Organizations are adopting microservices for building distributed applications that support agile delivery and scalable deployment, on-premise or in the cloud. However, the rapid adoption comes with its share of challenges. Product development teams should strategize to overcome these challenges while designing a product, and not as an afterthought.

This paper presents strategies to overcome these challenges using an Open Source framework, Istio.

Microservices adoption trends

A survey conducted by NGINX reveals that 70% of organizations are using or exploring microservices. The microservices architecture market is expected to reach $32.01 billion by 2023, growing at a CAGR of around 16.17%. Several large enterprises today are bringing microservices into their mainstream and soon there will be exponential growth across industries.

Microservices adoption challenges

The challenges stem from the fact that each application has multiple microservices, multiple versions, multiple instances and perhaps is implemented across different technologies.

This causes:

• Large component footprint: The integration of multiple microservices and their API connections adds risks, since each integration is also a potential point of failure
• Deployment complexity: Highly distributed, multi-instanced, multi-versioned with complex interactions and more moving parts lead to increased probability of failure
• Monitoring and tracing service problems: Due to highly distributed deployment and dynamically scaling services, it becomes a mandate to have a robust runtime monitoring mechanism and maintain a centralized log
• Service discovery: Microservices can explode in numbers when multiple instances and versions of services coexist. This necessitates efficient service registry/discovery and traffic routing
• Security concerns: With multiple exposed service endpoints, microservices become soft targets for hackers and crackers making it essential to have a robust security mechanism
• Shift in testing strategy: Traditional testing strategies may not be effective for microservices applications

Microservices technology stack – orchestration and beyond

Service Management using service mesh – enables better insights and control

Service level control over the traffic flow, configurable traffic routing, detailed telemetry, constant monitoring, graceful handling of failures, strong authentication and access control are needed to enable better insights and control across all services. Benefits of service mesh architecture here will be:

• Uniform observability
• Fine grained traffic control
• Inter service security enablement
• Decoupled functional responsibilities
  

Various models that support a service mesh pattern are :

Library: Each microservice has a library that includes the service mesh features. Mostly suited if services are written in one language. E.g. Hysterix

Node agent: An agent runs on every node, realizing the service mesh features and can serve varied types of workloads. The technology can be heterogeneous. E.g. Kubelet, Linkerd's mesh

Sidecar: In this pattern there is a sidecar that is attached to the main application, co-locating the related tasks and complementing the main application by providing the supporting service mesh features. E.g. Istio with Envoy, NginMesh with Istio

Out of these, the sidecar pattern has some advantages that makes it a preferred choice in certain frameworks.

• The sidecar supports a heterogeneous set of languages and frameworks
• The sidecar extends the services with absolutely no changes to the main service code
• No impact on the communication latency

Service Management through Istio service mesh

Istio, created by Google, IBM and Lyft, is a service mesh that provides behavioural insights and operational control over the service mesh using (a) a data plane and (b) a control plane (refer to the diagram below).

Wipro’s capabilities and accelerators

The Scalable Platform Engineering team in Wipro has developed microservices based products and platforms across industries. We help customers accelerate development of microservices based applications, with our capabilities such as:

• Orchestration Framework for automating deployment, scaling, and management of containerized applications
• Foundational Microservice Enabler Platform built by integrating the Scalable Orchestration Framework and Istio, which are enabled for Cloud and On-premise deployments
• Specialized services, which include architectural consulting, technology modernization, cloud native and cloud neutral microservices application building expertise and DevOps pipeline
• Readily available trained, skilled and experienced resource pool on microservices, container technologies and tools.

Conclusion

Organizations, using microservices strategy for product modernization and new product development, can benefit by adopting a service mesh framework, like Istio. Wipro, with its deep expertise and IP, is excited to work with organizations on their journey of microservices adoption, and deliver great products with faster time to market and reduced costs.

Roopa Shenoy M.

Senior Architect – Product Software & Software Services,

Industrial & Engineering Services, Wipro Limited

Roopa has 17 years’ experience in EngineeringNXT and Microsoft Technologies. She has expertise in delivery, pre-sales and solution development of enterprise and system level software across industry domains. She is currently handling key initiatives around scalable platforms and providing solutions in product development, product modernization and product sustenance areas.

Radhakrishna Singuru

DMTS - Senior Member - Product Software & Software Services,

Industrial & Engineering Services, Wipro Limited

Radha has 22 years’ experience in application and system software development in varied areas, ranging from Cloud and virtualization technologies, scalable platforms, SDN, L2/L3 switching and stacking software, etc., across multiple industry domains. He currently heads the Scalable Platforms, Software Products and Payments Practice.