Advanced Microservices Interview Questions

What are some kind of challenges that distributed systems introduces?

When you are implementing microservices architecture, there are some challenges that you need to deal with every single microservices. Moreover, when you think about the interaction with each other, it can create a lot of challenges. As well as if you pre-plan to overcome some of them and standardize them across all microservices, then it happens that it also becomes easy for developers to maintain services.

Some of the most challenging things are testing, debugging, security, version management, communication ( sync or async ), state maintenance etc. Some of the cross-cutting concerns which should be standardized are monitoring, logging, performance improvement, deployment, security etc.

On what basis should microservices be defined?

It is a very subjective question, but with the best of my knowledge I can say that it should be based on the following criteria.

i) Business functionalities that change together in bounded context

ii) Service should be testable independently.

iii) Changes can be done without affecting clients as well as dependent services.

iv) It should be small enough that can be maintained by 2-5 developers.

v) Reusability of a service

  

How to tackle service failures when there are dependent services?

In real time, it happens that a particular service is causing a downtime, but the other services are functioning as per mandate. So, under such conditions, the particular service and its dependent services get affected due to the downtime.

In order to solve this issue, there is a concept in the microservices architecture pattern, called the circuit breaker. Any service calling remote service can call a proxy layer which acts as an electric circuit breaker. If the remote service is slow or down for ‘n’ attempts then proxy layer should fail fast and keep checking the remote service for its availability again. As well as the calling services should handle the errors and provide retry logic. Once the remote service resumes then the services starts working again and the circuit becomes complete.

This way, all other functionalities work as expected. Only one or the dependent services get affected.

  

How can one achieve automation in microservice based architecture?

This is related to the automation for cross-cutting concerns. We can standardize some of the concerns like monitoring strategy, deployment strategy, review and commit strategy, branching and merging strategy, testing strategy, code structure strategies etc.

For standards, we can follow the 12-factor application guidelines. If we follow them, we can definitely achieve great productivity from day one. We can also containerize our application to utilize the latest DevOps themes like dockerization. We can use mesos, marathon or kubernetes for orchestrating docker images. Once we have dockerized source code, we can use CI/CD pipeline to deploy our newly created codebase. Within that, we can add mechanisms to test the applications and make sure we measure the required metrics in order to deploy the code. We can use strategies like blue-green deployment or canary deployment to deploy our code so that we know the impact of code which might go live on all of the servers at the same time.

  

What should one do so that troubleshooting becomes easier in microservice based architecture?

In monolith where HTTP Request waits for a response, the processing happens in memory and it makes sure that the transaction from all such modules work at its best and ensures that everything is done according to expectation. But it becomes challenging in the case of microservices because all services are running independently, their datastores can be independent, REST Apis can be deployed on different endpoints. Each service is doing a bit without knowing the context of other microservices.

In this case, we can use the following measures to make sure we are able to trace the errors easily.

1. Services should log and aggregators push logs to centralized logging servers. For example, use ELK Stack to analyze.
2. Unique value per client request(correlation-id) which should be logged in all the microservices so that errors can be traced on a central logging server.
3. One should have good monitoring in place for each and every microservice in the ecosystem, which can record application metrics and health checks of the services, traffic pattern and service failures.

How should microservices communicate with each other?

It is an important design decision. The communication between services might or might not be necessary. It can happen synchronously or asynchronously. It can happen sequentially, or it can happen in parallel. So, once we have decided what should be our communication mechanism, we can decide the technology which suits the best.

Here are some of the examples which you can consider.

A. Communication can be done by using some queuing service like rabbitmq, activemq and kafka. This is called asynchronous communication.

B. Direct API calls can also be made to microservice. With this approach, interservice dependency increases. This is called synchronous communication.

C. Webhooks to push data to connected clients/services.

  

How would you implement authentication in microservice architecture?

There are mainly two ways to achieve authentication in microservices architecture.

A. Centralized sessions

All the microservices can use a central session store and user authentication can be achieved. This approach works but has many drawbacks as well. Also, the centralized session store should be protected, and services should connect securely. The application needs to manage the state of the user, so it is called stateful session.

B. Token-based authentication/authorization

In this approach, unlike the traditional way, information in the form of token is held by the clients and the token is passed along with each request. A server can check the token and verify the validity of the token like expiry, etc. Once the token is validated, the identity of the user can be obtained from the token. However, encryption is required for security reasons. JWT(JSON web token) is the new open standard for this, which is widely used. Mainly used in stateless applications. Or, you can use OAuth based authentication mechanisms as well.

