Well-Architected Microservices

A Bit of Background

Based on my learnings and experience working with various large enterprise customers over the years, I have been putting together a checklist of items that has helped me to build, run and scale microservices efficiently and securely.

To give it a well-formed structure, I took an inspiration from the AWS Well-Architected Framework and came up with this version to align it to the microservices world.

Here is the Checklist: https://github.com/bbideep/well-architected-microservices/blob/main/well-architected-checklist.md

In some cases organizations might have already established well-defined internal tools and processes to on-board, build, and run microservices on platforms of their choice. In other cases, these need to be built to meet the specific requirements of a given organization. This transformation is a long and time consuming journey.

I hope this helps to quickly identify and address the different areas of building and running your microservices.

What is it?

The AWS Well-Architected Framework empowers architects with design principles and architectural best practices for running workloads in the cloud. It also provides additional lenses that can be used for certain industry and domain specific workload architecture assessments.

While the Well-Architected Framework covers a much larger and broader scope, this version is intended to enable teams to focus on the specifics required to build and run microservices on a platform like Kubernetes. Although, it contains a few references to Kubernetes it is meant to be generic enough to be applied to microservices irrespective of the platform.

What it is NOT?

This is not a guidance on how to write efficient code, development best practices, or a way to teach microservices architecture design patterns. Idea is to look at the various aspects of an overall architecture using the Well-Architected Framework pillars, but from Microservices standpoint (or Lens!).

The ‘How’ part of meeting the requirements/goals is beyond the scope of this framework and best left to the organizations and teams to implement.

Something to Think About

Probably, this list can be used as a Custom Lens within the AWS Well-Architected tool.

Contributions

Kindly submit an issue or a pull request or simply open a discussion with your inputs, suggestions, or anything that I might not have thought about or covered so far.

Also published here.