameworks.

Key Benefits:

• Spring MVC enables the construction of dynamic microservices apps with REST API.
• Inversion of Control makes it simple to interface with top frameworks.
• Micrometer, an additional framework for tracking useful data, distributed monitoring, and analytics.
• Cloud Foundry is utilized for horizontal scalability and integrating numerous backend services with simplicity.
• Time-to-market improvement for complicated application architecture.

2. Eclipse Vert.X

Eclipse Vert.X can be your top pick if you are searching for microservices solutions that are event-driven with regard to software development. It provides several language support, including Java, Ruby, Kotlin, Ceylon, JavaScript, Groovy, and Scala. Furthermore, the framework operates on a Java Virtual Machine, making it a perfect solution for service-oriented programs with complicated microservices architecture.

Unlike typical stacks and frameworks, Eclipse Foundation’s Vert.X features resource-efficient qualities that allow it to process several requests concurrently. It can conduct tasks in restricted environments, particularly containers. Vert.X is largely prominent as a microservice framework because of its functionalities and embedded qualities, which make it more of a flexible tool than a framework.

Key Benefits:

• It is compact in size, with a 650kb base.
• It is a flexible framework that enables developers to add as many components as necessary without introducing anything unnecessary.
• Medical tests are readily executable via Vert.X web or an event bus.
• Asynchronous unit tests are executed via Vert.XUnit
• It supports gPRC in accordance with Google’s program code.

3. Oracle Helidon

Oracle created the microservices framework Helidon. It is a set of Java libraries for writing  microservices. Helidon MP and Helidon SE are the two available variants. When compared to Helidon, Spring Boot is superior in a number of ways. Helidon is fairly new and there is currently a dearth of documentation, making it difficult to locate solutions on Stack Overflow.

Helidon MP is a MicroProfile standard implementation. This makes it an excellent option for Java EE programmers. Helidon SE is a small toolkit that supports the most recent Java SE features, including reactive streams, asynchronous and functional programming, and APIs with a fluid design. Helidon SE offers GraalVM native files for low storage use and flash -like launch. Helidon SE’s REST framework is based on Netty and provides a simplistic API for session handling.

Key Benefits:

• The minimum starting time ranges between 0.09 and 2.03 secs.
• Consists of a comprehensive cloud environment with all the required and universally supported technologies.
• Comprises 2 variations, Helidon SE and Helidon MP, for specific programming needs.

4. GoMicro

Go Micro is a modular RPC-based framework that offers the core architectural blocks for constructing microservices in the Go programming language. It provides service discovery with the consul, networking with HTTP, and encryption by proto-RPC or JSON-RPC, as well as Pub/Sub.

Go Micro meets the essential criteria for constructing scalable systems. It translates the microservice architectural pattern into a set of tools that serve as the system’s building pieces. Micro addresses the complexities of parallel computing and provides programmers with simple representations they already understand.

Technology evolves continuously. Infrastructure stacks are always evolving. Micro is a modular toolkit that tackles the aforementioned problems. Plug any framework or core technology into the system. Create future-proof solutions with micro.

Key Benefits:

• The micro API enables robust networking via discovery and modular processors to deliver HTTP, GRPC, WebSockets, and publish events, among other protocols.
• The CLI provides all the functions necessary to comprehend the state of your microservices.
• Create new application templates to rapidly get started. Micro offers established templates for microservice development. Always begin in the same manner and develop equivalent offerings to increase productivity.

5. Molecular

Molecular is an intriguing framework for microservices. As NodeJS gains popularity, this framework is ideal for JavaScript developers. Molecular is a quick, contemporary, and potent NodeJS microservices framework. It facilitates the creation of efficient, dependable, and accessible services.

Key Benefits:

• Balance support for event-driven infrastructure
• Built-in services registry and adaptive discovery of services
• Load-balanced queries & responses
• Numerous fault detection characteristics 
• Integrated caching approach 
• Modular monitors
• Integrated metrics with report generators
• Integrated tracing capability with exporters 

6. Quarkus

Kubernetes enthusiasts can testify for the Quarkus microservices technology! Red Hat’s Quarkus is a Kubernetes-native JS framework created specifically for OpenJDK HotSpot and GraevalVM. The framework provides a dynamic and impulsive programming approach to handle microservices architectural difficulties.

Kubernetes is designed to maximize minimal memory utilization and rapid developer setup. The quick launch time allows microservices and Kubernetes to scale automatically. 

Low memory utilization enables optimization of container capacity inside microservices, which separately launch many containers. However, novice programmers are leery of this framework due to its difficult GraalVM setup and OS-specific binary verification.