What would be your logging strategy in a microservice architecture?

Logging is a very important aspect of any application. If we have done proper logging in an application, it becomes easy to support other aspects of the application as well. Like in order to debug the issues / in order to understand what business logic might have been executed, it becomes very critical to log important details.

Ideally, you should follow the following practices for logging.

A. In a microservice architecture, each request should have a unique value (correlationid) and this value should be passed to each and every microservice so the correlationid can be logged across the services. Thus, the requests can be traced.

B. Logs generated by all the services should be aggregated in a single location so that while searching becomes easier. Generally, people use ELK stack for the same. So that it becomes easy for support persons to debug the issue.

  

How would you manage application configuration in microservice running in a container?

As container-based deployment involves a single image per microservice, it is a bad idea to bundle the configuration along with the image.

This approach is not at all scalable because we might have multiple environments and also, we might have to take care of geographically distributed deployments where we might have different configurations as well.

Also, when there are application and cron application as part of the same codebase, it might need to take additional care on production as it might have repercussions how the crons are architected.

To solve this, we can put all our configuration in a centralized config service which can be queried by the application for all its configurations at the runtime. Spring cloud is one of the example services which provides this facility.

It also helps to secure the information, as the configuration might have passwords or access to reports or database access controls. Only trusted parties should be allowed to access these details for security reasons.

  

What is container orchestration and how does it help in a microservice architecture?

In a production environment, you don’t just deal with the application code/application server. You need to deal with API Gateway, Proxy Servers, SSL terminators, Application Servers, Database Servers, Caching Services, and other dependent services.

As in modern microservice architecture where each microservice runs in a separate container, deploying and managing these containers is very challenging and might be error-prone.

Container orchestration solves this problem by managing the life cycle of a container and allows us to automate the container deployments.

It also helps in scaling the application where it can easily bring up a few containers. Whenever there is a high load on the application and once the load goes down. it can scale down as well by bringing down the containers. It is helpful to adjust cost based on requirements.

Also, in some cases, it takes care of internal networking between services so that you need not make any extra effort to do so. It also helps us to replicate or deploy the docker images at runtime without worrying about the resources. If you need more resources, you can configure that in orchestration services and it will be available/deployed on production servers within minutes.

Explain the API gateway and why one should use it?

 An API Gateway is a service which sits in front of the exposed APIs and acts as an entry point for a group of microservices. Gateway also can hold the minimum logic of routing calls to microservices and an aggregation of the response.

A. A gateway can also authenticate requests by verifying the identity of a user by routing each and every request to authentication service before routing it to the microservice with authorization details in the token.

B. Gateways are also responsible to load balance the requests.

C. API Gateways are responsible to rate limit a certain type of request to save itself from blocking several kinds of attacks etc.

D. API Gateways can whitelist or blacklist the source IP Addresses or given domains which can initiate the call.

E. API Gateways can also provide plugins to cache certain type of API responses to boost the performance of the application.

  

How will you ensure data consistency in microservice based architecture?

One should avoid sharing database between microservices, instead APIs should be exposed to perform the change.

If there is any dependency between microservices then the service holding the data should publish messages for any change in the data for which other services can consume and update the local state.

If consistency is required, then microservices should not maintain local state and instead can pull the data whenever required from the source of truth by making an API call.

What is event sourcing in microservices architecture?

In the microservices architecture, it is possible that due to service boundaries, a lot of times you need to update one or more entities on the state change of one of the entities. In that case, one needs to publish a message and new event gets created and appended to already executed events. In case of failure, one can replay all events in the same sequence, and you will get the desired state as required. You can think of event sourcing as your bank account statement.

You will start your account with initial money. Then all the credit and debit events happen, and the latest state is generated by calculating all of the events one by one. In a case where events are too many, the application can create a periodic snapshot of events so that there isn’t any need to replay all of the events again and again.

How will you implement service discovery in microservices architecture?

Servers come and go in a cloud environment, and new instances of same services can be deployed to cater increasing load of requests. So, it becomes absolutely essential to have service registry & discovery that can be queried for finding address (host, port & protocol) of a given server. We may also need to locate servers for the purpose of client-side load balancing (Ribbon) and handling failover gracefully (Hystrix). 

