Chapter 9. Securing a microservice

In this chapter, you’ll expand on previous examples by adding various types of security to them. First you will learn about the different kinds of security that you might need to consider when designing and developing microservices.

9.1. The importance of securing your microservice

Securing your microservice is a critical task that needs to be thought out from the beginning of development. Not doing so early results in greater development time for integrating security later. Why? Not designing for security results in code that might need major refactoring to do so at a later date.

Though not taking security into account before development on a typical Enterprise Java application can easily add months to the development schedule, at least with microservices you usually have a lot less code to be refactored. Even so, isn’t it better to design for security up front and save time?

9.1.1. Why is security important?

As enterprise developers, we’re often called on to develop myriad applications, with the end user of the application varying between internal or external, and sometimes both. Figure 9.1 shows a microservice used by a small group of internal users.

With these requirements, it’d be fair to determine that you can ignore security, right? Wrong!

9.2. Working with Keycloak

9.3. Securing the Stripe microservice

9.4. Capturing user authentication

Summary