29 Top Tools for Building Microservices on All Levels

Microservices architecture is a highly scalable structural style for software system development, suitable for enterprise applications across various sectors including enterprise, government, education, and charities. This approach is fundamentally different from traditional monolithic architecture, focusing on individual unit applications.

Microservices are small, independent, and unique. While they offer significant advantages, building microservices applications with the required tools is not straightforward. Beyond traditional software development, testing, and deployment challenges, continuous monitoring is necessary, and rapid problem resolution is required when failures occur.

According to Mike Amundsen's three pillars of microservices architecture - Communication, Team, and Innovation - communication is undoubtedly the most essential component. This article provides a comprehensive overview of top open-source tools for building microservices across multiple categories:

API Management and Testing

API Fortress - An API testing and health tool that automates functional testing, health monitoring, and load testing for enterprise APIs. It is designed as a no-code solution built on modern API architecture practices.

Postman - An API development suite for individual developers and teams, enabling UI-driven API testing. As a powerful HTTP client, it makes RESTful API exploration effortless.

Tyk - An open-source API management platform that is fast, scalable, and modern, supporting on-premises installation, cloud service, or hybrid deployment.

Communication

RabbitMQ - Enables communication patterns between microservices to scale applications and solve distributed system problems.

Amazon SQS - Provides powerful, flexible, and reliable microservices communication with message queue services for publish-subscribe models.

Apache Kafka - A distributed stream processing platform with high fault tolerance and resilience for dense data processing.

Google Cloud Pub/Sub - A fully managed real-time messaging service for sending and receiving messages between microservices.

Monitoring

Logstash - An open-source platform for centralized data collection, storage, and transformation.

Graylog - A centralized server that works with Logstash, providing ease of use, interactivity, and speed.

Kubernetes Development

Kubernetes - The gold standard for container orchestration, particularly powerful in container scheduling, load balancing, and service discovery.

Telepresence - Enables fast local development for Kubernetes using a hybrid model where services run locally while connecting to Kubernetes through a two-way proxy.

Istio - Provides service mesh technology for reliability, security, and manageability in microservices communication on Kubernetes.

Minikube - Allows running Kubernetes locally on laptops without WiFi connectivity.

Orchestration

Conductor - Netflix's microservices orchestration engine that enables workflow coordination through microservices.

Programming Languages

Elixir - A concurrent, functional, general-purpose programming language that works with Erlang VM (BEAM) bytecode.

Spring Boot - Simplifies the creation of REST-based microservices with minimal code.

Toolkits

fabric8 - An open-source Platform as a Service tool that helps developers with configuration management, IP addressing, and load balancing.

Seneca - A Node.js microservices toolkit for building message-based microservices workflows.

Google Cloud Functions - Lightweight, serverless functions for building decoupled microservices applications.

Frameworks

goa - A framework for building REST APIs and microservices in Golang using a design-first approach.

Kong - An API gateway installable in multiple operating environments with extensive read-deployment plugins.

Serverless Tools

Claudia - Simplifies AWS Lambda deployment and handles AWS Lambda and API Gateway deployment automatically.

Apache OpenWhisk - An event-based programming service and serverless computing platform.

Serverless - A console that combines FaaS/serverless technology with other cloud services.

Kubeless - A Kubernetes-native serverless framework that understands Kubernetes resources out of the box.

IronFunctions - An open-source serverless platform that supports any language and AWS Lambda format.

AWS Lambda - Provides serverless infrastructure with pay-per-use pricing, combinable with AWS API Gateway.

OpenFaaS - An open-source serverless platform that packages any process or container as serverless functions.

Microsoft Azure Functions - Event-driven on-demand compute functions that enhance Azure's existing application capabilities.