Spring Cloud solves this problem by providing a few ready-made solutions for this challenge. There are mainly two options available for the service discovery - Netflix Eureka Server and Consul. Let's discuss both of these briefly:

Netflix Eureka Server
Eureka is a REST (Representational State Transfer) based service that is primarily used in the AWS cloud for locating services for the purpose of load balancing and failover of middle-tier servers. The main features of Netflix Eureka are:

1. It provides service-registry.
2. zone aware service lookup is possible.
3. eureka-client (used by microservices) can cache the registry locally for faster lookup. The client also has a built-in load balancer that does basic round-robin load balancing. 

Spring Cloud provides two dependencies - eureka-server and eureka-client. Eureka server dependency is only required in eureka server’s build.gradle 

build.gradle - Eureka Server 

compile('org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-server')

On the other hand, each microservice need to include the eureka-client dependencies to enables

eureka discovery. 

 build.gradle - Eureka Client (to be included in all microservices) 

  compile('org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-netflix-eureka-client')

Eureka server provides a basic dashboard for monitoring various instances and their health in the service registry. The ui is written in freemarker and provided out of the box without any extra configuration.

Consul Server 

It is a REST-based tool for dynamic service registry. It can be used for registering a new service, locating a service and health checkup of a service. 

You have the option to choose any one of the above in your spring cloud-based distributed application. In this book, we will focus more on the Netflix Eureka Server option.

How will you use config-server for your development, stage and production environment?

If you have 3 different environments (develop/stage/production) in your project setup, then you need to create three different config storage projects. So, in total, you will have four projects: 

config-server 
It is the config-server that can be deployed in each environment. It is the Java Code without configuration storage. 

config-dev 
It is the git storage for your development configuration. All configuration related to each microservices in the development environment will fetch its config from this storage. This project has no Java code, and t is meant to be used with config-server.

config-qa
Same as config-dev but it’s meant to be used only in qa environment.

Config-prod
Same as config-dev but meant for production environment.
So depending upon the environment, we will use config-server with either config-dev, config-qa or config-prod.

   

How does Eureka Server work?

There are two main components in Eureka project: eureka-server and eureka-client. 

Eureka Server 
The central server (one per zone) that acts as a service registry. All microservices register with this eureka server during app bootstrap. 

Eureka Client 
Eureka also comes with a Java-based client component, the eureka-client, which makes interactions with the service much easier. The client also has a built-in load balancer that does basic round-robin load balancing. Each microservice in the distributed ecosystem much include this client to communicate and register with eureka-server.

Typical use case for Eureka 
There is usually one eureka server cluster per region (US, Asia, Europe, Australia) which knows only about instances in its region. Services register with Eureka and then send heartbeats to renew their leases every 30 seconds. If the service can not renew their lease for a few times, it is taken out of server registry in about 90 seconds. The registration information and the renewals are replicated to all the eureka nodes in the cluster. The clients from any zone can look up the registry information (happens every 30 seconds) to locate their services (which could be in any zone) and make remote calls. 

Eureka clients are built to handle the failure of one or more Eureka servers. Since Eureka clients have the registry cache information in them, they can operate reasonably well, even when all the eureka servers go down.

  

What is Circuit Breaker Pattern?

Microservices often need to make remote network calls to another microservices running in a different process. Network calls can fail due to many reasons, including-

1. Brittle nature of the network itself
2. Remote process is hung or
3. Too much traffic on the target microservices than it can handle

This can lead to cascading failures in the calling service due to threads being blocked in the hung remote calls. A circuit breaker is a piece of software that is used to solve this problem. The basic idea is very simple - wrap a potentially failing remote call in a circuit breaker object that will monitor for failures/timeouts. Once the failures reach a certain threshold, the circuit breaker trips, and all further calls to the circuit breaker return with an error, without the protected call being made at all. This mechanism can protect the cascading effects of a single component failure in the system and provide the option to gracefully downgrade the functionality.

Typical Circuit Breaker Implementation 

Here a REST client calls the Recommendation Service which further communicates with Books Service using a circuit breaker call wrapper. As soon as the books-service API calls starts to fail, circuit breaker will trip (open) the circuit and will not make any further call to book-service until the circuit is closed again. 

What are Open, Closed and Half-Open states of Circuit Breaker?

Circuit Breaker wraps the original remote calls inside it and if any of these calls fails, the failure is counted. When the service dependency is healthy and no issues are detected, the circuit breaker is in Closed state. All invocations are passed through to the remote service. 

If the failure count exceeds a specified threshold within a specified time period, the circuit trips into the Open State. In the Open State, calls always fail immediately without even invoking the actual remote call. The following factors are considered for tripping the circuit to Open State – 

• An Exception thrown (HTTP 500 error, can not connect)
• Call takes longer than the configured timeout (default 1 second)
• The internal thread pool (or semaphore depending on configuration) used by hystrix for the command execution rejects the execution due to exhausted resource pool. 

