Seneca.js role in microservices architecture across separate docker containers - node.js

I am in the planning phase of moving a c#.net monolithic application to node.js. I would like to implement the microservices architecture, event-driven, for this app using seneca.js and docker to separate each microservice into its own container hosted on aws elastic beanstalk. From what I have read and per recommendations this seems the way to go so far.
Here is where I am confused, in reviewing the seneca.js docs, I am not seeing how out-of-process communication is occurring.
In particular, if I want to allow multiple clients to subscribe to the same event should I use rabbitmq with seneca.js as there are times where several microservices have to perform actions for a particular event? In going this route, how would I handle a scenario where one of the subscribers fails and needs to run again? Seems like this event would need to be run again for this microservice only and not the others.
Also, in using seneca.js, how do I allow for exposing a rest api for each microservice to allow clients to gain access to its internal database and data using this approach?
Please let me know if I am incorrect in any aspects of this.

Related

Microservices, how to notify backend when task complete

For example, if i have main application (backend) and some microservice, e.g for image cropping.
User loads an image, making request to backend, backend using rabbitmq posts new task in the queue, then image cropping service pickup a task, completes it and i need somehow notify backend.
What is options for this? I need another microservice for such notifications?
so... there are reaaaaaaly many ways to do that.
On the high level, what you want to achieve is to produce an event that 1 or more services can react to. Now depending on what you have available, you can produce the event in a number of different ways.
if you want to be completely platform independent, you can use Apache Kafka. It's a popular service specifically for what we need -> publishing events and processing them at mass-scale. Kafka can be clustered, partitioned, have multiple parallel consumers of the same type (like multiple instances of your main backend service) or different types (3 different microservices that happen to be interested in a specific event). This bad boy just has it all and is famous for that. You can set up a cluster yourself or use one that comes out-of-the-box with some of the cloud platforms (like AWS for instance), but this might be more expensive and difficult to use compared to some cloud-specific fully-managed solutions.
if you're running your stuff on the google cloud, you can make it easier and cheaper by using the PubSub service. PubSub is a fully managed service that is scaled out-of-the-box (welcome to the cloud! you don't need to scale or cluster anything by yourself!).
if you're running on AWS, you can use SNS, or a more recent alternative - EventBridge (kinda like SNS, but booooooy what can it not do?). Yeah... I would recommend EventBridge. It can just do more... with the target filtering rules, payload transformations, it can automatically trigger more things...
Azure... ehm... Event Hub... but I haven't worked with this one yet... I'm not much of an Azurer... because you know... nobody uses azure for this kind of stuff...

Splitting load of an API between multiple servers

I'm planning to build an API for one of my projects. But I'm looking for a good way to manage it, and manage server load.
Would I be better off just creating everything on one server, or should I create multiple?
Thoughts:
If I create one server and that server crashes, the whole system would go down. But if I create multiple servers to handle this, and one of them crashes, only that part would go down.
How I was thinking to accomplish this:
1) Create one API ENDPOINT
2) When a user sends a REQUEST to that API ENDPOINT, the ENDPOINT would send another request to the correct server containing the special task, when the task is done it would return the data back to the user.
AKA:
User => ENDPOINT => ENDPOINT 1, ENDPOINT 2, ENDPOINT 3, => ENDPOINT => User
Is this how I should do it?
P.S. I don't know if this the right terminology but I'm trying to learn how to scale my ENDPOINTS/API/code.
About the load balancer, you should use specific web server applications to do that, like nginxor apache. This kind of web server tools already have implemented load balance mechanisms, you just need to configure it.
Also, I recommend you to pack your server in docker images. This way you could use Docker Swarm or Kubernetes to deploy and scale up/down your application. It's easier to manage your services, check applications states and deploy new versions.
You could use docker with nginx, where each docker container has an instance of your application and nginx will take care of redirect/distribute your requests between your instances.
What you are basically looking for is a comparison between microservices based architecture (or SOA) and a monolith.
In microservices, there are multiple services performing specific tasks. They all in-turn are used to perform complex tasks. Monoliths on the other hand consist of a big server which does everything and is also the single point of failure like your pointed.
Should you move to microservices?
It is widely agreed that a project should be built in monolithic architecture and then moved to microservices as the complexity grows. Martin Fowler's article explains this concept well.
This is because there are certain disadvantages and tradeoffs associated with this architecture -- inconsistency and latency, for instance.
TLDR; Stick to one server if starting, break into services when it becomes complex.

