10 Essential Microservice Best Practices Every Backend Engineer Should Know

Microservice architecture is not a silver bullet, but it offers a solid foundation for modern software systems. Hüseyin Babal, chief software architect at aurea and consultant at Kloia, shares ten best‑practice recommendations based on his experience.

The examples use Spring Boot for development, Consul for service discovery, Elasticsearch and Kibana for monitoring, and Docker and Jenkins for continuous delivery.

Best Practice 1 – Achieve True REST

Understanding the benefits of REST leads to Leonard Richardson's maturity model, which defines four levels:

Level 0: Use a single endpoint to access resources.

Level 1: Use the same HTTP method for different resources.

Level 2: Use different HTTP methods (GET, POST, PUT, DELETE) for different resources.

Level 3: Include hypermedia links in responses, achieving true REST.

Best Practice 2 – Use Spring HATEOAS

Spring HATEOAS helps you build navigable RESTful APIs by embedding hypermedia links directly in responses.

Best Practice 3 – Distributed Configuration

Instead of configuring dozens of settings at once, use a distributed key/value store such as Consul to manage configuration centrally.

Best Practice 4 – Client Code Generation

Generate client code for any supported language using Swagger, or use Feign annotations together with Ribbon for client‑side load balancing.

Best Practice 5 – Continuous Delivery

Demonstrate continuous delivery pipelines with Docker containers and Jenkins automation.

Best Practice 6 – Monitoring

Monitoring is ubiquitous; integrate tools like Elasticsearch and Kibana to collect and visualize metrics.

Best Practice 7 – Logging

Leverage Docker log drivers and formats such as GELF (Graylog Extended Log Format) for structured logging.

Best Practice 8 – APM

Application Performance Management (APM) collects detailed traces; Zipkin is a viable open‑source option.

Best Practice 9 – Data Aggregation at API Gateway

Aggregate data for specific clients at the API gateway layer to reduce backend calls.

Best Practice 10 – Event Subscription and CQRS

Separate commands (which change state without returning data) from queries (which return data without changing state) to improve scalability and maintainability.

Original article: https://dzone.com/articles/10-best-practices-for-microservice-architectures

Author: Derek Weeks

Translator: ForeverL888