Top Microservices Tools You Must Know In 2019

Microservices is an architectural style with the help of which, you can build small to complex business applications. To build applications with this architectural style developers need tools and technologies to build and monitor these services. So, in this article on Microservices Tools, I will discuss the various tools you can use to build these autonomous services.

Before, we begin discussing the tools and technologies used to build an application using microservices, let me tell you what are microservices.

What are microservices?

Microservices, aka microservice architecture, is an architectural style that structures an application as a collection of small autonomous services, modeled around a business domain. So, you can understand microservices as small individual services communicating with each other around the single business logic. If you wish to know more about microservices in-depth, then you can refer my article.

Now, that you have an idea of microservices, let us look into the tools used in microservices.

Microservices Tools

Microservices tools are a collection of various tools and technologies having various functionalities. These tools are used in various stages of building an application and help the developer to work with ease. They come with pre-defined functions, algorithms, and a very user-friendly GUI. Also, several start-ups and tech giants have been working on developing such user-friendly microservices tools. However, since microservices is an architectural style, it is often never enough to use one tool for the entire workflow.

Therefore, we’ll be looking at microservices tools used for the different, i.e.

• Operating System
• Programming Languages
• Tools for API Management & Testing
• Tools for Messaging
• Toolkits
• Architectural Frameworks
• Tools for Orchestration
• Tools for Monitoring
• Serverless Tools

Operating System

One of the very important factors of building an application is setting a proper foundation for your application. Well, this is done by the operating system. Linux is one such operating system, most commonly used while building applications. With the help of Linux containers, it provides a self-contained execution environment and lets you orchestrate small to big services like security, networking, and storage. So, if you ask me for better choices from the Linux family, then I feel, Red Hat and Ubuntu are full featuring operating systems with unnecessary functionalities. Apart from these, Linux providers have come up with tools such as Atomic Red Hat and Ubuntu including LXD, which is a container-oriented hypervisor.

Programming Languages

The main advantage of microservices is that different languages and technologies can be used to build different services of the same application. So, it gives the developers the freedom to choose their technology stack and build the application. But, the most popular programming languages used in microservices are Spring Boot and Elixir.

Spring Boot

Spring Boot simplifies the creation of REST-based microservices with the help of Spring Boot frameworks in just a few lines of code. Here are a few features of Spring Boot:

• Provides auto-configuration to load a set of default configuration for a quick start of the application
• It comes with embedded tomcat, servlet containers jetty to avoid the usage of WAR files
• Spring Boot provides an opinionated view to reduce the developer effort and simplify maven configurations
• Consists a wide range of APIs for monitoring and managing applications in dev and prod.

Elixir

Elixir is a general-purpose programming language which runs on the Erlang virtual machine. Elixir shares the same abstractions for building fault-tolerant and distributed applications. Below are a few features of Elixir:

• Developers can easily write the code in a short, fast, and maintainable manner.
• The Elixir code runs inside isolated lightweight processes which can be scaled individually.
• Elixir makes sure that the application never goes down, by providing supervisors. These supervisors describe how different parts of the system can be restarted if something goes wrong.
• This programming language comes with its own build tools to create projects, manage tasks and run the required tests.

Tools for API Management & Testing

While you start building applications using microservices, you also have to make sure that all the individual services communicate with each other using APIs’. Each microservice can have its own API to communicate with the other service. This is where API management and testing comes into the picture, as all the APIs present in the system, must be properly managed and tested to get the desired results.

The tools used for API Management and Testing are as follows:

Postman

Postman is an API development suite which allows you to easily run UI-driven API tests. With the help of Postman, the exploration of RESTful API resources becomes very easy. Also, with the help of Postman, you can pass HTTP requests to test, develop and get the required results. Here are some of its features:

• Postman integrates with your software development life-cycle in ease.
• It provides features to design APIs and maintain multiple versions of API with support.
• This tool can work for a small application to a big application.
• It supports collaboration of work by allowing you to save related API endpoints into a collection. Then you can go forward and share the entire collection to other developers.