Spring Cloud: ZUUL + Eureka + NodeJS

I am new to Spring-Boot(Cloud) and going to work on one new project.
Our project architect have designed this new application like this:
One front end Spring boot application(which is also microservice) with Angular-2.
One Eureka server, to which other microservices will connect.
ZUUL proxy server, which will connect to Front end and mircoservices.
Now, followings are the things I am confuse about and I can't ask him as he too senior to me:
Do I need to have separate ZUUL proxy server ? I mean, what is the pro and cons of using same front end application as ZUUL server?
How MicorService-1 will communicate with Node's MicroService-1? Some blogs suggesting the Sidecar. But again, why ? because I can directly invoke ReST api of NodeJS-1 from the Microservice-1.
(I know, this is very tough to guess but still asking) NodeJS services(which are not legacy services) are suppose to call some third party api or retrieve data from DB.
Now, what I am not getting is why we need NodeJS code at all? Why can't we do the same in the microservices written in Java?
Can anyone who have worked with similar kind of scenario shed some light on my doubts?
I do not have the full context of the problem that you are trying to solve, therefore answers bellow are quite general, but still may be useful:
Do I need to have separate ZUUL proxy server? I mean, what is the pro and cons of using same front end application as ZUUL server?
Yes, you gonna need a separate API Gateway service, which may be Zuul (or other gateways, e.g tyk.io).
The main idea here is that you can have hundreds or even thousands of microservices (like Amazon, Netflix, etc.) and they can be scattered across different machines or data centres. It would be really silly to enforce your API consumers (in your case it's Angular 2) to memorise all the possible locations of each microservice. Better to have one API Gateway that knows about all the services under it, so your clients can call your gateway and have access to the underlying services through one single place. Also having one in your system will decouple your clients from your services, so it's possible to evolve them independently.
Another benefit is that you can have access control, logging, security, etc. in one single place. And, BTW, I think that you are missing one more thing in your architecture - it's Authorization Server. A common approach in building security for microservices is OAuth 2.0.
How MicorService-1 will communicate with Node's MicroService-1? Some blogs suggesting the Sidecar. But again, why? because I can directly invoke ReST API of NodeJS-1 from the Microservice-1.
I think you could use Sidecar, but I have never used it. I suppose that the question 'why' is related to the Discovery Service (Eureka in your architecture).
You can't call microservice NodeJS-1 directly because there may be several instances of NodeJS-1, which one to call? Furthermore, you can't know whether service is down or alive at any given point in time. That's why we use Discovery Services like Eureka - they handle all of these. When any given service has started, it must register itself in Eureka. So if you have started several instances of NodeJS-1 they all will be registered in Eureka and whenever Microservice-1 wants to call NodeJS-1 service it asks Eureka for locations of live instances of NodeJS-1. The service then chooses which one to call.
(I know, this is very tough to guess but still asking) NodeJS services(which are not legacy services) are suppose to call some third party api or retrieve data from DB.
Now, what I am not getting is why we need NodeJS code at all? Why can't we do the same in the microservices written in Java?
I can only assume that the NodeJS has been chosen because it has an outstanding performance for IO operations, including HTTP requests that may come in hand when calling 3-rd party services. I do not have any other rational explanations for this.
In general, microservices give you a possibility to have your microservices written in different languages and it's cool indeed since each language solves some problems better than the other. On the other hand, this decision should be made with caution and answer the question - "do we really need a new language in our stack to solve problem X?".

Scalability of server-side application, best approach

I'm programming a server-side application which will manage requests from:
Game client
Website (HTTP requests)
API
As of now I'm using only one (NodeJS) application for every type of requests, the problem is that with a growing user base, this approach will generate a bottle-neck.
I would like some advices on how to develop the server-side architetture so that it'll be scalable.
The only solution that I know of is to use multiple servers with the same application running which will share the same memory (Redis server).
Is it possible in nodeJS to split the management of these types of request into multiple servers? Maybe one or more servers for each type of request?
Currently I'm using:
NodeJS
Redis
MySQL
Express
Socket.io
Thanks in advance, can you recommend some books on this matter?
On one machine to handle the power of multicore architecture you can use node.js Cluster module (https://nodejs.org/api/cluster.html).
I think it is a good idea to split API and Website on different applications. If you decide to run multiple node.js applications on one machine try to use pm2 (http://pm2.keymetrics.io/). You could probably split your API on a bunch of small applications - which called microservice architecture. I personally don't like microservice approach you can check the web for pros and cons.
Also if you deploy your application (or bunch of applications) on different virtual/phisycal machines (which is usual in production) you can use haproxy for balancing and
fault tolerance (http://www.haproxy.org/).

Can I run a microservice which keeps a port open in the cloud?

I'm new to microservices. I envision them as a set of processes running in two or more machines (I suppose for a given process two instances must be run in separate machines for reliability). In that setup, depending on the kind of clients I have there may be one process working as a TCP server serving on a specific high port and speaking a non-HTTP protocol.
However, for my low-bandwidth, testing purposes, I haven't found a free cloud service which provides that kind of environment (machines to run processes on – say, Java on Linux – while keeping a high port open).
Maybe the facilities I'm expecting are only available to paying customers, or maybe implementing a microservice architecture in the cloud goes beyond simply running processes in machines and sharing a database? Could someone clarify? (and if possible direct me to one such free service)
Yes, you are right when you say Microservices are more about independent service (processes) that can be deployed in one or more cloud machines. Each service can communicate to other using non-http protocol like Message brokers, Thrift, Remote Procedure call (RPC) etc.
As the architecture point of view, services should mostly be decoupled enough to handle complexity of distributed computing. see the image on Microservices Architecture link
There's a concept of API Gateway which could be used for authentication and service registration and discovery purpose.
Coming back to your question, you can test microservices on single cloud (by running each service on different port) and use API Gateway to discover the service path for references here are the links which are worth to look at these.
For concept see links: Microservices.io and stackoverflow question
For Implementation: zookeeper and Auth0 (this is what i'm using)
If you are java lover great to look at infoQ article
Some of the free source that might can help in building and testing microservices are: Google App Engine, hook.io

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