Automation

Use of automation is recommended when building a monolithic application, but it is absolutely necessary for microservices applications. Given the increased number of services that need to be built and deployed, it’s even more important to automate the build and deployment of the services. A widely accepted principle is that the first thing a team needs to build when starting a microservices project is the continuous delivery pipeline. Manual deployment takes a lot of time, and is the primary cause of failures in production. Multiply this issue by the number of services, and the chances of human error go up significantly. It is much better to write code or build a deployment pipeline than be responsible for manual deployments.

The automated pipeline can make these functions smoother and less error-prone:

• Builds

• Tests

• Deployments

• Rollback

• Routing & Registry

• Environments

All things should be automated and there should be no need for a deployment manual. Not only should we be concerned with automating the delivery of the application, we should consider automation for development. It should be easy for developers to provision environments, and friction due to a lack of automation in this area can impede development.