Microservices – application fragments need application services

Microservices are a cool way to build applications – cool in terms of the attention they get in blogs, marketing materials and conference speaking slots, but also cool in terms of genuinely offering a way to build applications that are more agile and robust than the monolithic architectures we have become used to.

But really what are microservices? They are just fragments of an application.   All the things we need from our monolithic applications we need from our fragments. Security, availability, performance. Each microservice needs to be up and running, have capacity and not be compromised if the integrity of the whole is to be preserved. Sure, there may be some services that are less critical than others, but in general you want all your services secure, fast, and available. How can you achieve this? Well there are number of ways, but the easiest is to reuse a common design pattern from the monolithic stack – an application proxy.

Application proxies allow you to insert a layer of logic and control between the microservice client and the server. Pretty basic stuff. But by de-coupling the client from the server, you essentially virtualize the service. That means you can scale, protect and manage the service without disruption to the clients. You can provide capacity without complexity and security without slowing the application.

Application traffic flow in microservices can be complex – multiple services need  to be able to communicate to create the application.

These complex flows can make application monitoring and security more complex to deliver – plus you need to code in client side discovery patterns if you need to scale out the number of instances supporting the service.

Adding an application proxy – like a BIG-IP allow you to shrink or grow the processing power for a particular microservice – and add security, availability and optimization services inline. This can help you with segmentation, reporting and performance challenges. With a programmable, API-driven application proxy you can design a responsive system that is able to respond to changes in the environment and add additional application layer logic easily and without changing application code.

With a strategic point of control like an application proxy - you can provide application services  to your microservices, adding security and scalability while keeping the agility and performance you need.