To Build a Microservices Architecture, Build a Developer Platform First

Introduction

In today's fast-paced software development landscape, microservices architecture has gained significant popularity for its ability to create scalable, maintainable, and loosely coupled systems. However, to avoid the challenges that can arise from poorly implemented microservices, it is crucial to prioritize the construction and enforcement of a developer platform. In this blog post, we will explore the benefits and reasons why building a developer platform should precede the development of microservices.

Standardization and Consistency

In theory, one of the benefits of a microservices architecture is that it doesn’t matter what’s inside the service “box” as long as it exposes its functionality via an API. In practice, maintaining hundreds of microservices written in different ways and various programming languages can become challenging for large organizations. A certain amount of standardization and consistency is required.

A developer platform establishes a set of standardized practices, patterns, and guidelines for building microservices. It ensures consistency across different services, promotes code reuse, and enhances the maintainability of the overall system. Developers can leverage common libraries, shared components, and established deployment processes, leading to increased productivity and reduced development time.

Enhancing Developer Experience

Microservices architecture places a significant burden on engineering teams to properly handle building, testing, and (especially) deploying their software. Whether you still believe in “DevOps” or not, it’s simply a fact that most developers would rather spend their time in the code and not (say) writing pipeline code to automate a blue-green deployment.

By building a developer platform, you prioritize the developer experience. You can provide easy-to-use tooling, such as automated testing frameworks, development environments, and continuous integration/continuous deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. This focus on developer experience boosts morale, promotes best practices, and attracts top talent to your organization. I’ll have more to say about the benefits of staffing a developer experience team in a future post.

Seamless Integration and Interoperability

To integrate with a microservice, you have to first understand how to use its API — what protocols and data formats it supports, what its SLAs are, and how it will evolve from version to version. And there are as many ways to design APIs as there are microservices engineers. To avoid wasted developer time and misunderstandings that lead to outages, some guardrails are required.

A developer platform enables seamless integration and interoperability between microservices. It provides standardized communication protocols, message formats, and data contracts. With the platform's foundational components in place, such as API gateways and service discovery mechanisms, microservices can easily communicate with each other and share data.

Scalability and Operational Efficiency

Scalability is a vital aspect of microservices architecture. But unfortunately it’s also something that a lot of engineers don’t have much experience with, particularly early in their careers. Same goes for operational efficiency concerns like monitoring, logging, and centralized error handling.

You can help engineers out by building operational best practices for scaling mechanisms, auto-scaling policies, and load balancing directly into the developer platform, thereby creating an infrastructure that can efficiently handle increased traffic and adapt to changing demands. And investing in common tools and approaches for monitoring, logging, and error handling will make it more likely that you can get insights into the system’s performance, debug issues, and ensure robustness and stability.

Security and Compliance

No one likes to hear that a container or library they depend on has a CVE and you need to rapidly upgrade, rebuild, and redeploy. But you’ll like it even less if it’s currently deployed in multiple versions of multiple microservices and each one has a bespoke build and deployment process. Or maybe you can’t even tell where-all it’s deployed in the microservices architecture.

A developer platform allows you to address security and compliance concerns proactively. You can implement authentication and authorization mechanisms, secure communication channels, establish auditing and compliance standards, and centralize vulnerability checking and mitigations. By building security into the platform, you ensure that microservices built on top of it inherit these essential security measures.

Conclusion

There are real challenges when you go to adopt a microservices architecture. A developer platform goes a long way to mitigating them. It sets the stage for a smooth transition into microservices and ensures that development teams have the necessary tools and infrastructure to build robust, scalable, and maintainable systems.

Let me know if you’d like to hear more about this, or if you have any additional microservices tips and tricks you’d like to share!