After a predetermined period of time (by default 5 seconds), the circuit transitions into a half-open state. In this state, calls are again attempted to the remote dependency. Thereafter the successful calls transition the circuit breaker back into the closed state, while the failed calls return the circuit breaker into the open state.

What are use-cases for Circuit Breaker Pattern and benefits of using Circuit Breaker Pattern?

1. Synchronous communication over the network that is likely to fail is a potential candidate for circuit breaker.
2. A circuit breaker is a valuable place for monitoring, any change in the breaker state should be logged so as to enable deep monitoring of microservices. It can easily troubleshoot the root cause of failure.
3. All places where a degraded functionality can be acceptable to the caller if the actual server is struggling/down. 

Benefits: -

1. The circuit breaker can prevent a single service from failing the entire system by tripping off the circuit to the faulty microservice. 
2. The circuit breaker can help to offload requests from a struggling server by tripping the circuit, thereby giving it a time to recover. 
3. In providing a fallback mechanism where a stale data can be provided if real service is down.

What is Hystrix?

Hystrix is Netflix implementation for circuit breaker pattern, that also employs bulkhead design pattern by operating each circuit breaker within its own thread pool. It also collects many useful metrics about the circuit breaker’s internal state, including -

1. Traffic volume.
2. Request volume.
3. Error percentage.
4. Hosts reporting
5. Latency percentiles.
6. Successes, failures, and rejections.

All these metrics can be aggregated using another Netflix OSS project called Turbine. Hystrix dashboard can be used to visualize these aggregated metrics, providing excellent visibility into the overall health of the distributed system.
Hystrix can be used to specify the fallback method for execution in case the actual method call fails. This can be useful for graceful degradation of functionality in case of failure in remote invocation. 

Add hystrix library to build.gradle dependencies { 

compile('org.springframework.cloud:spring-cloud-starter-hystrix') 

1) Enable Circuit Breaker in main application 

@EnableCircuitBreaker @RestController @SpringBootApplication
public class ReadingApplication {

... } 

2) Using HystrixCommand fallback method execution 

@HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "reliable") 

public String readingList() {

URI uri = URI.create("http://localhost:8090/recommended"); return this.restTemplate.getForObject(uri, String.class); 

} 

public String reliable() { 2
return "Cached recommended response"; 

}

1. Using @HystrixCommand annotation, we specify the fallback method to execute in case of exception. 
2. fallback method should have the same signature (return type) as that of the original method. This method provides a graceful fallback behavior while the circuit is in the open or half-open state. 

What is the difference between using a Circuit Breaker and a naive approach where we try/catch a remote method call and protect for failures?

Let's say we want to handle service to service failure gracefully without using the Circuit Breaker pattern. The naive approach would be to wrap the   REST call in a try-catch clause. But Circuit Breaker does a lot more than try-catch cannot accomplish - 

1. Circuit Breaker does not even try calls once the failure threshold is reached, doing so reduces the number of network calls. Also, several threads consumed in making faulty calls are freed up.
2. Circuit breaker provides fallback method execution for gracefully degrading the behavior. Try catch approach will not do this out of the box without additional boiler plate code.
3. Circuit Breaker can be configured to use a limited number of threads for a particular host/API, doing so brings all the benefits of bulkhead design pattern. 
4.  

So instead of wrapping service to service calls with try/catch clause, we must use the circuit breaker pattern to make our system resilient to failures.

How will you ignore certain exceptions in Hystrix fallback execution?

@HystrixCommand annotation provides attribute ignoreExceptions that can be used to provide a list of ignored exceptions.

Code

@Service

public class HystrixService { 

@Autowired

private LoadBalancerClient loadBalancer;

 @Autowired

private RestTemplate restTemplate;

@HystrixCommand(fallbackMethod = "reliable", ignoreExceptions = IllegalStateException.class, MissingServletRequestParameterException.class, TypeMismatchException.class)

public String readingList() {

ServiceInstance instance = loadBalancer.choose("product-service"); URI uri = URI.create("http://product-service/product/recommended"); return this.restTemplate.getForObject(uri, String.class);}

public String reliable(Throwable e) { return "Cloud Native Java (O'Reilly)"; 

In the above example, if the actual method call throws IllegalStateException, MissingServletRequestParameterException or TypeMismatchException then hystrix will not trigger the fallback logic (reliable method), instead the actual exception will be wrapped inside HystrixBadRequestException and re-thrown to the caller. It is taken care by javanica library under the hood.

