This is in continuation to my previous blog with the same topic… https://julianfrank.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/how-could-future-apps-look-like/ … So why again??
One of my pet project was going complicated beyond control to the extent that I hardly remember why I wrote the code in a particular way :sigh: … Hence I’ve been looking for converting my tiny yet complicated monolithic application into a micro service application! Looked around and found istio a few months back and love the level of policed flexibility it provides. This is great for enterprise environments with relatively large teams handling the whole new stack… Sadly for my project that was way too much overhead and complexity for a relatively few features that I was trying to build…
Then I discovered moleculer. This is a nice framework that has all the fundamental features of micro-service ecosystem ticked and yet relatively small and less complicated for my weekend project needs…You can read about its features at a glance at http://moleculer.services/docs/0.13/ … I moved some services -> got into trouble -> cried out for help -> got support from @icebobcsi and others in its gitter.im/moleculerjs/moleculer channel -> now my app is back on track…. Very impressed!
To add to the benefits, the capability to merge and separate services across nodes means that I can code in a system with all services in one node… When deploying to production, I can split the services into separate nodes and make then run in separate container or vm instances… The Framework cares nothing about where you host except that they are able to reach each other over the network. To make things simple you can start with service discovery over TCP Broadcast! Of course for large scale deployment, other mechanisms like NATS, MQTT, Redis etc would be a better fit. My only quip was that this is locked to NodeJS. I Hope that in future, other cloud friendly languages like Golang is also supported…
Back to the topic… My idea of apps being Universally Discover-able is already a possibility Now!
What is left is the service (which I referred to as app in my previous blog) to be self-aware and adapt to work conditions as per needed….
Just imagine a situation where we got five services as part of our application: A, B, C, D, E
Now imagine a situation that the app is bombarded with two users with one user targeting A while the second user using a mix of services
A self-Aware application would in this situation split itself into multiple nodes, letting the first node focus on user 2 while creating copies to handle the high demand from user 1…
When the load is removed, the services move back to a minimal node instance back to original size….
Currently this is facilitated by K8S with careful engineering from IT. But in future I believe, the framework would take care of deciding how the service behaves and the process of mitosis by itself… Am I just day-dreaming?? I don’t know !!
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