API Fortress

API Fortress is both an API test and health tools which automates the process of load testing, health monitoring, and functional testing. This tool is code-free and is built around modern API architectural patterns and practices. Below are a few features of API Fortress:

• This tool is highly interoperable with any platform that you choose in your toolchain and validates APIs built-in API management platforms

• It simplifies API Test creation and execution by providing a drag-drop GUI.

• This tool also simplifies end-to-end testing by providing easy generation of functional tests.

• API Fortress also aims to simplify collaboration by storing the tests and reports in a collaborative environment, to make sure that teams validate their APIs; if it satisfies the business case.

Microservices are a system, where autonomous services, communicate with each other or within themselves. To communicate with each other, microservices use the messaging queues. So, the tools used for messaging are as follows:

Apache Kafka

This tool is a distributed publish-subscribe messaging system originally developed at LinkedIn and later on became a part of the Apache project. Kafka is scalable, agile, and is distributed by design. So, Apache Kafka is a distributed stream processing platform which can be used for data processing or API calls. Here are a few features of Apache Kafka:

• Kafka has high throughput for publishing and subscribing messages, to maintain stable performance.
• This tool also guarantees zero downtime and zero data loss.
• Messages persist on disk as fast as possible
• Many applications can plugin and make use of Kafka as it offers to write new connectors.

RabbitMQ

This tool utilizes patterns to communicate between microservices and also scale applications simultaneously. With the help of this tool, you can connect microservices with each other to solve problems of distributed systems. Also, you can use this tool to exchange events between the individual services. Below are a few features of RabbitMQ:

• This tool offers a variety of features such as reliability, delivery acknowledgments, including persistence, publisher confirms, and high availability.
• By using this tool, messages are routed through exchanges before arriving at queues.
• RabbitMQ comes with the federation model and allows the servers that need to be more loosely and unreliably connected
• This tool supports messaging over multiple messaging protocols.

Toolkits

Toolkits in layman terms is a set of tools used for a specific purpose. In a microservice architecture, you can build various kinds of applications. So, you may have various toolkits used for a different purpose. The various tools you can consider in this section are as follows:

fabric8

fabric8 is a platform-as-a-service tool, which helps the developers provide configuration management system through Git. It is an open-source tool which handles port mappings and IP address complexities. This tool also holds the responsibility to load balance services with high availability and scalability.

Here are a few features of this tool:

• Provides a set of wizards to create applications faster and setup continuous delivery pipelines.
• fabric8 comes with on-premise Git repository hosting
• This tool provides maven repository manager for promoted releases along with a mirror of central maven repositories.
• It provides the developer console to  create, build, manage microservices with deep visualization into projects, apps, and environments

Seneca

Seneca is used for building message based microservices, processes and is the toolkit for Node.js. This toolkit helps you to write clean and organized code with the systematic business logic of the application. Features of Seneca are below:

• Seneca provides plugins which look after the foundations of the application. 
• You do not have to worry about which database has to be used and how to structure your components
• In Seneca, everything is written as a command. These commands get called whenever they match a set of properties.
• The code that you call, does not know which command gets the work done.
  

Architectural Frameworks

Since microservices itself is an architectural style, the architectural framework is an important factor. These frameworks are used with various technologies to build applications.
The two popular architectural frameworks are as follows:

goa

This architectural framework provides a way to build REST APIs’ and microservices using Golang. With the help of this architectural framework, you can design APIs’ along with its required dependencies. This framework runs on top of the Google Cloud Platform. Few of the features are as follows:

Kong

Kong is used for ready to deploy plugins for enhancing the development and deployment of microservices, With this tool, you can leverage the container and microservices design patterns to quickly build API-centric applications. Below are a few features of Kong:

• Provides plugins to extend and connect services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
• Analyzes real-time data and leverages ecosystems to deploy Kong with Kubernetes
•  Kong connects with automation tools to improve efficiency and reduce errors.
• Provides role-based access control and encrypts end-to-end to comply with industry regulations.

