Top Tips for Ensuring Microservices Security within Your Applications

Tips for Ensuring Microservices Security within Your Applications

Think innovation, and microservices is the first thing which comes to mind. Microservices has confirmed to be an innovative way to accelerate and enhance software development — this term specifically refers to the application subcomponents, which are formed separately to focus on one specific function. For example, an e-commerce store will have multiple microservices, some of which might pertain to order collection, account recovery, account accesses, and inventory management (including shipping). Big organizations like Amazon, eBay, Netflix, Twitter, rely heavily on microservices to make their e-commerce stores a success story.

Microservices are like containers; they can be reused, are scalable, and can contain different coding languages with ease. Applications can be adjusted easily, without changing the whole program. Considering the possibilities available with microservices security issues don’t come as a surprise. As is the case with every element of technology, there are security issues with microservices, which should be addressed to ensure maximum output in the long run.

Tips to Enhance Microservices Security for Better Performance:

Design Visibility into the Entire Infrastructure
To create a robust security model it is essential first to create a map of each service, and how they are linked to each other. This way, any dependencies can be mapped out, and it will help compare against any aberrations at a later date.

Follow the Concept of ‘Defense in Depth’
Layer each of your network security defenses; firewalls are not enough to defend all your microservices. It’s vital to secure component by component; during this stage, pinpoint any of the sensitive functions and lock them down with a defense-in-depth approach. An example would be to build fine-grained firewalls between services so that containers have safe dividers between the various services.

Security Can be Diversified
Each microservice is like a little container which needs to be locked to prevent unauthorized people from gaining access to the coding and the data. Having said this, what is the best way to secure each container? Diversify your security tactics for each microservice, and don’t keep the same pattern while ensuring the security codes. This way, each microservice is well secured, and there is little or absolutely no need to worry about security.

Enforce APIs for Enhanced Security
Since microservices are all small components joining to make one big app; it’s essential to understand how each part talks to the other over the network. These communications are the biggest challenges which should be recognized. If the application’s services are rigged with sensitive data, then you might need to check if your network is compliant to the required rules and regulations. APIs are the link between each of these components, so it’s necessary to ensure the security of the APIs and keep it up to date at all times. Well-built APIs use features like throttling, access tokens, and authentication features, which can be enforced when the time arises.

Use the Encryption Strategy Best for Your Network
HTTPS transport security is one of the best methods to protect data in transit. When the data is transferring externally from your network, HTTPS transport security can come to your rescue. Measures should also be taken to ensure any data related to microservices is encrypted at rest using robust encryption algorithms. While this might not be a foolproof solution, it is one of the strategies which can be employed in the transit period.

Limit Accesses to Immediate Users
Security is all about letting the right people into a system. If you have a lot of components which need specialized skills, then you need to limit access to the bare minimum. Don’t grant access to all the components to everyone working in the program; limit the access for best results.

Use Automation for Best Results
Manual efforts are a strict no-no in this world of competition. The higher the manual efforts involved, the more restricted would be the interest in the program. Hasten the process and remove all manual efforts — automation is the key to success.

Make Testing a Recurring Feature
Microservices heavily support Agile development methodologies, which can be used for the rapid deployment of new and improved services. Since technology is an ever-changing need, security features also need to be nimble, to be able to adjust as the technological needs change.

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Everything you need to Know about Serverless Microservices in AWS

Everything you need to Know about Serverless Microservices in AWS
It’s a well-known fact that handling multiple servers can be a painful experience, especially in the short run. Multiple servers mean multiple developers will need to work on the same code, making the code repository difficult to handle in the long run. One of the biggest disadvantages in the long run is the resiliency, which causes the whole back end to get bogged down, making the website crash and slow down eventually.

What are AWS Microservices?
The microservices architecture has been designed to solve all forms of front end and back end issues. The back end is wired to communicate with various small services through a network of HTTP or other messaging systems. Since the setup is rather elaborate, the whole procedure is time consuming and can take considerable time to setup. Post the setup formalities, a developer can benefit immensely by optimizing work through work parallelization and improved resiliency. Each developer can access and develop their own microservice, without worrying about code conflicts.

What does going Serverless mean?
The concept of going serverless is relatively new and has seen the day of light just recently. In an ideal situation, the traditional back end was deployed on a group of servers. Such an approach had its own set of advantages. It allowed the developers to control their own servers along with the infrastructure behind it. However, like everything else, it contributed a lot towards the cost, making it an inefficient solution for companies. Add a set of engineers to build, maintain and run the infrastructure, and your budget will increase manifold.

