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Microservices is the most popular development topic among readers of the NGINX blog. NGINX has been publishing regularly on microservices design and development for the past 2 years. To help you on your journey to adopting microservices, this post identifies some of the foundational posts we’ve published on the subject.

Many of our leading blog posts come from three series on microservices development. Our first series describes how Netflix adopted microservices enthusiastically, using NGINX as a core component of their architecture.

Netflix then shared their work with the open source community. The lessons they learned are described in three blog posts covering:

Source: Adrian Cockcroft
A cross-functional, DevOps-based approach is needed for
microservices development. Source: Adrian Cockroft

Our second series is Microservices: From Design to Deployment, which is a conceptual introduction to microservices. The series addresses practical concerns, such as:

These blog posts help you in building microservices applications and optimizing microservices performance.

To start migrating from a monolith to a microservices architecture, implement new functionality as microservices; continue routing requests for legacy functionality to the monolith until there is a replacement microservice
Pulling a single microservice out of a monolithic application

We’ve pulled this seven-part series into an eBook with examples for NGINX Open Source and NGINX Plus. The principles described form the foundation for our webinar, Connecting and Deploying Microservices at Scale.

Our third series began as a microservices example, but grew into our NGINX Plus‑powered Microservices Reference Architecture (MRA). The MRA is a microservices platform, a set of pre-developed models for microservices applications:

  • The Proxy Model puts a single NGINX Plus server in the reverse proxy position. From there, it can manage client traffic and control microservices.
  • The Router Mesh Model adds a second NGINX Plus server. The first server proxies traffic and the second server controls microservices functionality.
  • The Fabric Model is the most innovative. There’s still one NGINX Plus server in front, proxying traffic. But, instead of a second server to control the services, there’s one NGINX Plus instance per service instance. With its own instance of NGINX Plus, each service instance hosts its own service discovery, load balancing, security configuration, and other features. The Fabric Model allows SSL/TLS support for secure microservices communications with high performance, because individual NGINX Plus instances support robust persistent connections.
In the Fabric Model of the Microservices Reference Architecture from NGINX, NGINX Plus is deployed within each container and becomes the forward and reverse proxy for all HTTP traffic going in and out of the containers
The Fabric Model features an NGINX Plus instance paired with every microservice instance

Our strong focus on microservices will continue in 2017, beginning with an ebook detailing our Microservices Reference Architecture. To start experimenting with microservices yourself, start a free 30-day trial of NGINX Plus today. To stay up to date with our microservices content and more, sign up for the NGINX newsletter today.

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About The Author

Floyd Smith

Director of Content Marketing

Floyd Earl Smith has been involved in application development since the launch of the Macintosh and has written more than 20 books on hardware and software topics. He now writes for the NGINX blog, including contributing to blog posts and webinars about the NGINX Microservices Reference Architecture, a breakthrough microservices framework.

About F5 NGINX

F5, Inc. is the company behind NGINX, the popular open source project. We offer a suite of technologies for developing and delivering modern applications. Together with F5, our combined solution bridges the gap between NetOps and DevOps, with multi-cloud application services that span from code to customer.

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