11 Pathways to scalability

We’ve spent the whole book working towards a production microservices application, so where to now? It’s time to see what microservices can offer us in the future.

Throughout this book, we’ve taken many shortcuts that helped us get started quickly and cheaply with microservices. These shortcuts make it simpler to learn microservices and to bootstrap our fledgling application. Even though FlixTube is a simple application built with a relatively simple process, we are still using microservices, and this is an architecture that provides us many pathways towards future scalability.

In this chapter, we discuss how to manage a growing microservices application. How do we scale up to a bigger development team? How do we scale up to meet growing customer demand? We also need to talk about basic security concerns and how they relate to microservices. Then, we’ll briefly touch on what it takes to convert an existing monolith to microservices.

11.1 Our future is scalable

11.2 Scaling the development process

11.2.1 Multiple teams

11.2.2 Independent microservices

11.2.3 Splitting the code repository

11.2.4 Splitting the continuous delivery (CD) pipeline

11.2.5 The meta-repo

11.2.6 Creating multiple environments

11.2.7 Production workflow

11.3 Scaling performance

11.3.1 Vertically scaling the cluster