How To Effortlessly Adopt Microservices Using KrakenD

Introduction to the KrakenD API Gateway.

KrakenD is a modern open source API Gateway written in Golang. Currently, its performance is the fastest on the market thanks to its stateless architecture. This gives developers the flexibility to filter and manipulate responses from multiple services. Also, it comes with a lot of middlewares that help to secure transport, add authentication, throttle connections, and much more.

Consider this typical use case of KrakenD: You have a complex system with many services, and UI consumers want to call your backend. They need to do extra implementations to receive the responses from the server. Even if they’re interested in particular data only, they still have to wait for the whole response and then filter the data.

Here is how KrakenD comes into play. It adds a layer between your system and the client. Thanks to that layer, the consumer receives the information they want without having to change their implementation.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the main benefits of using KrakenD.

Merge Service Responses Into One

You can manipulate the content you receive from the backend before returning it to the client. Let’s see a simple example that illustrates how KrakenD gives you the flexibility to achieve this without any coding.

Prepare the backend data

I’m going to merge the filtered response of two services into one. Instead of writing the services myself, I’m going to use  JSONPlaceholder. It’s a handy fake API for testing and prototyping. It has a set of predefined resources that can be used to generate dummy data.

I’ve chosen the posts and comments services.

Open this URL in your browser to see one of the posts:

https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

#microservices #devops #programming

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Why Use WordPress? What Can You Do With WordPress?

Can you use WordPress for anything other than blogging? To your surprise, yes. WordPress is more than just a blogging tool, and it has helped thousands of websites and web applications to thrive. The use of WordPress powers around 40% of online projects, and today in our blog, we would visit some amazing uses of WordPress other than blogging.
What Is The Use Of WordPress?

WordPress is the most popular website platform in the world. It is the first choice of businesses that want to set a feature-rich and dynamic Content Management System. So, if you ask what WordPress is used for, the answer is – everything. It is a super-flexible, feature-rich and secure platform that offers everything to build unique websites and applications. Let’s start knowing them:

1. Multiple Websites Under A Single Installation
WordPress Multisite allows you to develop multiple sites from a single WordPress installation. You can download WordPress and start building websites you want to launch under a single server. Literally speaking, you can handle hundreds of sites from one single dashboard, which now needs applause.
It is a highly efficient platform that allows you to easily run several websites under the same login credentials. One of the best things about WordPress is the themes it has to offer. You can simply download them and plugin for various sites and save space on sites without losing their speed.

2. WordPress Social Network
WordPress can be used for high-end projects such as Social Media Network. If you don’t have the money and patience to hire a coder and invest months in building a feature-rich social media site, go for WordPress. It is one of the most amazing uses of WordPress. Its stunning CMS is unbeatable. And you can build sites as good as Facebook or Reddit etc. It can just make the process a lot easier.
To set up a social media network, you would have to download a WordPress Plugin called BuddyPress. It would allow you to connect a community page with ease and would provide all the necessary features of a community or social media. It has direct messaging, activity stream, user groups, extended profiles, and so much more. You just have to download and configure it.
If BuddyPress doesn’t meet all your needs, don’t give up on your dreams. You can try out WP Symposium or PeepSo. There are also several themes you can use to build a social network.

3. Create A Forum For Your Brand’s Community
Communities are very important for your business. They help you stay in constant connection with your users and consumers. And allow you to turn them into a loyal customer base. Meanwhile, there are many good technologies that can be used for building a community page – the good old WordPress is still the best.
It is the best community development technology. If you want to build your online community, you need to consider all the amazing features you get with WordPress. Plugins such as BB Press is an open-source, template-driven PHP/ MySQL forum software. It is very simple and doesn’t hamper the experience of the website.
Other tools such as wpFoRo and Asgaros Forum are equally good for creating a community blog. They are lightweight tools that are easy to manage and integrate with your WordPress site easily. However, there is only one tiny problem; you need to have some technical knowledge to build a WordPress Community blog page.