With the introduction of the serverless technology, all these problems can be solved considerably. You can make use of a service which will run your code, as well as take care of all your maintenance issues. What you do end up paying for is the time it usually takes to process each request thrown at the code. For this purpose, AWS offers the AWS Lambda service, which is somewhat similar to the functionality of Microsoft’s Azure Function and Google’s Cloud Functions.

What Services aid the Serverless Microservices?
Amazon API Gateway: API is a gateway service that offers the option to use a configurable REST API in the form of a service. You get to author your needs and create it in the form of a code. Say, for example, you decided what would happen if a particular HTTP Method is implemented and called on a certain HTTP Resource. In this case, say you want to execute and implement a Lambda function if the HTTP request comes through. API Gateway helps in mapping input and output data through a series of formats. Thankfully API Gateway is a fully fledged service, which is managed extensively, allowing you to pay for only what you use.

AWS Lambda Services: Being a pay as you go service, AWS Lambda is a well-managed service hub. It allows you to get rid of over provisioning costs, as well as avoid the need of any boot time, patching, as well as load balancing.

Amazon DynamoDB: Amazon DynamoDB is a document store wherein you can look up values through their key values multiple Availability Zones or data centers to bring about a subtle consistency. Like Lambda, it too is a 99% managed service, while the remaining 1% is free to perform reading and writing of code.

The Request Flow and how it Works with Microservices
In an ideal situation, it’s imperative to understand how the data flows through serverless microservices. The user’s HTTP hits the API Gateway; the API Gateway checks the HTTP request and figures if the request is valid or not. Through this approach, it makes multiple requests within the database and executes the business logic.

Another system which aids the processing of information within the serverless environment is the AWS CloudWatch. The AWS CloudWatch stores metrics in the form of numbers and text information in the form of logs. It also allows you to define your alarms over your metrics. At any given point of time, if your system begins to default, you can get an instant notification of the default using AWS SNS, making the process seamless and streamlined.

Summary
AWS Microservices are well balanced and fully managed, thereby allowing you to concentrate on performing multiple forms of other operational tasks. Through the concentration on other important tasks, the functionality of the code can be improved manifold, as it is performed through a series of automated tasks.

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Microservices Architecture Advantages and Challenges
microservices building an-effective business model with aws architecture

Microservices: Building an Effective Business Model with AWS Architecture

Microservices: Building an Effective Business Model with AWS Architecture

One buzz-word that has been spreading across the IT industry for the last few years is ‘Microservices’. However, these are not completely new approach to the IT infrastructure, but a combination of best proven methods of concepts such as nimble software development, service related architecture and API-first design (building the API first and developing the web application on top of that).

Microservices can be simply defined as ‘a self-contained process fulfilling a unique business capability’.

Following are some characteristics of a microservice architecture:

– Redistributed data management: Microservices don’t rely on a single schema in their central database. They have different views for various data models and are unique in the ways they are developed, deployed and managed.

– Functional independence: Modules in the microservice architecture can act independently without affecting the functionality of other components. They can be changed or upgraded without affecting other microservice modules.

– Simplicity: Each component is built on a set of capabilities fulfilling a specific function. Depending on the level of complexity, it can be split up into two or more independent components.

– Flexible and heterogeneous approach: Microservice gives the teams a freedom to choose the best tools and methods for their specific problems, be it programming languages, operating systems or data stores.

– Black box design: Microservice components potentially hide the details of their complexity from other components. The internal communication between the components happen with very well defined APIs to prevent implicit data dependencies.

– DevOps: This means, when you build it, you operate it. This helps the developers to be in close contact with their consumers, precisely understanding their needs and expectations.

Benefits and challenges of Microservices:

When addressing the agility and scalability issues of traditional monolithic architecture deployments, microservices benefit consumers in various ways such as:

Microservices create a sophisticated working environment where small and independent teams take the ownership of a particular service. Hence, empowering them to work quickly and independently shortening the cycle times.

Having a Devops culture by merging the development and operational skills removes the hassles and contradictions, providing an agile deploying environment. Making it easy to test and implement new ideas faster, henceforth creating a low cost of failure.

Dividing a software into small and well defined modules can be maintained, reused and composed easily, giving out a great output in-terms of quality and reliability.