What is Strangulation Pattern in microservices architecture?

Strangulation is used to slowly decommission an older system and migrate the functionality to a newer version of microservices. 

Normally one endpoint is Strangled at a time, slowly replacing all of them with the newer implementation. Zuul Proxy (API Gateway) is a useful tool for this because we can use it to handle all traffic from clients of the old endpoints but redirect only selected requests to the new ones. 

Let’s take an example use-case: 

/src/main/resources/application.yml 

zuul:

    routes:

first:
path: /first/**
url: http://first.example.com --1 

legacy:
path: /**
url: http://legacy.example.com  -- 2 

1)Paths in /first/** have been extracted into a new service with an external URL http://first.example.com 

2 )legacy app is mapped to handle all request that do not match any other patterns (/first/**). 

This configuration is for API Gateway (zuul reverse proxy), and we are strangling selected endpoints /first/ from the legacy app hosted at http://legacy.example.com slowly to newly created microservice with external URL http://first.example.com

How does Hystrix implement Bulkhead Design Pattern?

The bulkhead implementation in Hystrix limits the number of concurrent calls to a component/service. This way, the number of resources (typically threads) that are waiting for a reply from the component/service is limited.

Let's assume we have a fictitious web e-commerce application as shown in the figure below. The WebFront communicates with 3 different components using remote network calls (REST over HTTP). 

• Product catalogue Service
• Product Reviews Service
• Order Service

Now let's say due to some problem in Product Review Service, all requests to this service start to hang (or timeout), eventually causing all request handling threads in WebFront Application to hang on waiting for an answer from Reviews Service. This would make the entire WebFront Application non-responsive. The resulting behavior of the WebFront Application would be same if request volume is high and Reviews Service is taking time to respond to each request.

The Hystrix Solution

Hystrix’s implementation for bulkhead pattern would limit the number of concurrent calls to components and would have saved the application in this case by gracefully degrading the functionality. Assume we have 30 total request handling threads and there is a limit of 10 concurrent calls to Reviews Service. Then at most 10 request handling threads can hang when calling Reviews Service, the other 20 threads can still handle requests and use components Products and Orders Service. This will approach will keep our WebFront responsive even if there is a failure in Reviews Service. 

How to handle versioning of microservices?

There are different ways to handle the versioning of your REST api to allow older consumers to still consume the older endpoints. The ideal practice is that any nonbackward compatible change in a given REST endpoint shall lead to a new versioned endpoint. 

Different mechanisms of versioning are: 

• Add version in the URL itself
• Add version in API request header 

Most common approach in versioning is the URL versioning itself. A versioned URL looks like the following: 

Versioned URL 

  https://:/api/v1/...

  https://:/api/v2/...

As an API developer you must ensure that only backward-compatible changes are accommodated in a single version of URL. Consumer-Driven-Tests can help identify potential issues with API upgrades at an early stage.

Is it a good idea to share a common database across multiple microservices?

In a microservices architecture, each microservice shall own its private data which can only be accessed by the outside world through owning service. If we start sharing microservice’s private datastore with other services, then we will violate the principle of Bounded Context. 

Practically we have three approaches -

1. Database server per microservice - Each microservice will have its own database server instance. This approach has the overhead of maintaining database instance and its replication/backup, hence its rarely used in a practical environment. 
2. Schema per microservice - Each microservice owns a private database schema which is not accessible to other services. Its most preferred approach for RDMS database (MySql, Postgres, etc.)
3. Private Table per microservice - Each microservice owns a set of tables that must only be accessed by that service. It’s a logical separation of data. This approach is mostly used for the hosted database as a service solution (Amazon RDS).

What are best practices for microservices architecture?

Microservices Architecture can become cumbersome & unmanageable if not done properly. There are best practices that help design a resilient & highly scalable system. The most important ones are 

Partition correctly 

Get to know the domain of your business, that's very important. Only then you will be able to define the bounded context and partition your microservice correctly based on business capabilities. 

DevOps culture 

Typically, everything from continuous integration all the way to continuous delivery and deployment should be automated. Otherwise,  a big pain to manage a large fleet of microservices. 

Design for stateless operations 

We never know where a new instance of a particular microservice will be spun up for scaling out or for handling failure, so maintaining a state inside service instance is a very bad idea. 

