In this chapter, we will learn about an architecture pattern for application development on cloud, called the microservices architecture pattern. We will also learn how to use Bluemix, and services on Bluemix, to build and deploy applications that employ the microservices architecture. In a nutshell, we will learn about the following topics:
Understanding the microservices architecture pattern
Developing a microservice-based application on Bluemix.
The microservices architecture pattern is a method to develop applications that are composed of smaller applications, each of which is developed as a small service and has independent lifecycle management. These smaller services are loosely coupled together to form a larger application. When you consider whether an application should use microservices architecture, you should carefully evaluate whether it makes sense for the smaller functions to exist as independent microservices. Since each of the constituent micorservices in a microservices-based application has its own lifecycle management, you will have DevOps for each of the services managed independently.
One of the things you need to consider before you break your application down into microservices is the granularity required. Breaking it down into too many granular units would increase the operations overhead, while breaking it down into too few units would increase the application...
Having gained an understanding of what Bluemix is and what it offers from the previous chapters, and now having gained an understanding of the microservices pattern, you will be able to get a perspective on why Bluemix is a platform that is suitable for microservices-based application development. Let us immediately get into discussing an application use case that we will illustrate in this section, which will also help to bring forth the concept of microservices and help with your understanding of this.
In this section, we will build an application leveraging concepts and applications that we have developed and learned in previous chapters. We will be using the application we developed in Chapter 4 , Leveraging On-Premise Software for Applications on Bluemix in which we retrieved a certain Twitter feed, translated it into French, did some sentiment analysis on it, and then persisted it in a MongoDB database that existed locally on...
In this chapter, you learned about the microservices architecture pattern. You should now be able to differentiate between a monolithic application and an application that is composed of microservices. You also learned about how Bluemix, as a cloud platform, provides the ability to seamlessly develop microservices-based applications. Going a step further, you can attempt to configure scaling policies on each of the applications separately and see it perform. Also, you will note that a failure to any one microservice does not bring down the other microservices. You can explore further and build various interesting and innovative microservices-based applications on Bluemix by leveraging the value-added services that Bluemix offers.
In the next chapter, we will look at another exciting set of services on Bluemix, these are services in Mobile category, which help with mobile application development.
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