As software systems continue to grow in complexity, microservices have emerged as a popular architecture pattern for building scalable, flexible, and agile applications.
In a 2023 Gartner Peer Community survey, 74% of organizations are already using microservices architecture. Meanwhile, 23% of leaders’ organizations aren’t using it yet but are planning to jump on board soon.
If you’re considering implementing microservices in your organization, it’s important to have the right tools during software development.
This guide will introduce you to the top microservices tools that can help you design, build, deploy, and manage your microservices-based applications.
What are Microservices Tools?
Microservices tools are software and platforms that aid in the development, deployment, monitoring, and management of microservices-based applications. These tools are designed to make it easier for developers and organizations to adopt a microservices architecture by providing features like service discovery, load balancing, communication protocols, and more.
Microservices tools can be classified into different categories based on their functionality, and our list includes some of the top tools in each category.
Let’s start!
API Management and Testing Tools
Microservices allow others to access their features via Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), enabling communication between software components and external systems. A well-known example is Netflix’s API gateway for managing streaming services.
For API management and testing tools, these are what you should use:
Open API
Formerly known as Swagger, the Open API Specification is a widely used tool for defining APIs within a microservice architecture. It is ideal for designing, documenting, and testing APIs.
Using a standardized format, it allows you to define APIs, create interactive documentation, and automate client SDK generation. Open API streamlines the building and maintenance of APIs, making it crucial for microservice development.
API Fortress
API Fortress is a handy tool that helps you automate the functional testing, load testing, and health monitoring of enterprise APIs. It’s designed to be code-free, making life easier! Plus, it’s built around modern API architectural patterns and practices.
Postman
Postman is an all-in-one API development suite great for teams and individual developers alike. It lets you effortlessly run UI-driven API tests. As a top-notch HTTP client, Postman makes exploring RESTful APIs a breeze. You can quickly assemble both complex and simple HTTP requests to test, develop, and document APIs in no time.
Languages and Frameworks
Language and framework choice is crucial when developing microservices. So, you’ll need to pick the ones that best suit your project’s needs.
Here are some popular languages and frameworks for microservices:
Spring Boot
Spring Boot is a popular Java-based framework packed with features and conventions that make development easier. Its opinionated style cuts down on repetitive coding, letting developers concentrate on business logic, which makes it a great pick for creating microservices.
Some of its key features include simplified build configuration thanks to starter dependencies, sensible defaults that make creating production-ready apps a breeze, and the best part? There’s no need for XML configuration or code generation, which really streamlines app development.
Golang
Go, or Golang, is popular for microservices due to its simplicity, concurrency model, and performance. Its lightweight design and extensive standard library make it ideal for scalable microservices.
Golang equips you with goroutines and channels for built-in concurrency, letting scalable microservices handle loads of operations simultaneously. With handy packages for HTTP, JSON, and more, Go makes RESTful API development and service communication in microservices architectures a breeze.
Elixir
With Elixir, you can easily expand your programming skills. This tool is both functional and concurrent, designed to complement any programming language. It works with bytecode on the BEAM, also known as the Erlang VM.
Elixir is perfect for building distributed systems, web development, and much more. Plus, it offers plenty of time-saving features that developers love.
Code Editor
When designing microservices, having a powerful code editor is essential. It can help you write clean and efficient code, troubleshoot errors, and enhance your productivity.
Visual Studio Code
Visual Studio Code (VS Code) from Microsoft is a go-to code editor because of its versatility and extensive features. It supports loads of programming languages and frameworks. You’ll find handy tools like IntelliSense, debugging features, and Git integration to make your coding life easier.
More than that, its ecosystem of extensions offers all sorts of tools and services, perfect for microservice development. Thanks to powerful debugging and a wide range of plugins, VS Code really boosts your productivity and simplifies your development workflow.
Messaging Tools
Building an app with microservices requires setting up a system for multiple services to communicate, using message queues for smooth interaction. Popular messaging tools facilitate this process, and here are the best of them:
RabbitMQ
RabbitMQ makes it easy to use patterns for communication between microservices, helping you grow applications smoothly and tackle common distributed systems issues. In a microservices setup or any distributed system, RabbitMQ connects competing microservices and also handles service-to-service event communication nicely.
