In this chapter, we will start building our application based on microservices now that we know why microservices are necessary for the development of our application and the advantages we can enjoy if we base the application on microservices.
The application that we will develop in this book (which is similar to Pokemon GO) is called Finding secrets. This application will be like a game using geolocation to find different secrets around the world. The entire world keeps a lot of hidden secrets and the players will have to find them as soon as possible. There are 100 different kinds of secrets, and they will generate and appear in different parts of the world every day, so the players will be able to find them by walking around different areas and checking to see if there are any kind of secrets nearby.
The secrets will be saved in the application wallet and if the player finds a secret that they already have in their wallet, they will not be able to collect it.
The players will be able to duel against other players if they are close. The duel consists of throwing a dice to get the highest number, and the player who loses will give a random secret to the other player.
In the subsequent chapters, the specific functions will be more detailed, but in this chapter, we only need to know how the applications works in order to have a general overview of the entire application to start building the basic platform based on microservices.
Creating an application based on microservices is not like a monolithic application. For this reason, we have to divide our functionalities into different services. To do this, it is important to follow an adequate design and structure each of the microservices according to its requirements.
The design takes care of dividing the application into logical parts and groups them according to their existing relationship. The architecture takes care of defining which concrete elements support each of the microservices, for example, where the data is stored or the communication between the services.
Throughout the book, we will follow the given structure for each microservice. In the following image, you will see the structure of one of the microservices, the rest of them are similar; however, some parts are optional:
All the requests for our microservices come from a REVERSE PROXY as this allows us to balance the load. Also, we use NGINX as a gateway for the API built in PHP. To reduce the load and increase the performance of PHP and NGINX, we can use a CACHE layer.
In case we need to execute big, resource consuming tasks, or the tasks do not need to be executed in a concrete time window, our API can use a QUEUE system.
In case we need to store some data, our API is responsible for managing the access and saving the data in our DATA STORE.
We can use Telemetry (it is a system that gets the stats from the container) and autodiscovery (it is a system that helps us to see which containers are working properly) to supervise the container ecosystem.