Scalability and faster time-to-market are important considerations that have compelled many firms to choose microservices design for handling operations in SAP Commerce Cloud. It is helping ecommerce businesses to effectively manage multiple aspects of operations by maintaining cost-efficiency and flexibility.
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With constant evaluation of technical architecture patterns, CTOs have found microservice architecture a clear path to embracing e-commerce operations. Implementing this microservices architecture will lead to numerous benefits, including decoupled management, scalability, flexibility in choosing the right tech stack, and fault tolerance. However, thinking of a switch from a monolithic architecture is never an easy task. It necessitates careful planning and an understanding of bounded contexts and code responsibilities.
So, we are investigating the best practices for extending SAP Hybris’ features and capabilities by integrating microservices architecture through this blog.
Understanding Microservices Architecture
Under the microservice design approach, the structures are coupled into self-contained units that are deployed and managed independently. Each service performs a business function within a comprehensive application ecosystem. The components will run independently without interrupting the other core parts through modular development that does not affect the entire system.
Unlike monolithic architecture, microservice allows communication through APIs, which ensures a cohesive, decoupled service. Operating on a flexible approach, this architecture is developed in any programming language, scaled as per individual demand, and maintains robustness while replacing or updating the data. These three categories of microservices architecture including:
- Domain microservice
- Integration microservices
- Unit-of-work microservices
Microservice in SAP Commerce Cloud enables developers to have independent responsibilities and decentralized data administration. Here are some common features of this architecture in the context of SAP Hybris:
- Developing API-Driven Gateways: Microservices architecture interacts via APIs synchronously with other systems that provide clear endpoint documentation for service communication. In the SAP ecosystem, API gateway Kyma is frequently utilized for communicating the services across two points.
- Event-Driven Microservices: This type of architecture perfectly complements the event-centric nature of operations like order management and inventory updates in e-commerce businesses. It works by creating and communicating events, allowing microservices to react to them.
- Service Mesh: For complex architectures, a service mesh accelerates service-to-service communication like Istio. An infrastructure layer handles complexities like security, load balancing, and monitoring.
- Serverless Functions: Many event-driven tasks in SAP Commerce Cloud are leveraged with serverless functions. Microservices help developers be less dependent on the underlying architecture while executing specific functions through event responses.
- Stateless and Stateful Microservices: In stateless microservices, the call request is independent and does not require the preservation of any interaction. Stateful microservices will retain information that needs to be retrieved later, which will help maintain the context in conversations.
Benefits of Implementing Microservice Architecture in SAP Commerce Cloud
Compared to monolithic design, microservice architecture takes an agile approach to manage applications in modular components. Here are some prime benefits of using this architecture into SAP Commerce Cloud:
- Scalability: The independent operations of services under microservices allow the DevOps team to develop exciting components without worrying about downtime or outages. They can also choose the most suitable tech stack without worrying about compatibility issues.
- Improved Fault Tolerance and Resilience: The services of microservices architecture are independently running into the SAP solution, it makes sure that other components of the systems are not impacted from single failure. This reduces the risks of downtime for developers.
- Quick Deployment: Any changes made to the architecture require a redeployment in case of a monolithic pattern. But the microservices architecture in SAP Commerce Cloud will allow faster releases since the work is independent. In this manner, the decoupling services promote agility, which means you can swiftly roll out updates with minimum disruption.
- Enhanced Team Productivity: No doubt, this kind of architecture promotes a sense of ownership to the teams by making them responsible for separate deployment. Teams are not burdened with the complexities of the entire system, which helps maintain the quality of service.
- Fast Time-to-Market: Developers can employ this “microsurgery” into the architecture without causing interference with other codes, which would reduce the ripple effects of the overall SAP solution. So, new technologies and features can be adopted quickly without fear of outages.
10 Best Practices for Implementing Microservice Architecture in SAP Commerce Cloud
Here are some of the best practices that you can adopt while implementing microservices architecture in SAP Commerce Cloud:
1. Start With Domain-Driven Design for Strong Foundation
With domain-driven design, you can create boundaries between different domains, ensuring that each domain service is aligned with a business capability. This can help break down the e-commerce solution with a well-defined aggregate root that relates to the domain’s central object. For instance, in an order service, the aggregate root is order itself.
2. Follow Single Responsibility Principle (SRP)
In software development, the SRP rule defines each class as having a single responsibility to alter. This can make the software more understandable and manageable. The modules need to be decoupled to increase the chances of forming a clear and concise interface. For instance, an e-commerce portal might have multiple services with single responsibilities that do not need to be integrated with one another as it will increase the complexity.
3. Decoupling Services with APIs
Microservice architecture’s core competency is decoupling services. SAP Commerce Cloud allows communication between two services through well-defined APIs such as RESTful and GraphQL. Since the services are loosely coupled, the changes in one system will impact others. You can implement API gateways to create a central point of communication for authentication and control service discovery.
4. Keep Asynchronous Communication between Microservices
There are synchronous and asynchronous communications in microservices. Synchronous communication in e-commerce platforms takes place through a series of steps while placing an order. Asynchronous communication will occur at the fulfillment stage when the customer notification is processed. You need to maximize asynchronous communication where there is no dependency on other components, which increases the efficiency of the application.
5. Data Storage Separation
One of the best practices in microservices is to store data in a separate database rather than a common database for monolithic architectures, which is a logical separation of data. This approach is regarded as decentralized data management, which allows users to have full independence of data storage. It will reduce latency and enhance the system’s security.
6. Fault Tolerance with Circuit Breakers
As already discussed, fault tolerance is the key advantage of microservices, which must be implemented correctly to eliminate potential service failures. You need to use circuit breaker patterns to avoid cascading failures. Also, you can disable non-critical functions when the dependent service is unavailable. Use a retry mechanism for failing services with exponential backoff.
7. Using Container Orchestration Framework
Containerization and orchestration tools are best when it comes to managing the microservice architecture. In SAP Commerce Cloud, Docker is used for containerization and Kubernetes for orchestration, which can balance load and automatically scale services. These tools provide a way for consistently building and deploying services in whatever language they are coded in. These tools will also facilitate monitoring and logging tools, which substantially helps reduce the architectural complexity.
8. Continuous Integration/Continuous Deployment (CI/CD)
If you want your microservice architecture to function properly, consider using CI/CD pipelines, which are typically used for testing, integrating, and automating code releases. In order to reduce the risk of downtime, users can also employ blue-green deployment methodologies, which enable them to test the code in two settings. Use of some cloud-native technologies, such as SAP Hybris’s Kubernetes, can speed up deployments along with thorough testing.
9. Embrace Event-Driven Architecture
In SAP Commerce Cloud, event-driven architecture will be the best approach for loosely coupling services. You can use message brokers like Kafka or RabbitMQ to leverage asynchronous communication. Ensure eventual consistency across data and use saga patterns to manage multiple transactions, keeping data consistency in place across services.
10. Monitoring and Logging
Monitoring and logging are the best practices for improving the high performance of microservices. Experienced developers will be required to detect performance errors by performing such activities. You can run periodic health checks on the services and trigger alerts when the service is down to avoid failed service requests.
Conclusion
Microservice architecture has the essence of modular and independent setups, and developers can gravitate towards patterns that can be complex in terms of SAP Commerce Cloud. Embracing the domain-driven design, asynchronous communication, data decentralisation, and fault tolerance will make your infrastructure more suitable. Being a strategic enabler, microservices empower businesses to adapt, scale, innovate, and respond faster to customer demands by moving ahead from monolithic architectures.