Each service can be developed and implemented with their best-suitable programming languages and frameworks, and can be finely tuned in-line with aptly performing service configurations.

Failure isolation is made easier with microservices as techniques such as health-checking, caching or circuit breakers allow you to reduce the blast radius of a failing component.

Despite all these advantages we have discussed above, there are some disadvantages of these microservice approaches as diverse systems invite more complexity.

Determining the right boundaries for a microservice architecture is crucial when you migrate from a traditional monolithic architecture.

Versioning for a microservice architecture can be challenging.

Developing an effective team structure, transforming the organization to follow a devops approach and streamlining an effective communication between them can be challenging.

The more the number of microservice modules, the more is its complexity in interactions.

In a microservice approach, we no longer run a single service, but a combination from dozens to even hundreds of services. This increases operational complexity to a greater level.

AWS, one of the most-preferred cloud service platforms has number of offerings those address the challenges of a microservice architecture.

Effective Scaling and Provisioning of resources:

AWS microservice architecture employ on-demand resources that are readily available and provisioned when needed. Multiple environments can co-exist correspondingly, so that you need not employ difficult forecasting methods to guess the storage capacity of the microservices.

You only pay for what you use:

You can potentially experiment the new features or services, and roll them out if they aren’t successful for your business goals in AWS microservice architecture. This helps you find the innovation best suiting your business goals and also fulfills a microservice’s goal of achieving high agility.

Versatile programmability:

AWS microservices come with a specific API, Command Line Interface (CLI) and SDKs for different programming languages. Even complete architectures can be cloned, scaled and monitored through custom codes and programming languages. And, in-case of any failure, they are capable in healing themselves automatically.

AWS microservices provide you with a flexible environment to programmatically build custom tools and deploy the suitable resources, thereby reducing the operational costs and efforts.

Infrastructure as a Code:

AWS microservice architecture lets you to describe the whole infrastructure as a code and allows you to manage it in a version-control environment. You can redeploy any specific version of an infrastructure at any time, and compare the quality and performance to any application version to ensure they are in sync.

Reduce operational complexity with Continuous deployment and delivery:

Managing multiple application cycles in parallel can lead to operational complexity. AWS microservices offer automation of the provisioning and deployment process, enabling the adoption of continuous integration. This ‘continuous integration’ of the development part of the life-cycle can be further extended to the operations part of the life-cycle.

Managed services with AWS microservice architecture:

One of the key benefits of cloud infrastructures is it relieves you of the hassles of provisioning virtual servers, installing and configuring the softwares, and dealing with scaling and reliable backups. Monitoring, scaling and security are already built into the AWS microservices, helping you to further reduce the operational complexity of running microservice based architectures.

Service-oriented and Polyglot approach:

Each AWS microservice focuses on solving a specific and well-defined problem by communicating with other services using clearly defined APIs. This approach breaks down the complex infrastructure into simpler bricks or modules, preventing the need of duplication of the processes.

With microservices definitely helping to break down the complex business process into simpler modules, AWS cloud microservices further reduces the operational and interactional complexity of the microservices, helping you to define and use the most ‘appropriate’ solution for your specific business problem.

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The Difference between SOA and Microservices?

We’ve had a few articles over the years on the differences and similarities between SOA and microservices. Some suggest there is much to be learned from SOA whereas others believe that distancing microservices from SOA is more beneficial. Furthermore, Neal Ford, amongst others, has suggested that moving from monolithic architectures to a services-based approach may be easier than going to microservices. There has not been much activity recently around the overall “SOA or microservices” debate until RedMonk’s Stephen O’Grady published an article on the subject. In it O’Grady suggests that the size of the service is not the deciding factor, similar to what others have argued over the years, such as Dan North, and separately Jeppe Cramon stated:

Read more..

Microservices Architecture Advantages and Challenges

I was asked to review an architecture diagram for an application that would use MicroServices. I could find few REST APIs in the diagram connecting to a single database.

That raised tons of questions:

1. Only one database?
2. What if the database is down?
3. All services will be hosted in a single server?
4. What if I need to upgrade the server?

What is MicroService?

