Service-to-service communication for Cloud Foundry

Question

I need to deploy two node services to CF (each service in its own container). The apps need to communicate. How is it recommended to implement this communication? I can't find any guide which explains service-to-service communication in CF, and since it should deploy to the cloud I need some best practices. Some examples will be very helpful.

Answer 1

This is a classic question that always come to solve any enterprise application integration pattern and it comes down to the point that, what type of integration needs one has.

If an app want to have synchronous communication to get a real time response, RESTFul APIs are the most loved integration style of this age. But one also need to consider that, creation of huge numbers of APIs (which is the downside of going with Microservices based architecture) also brings-in the huge overhead of maintaining the set and locating the correct one. An API Gateway and a Service Discovery tools should be of help here. I am a novice about Blue-mix but you can surely host a Spring-Cloud-Eureka or Consul based Service Discovery on it to serve the purpose, and similarly Spring Cloud Zuul to have an API Gateway.

Another simple catch here is to ensure not to build one central service as fat spof to cater to whole of your microservices world but rather have many such services each catering to a contextually bound microservices.

On the similar line, if the need is to have async communication , message brokers such as - RabbitMQ, Kakfa should be the best and simplest integration style for apps to communicate. The same catch of not building a SPOF service but rather have separate service instances one each for a set of bounded microservices applies here as well, with all these instances being further federated for wider communication should be taken care of.

Answer 2

Your answer will depend on what kind of communication you want between your apps.

If you're looking to deploy a microservice-based architecture pattern for your Node services, ie server code that performs an independent, granular business function, I would recommend getting started reading the docs here and using the new Bluemix Developer Console .

Here there is a growing set of patterns and starters that you can use to understand and develop cloud native apps that can communicate to each other by exposing API endpoints compliant with the Open API specification and auto-generating SDKs for your omnichannel client applications.

After downloading the selected starter, you can modify the code to expose an API that performs the business logic that you need. Subsequently, you can run your project locally in a container or deploy it to Bluemix using the bx dev command line tool.

After setting that up, you will have cross platform, language independent communication between your microservices and client applications.