Design for failures 

Failures are inevitable in distributed systems, so we must design our system for handling failures gracefully. failures can be of different types and must be dealt with accordingly, for example - 

1. Failure could be transient due to inherent brittle nature of the network, and the next retry may succeed. Such failures must be protected using retry operations.
2. Failure may be due to a hung service which can have cascading effects on the calling service. Such failures must be protected using Circuit Breaker Patterns. A fallback mechanism can be used to provide degraded functionality in this case.
3. A single component may fail and affect the health of the entire system, bulkhead pattern must be used to prevent the entire system from failing. 

Design for versioning 

We should try to make our services backward compatible, explicit versioning must be used to cater different versions of the RESt endpoints. 

Design for asynchronous communication b/w services 

Asynchronous communication should be preferred over synchronous communication in inter microservice communication. One of the biggest advantages of using asynchronous messaging is that the service does not block while waiting for a response from another service. 

Design for eventual consistency 

Eventual consistency is a consistency model used in distributed computing to achieve high availability that informally guarantees that, if no new updates are made to a given data item, eventually all accesses to that item will return the last updated value. 

Design for idempotent operations 

Since networks are brittle, we should always design our services to accept repeated calls without any side effects. We can add some unique identifier to each request so that service can ignore the duplicate request sent over the network due to network failure/retry logic. 

Share as little as possible 

In monolithic applications, sharing is considered to be a best practice but that's not the case with Microservices. Sharing results in a violation of Bounded Context Principle, so we shall refrain from creating any single unified shared model that works across microservices. For example, if different services need a common Customer model, then we should create one for each microservice with just the required fields for a given bounded context rather than creating a big model class that is shared in all services. The more dependencies we have between services, the harder it is to isolate the service changes, making it difficult to make a change in a single service without affecting other services. Also, creating a unified model that works in all services brings complexity and ambiguity to the model itself, making it hard for anyone to understand the model.
In a way are want to violate the DRY principle in microservices architecture when it comes to domain models. 

How will you implement caching for microservices?

Caching is a technique of performance improvement for getting query results from a service. It helps minimize the calls to network, database, etc. We can use caching at multiple levels in microservices architecture - 

1. Server-Side Caching - Distributed caching software like Redis/MemCache/etc are used to cache the results of business operations. The cache is distributed so all instances of a microservice can see the values from the shared cache. This type of caching is opaque to clients.
2. Gateway Cache - central API gateway can cache the query results as per business needs and provide improved performance. This way we can achieve caching for multiple services at one place. Distributed caching software like Redis or Memcache can be used in this case.
3. Client-Side Caching - We can set cache-headers in http response and allow clients to cache the results for a pre-defined time. This will drastically reduce the load on servers since the client will not make repeated calls to the same resource. Servers can inform the clients when information is changed, thereby any changes in the query result can also be handled. E-Tags can be used for client-side load balancing. If the end client is a microservice itself, then Spring Cache support can be used to cache the results locally. 

What is a good tool for documenting Microservices?

Swagger is a very good open-source tool for documenting   APIs provided by microservices. It provides very easy to use interactive documentation.

By the use of swagger annotation on REST endpoint, api documentation can be auto-generated and exposed over the web interface. An internal and external team can use web interface, to see the list of APIs and their inputs & error codes. They can even invoke the endpoints directly from web interface to get the results.

Swagger UI is a very powerful tool for your microservices consumers to help them understand the set of endpoints provided by a given microservice.

What are the tools and libraries available for testing microservices?

Important Tools and Libraries for testing Spring-based Microservices are - 

JUnit 

the standard test runners 

TestNG 
the next generation test runner 

Hemcrest 
declarative matchers and assertions 

Rest-assured 
for writing REST Api driven end to end tests 

Mockito 
for mocking dependencies 

Wiremock 
for stubbing thirdparty services 

Hoverfly 
Create API simulation for end-to-end tests. 

Spring Test and Spring Boot Test 
for writing Spring Integration Tests - includes MockMVC, TestRestTemplate, Webclient like features. 

JSONassert 
An assertion library for JSON. 

Pact 
The Pact family of frameworks provide support for Consumer Driven Contracts testing. 

Selenium 
Selenium automates browsers. Its used for end-to-end automated ui testing. 

Gradle 
Gradle helps build, automate and deliver software, fastr. 

IntelliJ IDEA 
IDE for Java Development 

Using spring-boot-starter-test 
We can just add the below dependency in project’s build.gradle 

testCompile('org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-test')

This starter will import two spring boot test modules spring-boot-test & spring-boot-test- autoconfigure as well as Junit, AssertJ, Hamcrest, Mockito, JSONassert, Spring Test, Spring Boot Test and a number of other useful libraries.