The Quarkus development paradigm works well with HTTP microservices, reactive apps and serverless architectural systems, which is one of its benefits. With their simple characteristics and very accessible system, which concentrates on the commercial side of the entire program, the performance of developers is much boosted. F furthermore, uniform setups, live programming, DEV UI, and test automation improve the microservice development experience for developers.

Key Benefits:

• Possesses an extensive environment of technologies, frameworks, and APIs, making it simple to understand and utilize.
• It is a framework for a generation that improves coding for JVM and native script to enhance application performance.
• Comparable to other container-first frameworks, it promises quicker load times.
• Minimal RSS memory and high memory usage.

7. Micronaut

Micronaut is a contemporary, JVM-based, full-stack framework aimed at developing microservices apps that are adaptable and readily tested.

Micronaut is created by the authors of the Grails framework and draws motivation from the experiences learned over the past when creating real-world systems from monoliths to microservices with Spring, Spring Boot, and Grails.

Micronaut intends to offer the resources required to create microservice apps with complete functionality.

Key Benefits:

• Dependency Injection and Inversion of Control (IoC)
• Adaptive Defaults and Automatic Settings
• Service Discovery
• HTTP Routing
• HTTP Client with load-balancing on the client-side

8. Lightbend Lagom

Lagom is an open-source framework for developing Java or Scala microservices applications. Lagom is based on the established advanced technology Akka and Play, which are already in operation for a few of the desired applications.

The unified development ecosystem of Lagom enables you to concentrate on resolving business issues rather than connecting services together. A single operation creates the project, runs your microservices and accompanying modules, and boots the Lagom architecture. When it identifies modifications to the source code, the build is reloaded on the fly.

Key Benefits:

• Properly defined development duties – to improve nimbleness
• More regular launches with reduced risk — to increase development cycles
• Systems have reactive features – reactivity, robustness, adaptability, and flexibility — to optimize current computer settings and fulfil high user demands.

9. AxonIQ

Axon provides a single, productive method for designing Java programs that can transition without major rework.

Axon consists of both a software system and dedicated architecture to offer corporation-ready assistance for the software system, particularly for enterprise software development process. Axon Framework provides the model, while Axon Server provides the architecture. Both are free sources.

Key Benefits:

• It is a Java microservices framework that facilitates the development of microservices design using Domain-Driven Design concepts.
• In addition to DDD, the Axon Framework supports the implementation of microservices paradigms like Command-Query-Responsibility-Segregation (CQRS) and Architecture.
• Axon is capable of meeting even the most stringent business needs, such as the most effective scalability of information storage, encryption, networking, load-balancing, internationally dispersed data centres, third-party interface, statistics, and analytics.

10. Ballerina

Ballerina is one of the programming languages for writing network applications, not a framework. Built from the ground up for writing disconnected services. It is really simple to create network apps. It is an open-source coding language and framework that enables cloud-era app developers to design software that simply works with minimal effort.

There are other additional capabilities, such as multitasking, broadcasting, encryption, and native support for Microservices.

Key Benefits:

• Particular linguistic structures for receiving and supplying network services.
• Modules and grammar for asynchronous interaction that fit well with sequence diagrams, allowing bidirectional translation of Ballerina source code among written and visual presentations.
• A dynamic architectural type model that permits looser coupling than typical strongly typed programs.
• Includes continuous integration and delivery technologies, like Jenkins, Travis, and Codefresh; observability solutions, like Prometheus, Zipkin, and Honeycomb; and cloud orchestration platforms, like Kubernetes, in your project.

11. DropWizard

DropWizard is an additional effective framework for developing RESTful microservices. It utilizes famous Java technologies such as Jetty, Jackson, and Jersey to facilitate the creation of high-performance Software apps in a more expedient manner.

Key Benefits:

• DropWizard provides built-in framework support for deployment, tracking, analytics, and several other operational activities. There is a limited range of materials accessible for mastering DropWizard.

12. Eclipse MicroProfile

The Eclipse MicroProfile initiative is an enhancement to Java EE that aims to optimize Enterprise Java for the development of Microservices architecture and cloud-based solutions. Because the system is built on an array of Jakarta EE WebProfile APIs, the procedure for developing MicroProfile apps stays largely unchanged.

Key Benefits:

MicroProfile is gaining popularity not only because of its simplicity of use but also because it attempts to define an API for microservices written in Java by pulling together a number of businesses and organizations. MicroProfile’s essential APIs are CDI, JAX-RS, JSON-P, Metrics, and Config.

2. Conclusion

Microservices are no less than an underpinning of modern applications as the need for increased reliability, production, service, and performance in the market. Due to the high cost of testing in different contexts, selecting the appropriate framework may appear to be a difficult task. To assert that the specified framework would yield the desired results takes a keen eye for precision and specialized knowledge.

