Java Microservices

What are Java Microservices? A Comprehensive Guide

By John Kroemer 1 year ago


The microservice architectural style continues to grow in popularity for building scalable and resilient applications. Java is a versatile programming language commonly used for backend services and microservices. Its rich ecosystem, portability, and extensive tooling support make it a great fit for implementing microservices. In this article, we’ll provide an overview of key Java technologies and best practices for successfully developing Java Microservices.

Understanding Java Microservices

Microservices architecture structures an application as a collection of small, autonomous, and focused services. Each service implements specific business capabilities, uses its own data stores, and communicates via well-defined APIs – typically REST over HTTP. These services can be developed and deployed independently, enabling modular delivery of complex applications.

Microservices promote separation of concerns, decentralize data management, and provide flexibility to experiment and scale. However, they also introduce complexity around distributed systems concepts like consensus, coordination, and consistency. The aim is to build loosely coupled services that balance autonomy with standardization.

Java microservices are standalone, focused modules communicating via APIs that collectively realize complex business functions. Their decentralized approach powered by Java facilitates continuously delivering and scaling applications. Microservices built with Java leverage its portability, performance, and vast ecosystem of open-source libraries.

Java’s extensive open-source ecosystem provides a multitude of libraries and frameworks to accelerate building microservices:

  • Spring Boot – Spring Boot is a widely used framework for building microservices in Java. It simplifies the development process and includes features like embedded servers, auto-configuration, and a variety of extensions for building robust microservices. Sprint Boot makes it easy to create standalone and production-ready services.
  • Dropwizard – A lightweight framework focused on operational tasks like logging, configuration, metrics, and serialization. It’s a great fit for data-centric Java microservices.
  • Micronaut – An innovative framework optimized for GraalVM and ahead-of-time compilation. Starts up lightning-fast microservices with a minimal memory footprint. It aims for low memory usage and fast startup times.
  • Helidon – Helidon is Oracle’s microframework which embraces a metrics-first approach with monitoring built-in. Production-ready microservices with low overhead.
  • Quarkus – A Kubernetes-native Java stack tailored for GraalVM and OpenJDK HotSpot, optimized for both low latency and high throughput. It is particularly well-suited for containerized environments.

Fundamental Design Concepts

While microservice capabilities differ across domains, there are fundamental concepts that influence the structure and design of Java microservices:

  1. Single Responsibility Principle: Each microservice focuses on a specific business capability and changes independently from others.
  2. Loose Coupling: Services interact through well-defined interfaces using lightweight protocols like REST/JSON minimizing interdependencies.
  3. High Cohesion: Related behavior and dependencies are grouped within the same service boundary.
  4. Autonomous Microservices: Services act as independent components with control over data persistence and other complexities.
  5. Decentralized Data Management: Storage decisions are made per service based on specific needs such as relational, NoSQL, etc.
  6. Infrastructure Automation: Continuous integration, delivery pipelines and infrastructure as code enable reproducible environments.

These principles allow the creation of evolvable services aligned to domain boundaries that can scale.

API-First Development with Java

As microservices expose application logic behind APIs, API design is pivotal. API-first development focuses on formally defining APIs with specifications like OpenAPI before implementation. This drives the creation of truly reusable services with independently manageable contracts.

For Java microservices, this means focusing on the structure and capabilities of REST endpoints exposed to consumers early on during design. Best practices like using nouns to represent resources, appropriate HTTP verbs to indicate operations, meaningful error codes, and consistent versioning apply to quality API design.

Popular Java microframeworks like Micronaut and Quarkus provide great support for OpenAPI specifications allowing you to visualize and validate the design of Java microservices. You can also take advantage of API gateways like Kong, Tyk, or ExpressGateway for management capabilities as complexity increases. Overall, API-first development ensures services developed in Java implement well-structured interfaces.

Also Read – Advantages and Disadvantages of Monolithic Architecture

Communication Styles for Java Microservices

Inter-service communication enables Java microservices to function as a system. There are generally four styles used:

  1. Synchronous Protocols: REST over HTTP allows straightforward integration. Often used for user-facing services calling backend services.
  2. Asynchronous Messaging: Message brokers like Apache Kafka decouple services using events/messaging. Adds reliability and buffers against failures.
  3. Request/Response: AMQP protocols like RabbitMQ are useful where low latency response is needed from an async process.
  4. Remote Procedure Calls: gRPC provides cross-language RPC communication natively using protocol buffers and HTTP/2. Suits internal microservices.

The style selected depends on functional needs around consistency, reliability, and performance. For Java microservices, REST APIs are common for internet-facing endpoints whereas message brokers and RPC power background jobs and data processing.

Applying Key Microservice Patterns with Java

Beyond core architecture and communication principles, design patterns help solve recurring problems when building Java microservices. These and other key patterns manage complexity arising from distribution and failure scenarios commonly encountered when scaling microservices:

  • Database per Service – Persistence decisions made locally per service based on data access patterns.
  • Circuit Breaker – Prevents cascading failures by open-circuiting failed dependencies temporarily. Java has resilience4j and Netflix Hystrix libraries.
  • API Gateway – Single entry point that hides internal structure, and provides cross-cutting capabilities like security, rate limiting, etc.
  • Service Registry & Discovery – Enables services to dynamically discover providers using a centralized registry like Eureka or Consul.
  • Distributed Tracing – Logs and correlates activity as requests propagate across microservices. Java frameworks have OpenTelemetry integration.

Running Java Microservices in Production

While Java development seems to be straightforward to you but running microservices in production introduces operational considerations around deployment, scaling, and monitoring. That’s where platforms like Kubernetes excel by handling infrastructure provisioning, zero downtime releases, autoscaling, health monitoring, and more.

Kubernetes provides first-class support for Java applications via OpenJDK images. Its horizontal scaling capabilities allow elastically running multiple instances of Java services as needed. A few Frameworks we mentioned above like Micronaut, Quarkus, and Helidon offer integrations facilitating deployment.

For observability, Java microservice platforms consolidate logs, metrics, and traces in systems like Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, and Zipkin. Kubernetes collects these signals enabling analysis and alert creation. Investing in observability helps quickly pinpoint and resolve issues.

Conclusion

Java offers a high-performance platform for developing microservices. Java removes unnecessary complexity for engineers and enables the delivery of resilient, scalable systems due to its rich ecosystem of libraries, frameworks, and tools. Java Microservices can be further optimized with techniques such as Kubernetes-native development, Function-as-a-Service serverless, and GraalVM.

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