Top Microservices Frameworks in 2024: Overview

For the newbies who are reading this blog, microservices is the result of a development methodology in which a single big application is divided into smaller services each performing a specific function. Microservices are becoming very popular and 61% of respondents in an O’Reilly survey admitted that their organizations have been using microservices for more than a year and 28% have used microservices for about three years now lends credence to the fact.

Each of these services is independently deployed, they need minimum management, leverage distinctive data storage technologies, and support different programming languages. Needless to say, microservices are becoming a favorite with those organizations that are trying to gain more control while using large and complex monolithic applications.
Given below are some of the favorite frameworks that developers like to use while building microservices.

Spring Boot with Spring Cloud

This is a popular Java framework used for microservices development. With extensions such as Spring Cloud, developers can easily build full-stack microservices. The Spring Boot + Spring Cloud combination is a popular one and supports a large development community. Therefore, plenty of help is at hand for the developers. 

Spring Cloud supports many out-of-the-box facilities such as services discovery and load balancing which are invaluable for developers. A large number of collaborating components that are available in Spring Boot make it easy for building both small- and large-scale systems. The best part is that the developer can start with a simple architecture. The Inversion of Control property also allows developers to integrate Spring Boot easily with other frameworks. 

• Data Management

Spring uses different modules that help to easily integrate with popular databases. Spring JPA, Spring JDBC, Spring Apache Cassandra and Spring MongoDB are a few extensions.

• Failure- Handling Strategies

 When integrated with Resilience4J, Spring Boot provides many functionalities such as Circuit breakers, Timeout, Retry, Rate Limiters, Bulkheads, fallback handlers, etc. that can help to handle failures in distributed systems. 

• Observability features

The Spring Boot Actuator facility provides features such as health check, Metrix, and view logs.

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• Communication Styles

Spring has the capabilities to build reactive apps. Whilst it is easy to build rest API using Spring MVC, easy integration with MQ enables building asynchronous style services. Spring has modules that also allow it to build SOAP-based applications.

• Middle-tier Integration

Using various modules, Spring provides abstractions that can be integrated with any AMQP, Apache Kafka, ActiveMQ, or RabbitMQ.

• Integration with Tools 

Spring Boot allows integration with powerful tools such as Prometheus, Consul, Grafana, and Jaeger.

• Cloud-Native Support

It is easy to deploy on DevOps, Docker, Kubernetes, Etcd, and OpenTracing.

• Security Features

Spring Security offers good options such as support for OAuth2, the possibility to build stateful and stateless services, session management, key vault, and gateway patterns.

Other features:

• Spring Cloud Config offers distributed config management
• Service Discovery — Client and Server Side
• Performance monitoring— Catching support, Load Balancing, Clustering with Spring Cloud Cluster
• Communication Data Format —XML and JSON
• Testing — Spring Testing module, Mocking, and Profiling
• Learning Curve —The modularity characteristic allows an easy learning curve.

QuarkusIO

Another full-stack Kubernetes-native Java framework is Quarkus, which optimises Java particularly for containers and makes it a powerful platform for serverless, cloud, and Kubernetes environments. Quarkus is created for Java virtual machines (JVMs) and native compilation.

Redhat is supporting Quarkus, which is swiftly gaining momentum for building scalable, high-performance Java applications. Applications built on the Quarkus platform are known for their quick startup times.

If you want to study Quarkus in 2024, I highly recommend that you check out this Starting with Quarkus course by Antonio Goncalves, one of the Quarkus pioneers on Udemy. Many Java programmers are interested in trying Quarkus for fast and reactive Microservices. 

How SayOne Can Help

At SayOne Technologies, we have been helping enterprises to modernize their IT legacy systems with secure, independent, and agile full-stack microservices applications that we build using Java Spring Boot together with Spring Cloud extension. 