Our Payroll & Staffing Services at sysgenpro is well-versed in the complexities of microservices and adept at elevating any organization to new heights. Consult with us immediately regarding the implementation of a fresh microservices framework and web development for your young firm.

The post Top 12 Microservices Frameworks appeared first on sysgenpro Blog.

DevOps is about setting the cultural changes, practices, and integrating technologies that improves an organization’s capacity. The DevOps best practices within business will enable them to develop high-performing applications and services, allowing them to consistently evolve and enhance the products and development services at a rate that is faster than conventional software development methods and infrastructure needs. If you are a business wanting to streamline and automate your business then DevOps is for you and in fact this blog too. Explore till the end to find out the smallest information that makes you choose DevOps over any other app development process. In addition we have our complete tried and tested best practices for your business to apply within.

What is DevOps?

Often interpreted as just a development process, this method is all about building a secure environment. If we were to define DevOps then we can say that DevOps is a corporate initiative that aims to enhance communication and cooperation between development and operations teams in any software development process. This new way of combining development and operations will automate, improve software deployment speed, shorten software development lifecycle and deliver software of high-quality. It’s a new style of working with all pre-acted changes for software development teams and the companies for which they work.

Statistics by Gartner on DevOps are clearly stating a constant rise in the SaaS market by reaching $117.7 billions in 2021 and will surpass all the limits in the upcoming year. If you have a question will this impact DevOps as a sector? Yes since DevOps works on the principles of CI/CD and that is the common process which pushes them to take up more virtual cloud environments for work. 

Many businesses are cynical about whether to take up DevOps or not? It may be because they haven’t used it for their own business or could be because of lack of understanding or could be because of someone’s past experience or it could be even yours. But if your business has best DevOps practices in place, they can accomplish the results they dreamt of. To bring a resolution to this concern, we decided to bring forward all the tried and proved DevOps best practices

DevOps Best Practices

1. Agile Project Management

Agile project management and software development is an iterative method to add value in the process of software development for clients to receive faster outcomes with fewer hitches. Applying agile into your business process will increase release frequencies, the agile teams will be able to focus on delivering work in smaller increments rather than not meeting long-term deadlines. Continuous evaluation of requirements, plans, and results allows teams to adapt to continuous feedback and turn your pivot wherever it’s needed.

Here are some of the essential ideas for agile project management:

• When you can take up large-scale projects, agile enables you to break it into smaller iterations, and teams must adjust to changes in demands or scope as they advance. Learn how to scope and structure work using features of agile methodology.
• Scrum and kanban are important project management methods for agile teams to consider. They help development teams to plan, track, and deliver incremental work without compromising deadlines. 

2. Build a Collaborative Culture

When you start to use DevOps for your business, you are inviting more collaboration and transparency with your team and system. DevOps helps you remove the silos or gaps between all teams like the team of developers, operations, and quality assurance. As a result, this method allows you to develop faster and deliver quickly to consumers. You can accomplish this degree of collaboration by transforming the mentality of the team’s culture and functioning. This will make them more focused on achieving a unified aim or set of goals.

If you want to meet your customer needs and expectations then both the teams- Developers and Operations engineers must know their responsibilities to make a smooth and effortless move towards the software development process. Development and operations become a component of everyone’s duties in DevOps, regardless of their individual team positions.

3. Build with the Right Tools

Can you separate rain and water? Similarly, you can’t separate automation from DevOps. A good DevOps methodology relies heavily on automation. In any DevOps-based organization, automating the process means you are holistically automating designing, testing, and delivering software that makes life easier for both developers and operations engineers.

As the business DevOps tools will always help you whether it’s in programming that records your performance metrics, sends out warnings when things go wrong, or gives you a broad view of your software development lifecycle.

4. Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery

Since DevOps has been in business, there has been considerable interest in the concept upon which it is based and well known as the CI/CD pipeline. To brief about it, continuous integration is a practice by software developers applying DevOps approach where they regularly merge source code into a centralized repository. On every merge on repository, the CI pipeline will kick-in the build and test operations. The CI pipeline usually gets the source code that is merged on the central repository, builds it on the build environment and runs a series of automation tests. Which enables the development team to get the feedback early in terms of bugs and be able to fix them early. 

The continuous delivery pipeline usually allows teams to deploy software releases on test, stage or production environments as soon as the CI pipeline has produced a successful build. This also allows developers and quality assurance engineers to extensively perform testing, upgrades and identify the glitches or concerns ahead of time. Automating the creation and replication of many environments for testing, which was previously difficult to achieve on-premises, is now simple and cost-effective. DevOps orchestration tools are used to coordinate the CI/CD and other pipelines for automation of development and operations tasks. 

