Microservice architecture is one of the most popular software architecture styles that enables the rapid, frequent, and reliable delivery of large, complex applications. There are numerous learning materials on the benefits of microservices, design, and implementations. However, there are very few resources that discuss how to write your code to cloud-native platforms like Kubernetes in a way that just works. In this article, I am going to use the same microservice E-Commerce sample used in the Rethinking Programming: Automated Observability article and discuss Ballerina’s built-in Kubernetes support to extend it to run in Kubernetes platforms.

The sample code covers the implementation of an e-commerce backend that simulates the microservices required to implement searching for goods, adding them to a shopping cart, doing payments, and shipping.

E-Commerce Backend Microservices Architecture

Code to Kubernetes

Docker helps to package the application with its dependencies while Kubernetes helps to automate deployment and scaling and to manage containerized applications. Kubernetes defines a set of unique building blocks that collectively provide mechanisms to deploy, maintain, and scale applications.

On the other hand, the developer has to write code in a certain way to work well in a given execution environment. The microservices have to be designed, architected, and implemented in a way that performs well in a platform like Kubernetes. Otherwise, the application code will not be well-fitting to the Kubernetes building blocks. In other words, deployment should not be an afterthought, we should design and write our code to run in Kubernetes.

Let’s look at potential Kubernetes deployment architecture for the above e-commerce application.

#microservice architecture #microservice #kubernates #ballerina #programing language