Microservices: From Design to Deployment, a Free Ebook from NGINX

We’re happy to announce the release of a new ebook from NGINX, Microservices: From Design to Deployment, by Chris Richardson and Floyd Smith. Download your copy now.

Microservices architecture is the new state of the art in application development and deployment. Microservices enable architects, developers, and operations people can meet the needs of users for continually updated feature-rich, capable, and robust apps.

The architecture of NGINX and NGINX Plus is uniquely suited to the development of microservices apps, from initial implementation to a complete suite of services. But how do you tie it all together?

This ebook will help you find the best microservices design strategies for your applications, show you how to begin refactoring monolithic applications into microservices, and demonstrate how NGINX and NGINX Plus can support your transition to microservices.

The ebook’s chapters cover the key topics in microservices design and development:

Foreword – Introduces microservices, NGINX and its relevance to microservices, and describes the book’s chapters.
Chapter 1: Introduction to Microservices – A clear and simple introduction to microservices, from its perhaps overhyped conceptual definition to the reality of how microservices are deployed in creating and maintaining applications.
Chapter 2: Using an API Gateway – An API Gateway is the single point of entry for your entire microservices-based application, offering an API for each of the microservices. NGINX Plus can effectively be used as an API Gateway with load balancing, static file caching, and more.
Chapter 3: Inter-Process Communication in a Microservices Architecture – Once you break a monolithic application into separate pieces – microservices – the pieces need to speak to each other. And it turns out that you have many options for inter-process communication, including representational state transfer (REST). This chapter gives the details.
Chapter 4: Service Discovery in a Microservices Architecture – When services are running in a dynamic environment, finding them when you need them is not a trivial issue. In this chapter, Richardson describes a practical approach to solving this problem.
Chapter 5: Event-Driven Data Management for Microservices – Instead of the unified data store (or two) found in a typical monolithic application, each microservice maintains its own unique data representation and storage. This gives you great flexibility, but can also cause complexity, and this chapter helps you sort through it.
Chapter 6: Choosing a Microservices Deployment Strategy – In a DevOps world, how you do things is just as important as what you set out to do in the first place. Richardson describes the major patterns for microservices deployment so you can make an informed choice for your own application.
Chapter 7: Refactoring a Monolith into Microservices – In a perfect world, you would always get the time and money you need to convert core software into the latest and greatest technologies, tools, and approaches, with no real deadlines. But you may well find yourself converting a monolith into microservices, one… small… piece… at… a… time. Richardson presents a strategy for doing this sensibly.
Resources – Key NGINX resources for microservices.