What is the difference between Orchestration and Choreography in microservices context?

In Orchestration, we rely on a central system to control and call other Microservices in a certain fashion to complete a given task. The central system maintains the state of each step and sequence of the overall workflow. In Choreography, each Microservice works like a State Machine and reacts based on the input from other parts. Each service knows how to react to different events from other systems. There is no central command in this case.

Orchestration is a tightly coupled approach and is an anti-pattern in a microservices architecture. Whereas, Choreography’s loose coupling approach should be adopted where-ever possible.

Example

Let’s say we want to develop a microservice that will send product recommendation email in a fictitious e-shop. In order to send Recommendations, we need to have access to user’s order history which lies in a different microservices. 

In Orchestration approach, this new microservice for recommendations will make synchronous calls to order service and fetch the relevant data, then based on his past purchases we will calculate the recommendations. Doing this for a million users will become cumbersome and will tightly couple the two microservices. 

In Choreography approach, we will use event-based Asynchronous communication where whenever a user makes a purchase, an event will be published by order service. Recommendation service will listen to this event and start building user recommendation. This is a loosely coupled approach and highly scalable. The event, in this case, does not tell about the action, but just the data.

How frequent a microservice be released into production?

There is no right answer to this question, there could be a release every ten minutes, every hour or once a week. It all depends on the extent of automation you have at a different level of the software development lifecycle - build automation, test automation, deployment automation and monitoring. And of course, on the business requirements - how small low-risk changes you care making in a single release.

In an ideal world where boundaries of each microservices are clearly defined (bounded context), and a given service is not affecting other microservices, you can easily achieve multiple deployments a day without major complexity.

Examples of deployment/release frequency

1. Amazon is on record as making changes to production every 11.6 seconds on average in May of 2011.
2. Github is well known for its aggressive engineering practices, deploying code into production on an average 60 times a day.
3. Facebook releases to production twice a day.
4. Many Google services see releases multiple times a week, and almost everything in Google is developed on mainline.
5. Etsy Deploys More Than 50 Times a Day.

What are Cloud-Native applications?

Cloud-Native Applications (NCA) is a style of application development that encourages easy adoption of best practices in the area of continuous delivery and distributed software development. These applications are designed specifically for a cloud computing architecture (AWS, Azure, CloudFoundary, etc).

DevOps, continuous delivery, microservices, and containers are the key concepts in developing cloud-native applications.

Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, Docker, Jenkins, Git are a few tools that can help you write Cloud-Native Application without much effort.

Microservices

It is an architectural approach for developing a distributed system as a collection of small services. Each service is responsible for a specific business capability, runs in its own process and communicates via HTTP REST API or messaging (AMQP).

DevOps

It is collaboration between software developers and IT operations with a goal of constantly delivering high-quality software as per customer needs.

Continuous Delivery

Its all about automated delivery of low-risk small changes to production, constantly. This makes it possible to collect feedback faster.

Containers

Containers (e.g. Docker) offer logical isolation to each microservices thereby eliminating the problem of "run on my machine" forever. It’s much faster and efficient compared to Virtual Machines.

How will you develop microservices using Java?

Spring Boot along with Spring Cloud is a very good option to start building microservices using Java language. There are a lot of modules available in Spring Cloud that can provide boiler plate code for different design patterns of microservices, so Spring Cloud can really speed up the development process. Also, Spring boot provides out of the box support to embed a servlet container (tomcat/jetty/undertow) inside an executable jar (uber jar), so that these jars can be run directly from the command line, eliminating the need of deploying war files into a servlet container. 

You can also use Docker container to ship and deploy the entire executable package onto a cloud environment. Docker can also help eliminate "works on my machine" problem by providing logical separation for the runtime environment during the development phase. That way you can gain portability across on-premises and cloud environment.

How to achieve zero-downtime during the deployments?

As the name suggests, zero-downtime deployments do not bring outage in a production environment. It is a clever way of deploying your changes to production, where at any given point in time, at least one service will remain available to customers.

Blue-green deployment 

One way of achieving this is blue/green deployment. In this approach, two versions of a single microservice are deployed at a time. But only one version is taking real requests. Once the newer version is tested to the required satisfaction level, you can switch from older version to newer version.

You can run a smoke-test suite to verify that the functionality is running correctly in the newly deployed version. Based on the results of smoke-test, newer version can be released to become the live version.

