Increase Microservices Agility Using a Unified Platform

Written by Harini Krish

Lead Technical Content Writer

Unifying governance, security, and discoverability across your microservices and APIs.

Governance, security, and discoverability are all critical challenges for organizations using or planning to use microservices. You can use service mesh to abstract the governance considerations behind microservices that primarily interact with one another. When combined with API management, you can fully manage, discover and secure all your services — including those that are externally facing.

These considerations regarding microservices are vital. Research show that 91% of organizations are using or have plans to use microservices. The benefits are clear — while a monolithic architecture is hard to develop and maintain, a microservices architecture allows for greater agility with its smaller, more targeted services.

However, microservices cannot function alone, and they often work together to compose larger applications. The integration patterns to accomplish these interactions have evolved from traditional hub-and-spoke enterprise application integration (EAI) to service-oriented architecture (SOA) and now, to a more API-led approach.

As an organization builds more microservices, complexity grows. The governance and security considerations behind microservice interactions are often custom coded into the service logic. Teams often build in different languages and deploy to multiple environments, and organizations are typically siloed in the way they manage their services.

What Microservices Got Right?

Dealing with monolithic applications and architectures can cause development organizations headaches and often creates slower, less-reliable applications and longer development schedules. Companies creating applications in this type of environment will struggle to deliver the experiences their customers expect.

However, this is not inevitable. Microservices are the progress of best-practice architectural principles. With a microservice based application architecture, you can build your applications to scale with your business and adapt to customer needs.

With a microservices approach, large complex applications can be divided up into smaller building blocks of executables that interact to offer the functionality of a highly complex application. To accomplish this, applications are broken down into smaller, independent services with strong network boundaries. These services are not dependent on a specific coding language, so development teams can use the language tools they are most comfortable with — accelerating application development.

How a Service Mesh Solves Microservices Challenges

A service mesh is an architectural design for microservices deployments. Its primary goal is to make service-to-service communications secure, fast, and reliable within a cluster. It also addresses the challenges created by microservices by drawing out common capabilities of security, fault tolerance, and management out of the service code.

Is a Service Mesh Enough?

Service mesh is viewed as a crucial component in helping solve the operational challenges in managing and governing microservices. According to Gartner and IDC, companies deploying microservices to production will require some form of service mesh capabilities in order to scale.

What Role Does API Management Play?

  • API gateways are protecting north-south traffic out of the Kubernetes cluster.
  • API security is applied to the gateway to identify malicious clients and payloads.
  • Developer portals to make services reusable to accelerate future projects.

Anypoint Platform is the #1 platform for integrations and APIs. It is used widely to implement a variety of integration use cases like microservices, SaaS integration, API Management, SOA, ESB, and more. With Royal Cyber’s Anypoint Service Mesh, you can extend the benefits of the application network to any service, not just those built leveraging the Mule runtime engine. This allows customers to:

Discover and Leverage Any Service in Any Architecture

  • Visualize microservice dependencies using the application network graph.

  • Empower innovation teams to build with technologies that best align with their skillsets.

  • Maximize adoption and reuse by adding microservices to Anypoint Exchange.

Centrally Manage and scale

  • Ensure resiliency across services with Istio traffic control policies.

  • Measure and optimize performance across all microservices with API analytics.

  • Integrate with existing continuous delivery or CI/CD pipelines.

Enable Security by Default

  • Ensure zero-trust with Istio and Envoy authentication and authorization policies.

  • Add additional layers of security for consumer facing services.

In this way, we are extending the power of our API management capabilities to all services. With Anypoint Service Mesh, you have the ability to secure your traffic from a single control plane.

Microservices are an important piece to making an enterprise more agile and flexible. However, organizations that rely on microservices alone will have difficulty managing the security and governance complexity of this type of architecture. Combine that with teams building in different languages and deploying to multiple environments, organizations will find themselves siloed in managing their applications and services.

A service mesh can solve many of the security and governance challenges. Royal Cyber can bring service mesh and API management together into a single platform like the MuleSoft Anypoint Platform — your organization can centrally manage and scale microservices, enable security by default, and allow developers to discover any service in any architecture. You may be interested in discovering the step-by-step process of how you can integrate MuleSoft Logging with Datadog.

Request for a free demo to learn how a service mesh fits into your microservices strategy and how MuleSoft Anypoint Service Mesh can help you extend your application network to any service. For more information, you can email us at [email protected] or visit www.royalcyber.com.

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