We build projects having simple systems that enable quick repairs and produce updates and upgrades with minimum or no downtime. We build applications by leveraging agile and DevOps methodologies. We provide active support and maintenance services that enhance the quality of our microservices applications development services.

Eclipse Vert.X

This is yet another popular Microservices services framework used by developers. This framework supports multiple languages and if any organization has Java and Kotlin, this framework could be their ideal choice for javascript developers. Vert. X is a toolkit for building reactive microservices that runs on the JVM.

Eclipse Vert.x is event-driven and allows the app to handle concurrency with just a small number of kernel threads. Vert.x also allows scaling with minimal hardware. The other cool features that this framework provides include is that it is lightweight with the core being 650kB in size and it is very fast.

Read our blog “Event-Driven Architecture - Fundamental for Digital Transformation”.

Vert.x is not an application server but is modular and simple. You can, however, create lightweight yet powerful and high-performance microservices using Vert.X.

Vert.x offers various components/Libraries to build Microservice applications such as Vert.x Service Discovery, Vert.x Circuit Breaker, Vert.x Config supports clustering and scalability, facilitates observability with Vert.x Health Checks component facilitates testing, offers gRPC Support with Vert.x gRPC module. Service Proxies allow isolation of functionalities and exposure on the event bus for consumption by other services. Vert.x is a polyglot and encourages DevOps methodology, which is a huge advantage. 

Oracle Helidon Microservices Framework

Helidon microservices framework is developed by Oracle. Helidon, a collection of Java libraries for writing microservices, there are two variants, Helidon MP and Helidon SE. Helidon is quite new and there is extensive documentation that is available. Spring Boot outperforms because of the many features it possesses.

Helidon MP, an implementation of the MicroProfile specification, it is a good choice for Java EE developers. Helidon SE is a compact toolkit embracing the latest Java SE features: asynchronous and functional programming, reactive streams, and fluent-style APIs. Helidon SE supports GraalVM native images that result in a small footprint and very fast startup. The REST framework is Helidon WebServer for Helidon. 

Other Helidon MP features to build Microservices applications:

• Helidon libraries interoperate with popular tools from the cloud-native space such as Docker and Kubernetes, Prometheus, OpenTracing, and Etcd.
• Helidon gRPC Server provides framework support for creating gRPC applications.
• The config component uses a Java API to load and process configuration properties.
• Health checks are done at regular intervals using external tools, such as orchestrators like Kubernetes. 
• Security measures to support authentication, authorization and audit are available.

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Go Micro (Golang Microservices Framework)

It is a pluggable RPC-based library that provides some of the fundamental building blocks to code microservices in Go. It implements service discovery functions using the following: consul, communication via HTTP, and encoding using proto-rpc or json-rpc and Pub/Sub.

Read our blog :  Infusing Retail Edge Architecture with Microservices-Benefits

Go Micro addresses the main requirements that are required for building scalable systems. This library turns the microservice architecture pattern into a set of tools that act as the platform’s building blocks. Micro provides simple abstractions for complex distributed systems that are understood by developers.

Micro is a pluggable toolkit that addresses these issues such as constantly evolving technology and changing infrastructure stack. 

Some of the runtime features are:

• The micro API gateway provides powerful routing via pluggable and discovery handlers to serve WebSockets, HTTP, grpc, publish events, and more.
• The CLI gives provides interactive commands to help you understand what’s happening with your microservices.
• A transparent service proxy built on Go Micro and the MUCP protocol provides different functions such as load balancing, Offload service discovery, transport, message encoding, middleware, and broker plugins to a single location. You can run it as a standalone proxy or alongside your service.
• Micro provides predefined templates to get started quickly. It is recommended to start in the same way and build identical services to increase productivity.
• The SlackOps bot runs on your platform and allows you to manage your applications from Slack. The microbot gives you the chance to communicate with your team via messaging.
• The web dashboard allows you to explore the services, describe endpoints, specify request and response formats and even query the services directly.