Tools for Orchestration

As microservices work with respect to containers, container orchestration is an important aspect which needs to be considered. In today’s market, there are various tools regarding the container orchestration for microservices, but the top tools are as follows:

Kubernetes

Kubernetes is an open-source container management (orchestration) tool. It’s container management responsibilities include container deployment, scaling & descaling of containers & container load balancing. Going by the definition, you might feel Kubernetes is very ordinary and unimportant. But trust me, this world needs Kubernetes for managing containers, as much as it needs Docker for creating them. Here are a few features of Kubernetes:

• Kubernetes can help you to deploy and update secrets and application configuration without rebuilding your image and without exposing secrets in your stack configuration.
• In addition to managing services, Kubernetes can also manage your batch and CI workloads, thus replacing containers that fail, if desired.
• Kubernetes needs only 1 command to scale up the containers or to scale them down when using the CLI. Else, scaling can also be done via the Dashboard (Kubernetes UI).
• With Kubernetes, you can mount the storage system of your choice. You can either opt for local storage, or choose a public cloud provider such as GCP or AWS, or perhaps use a shared network storage system such as NFS, iSCSI, etc.

Istio

This tool supports service deployment on Kubernetes. It also provides features for manageability, security, and reliability to microservices communications. Well, this is done by the service mesh technology which allows you to improve the relationships and interactions between application and microservices. Few of the features are as follows:

• Performs automatic tracing, monitoring, and logging of the services.
• This tool automatically secures services, through managed authorization, authentication, and encryption of communication between services.
• Istio controls the flow of traffic and API calls between services, conducts a range of tests and upgrades with red or black deployments
• It also applies policies and ensures that they’re enforced, and resources are fairly distributed among consumers.

Tools for Monitoring

Once the application, is built,  it is very important, to monitor the working of applications. So, to monitor applications, you can use the following tools:

Prometheus

Prometheus allows visualizing monitoring information using and supports time-based tracking for anomalous patterns to be detected. This is an open-source tool which, gathers monitoring information. Below are a few features of Prometheus:

• Provides a flexible query language.
• Comes with distributed storage and single server nodes which are autonomous
• Discovers targets via service discovery or static configuration
• Provides dashboarding and graphing support.

Log stash

Logstash is an open-source tool through which you can check the logs. This tool lets you stash, centralize and transform data. The features of this tool are as follows:

• Logstash supports a variety of inputs which pull in events from a multitude of common sources, all at the same time. 
• This tool aims to transform and prepare data regardless of its complexity
• Log stash allows you to choose your own stash and transport data
• It is a pluggable framework consisting over 200 plugins to create and configure pipeline as you want.

Serverless Tools

These tools are a part of microservices, which optimize the methodology of breaking stuff into small functions. Few of the serverless tools are as follows:

Claudia

Claudia is a serverless tool used for deployments for AWS Lambda and API Gateway. This tool automates error-prone deployments and configuration tasks. It also contains tools such as Claudia Bot Builder and Claudia API Builder.

 The features of this tool are as follows:

• Claudia lets you deploy and update using a single command
• It reduces the boilerplate code
• With the help of this tool, you can manage multiple versions
• You can use standard NPM packages and do not have to learn Swagger

AWS Lambda

This tool provides infrastructure-less servers for your microservices builds and the users charged on a pay-per-use rate. This tool can be used in combination with AWS API Gateway to host a REST or API service. This amazon web service allows your API to serve any requests made by users. Below are a few features of AWS Lambda:

• This tool enables you to run your code in response to events and automatically manages the dependent compute resources.
• AWS lets you run the code without managing the servers. It a pay as you use to service and you pay only for the compute time consumed.
• This tool scales an application automatically by running a code for each trigger.
• AWS Lambda can also be used to build a serverless backend for processing mobile, API and web requests.

If you wish to learn Microservices and build your own applications, then check out our Microservices Certification Training which comes with instructor-led live training and real-life project experience. This training will help you understand Microservices in-depth and help you achieve mastery over the subject.

Got a question for us? Please mention it in the comments section of ” Microservice Tools” and I will get back to you.