Demand for flexible and agile systems has always been higher.
With customers demanding faster services, companies are turning to microservices to build scalable, resilient applications.
According to Statista in 2021, 85% of large organizations already used microservices in business.
However, as always, there’s that question - Which programming language to use? Is .NET good to build microservices architecture on?
Fortunately, yes.
.NET is a highly versatile and stable language today to build microservices. But no matter how good a language is, you must follow the best practices to maximize opportunities.
What Are Microservices?
Unlike monolithic (one big chunk) architecture, Microservices architecture breaks down services into small parts, aka microservice.
Each service has one specific task or business logic, which means there are no clashes between two microservices down the road.
One of the perks of microservices is that they are isolated from each other. To communicate with each other, they use an API gateway.
Why Microservices with .NET are a Good Choice?
- Cross-Platform Compatibility
.NET provides cross-platform abilities through frameworks like .NET core and Xamarin. This means your microservices can run on different operating systems like Windows, Linux, and macOS, thus giving you flexibility by reducing infrastructure constraints. - Containerization capability
Containers, when coupled with platforms like Kubernetes, can bring much-needed flexibility in the deployment of applications. It also helps you save your resources by proper utilization. - Cloud compatibility
.NET is cloud compatible and supports cloud scalability. Hence, any microservice built with .NET is compatible with cloud environments. Azure and AWS are the two best cloud platforms paired. NET.
Now let’s jump onto microservice patterns and best practices.
Best Practices for Microservices Development with .NET
1. Choose the Right Microservices Pattern
Microservice patterns can be categorized into different parts, namely:
- Decomposition pattern: This pattern breaks down applications into sub-domains based on business functions.
- Integration pattern: This pattern solves orchestration issues, and Ingress needs across your system as a whole.
- Database pattern: This pattern manages data of different software components. It also facilitates communication between two databases or more.
- Observability pattern: This pattern helps discover unknown issues between various service interactions to build a secure app.
Each pattern has its application, so you must choose it carefully based on business requirements.
2. Use the Single Responsibility Principle
Like in programming, where a class has only one function to execute, Microservices should be designed only for one specific task.
For example, you are building a microservice for an e-commerce store. Therefore, you will have components like Inventory Service, order service, payment services, etc. So, inventory services should only handle the inventory of e-commerce stores.
3. Have A Good API Design and Ensure Backward Compatibility
Microservices rely on API gateways to communicate with each other. Thus, it's essential to design your APIs carefully.
One of the most common ways to design a scalable API is using Restful APIs.
RESTful API has one core benefit - you don’t need any framework or SDKs to run them. The model for API is an industry standard.
Backward compatibility is another thing to keep in mind while designing API. In simple terms, backward compatibility means every API should be built such that no existing service breaks.
To implement this, you can use API versioning. .NET supports web API versioning, which implements multiple versions of the same API. This way, numerous clients can work with the required version of API.
4. Database Management
You might feel code architecture is the problem behind scalability issues, but that's not true! The real bottleneck in databases.
As the application grows, so does the data. Each microservice has its database, making it challenging to keep data consistent. So, in such cases, use Entity Framework Core to manage data across your microservice.
5. Always Monitor Services
Monitoring microservices and seeing if they function correctly continuously is a good practice. To achieve this, you can use a monitoring mechanism. Fortunately, .NET has a feature called Health Checks. The health check is an in-built middleware in .NET that reports the health of your application.
6. Use Containers
What is a container? Why is it needed?
Containers are like a box.
Each box holds a specific piece of code. The primary purpose of containerization is to keep things organized and make deploying your code in any environment easy. Containers and microservices are a perfect match for each other. The excellent news is that ASP.NET has in-built support for deploying and building microservices using Docker.
7. Leveraging Logging and Tracing
Logging is like keeping a notebook where you track important events.
Similarly, in the programming world, logging helps you understand what is happening inside the code and what events are occurring. So, whenever a problem arises, the .NET developer can go to logs and troubleshoot the issue.
Logging is essential when building scalable microservices. However, as microservices are spread throughout the application, each service has its log, which can be harder to trace. So the best practice is to aggregate all the records.
Conclusion
Scalability is essential in today’s fast-paced world. With every hour of downtime, companies lose around 1 million USD.
Microservices and .NET can resolve scalability issues and provide a strong foundation for your system during peak traffic.
As always, achieving scalability needs experts to help. At Clarion Technologies, we take pride in having the world’s top 5% .NET talent that will help you build scalable systems. So, hire the best .NET programmers and get started.
