Microservices

Over the last few years, our industry has moved away from monolith architectures to microservice architectures. For a good number of reasons, this trend continues to remain strong. One issue you may encounter with creating microservices if you are not using a monorepo is that you may have to build a new project whenever you need to add a new microservice to your app ecosystem. Creating a new project may include creating new repositories in Bitbucket/Github, configuring a continuous integration pipeline, adding build/deploy scripts, building the project based on some folder structure that has been determined by the team. It can also involve configuring how the service captures logs, communicating with other services, exposing an Open API definition, configuring a docker file, having a helm chart to deploy to k8s, installing external packages, and so on. ...

Recently I was asked to review a Web API written in Node.js. The API exposes an authentication endpoint, this authentication endpoint must be highly available, responsive, and it cannot become a bottleneck, otherwise, the user experience is severely impacted. Unfortunately, the endpoint had become a bottleneck and was impacting the overall performance of the application. Upon further review, it was determined that the problem was coming from a hashing function that takes the user’s password, hashes it, and compares the result with the stored hashed password from the database. Here is the code without the implementation details. ...