Microservice frameworks

Microservices are already in the main stream. When developing microservices, there are some cross-cutting concerns that need to be implemented, such as externalized logging, tracing, embedded HTTP listener, health checks, and so on. As a result, significant efforts will go into developing these cross-cutting concerns. Microservices frameworks are emerged in this space to fill these gaps.

There are many microservices frameworks available apart from those that are mentioned specifically under the serverless computing. The capabilities vary between these microservice frameworks. Hence, it is important to choose the right framework for development.

Spring Boot, Dropwizard, and Wildfly Swarm are popular enterprise-grade HTTP/REST implementations for the development of microservices. However, these frameworks only provide minimalistic support for large-scale microservices development. Spring Boot, together with Spring Cloud, offers sophisticated support for microservices. Spring Framework 5 introduced the reactive web framework. Combining Spring Boot and Spring Framework 5 reactive is a good choice for reactive style microservices. Alternatively, Spring Streams can also be used for the microservices development.

The following is a curated list of other microservices frameworks:

• Lightbend's Lagom (www.lightbend.com/lagom) is a full-fledged, sophisticated, and popular microservices framework for Java and Scala.
• WSO2 Microservices For Java - MSF4J (github.com/wso2/msf4j) is a lightweight, high performance microservices framework.
• Spark (sparkjava.com) is a micro framework to develop REST services.
• Seneca (senecajs.org) is a microservices toolkit for Node JS in a fast and easy way similar to Spark.
• Vert.x (vertx.io) is a polyglot microservices toolkit to build reactive microservices quickly.
• Restlet (restlet.com) is a framework used to develop REST-based APIs in a quick and efficient way.
• Payra-micro (payara.fish) is used to develop web applications (war files) and run them on a standalone mode. Payra is based on Glass Fish.
• Jooby (jooby.org) is another micro-web framework that can be used to develop REST-based APIs.
• Go-fasthttp (github.com/valyala/fasthttp) is a high performance HTTP package for Go, useful to build REST services.
• JavaLite (javalite.io) is a framework to develop applications with HTTP endpoints.
• Mantl (mantl.io) is open source microservices framework come from Cisco for the microservice development and deployments.
• Fabric8 (fabric8.io) is an integrated microservices development platform on top of Kubernetes, backed by Red Hat.
• Hook.io (hook.io) is another microservices deployment platform.
• Vamp (vamp.io) is an open source self-hosted platform to manage microservices that relies on container technologies.
• Go Kit (github.com/go-kit/kit ) is a standard library for microservices using the Go language.
• Micro (github.com/micro/micro) is a microservice toolkit for Go language.
• Lumen (lumen.laravel.com) is a lightweight, fast micro-framework.
• Restx (restx.io) is a lightweight, REST development framework.
• Gizmo (github.com/NYTimes/gizmo) is a reactive microservices framework for Go.
• Azure service fabric (azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/service-fabric/) has also emerged as a microservice development platform.

This list does not end here. There are many more in this category, such as Kontena, Gilliam, Magnetic, Eventuate, LSQ, and Stellient, which are some of the platforms supporting microservices.

The rest of this book will focus on building microservices using Spring Framework projects.