Exchanging data between microservices

Exchanging data between microservices

It's already 2023 and the software development is evolving lot faster than ever.

There are several software architecture patterns that are used to build a application, it depends on the use case and the requirements [majorly non functional] of the application.

The most popular architecture pattern is client-server architecture. It's a great way to build a scalable and maintainable application. But the client-server architecture has its own challenges. One of the biggest challenges is running multiple services on a single server. Most of the time, the server might not be powerful enough to run multiple services parellely, that's where microservices architecture comes into picture.

The microservices architecture is an subset of client-server architecture. It's a great way to build a scalable and maintainable application. But the microservices architecture has its own challenges. One of the biggest challenges is exchanging data between microservices. In this article, I will knot down some of the points which I learnt.

A common set of similar methods are grouped together to form a microservice. For example, [Ecommerce Application] a microservice can be a

• user service
• product service
• payment service
• shipping service, etc.

Each microservice can have its own database and it's own business logic. The microservices are independent of each other. They can be developed and deployed independently. But the all the services need to communicate with each other at one point to be able to perform a task. For example, when a user places an order, the user service needs to communicate with the product service to check the availability of the product and the payment service to process the payment.

user service --> product service --> payment service --> shipping service

This is where the challenge arises, how can we exchange data between services internally?

There are several ways to exchange data, it all boils down to the size, format and the frequency of data exchange and security requirements. [Better Applications can be developed from Good User requirements]

Walking on water and developing software from a specification are easy if both are frozen. --Edward V. Berard

We'll take a look at 4 exchanging protocols [methods]:

• Synchronous Messaging
  REST APIs: A simple and common method to exchange data between microservices using HTTP requests and responses.

• Asynchronous Messaging: Using a message broker, such as Apache Kafka or RabbitMQ, to exchange messages between microservices asynchronously.

• gRPC: A high-performance, open-source framework for building remote procedure call (RPC) APIs.

• Event-Driven Architecture: Using events to trigger actions and exchange data between microservices.

Let's Try and take a look at each protocols Pro's and Con's

1. REST API's

This is a pretty common method to exchange data between frontend and backend services