🚀 Blackbird is here! Accelerate your API development with AI-powered Code Gen, Instant Mocking with Prod-Like Environments. 👉 Start your free trial

Blog

The latest posts and insights about Ambassador Labs - our products, our ecosystem, as well as voices from across our community.

Microservices

Creating a Microservice? Answer these 10 Questions First

Microservices appear simple to build on the surface, but there’s more to creating them than just launching some code running in containers and making HTTP requests between them. Here are 10 important questions that you should answer about any new microservice before development begins on it – and certainly before it gets deployed into production. 1. How will it be tested? Microservices have an interesting set of benefits and drawbacks when it comes to testing. On one hand, unit testing a small service that represents a well-defined piece of functionality is likely a lot easier than testing an entire monolithic application. On the other hand, verifying the quality of a whole application that is composed of many microservices can represent a significant amount of testing complexity: instead of running a single command to test the code running in one process, a large number of integrated dependent components must be running first, verified as healthy, and stay running throughout the tests.

February 2, 2016 | 15 min read
Building Resilient Microservices Blog

Microservices

Building Resilient Microservices from the Fallacies of Distributed Computing

Microservices are the latest hot trend in software architecture – and with good reason. They create a path to Continuous Deployment in cloud-native environments, giving organizations increased business velocity and flexibility. However, that speed can lead engineers to focus too much on the business features they are more easily churning out and forget that their new highly distributed system could in fact be more prone to failures than would a similarly-scoped monolith. This is because resilience is an oft-overlooked concern in microservices development. A wish to make systems more resilient was at the heart of the “Fallacies of Distributed Computing”, originally penned by L Peter Deutsch in 1994 when he was at Sun Microsystems, and augmented by a few others since then. The fallacies read as follows: The network is reliable.

January 19, 2016 | 11 min read