It will not be an easy task to define MicroService in a single statement. The definition depends on different viewpoints & requirements. However, most of the prominent characteristics of MicroServices are:

• They encapsulate a customer or business scenario.
• They are developed by a small development team.
• They can be written in any programming language and use any framework.
• OOPS concept is implemented in loosely coupled manner
• The Codebase is small that are independently versioned, deployed, and scaled.
• They interact with other MicroServices over well-defined interfaces and protocols.
• They have unique names (URLs) that can be used to resolve their location.
• They remain consistent even after failures.

SOA vs Microservices

Microservice is not only SOA. If Microservices are to be defined, is simply an ideal, refined form of SOA. SOA focuses on imperative programming, whereas MicroServices architecture focuses on a responsive-actor programming style. It’s something like decomposing a large monolithic service into smaller independent services which are self deployable, sustainable & scalable.

Microservice Architecture – Overview

Just as there is no formal definition of the term MicroServices, there’s no standard model that you’ll see represented in every system based on this architectural style. But you can expect most MicroService systems to share a few notable characteristics.

1. Software built as MicroService can be broken down into multiple components, so that each of these services can be deployed, and redeployed independently without compromising the integrity of an application.
2. The MicroServices style is usually business and priorities centric. Unlike a traditional monolithic development approach, MicroService architecture utilizes cross-functional teams. In MicroServices, a team owns the product for its lifetime, as in Amazon’s oft-quoted maxim “You build it, you run it.”
3. MicroServices have smart endpoints that process info and apply logic, and dumb pipes through which the info flows. They receive requests, process them, and generate a response accordingly.
4. Decentralized control between teams, so that its developers strive to produce useful tools that can then be used by others to solve the same problems.
5. MicroServices architecture allows its neighbouring services to function while it bows out of service. This architecture also scales to cater to its clients’ sudden spike in demand.
6. MicroService is ideal for evolutionary systems where it is difficult to anticipate the types of devices that may be accessing our application.
MicroService architecture uses services as small components and is usually business centric; focuses on products functionality; has smart end points but standard input/output mechanisms; is decentralized, as well as decentralized data management; is designed to auto scale & is resilient to failure; and, of course is an evolutionary model.

Knowledge Needed to Implement MicroService

To conclude our brief overview of microservices here, we need to have a basic grasp of the following concepts:
• Object Oriented Programming (OOP) with loose coupling techniques
• Web service / API/ REST—a way to expose the functionality of your application to others, without a user interface
• Service Oriented Architecture (SOA)—a way of structuring many related applications to work together, rather than trying to solve all problems in one application
• Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)—the idea of code with one focus
• Interface Segregation Principle (ISP)—the idea of code with defined boundaries.

Advantages of MicroService

• Evolutionary Design – No need to rewrite your whole application. Add new features as MicroServices, and plug them into your existing application
• Small Codebase – Each MicroService deals with one concern(SoC) only – this result in a small codebase, which means easier maintainability
• Auto Scale – freedom to scale only the loaded service, as that service will handle the bigger load.
• Easy to Deploy – Deploy only the needed codebase, instead of redeploying the entire application.
• System Resilience – If some of the services go down only some features will be affected, not the entire application.

Challenges of MicroService

The MicroService architecture helps a lot, but comes with its own challenges.
• Inter Service Communication – MicroServices will rely on each other and they will have to communicate. A common communication channel needs to be framed using HTTP/ESB etc.
• Health Monitoring – There are more services to monitor which may be developed using different programming languages.
• Distributed logging – Different services will have its own logging mechanism, resulting GBs of distributed unstructured data.
• Transaction Spanning – MicroServices may result in spanning of transactions over multiple services & database. An issues caused somewhere will result is some other issues somewhere else.
• Finding root cause – Distributed logic with distributed data increases the effort of finding the root cause. The performance related root cause can still be managed using APM tools like New Relic & Dynatrace.
• Cyclic dependencies between services – Reproducing a problem will prove to be very difficult when it’s gone in one version, and comes back with a newer one.

Conclusions

MicroServices architectural style is an important idea – one worth serious consideration for enterprise applications. A Monolithic architecture is useful for simple, lightweight applications. It will be a maintenance nightmare if used for complex applications. The MicroServices architecture pattern is the better choice for complex, evolving applications despite the drawbacks and implementation challenges.

MicroServices is prevalent for a long time and recently we are seeing increase in their popularity. There are a number of factors that lead to this trend with scalability being probably the most important one. Utilization of MicroServices by “big guys” like Amazon, NetFlix, eBay, and others, provides enough confidence that this architectural style is here to stay.