5. Shift Left with CI/CD

In DevOps when teams use this “shift left,” approach  they include testing the codes  in the early development process. This way, rather than submitting numerous changes to a separate test or QA team, developers may resolve errors or improve code quality while working on the relevant area of the codebase by running a variety of tests during the development process. The ability to shift left is based on the techniques of continuous integration, continuous delivery (CI/CD) and continuous deployment. Shift left approach encourages teams to focus on early testing along with development, which enables teams finding bugs early and resolving them early.  

6. Monitor the Right Metrics

One of the best practices followed by DevOps is continuity. DevOps is continuously working at all times and hence, it wouldn’t be wrong if we say that best practice is continuous performance monitoring. If you measure the relevant performance indicators, such as consumed effort, remaining effort, lead time, mean time to detect, and issue severity, then the efficacy of a DevOps can  be determined.

Monitoring the data is significantly important because it has the potential  to spot problems early and recover swiftly. The DevOps metrics are designed in a way that will determine the goals and expectations of your company. Using DevOps you can vouch for the right indicators, such as team velocity, success factors, unit cost, relevant profitability, total involved cost, and other development team challenges.

7. Make a Move to Microservices

Microservices are part of the DevOps strategy of breaking down big, complicated projects into smaller chunks. Different services can be worked on, tested and deployed  independently without having an impact on the overall system. The method of designing a single application as a collection of discrete services is known as microservices architecture. It differs from monolithic architecture, which combines the user interface and access codes into a single application. Microservices architecture enables you to deploy smaller applications as independent services, which are later linked together via an application programming interface (API).

8. Implement Automation

Automation is a synonym to DevOps and thus makes it an inseparable part of DevOps development process as well as one of its best practices. To test the applications on regular intervals is a regular task for software developers. Efficiency is the key in this process and thus most of the business prefer doing it by manual testing methods. But when you use DevOps, the process gets a lot more simpler. With automation Testing in DevOps makes the Software development lifecycle  faster and effective. Automated Testing eliminates the need for testers to repeat routine test operations. They can spend considerable time devising novel test cases and collaborating with developers to avoid bugs.

Along with the Test Automation, one can also automate the entire DevOps Pipeline: code merge – build – configure – deploy – test – provision – release. In parallel, automation in performance monitoring tasks and infrastructure configuration management is also a productive approach.  This encourages developers to get the issues fixed early and improve overall product quality. Fortunately, there are plenty of automation tools and technologies to choose from, so the testing team can assess what works best for them and make a selection.

9. Continuous Security

As we saw that everything is consistent when we use DevOps for businesses. Specifically when it comes to security, consistency plays a vital role. With DevOps, developers can have a strong backup in terms of security. The security tools are closely integrated with CI/CD pipeline and the controls of DevOps do not bother the agility and smoothness of DevOps. The intellectual properties are at a much safer place with machines that build using trusted and verified credentials. You can categorize them as per the priorities and then add a layer of security with different credentials. If you want, you can also build test scripts that contain the access rights for each category. 

10. Gather Continuous Feedback

Continuous feedback is an iterative process followed by DevOps practitioners to ensure team members have track of all tasks they need to complete on time. This means that anything in the pipeline which is faulty will be quickly and timely communicated to the development, test and operation teams. It also means that the team members will get clear, on-time, build, integration, and test results as early as possible. All the development failures, performance, integration, build issues, and reported defects will be in a continuous loop and will be communicated timely to the product management team. This development sprint is created with the thought that the development team can now achieve speed with quality. Continuous feedback is one of the foundations of DevOps that allows for both- speed and quality.

DevOps Benefits in Brief

The DevOps field as a whole focuses on improving inter-departmental communication and more significantly dispersing the workloads. Say for instance if we talk about the role of developers, they might include unit testing into their daily routines, while if there is DevOps in place then the sysadmins can separately fix some of the flaws detected during deployment process. The successful integration of DevOps within your company’s business operations enables:

1. Lowered time to market
2. Decreased number of failing software 
3. Reducing the time between repairs
4. Increasing the frequency and consistency of deployments
5. Getting down the average recovery time 

These are some of the most evident benefits that an organization will get when they implement DevOps.

Conclusion

From this insightful blog on DevOps best practices, we hope you are now able to draw knowledgeable outcomes about DevOps. Your in-house DevOps engineers or engineers from third party companies- both take up complete responsibility of how to function together, consistently through constant monitoring, testing and feedback loops. Utilizing DevOps for your business will be beneficial if done correctly by understanding the idea and depth of DevOps, and teaching teams on how to implement it for your needs. 

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