Hard Code

The 12-factor app guideline was published by Heroku the platform as a service (PaaS) provider (now a part of Salesforce.com). These were a set of principles/best practices that one needed to follow to build applications on the Heroku PaaS. Over time, this has become the de-facto standard for building web applications on the cloud or more precisely cloud-native applications. The original 12-factor app guideline is available at 12factor.net and was not really meant for microservices. In this post, I will try to go over the 12-factor app guidelines and check how they fit into microservices architecture. 1 – Codebase One codebase tracked in revision control, many deploys The application codebase should be maintained in a version control system (VCS).All developers should have easy access to VCS.There is only one codebase per application in the VCS, but there can be multiple deployment copies of this application codebase. For example, an application can be deployed in di...

A real life story In my previous post introducing microservices , I wrote about this insurance product I was working on at the beginning of my IT career. It started off very simple as a layered application. Well it was not simple, the learning curve with J2EE of that time was indeed high. Just like microservices, it was all shiny new thing. The application started with just a couple of us. Then we started adding features. The product was sold. I was happy, I went to install and implement it at customer sites. It was fun. Then customers demanded more and more features. New features were also required to address new business challenges and compete with established players. So we kept adding more bricks and mortar on that same structure. 2+ years flew by and I realized that we have about 20 odd modules, 500+ tables, and nearly a team of 100+. We had several customers in the US and elsewhere using this product. It was really a big success in such a short span of time. But I also rea...

The whole idea of microservices revolves around building a large application from a set of small modules which are composed around business functions.Let me share one concrete example to understand this better. Figure 1, shows the classic layered architecture that I was introduced to back in 2001 when I was building a large product for the insurance providers. Figure 1 - Classic Architecture of the Insurance Product Only three key modules from the product are shown here for simplicity. This was a very large product with several other modules. The UI was developed using JSPs (HTML, Stylesheets, Javascript). The UI was packed in a war file. The business logic was written using stateless session beans. The data access layer was all entity beans. The EJBs and the war file was then packaged inside an ear file and finally deployed in a Java application server. This application was also modular, but horizontally.So that ear file contained everything – the UI, business logic, the data...

Microservices is still a new and evolving subject. Hence, there is a lot of confusion regarding the term and concepts around it. A lot of clarity is starting to emerge of late, as teams try to embrace this new architectural style.I know people tend to think and preach that since the application that they have developed recently expose few REST web services, they are doing microservices. Some have even installed API Gateway in front of the Rest web services layer. Trust me this is still a layered cake classic architecture which is just opposite of microservices. The naysayers call this a monolith . I have some reservations against that word. Later I will explain the reason for the same. Figure 1 - Classic Architecture Microservices is an architectural style. In this style, an application (generally large and complex one) is built using a small set of loosely coupled services which implement specific business capabilities. Well, we have been doing this for years, haven't w...

Spring Boot is a great gift for all Spring developers. The productivity boost is enormous. It also makes it extremely easy to unit tests slices of your layered application. This feature is available from Spring Boot 1.4.x onwards. In this post, I am going to focus only on unit testing of Spring MVC classic controller i.e non-REST controller. Spring Boot test slice support for MVC controller is enabled by the following annotation This tells Spring MVC test framework that we only intend to test EmployeeController So it will only make the web MVC components (controllers, interceptors etc) available with mocking support. For more details of this annotation please refer to the Javadoc here . In the example above, we are testing the request to copy the Employee. Mockito is used to create and inject the mock objects. Spring takes care of the mock objects, dependencies for us. This makes it extremely easy to write unit tests for classic Spring MVC controllers. Note that for quic...