Molecular (NodeJS Microservices Framework)

The Molecular NodeJS microservices framework works best for a JavaScript developer. Molecular is a powerful, fast and modern framework that helps you build reliable, efficient, and scalable services.

Some main features:

• Supports event-driven architecture with load balancing
• It supports a built-in service registry and allows dynamic service discovery
• Supports load-balanced requests and events (random, round-robin, latency, CPU-usage, sharding)
• Offers fault tolerance features such as Bulkhead, Circuit Breaker, Timeout, Retry, Fallback)
• Offers a built-in caching solution (MemoryLRU, Redis, and Memory)
• Supports pluggable loggers (Console, Pino, File, Bunyan, Debug, Winston, Datadog, Log4js)
• It has a built-in metrics feature with reporters
• There is also a built-in tracing feature with exporters (Console, Event, Datadog, Jaeger, Zipkin)

Quarkus Microservices Framework

This is a new framework that is well suited for Kubernetes. This is a container-first, cloud-native framework by Red Hat for writing Java microservices. It is tailored for HotSpot and GraalVM crafted from the best Java libraries/standards. The goal with which Quarkus was made was to facilitate Java to become the leading platform in serverless and Kubernetes environments. Also, it offers developers a unified imperative and reactive programming model to address a wider range of distributed application architectures optimally.

Micronaut

Micronaut is a full-stack microservices framework that is Java-based and designed for building modular and easily testable microservices. Developed by the Grails framework creators, it has been made specifically for building real-world applications using Spring, Spring Boot, and Grails. Micronaut comes with many tools required for building full-featured microservices applications. Other features include:

Read our blog :  What Kind of Challenges Can Microservices Help You Overcome

• Auto-Configuration and sensible defaults
• Inversion of Control (IoC) and Dependency Injection 
• Configuration/Configuration Sharing
• HTTP Routing
• HTTP Client with client-side load-balancing
• Service Discovery

 Simultaneously, Micronaut aims to avoid the disadvantages posed by frameworks like Spring Boot, Spring, and Grails by offering:

• Reduced memory footprint
• Fast startup time
• Minimal use of reflection
• Easy unit testing
• Minimal use of proxies

Lightbend Lagom Microservices Framework

Lagom is an open-source framework that facilitates building Reactive microservices systems using Java or Scala. Lagom builds on Akka and Play technologies which are used in the production of many demanding and modern applications.

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Lagom has an integrated development environment that allows the builder to focus on solving business problems. The builder can use just a single command to build a project, to then start supporting components and microservices, and also the Lagom infrastructure. The environment also has a hot-reload feature to observe changes to the code.  

Services created with Lagom define better development responsibilities that increase agility, allow more frequent releases, thus reducing time to market, and enable the creation of systems having reactive qualities such as resilience, responsiveness, scalability, and elasticity that meet demanding user expectations and also make the best use of modern computing environments.

AxonIQ Microservices Framework

Axon allows development Java applications from a monolith without significant refactoring into event-driven microservices.

Axon supports a programming model as well as advanced infrastructure to provide support for enterprise-ready operations for the programming model such as for scaling and distribution of mission-critical business applications. The Axon Framework and Axon Server (the infrastructure part of Axon) are both open-sourced.

Axon Framework, a Java microservices framework, helps you build microservices architecture using Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles. It also allows you to implement microservices patterns such as CQRS and event-driven architecture models.

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Axon meets the most demanding enterprise requirements such as efficient scaling of event storage, clustering, security, load-balancing, globally distributed data centers, metrics, service discovery, third-party integration, and monitoring.

Ballerina Microservices Language

Ballerina is a distributed programming language that allows writing distributed applications. You can write decoupled services from the ground up. It is also easy to write network applications using Ballerina. As Ballerina is an open-source programming language, it is easy for programmers to write software that just works.

Overall, Ballerina allows a structured system that allows for a loose coupling when compared to traditional languages.

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