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS)
Amazon Simple Queue Service (SQS) offers robust, reliable, and flexible communication for your microservices. If you’re on the fence about which publish-subscribe model to choose for your microservice communication, SQS can be your guide. Queues are great for safely holding messages in transit and boosting performance and reliability.
Apache Kafka
Message queuing is key in microservices architecture for handling messages between services and external sources. Whether it’s for heavy-duty API requests or processing large data volumes, Apache Kafka is your go-to for a resilient and fault-tolerant distributed stream processing framework.
Google Cloud Pub/Sub
This is a real-time messaging service that’s perfect for microservices, offering fully managed capabilities for sending and receiving messages in real time. Google Cloud Pub/Sub helps manage the flow of asynchronous requests, reducing the time users spend waiting for responses.
Monitoring Tools
Keeping an eye on workflows in the production environment is key once applications are up and running. Proactive monitoring of application development also helps spot issues early, preventing system hiccups that could disrupt your application’s smooth operation.
Here are some top monitoring tools:
Prometheus (+Grafana)
In monitoring microservices, Prometheus and Grafana make a fantastic team. Prometheus is an open-source platform for collecting and storing metrics data in a time-series database, offering real-time alerting and flexible querying. It gathers and analyzes data from various endpoints, triggering alerts based on specific conditions.
Grafana complements Prometheus by providing an intuitive platform for visualizing and analyzing data with easy-to-use dashboards. It supports creating various visual elements and integrates with Prometheus, InfluxDB, and other data sources.
Together, Prometheus and Grafana provide a powerful solution for real-time monitoring, alerting, and troubleshooting, ensuring your data pipeline and systems are reliable and performing well while making data exploration a breeze.
Logstash
Logstash is an impressive monitoring tool you can use for your deployed microservice and its monitoring. It’s an open-source platform where you can easily centralize, stash, and transform your data.
Graylog
Graylog comes with an interactive and quick interface that is easy to use. What is great about this tool is that it stands out on its own. You can explore data with it in no time. Plus, it’s scalable and designed to grow with your business as needed.
Tip: By using Logstash and Graylog together, you can set up a centralized server.
Datadog
Datadog is a cloud platform for monitoring, security, and analytics, offering solutions for servers, databases, and cloud apps. It automates infrastructure monitoring with data collection, visualization, and management of traces, logs, and metrics, featuring over 450 integrations for a unified view of systems.
Using Datadog to monitor microservices, you can analyze service interactions and quickly spot and resolve issues. IT and DevOps (Development and Operations) teams can use this tool to gain real-time insights and track infrastructure and cloud events.
Orchestration Tools
Orchestration tools automate the deployment, scaling, and management of containers for better orchestration of services in a microservices architecture.
Here are some top options:
Kubernetes (K8s)
Kubernetes is an open-source container orchestration platform that automates deploying, managing, and scaling containerized applications. Together with Docker, Kubernetes forms a robust base for managing microservices-based systems, addressing operational complexities as workloads scale.
Conductor
Conductor is Netflix’s microservice orchestration engine, part of its OSS ecosystem. It runs in the cloud, integrating a flow orchestrator to execute tasks across microservices while facilitating visualization and control of interactions. Conductor enables users to define and manage workflows within an application, ensuring the correct execution order and data availability.
Orkes Conductor
Orkes Conductor is a handy platform that brings everything together to develop distributed apps, processes, and business flows. It’s great for managing microservice systems and gives a solid base for complex distributed apps.
With Orkes Conductor, you can use microservices to create flexible, scalable, and resilient apps, taking care of service discovery, load balancing, fault tolerance, and scalability. This way, developers can focus on what’s important—core business logic and innovation.
Need Help with Microservices?
Switching to a microservices architecture is a complex process, and managing is another challenge. So, having a team of experts who can guide you through the entire process is essential.
At Startechup, we offer expert consulting web services to help organizations successfully adopt and manage microservice architectures. Whether you need guidance in designing, building, testing, or deploying microservices, we have got you covered!
Contact us today to learn more about our services and how we can assist you with your microservices journey!