Changes required in client code to handle zero-downtime 

Lets say you have two instances of a service running at the same time, and both are registered in Eureka registry. Further, both instances are deployed using two distinct hostnames: 

/src/main/resources/application.yml 

  spring.application.name: ticketBooks-service

  ---

  spring.profiles: blue

  eureka.instance.hostname: ticketBooks-service -blue.example.com

  ---

  spring.profiles: green

  eureka.instance.hostname: ticketBooks-service -green.example.com

Now the client app that needs to make api calls to books-service may look like below: 

@RestController 

@SpringBootApplication 

@EnableDiscoveryClient

 public class ClientApp { 

@Bean
@LoadBalanced
public RestTemplate restTemplate() { 

return new RestTemplate(); } 

@RequestMapping("/hit-some-api") 

public Object hitSomeApi() { 

return restTemplate().getForObject("https://ticketBooks-service/some-uri", Object.class);  } 

Now, when ticketBooks-service-green.example.com goes down for upgrade, it gracefully shuts down and delete its entry from Eureka registry. But these changes will not be reflected in the ClientApp until it fetches the registry again (which happens every 30 seconds). So for upto 30 seconds, ClientApp’s @LoadBalanced RestTemplate may send the requests to ticketBooks-service-green.example.com even if its down. 

To fix this, we can use Spring Retry support in Ribbon client-side load balancer. To enable Spring Retry, we need to follow the below steps: 

Add spring-retry to build.gradle dependencies 

compile("org.springframework.boot:spring-boot-starter-aop")

compile("org.springframework.retry:spring-retry")

Now enable spring-retry mechanism in ClientApp using @EnableRetry annotation, as shown below: 

@EnableRetry @RestController @SpringBootApplication @EnableDiscoveryClient public class ClientApp { 

... } 

Once this is done, Ribbon will automatically configure itself to use retry logic and any failed request to ticketBooks-service-green.example.com com will be retried to next available instance (in round-robins fashion) by Ribbon. You can customize this behaviour using the below properties: 

/src/main/resources/application.yml 

ribbon:

MaxAutoRetries: 5 

MaxAutoRetriesNextServer: 5 

OkToRetryOnAllOperations: true

OkToRetryOnAllErrors: true

How to achieve zero-downtime deployment (blue/green) when there is a database change?

The deployment scenario becomes complex when there are database changes during the upgrade. There can be two different scenarios: 1. database change is backward compatible (e.g. adding a new table column) 2. Database change is not compatible with an older version of the application (e.g. renaming an existing table column) 

1. Backward compatible change: This scenario is easy to implement and can be fully automated using Flyway. We can add the script to create a new column and the script will be executed at the time of deployment. Now during blue/green deployment, two versions of the application (say v1 and v2) will be connected to the same database. We need to make sure that the newly added columns allow null values (btw that’s part of the backward compatible change). If everything goes well, then we can switch off the older version v1, else application v2 can be taken off. 
2. Non-compatible database change: This is a tricky scenario, and may require manual intervention in-case of rollback. Let's say we want to rename first_name column to fname in the database. Instead of directly renaming, we can create a new column fname and copy all existing values of first_name into fname column, keeping the first_name column as it is in the database. We can defer non-null checks on fname to post-deployment success. If the deployment goes successful, we need to migrate data written to first_name by v1 to the new column (fname) manually after bringing down the v1. If the deployment fails for v2, then we need to do the otherwise. 

Complexity may be much more in a realistic production app, such discussions are beyond the scope of this book.

How to maintain ACID in microservice architecture?

ACID is an acronym for four primary attributes namely atomicity, consistency, isolation, and durability ensured by the database transaction manager. 

Atomicity 

In a transaction involving two or more entities, either all of the records are committed or none are. 

Consistency 

A database transaction must change affected data only in allowed ways following specific rules including constraints/triggers etc. 

Isolation 

Any transaction in progress (not yet committed) must remain isolated from any other transaction. 

Durability 

Committed records are saved by a database such that even in case of a failure or database restart, the data is available in its correct state. 

In a distributed system involving multiple databases, we have two options to achieve ACID compliance: 

1. One way to achieve ACID compliance is to use a two-phase commit (a.k.a 2PC), which ensures that all involved services must commit to transaction completion or all the transactions are rolled back.
2. Use eventual consistency, where multiple databases owned by different microservices become eventually consistent using asynchronous messaging using messaging protocol. Eventual consistency is a specific form of weak consistency. 

2 Phase Commit should ideally be discouraged in microservices architecture due to its fragile and complex nature. We can achieve some level of ACID compliance in distributed systems through eventual consistency and that should be the right approach to do it.