4. Shortcodes
Since we gave you a problem in the previous section, we would also give you a perfect solution for it. You might not know to code, but you have shortcodes. Shortcodes help you execute functions without having to code. It is an easy way to build an amazing website, add new features, customize plugins easily. They are short lines of code, and rather than memorizing multiple lines; you can have zero technical knowledge and start building a feature-rich website or application.
There are also plugins like Shortcoder, Shortcodes Ultimate, and the Basics available on WordPress that can be used, and you would not even have to remember the shortcodes.

5. Build Online Stores
If you still think about why to use WordPress, use it to build an online store. You can start selling your goods online and start selling. It is an affordable technology that helps you build a feature-rich eCommerce store with WordPress.
WooCommerce is an extension of WordPress and is one of the most used eCommerce solutions. WooCommerce holds a 28% share of the global market and is one of the best ways to set up an online store. It allows you to build user-friendly and professional online stores and has thousands of free and paid extensions. Moreover as an open-source platform, and you don’t have to pay for the license.
Apart from WooCommerce, there are Easy Digital Downloads, iThemes Exchange, Shopify eCommerce plugin, and so much more available.

6. Security Features
WordPress takes security very seriously. It offers tons of external solutions that help you in safeguarding your WordPress site. While there is no way to ensure 100% security, it provides regular updates with security patches and provides several plugins to help with backups, two-factor authorization, and more.
By choosing hosting providers like WP Engine, you can improve the security of the website. It helps in threat detection, manage patching and updates, and internal security audits for the customers, and so much more.

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#use of wordpress #use wordpress for business website #use wordpress for website #what is use of wordpress #why use wordpress #why use wordpress to build a website

Testing Microservices Applications

The shift towards microservices and modular applications makes testing more important and more challenging at the same time. You have to make sure that the microservices running in containers perform well and as intended, but you can no longer rely on conventional testing strategies to get the job done.

This is where new testing approaches are needed. Testing your microservices applications require the right approach, a suitable set of tools, and immense attention to details. This article will guide you through the process of testing your microservices and talk about the challenges you will have to overcome along the way. Let’s get started, shall we?

A Brave New World

Traditionally, testing a monolith application meant configuring a test environment and setting up all of the application components in a way that matched the production environment. It took time to set up the testing environment, and there were a lot of complexities around the process.

Testing also requires the application to run in full. It is not possible to test monolith apps on a per-component basis, mainly because there is usually a base code that ties everything together, and the app is designed to run as a complete app to work properly.

Microservices running in containers offer one particular advantage: universal compatibility. You don’t have to match the testing environment with the deployment architecture exactly, and you can get away with testing individual components rather than the full app in some situations.

Of course, you will have to embrace the new cloud-native approach across the pipeline. Rather than creating critical dependencies between microservices, you need to treat each one as a semi-independent module.

The only monolith or centralized portion of the application is the database, but this too is an easy challenge to overcome. As long as you have a persistent database running on your test environment, you can perform tests at any time.

Keep in mind that there are additional things to focus on when testing microservices.

• Microservices rely on network communications to talk to each other, so network reliability and requirements must be part of the testing.
• Automation and infrastructure elements are now added as codes, and you have to make sure that they also run properly when microservices are pushed through the pipeline
• While containerization is universal, you still have to pay attention to specific dependencies and create a testing strategy that allows for those dependencies to be included

Test containers are the method of choice for many developers. Unlike monolith apps, which lets you use stubs and mocks for testing, microservices need to be tested in test containers. Many CI/CD pipelines actually integrate production microservices as part of the testing process.

Contract Testing as an Approach

As mentioned before, there are many ways to test microservices effectively, but the one approach that developers now use reliably is contract testing. Loosely coupled microservices can be tested in an effective and efficient way using contract testing, mainly because this testing approach focuses on contracts; in other words, it focuses on how components or microservices communicate with each other.

Syntax and semantics construct how components communicate with each other. By defining syntax and semantics in a standardized way and testing microservices based on their ability to generate the right message formats and meet behavioral expectations, you can rest assured knowing that the microservices will behave as intended when deployed.

#testing #software testing #test automation #microservice architecture #microservice #test #software test automation #microservice best practices #microservice deployment #microservice components

Microservices Adoption Using Different Patterns

Microservice is an architectural style that made up of smaller (micro) applications that communicate with each other, through open protocols like HTTP. Microservices have a much simpler and direct communication mechanism. Microservices typically deployed Docker platforms in the cloud environment will get maximum benefit.

