ACP Assignment 2 Specifications (Essay)
18.02.2024
This assignment has been designed to see your understanding of overall patterns, technology, and application in the microservice / cloud area.
As we were talking very much about services there are 2 main questions:
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1) What to consider when implementing a microservice architecture approach?
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2) How could you use Kafka in an event-driven service-based architecture?
Answering those would be, if done the classic way, a very elaborate, research-intensive task and as many of you will be using tools for this, the thought was to reverse the process...
Thus, you will be provided with answers generated by ChatGPT for these questions, which were edited to some extent to focus on the relevant parts (and omit some things not talked about).
Your task now is:
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1) Find arguments for (or perhaps against) some statements. If you think things are good or disagree, tell why.
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2) Find and elaborate on references (for either) and show your thoughts
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3) What is your vision, where do you see applications and use-cases, dangers?
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4) Write in a structured way, using some formatting (sub-header, etc.) to break up your essay. Some bullet-point use is ok, where appropriate.
The main idea should be to see what you personally think about the statements, what you consider relevant background and necessary side-knowledge.
Please limit your responses to 1,400 words in total and clearly separate both topics (where the word-count can be freely shifted between the two parts).
This is a very liberal essay where there is no right or wrong-answer just good and better attempts to solve it.
Marking:
This essay task has a maximum mark of 30 / 100 points in relation to the entire ACP course. It will be marked according to the Rubrik
ACP Assignment 2 Specifications (Essay)
ChatGPT answer for “What to consider when implementing a microservice architecture approach”:
Implementing a microservices architecture approach involves careful consideration of various factors to ensure success. Here are key aspects to consider:
1. **Business Domain Decomposition**:
Identify and decompose different business domains within your application into separate microservices. Each microservice should be responsible for a specific business function or capability, enabling better alignment with organizational goals.
2. **Service Boundaries**:
3. **Data Management**:
Define clear boundaries for each microservice to ensure loose coupling and high cohesion.
Avoid creating monolithic services or overly chatty interactions between services, as this can
lead to complexity and hinder scalability.
Decide how data will be managed within the microservices architecture. Options include
database per service, shared databases with appropriate isolation mechanisms, or polyglot
persistence. Choose the approach that best fits the data access patterns and scalability
requirements of your application.
4. **Communication Protocols**:
Determine how microservices will communicate with each other. Use lightweight protocols
such as HTTP/REST, messaging systems like Kafka or RabbitMQ, or gRPC for efficient and
scalable communication. Consider the trade-offs between synchronous and asynchronous
communication based on latency, reliability, and consistency requirements.
5. **Service Discovery and Routing**:
Omitted
6. **Fault Tolerance and Resilience**:
Design microservices with fault tolerance and resilience in mind. Implement retry strategies,
circuit breakers, and fallback mechanisms to handle failures gracefully and prevent cascading
failures across the system. Consider leveraging distributed tracing and monitoring tools to
detect and diagnose failures in real-time.
7. **Monitoring and Observability**:
Omitted
8. **Security**:
Omitted
ACP Assignment 2 Specifications (Essay)
9. **Deployment and Orchestration**:
Omitted
10. **Team Organization and Culture**:
Align your team structure and culture with the principles of microservices architecture.
Organize cross-functional teams around individual microservices to promote autonomy,
ownership, and accountability. Foster a culture of collaboration, experimentation, and
continuous improvement to drive innovation and agility.
11. **Documentation and Communication**:
Omitted
By considering these factors during the implementation of a microservices architecture, you
can build a scalable, resilient, and maintainable system that meets the needs of your
organization and users.
ACP Assignment 2 Specifications (Essay)
ChatGPT answer for: “How could you use Kafka in an event-driven service-based
architecture?”
In an event-driven service-based architecture, Kafka serves as a powerful messaging system facilitating communication between microservices through the use of events. Here's how Kafka can be effectively utilized within such an architecture:
1. **Event Bus**:
Kafka acts as a centralized event bus, enabling asynchronous communication between microservices. Each microservice can publish events to Kafka topics, and other microservices can subscribe to these topics to consume the events. This decouples the producers and consumers of events, allowing for greater flexibility and scalability.
2. **Event Sourcing**:
Kafka can be used for implementing event sourcing, where changes to the state of a microservice are captured as a sequence of events. These events are stored in Kafka topics and can be replayed to reconstruct the state of the microservice at any point in time. This pattern enables auditability, traceability, and the ability to recover from failures.
3. **Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS)**: Omitted
4. **Real-time Data Processing**: Omitted
5. **Event-Driven Workflow Orchestration**:
Kafka can be used to orchestrate complex workflows across multiple microservices by modeling each step of the workflow as an event. Microservices subscribe to relevant events in Kafka topics and execute their part of the workflow when the corresponding events are received. Kafka ensures reliable delivery and ordering of events, even in distributed environments.
6. **Fault Tolerance and Scalability**: Omitted
7. **Integration with External Systems**:
Kafka Connect, a framework for connecting Kafka with external systems, allows microservices to integrate with various data sources and sinks. Microservices can use Kafka Connectors to ingest data from databases, message queues, IoT devices, and other systems into Kafka topics, enabling seamless data integration and interoperability.
ACP Assignment 2 Specifications (Essay)
By leveraging Kafka in an event-driven service-based architecture, organizations can build scalable, resilient, and flexible systems capable of processing high volumes of data in real- time, facilitating rapid innovation and adaptation to changing business requirements.
ACP Assignment 2 Specifications (Essay)