All articles tagged #architecture

There are lots of posts trying to show how simple it is to get started with Kubernetes. But many of these posts use complicated Kubernetes jargon for that, so even those with some prior server-side knowledge might be bewildered. Let me try something different here. Instead of explaining one unfamiliar matter (how to run a web service in Kubernetes?) with another (you just need a manifest, with three sidecars and a bunch of gobbledygook), I'll try to reveal how Kubernetes is actually a natural development of the good old deployment techniques.

If you already know how to run services using virtual machines, hopefully, you'll see that there's not much of a difference in the end. And if you're totally new to operating services at scale, following through the evolution of the technology might help you as well with the understanding of contemporary approaches.

As usual, this article is not meant to be comprehensive. Rather it's an attempt to summarize my personal experience and how my understanding of the domain has been forming over the years.

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Disclaimer: despite the controversial title, this article is not trying to show that RPC is a superior approach to REST, or GraphQL is superior to RPC. Instead, the goal of the article is to give you an overview of the approaches, their strengths and weaknesses. The final choice anyway will be a trade-off.

Even though HTTP is an application layer (i.e. L7), protocol, when it comes to API development, HTTP de facto plays the role of a lower-level transport mechanism.

There are multiple conceptually different approaches on how to implement an API on top of HTTP:

• REST
• RPC
• GraphQL

...but the actual list of things an average API developer needs to be aware of is not limited by these three dudes. There are also JSON, gRPC, protobuf, and many other terms in the realm. Let's try to sort them out, once and for all!

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Traefik is The Cloud Native Edge Router yet another reverse proxy and load balancer. Omitting all the cloud-native buzzwords, what really makes Traefik different from Nginx, HAProxy, and alike is the automatic and dynamic configurability it provides out of the box. And the most prominent part of it is probably its ability to do automatic service discovery. If you put Traefik in front of Docker, Kubernetes, or even an old-fashioned VM/bare-metal deployment and show it how to fetch the information about the running services, it'll automagically expose them to the outside world. If you follow some conventions of course...

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How services talk to each other?

Imagine you're developing a service... For certainty, let's call it A. It's going to provide some public HTTP API to its clients. However, to serve requests it needs to call another service. Let's call this upstream service - B.

Obviously, neither network nor service B is ideal. If service A wants to decrease the impact of the failing upstream requests on its public API success rate, it has to do something about errors. For instance, it could start retrying failed requests.

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