Businesses grow and scale which impacts the architecture of their applications and the way that their applications evolve. One architectural approach that’s generating a considerable amount of buzz (and contributing to the enterprise software renaissance) is microservices. Conventionally, Ruby on Rails is known by its monolithic approach, but we are starting to use it for microservices. We will discuss using Ruby on Rails effectively in a micro services architecture in this blog post.
- Introducing Microservices Architecture
First, let’s take a look at what microservices architecture is, before getting into how it all applies to Ruby on Rails. When we work on a microservices setup then we divide an application into small, independent services and communicate them through APIs. Each service is focused on a specific business function, allowing for:
Scalability: You can scale services independently of one another.
Flexibility: Different technologies are used by teams for different services, so that each service is optimised for its assigned task.
Resilience: It doesn’t mean that failure in one service take down the whole application.
- There are many reasons why to select Ruby on Rails for micro services.
While Ruby on Rails is often associated with monolithic applications, it has several features that make it a strong candidate for microservices architecture:
a. Rapid Development
The good thing with Ruby on Rails is that you can develop faster; it is therefore apt to create your microservices fast.
Convention over Configuration: Rails follows conventions and allows you to ramp up fast with quick setup, rather than spending time to build separate services.
Rich Ecosystem of Gems: With the large set of gems, integration of features can be done very quickly, letting teams just do what they need to do: building features rather than boilerplate code.
b. RESTful API Design
The underlying architecture of Rails, inspired by RESTful principles, makes easy to create and consume APIs that are central to the microservices architecture.
Built-in Tools: Rails gives you built in JSON support for responses and JSON routes for API requests, making the exposure of a service endpoint a lot more simple.
Versioning Support: Developers can use versioning strategy they want to manage changes in API effectively without breaking backward compatibility.
c. Strong Community Support
The Ruby on Rails community is quite active and vibrant, one which brings you many easy to use plugins and libraries.
Documentation and Tutorials: It offers comprehensive documentation which the developers can very quickly troubleshoot issues and adopt the best practices also.
Community Contributions: It’s a community that actively shares knowledge and makes it easier to find a solution that will suit a need for a particular microservices challenge.
- How to Use Ruby on Rails in Microservices at Its Best
To maximize the effectiveness of Ruby on Rails in a microservices architecture, consider the following best practices:
a. Service Isolation
They should be isolated and focused on a single business function. It’s also separated so you can deploy and scale them independently.
Database Per Service: Each microservice should ideally have its database. By doing so, we prevent tight coupling and support flexible data management strategies.
b. Use of API Gateways
We need to implement an API gateway that will route requests to the right microservices. This makes client side interactions more secure and easier.
Centralized Authentication: It provides an Authentication and Authorization mechanisms and acts as an API gateway as a Single entry point for clients.
c. Monitoring and Logging
In a microservices architecture, real problem comes in when you are unable to understand which service is responsible for what and what exactly is the situation. You need help to debug and associate a problem to the specific functionality, as the system cannot be in isolation. That makes monitoring and logging crucial.
Centralized Logging Solutions: To help with aggregation of logs from different services in order to help track down issues use tools like ELK (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Splunk.
Performance Monitoring: Performance monitoring tools have to be implemented to log the health and performance of individual microservice.
d. Containerization
Deploying Ruby on Rails Microservice might consider containerizing tools such as Docker. Each service runs in its own isolated environment on containers, which guarantees a consistent delivery across any environment.
Ease of Scaling: It is easy to scale up or down a container based on demand to improve resource management.
- Real-World Use Cases
Several companies have successfully implemented Ruby on Rails in microservices architecture:
GitHub: GitHub’s reputation may mostly be attached to its monolithic application, but it has leveraged microservices to support some particular features, which are better scaled and developed independently.
Shopify: This platform uses Ruby on Rails as a framework as well as microservices to provide its spread out set of features and high traffic scalability.
- Challenges and Considerations
While Ruby on Rails is a strong contender for microservices architecture, there are challenges to be aware of:
Performance Concerns: Being an interpreted language, Ruby will not quite live up to the superlative performance of compiled (and strict) languages in certain, high load situations. It all needs to be carefully optimized and load balanced.
Increased Complexity: When we need to manage multiple microservices, the complexity of deployment, versioning and service discovery increases. But you need a solid infrastructure.
Conclusion
Microservices architecture can be a right way to go about with Ruby on Rails since it supports rapid development with RESTful API and a solid community. By following best practices and by taking advantage of the framework’s strengths, teams can create scalable and maintainable applications that meet the requirements of modern business world.
The tech landscape changing has brought forth adoption of microservices with Ruby on Rails into liability, giving businesses an edge to innovate fast and be quick to react to changes in the market. If you have a new project or are transforming an existing application, Ruby on Rails has the features and capabilities to make its life easy in a microservices world.