Preface

The microservices architecture has developed into a mainstream approach to building enterprise-grade applications within the past few years. Many organizations, from large to medium to small start-ups, have started utilizing the microservices architecture to build their applications. With more and more people adopting the microservices approach to build applications, some practical challenges of the architecture have been uncovered. Inter-service communication is one challenge that most microservices teams experience when scaling applications to a larger number of instances.

At first, point-to-point inter-service communication was not working well, and the concept of smart endpoints and dumb pipes was proposed as an alternative approach. Instead of connecting microservices in a point-to-point manner, having a messaging layer to decouple the microservices looked like a better solution.

NATS messaging technology was originally developed as the messaging technology to be used in the Cloud Foundry platform. It was built to act as the always-on dial tone for inter-service communication. Its performance and the simple interface it exposed to interact with clients made it popular within the developer community.

In this book, we discuss how NATS messaging can be used to implement inter-service communication within a microservices architecture. We start with a comprehensive introduction to microservices, messaging, and NATS technology. Then we go through the architectural aspects and provide a reference implementation of an application using the Go programming language. We cover the security and observability aspects of the proposed solution and how that can co-exist in an enterprise platform. At the end of the book, we discuss the latest developments in microservices and NATS messaging and explore how these developments can shape our proposed solution.

Who this book is for

This microservices book is for enterprise software architects and developers who design, implement, and manage complex distributed systems with microservices architecture concepts. Intermediate-level experience of any programming language and software architecture is required to make the most of this book. If you are new to the field of microservices architecture and NATS messaging technology, you can use this book as a learning guide to get into those areas.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Introduction to the Microservices Architecture, provides a comprehensive introduction to the microservices architecture.

Chapter 2, Why Is Messaging Important in a Microservices Architecture?, discusses different messaging technologies and why microservices architectures require messaging.

Chapter 3, What Is NATS Messaging?, explores the NATS messaging technology by covering the concepts with practical examples.

Chapter 4, How to Use NATS in a Microservices Architecture, discusses the possible ways to use NATS messaging in a microservices context.

Chapter 5, Designing a Microservices Architecture with NATS, provides a reference architecture using a real-world application to build a microservices-based application with NATS.

Chapter 6, A Practical Example of Microservices with NATS, provides a reference implementation of an application using the microservices architecture along with NATS.

Chapter 7, Securing a Microservices Architecture with NATS, discusses the security of the overall microservices architecture, including NATS, with examples on securing NATS servers.

Chapter 8, Observability with NATS in a Microservices Architecture, explores various monitoring and troubleshooting requirements and available technologies with an example implementation.

Chapter 9, How Microservices and NATS Co-exist with Integration Platforms, discusses the aspects related to the integration of microservices-based applications with other enterprise systems.

Chapter 10, Future of the Microservices Architecture and NATS, explores the new developments in the microservices and NATS domains.

To get the most out of this book

This book is written in such a way that you will get the best learning experience by reading the chapters in order. The book includes commands, code examples, and step-by-step instructions as and when necessary. Following these instructions will help immensely in understanding the concepts. The book also provides several exercises so that you can improve your understanding and apply the knowledge to real-world applications. Try to complete the exercises while reading the book.

In addition to the this software, you need the CFSSL tool to create certificates to try out the examples in Chapter 7, Securing a Microservices Architecture with NATS. This tool can be downloaded from here: https://github.com/cloudflare/cfssl.

All the examples in this book were tested using macOS. Most of the examples should work with both Windows and Linux operating systems.

If you are using the digital version of this book, we advise you to type the code yourself or access the code from the book's GitHub repository (a link is available in the next section). Doing so will help you avoid any potential errors related to the copying and pasting of code.

You may benefit from following the author on Twitter (https://twitter.com/chanakaudaya), Medium (https://chanakaudaya.medium.com), and GitHub (https://github.com/chanakaudaya), or by adding them as a connection on LinkedIn (https://linkedin.com/in/chanakaudaya).

Download the example code files

You can download the example code files for this book from GitHub at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/Designing-Microservices-Platforms-with-NATS/. If there's an update to the code, it will be updated in the GitHub repository.

We also have other code bundles from our rich catalog of books and videos available at https://github.com/PacktPublishing/. Check them out!

Code in Action

The Code in Action videos for this book can be viewed at http://bit.ly/2OQfDum.

Download the color images

We also provide a PDF file that has color images of the screenshots and diagrams used in this book. You can download it here: https://static.packt-cdn.com/downloads/9781801072212_ColorImages.pdf.

Conventions used

There are a number of text conventions used throughout this book.

Code in text: Indicates code words in text, database table names, folder names, filenames, file extensions, pathnames, dummy URLs, user input, and Twitter handles. Here is an example: "The request message is published to the patient.profile subject and the subscribers are listening on the same subject."

A block of code is set as follows:

func main() {
// Initialize Tracing
initTracing()
}

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$ nats-server --config node.conf --log nats.log

Bold: Indicates a new term, an important word, or words that you see onscreen. For instance, words in menus or dialog boxes appear in bold. Here is an example: "You could observe the +OK message coming from the server as a response to the PUB command."

Tips or important notes

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