Microservices architecture’s main aim is to break down the applications into smaller applications for maintainability and address the particular functionality. Microservices are scalable, and the maintainability of the application was as typical in monolithic applications. Below are some of the benefits of microservices architecture

• Time to market for new functionality
• Seamless integrations
• Adoption of new technologies
• Resource (Hardware) utilization effectively
• Security
• API based functions for reuse effectively

In monolithic apps, all the functionalities are part of a single application and deployed as a single war/ear file. Earlier days, most of the applications are building by using the MVC design pattern. Microservice architectures create applications that remain maintainable in the long run since the applications are can modify and deploy without impacting other services leads to flexibility. Development and deployment efforts are increasing, and testing should perform for each component or Service in Microservice applications

The biggest challenge is deciding how to partition the exiting system into Microservices. Some strategies have to adapt to decouple the Microservices from existing Monolithic applications. Below are some of the patterns uses in the different domains while decoupling the applications. The patterns are widely used in all domains

• Decompose by Business Capability
• Decompose by Sub Domain
• API Gateway
• Aggregator
• Circuit Breaker
• Distribute Tracing
• Log Aggregator

#microservices #api gateway #circuit breaker #microservices adoption #aggregator #monolithic apps

What Is a Microservice Architecture? Why Is It Important Now?

We have been building software applications for many years using various tools, technologies, architectural patterns and best practices. It is evident that many software applications become large complex monolith over a period for various reasons. A monolith software application is like a large ball of spaghetti with criss-cross dependencies among its constituent modules. It becomes more complex to develop, deploy and maintain monoliths, constraining the agility and competitive advantages of development teams. Also, let us not undermine the challenge of clearing any sort of technical debt monoliths accumulate, as changing part of monolith code may have cascading impact of destabilizing a working software in production.

Over the years, architectural patterns such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Microservices have emerged as alternatives to Monoliths.

SOA was arguably the first architectural pattern aimed at solving the typical monolith issues by breaking down a large complex software application to sub-systems or “services”. All these services communicate over a common enterprise service bus (ESB). However, these sub-systems or services are actually mid-sized monoliths, as they share the same database. Also, more and more service-aware logic gets added to ESB and it becomes the single point of failure.

Microservice as an architectural pattern has gathered steam due to large scale adoption by companies like Amazon, Netflix, SoundCloud, Spotify etc. It breaks downs a large software application to a number of loosely coupled microservices. Each microservice is responsible for doing specific discrete tasks, can have its own database and can communicate with other microservices through Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to solve a large complex business problem. Each microservice can be developed, deployed and maintained independently as long as it operates without breaching a well-defined set of APIs called contract to communicate with other microservices.

#microservice architecture #microservice #scaling #thought leadership #microservices build #microservice

How To Effortlessly Adopt Microservices Using KrakenD

Introduction to the KrakenD API Gateway.

KrakenD is a modern open source API Gateway written in Golang. Currently, its performance is the fastest on the market thanks to its stateless architecture. This gives developers the flexibility to filter and manipulate responses from multiple services. Also, it comes with a lot of middlewares that help to secure transport, add authentication, throttle connections, and much more.

Consider this typical use case of KrakenD: You have a complex system with many services, and UI consumers want to call your backend. They need to do extra implementations to receive the responses from the server. Even if they’re interested in particular data only, they still have to wait for the whole response and then filter the data.

Here is how KrakenD comes into play. It adds a layer between your system and the client. Thanks to that layer, the consumer receives the information they want without having to change their implementation.

In this article, we’ll take a look at the main benefits of using KrakenD.

Merge Service Responses Into One

You can manipulate the content you receive from the backend before returning it to the client. Let’s see a simple example that illustrates how KrakenD gives you the flexibility to achieve this without any coding.

Prepare the backend data

I’m going to merge the filtered response of two services into one. Instead of writing the services myself, I’m going to use  JSONPlaceholder. It’s a handy fake API for testing and prototyping. It has a set of predefined resources that can be used to generate dummy data.

I’ve chosen the posts and comments services.

Open this URL in your browser to see one of the posts:

https://jsonplaceholder.typicode.com/posts/1

#microservices #devops #programming