What Are the Essential Tools and Technologies for Building Microservices?

When a new project starts, an architect must bridge business requirements and technical implementation, involving business modeling and technical design that rely on theoretical concepts and practical tools.

The series focuses on practical technology tools rather than single‑technology deep dives, organizing content by technical dimensions to support a top‑down, practice‑oriented approach.

Technology Panorama

The microservice ecosystem is divided into four parts:

Microservice Management : Distributed system implementation, covering service discovery, registration, gateways, load balancing, high availability, orchestration, configuration, task scheduling, caching, API management, resilience patterns, monitoring, and more.

Storage Technology : Relates to storage, big data, and AI systems, including structured, semi‑structured, and unstructured data stores.

Business Support : Technologies used during business implementation that are not core microservice components, such as LBS, AI, Big Data, search, static site generation, recommendation engines, user tracking, identity services, SEO/SEM, web crawling, feature toggles, multi‑tenant management, payment aggregation, and visualization tools.

DevOps : Automation and operational tooling driven by agile and microservice design, covering infrastructure as code, configuration management, deployment, version control, logging, monitoring, continuous delivery, metrics, performance analysis, tracing, and API management.

Microservice Management Tools

Content publishing: CDN, distributed storage

Remote procedure calls: RPC, RMI, JMS, AMQP

Service discovery: DNS, Zookeeper, Spring Eureka, Spring Consul, ETCD, Redis

Service registration: DDNS, Zookeeper, Spring Eureka, Spring Consul

Gateway: Zuul, Kong, Nginx Plus, OpenResty, Spring Cloud Gateway

Load balancing: LVS, Nginx, F5

High availability: HAProxy, keepalive

Service orchestration: Netflix Conductor, Uber Cadence, Zeebe, In‑Bank Baker, Spring Cloud Zuul, Node‑RED, ApiConfig

Configuration management: Spring Config, Apollo, Git, Nginx, Consul, Netflix Archaius

Distributed task scheduling: XXL‑Job, Elastic‑Job

Asynchronous tasks: AMQP, Spring Cloud, Dubbo

Caching: Redis, Memcached, MySQL Memory DB, H2

Frontend‑backend separation: Swagger, API Gateway

Service degradation: Dubbo, Spring Cloud Hystrix

Rate limiting: Dubbo, Spring Cloud Hystrix

Circuit breaking: Dubbo, Spring Cloud Hystrix

Failure recovery: Docker, Swarm, Kubernetes

Transaction management: Seata, Fescar, GTS, Narayana

Dynamic election: Zookeeper

User management: authentication, authorization, billing, session handling

OpenAPI: Kong, Apigee

Object storage: MinIO, Riak CS (Amazon S3 compatible), Ceph

Event‑driven: EventBus, Spring Event

Concurrent processing: Akka, Actor model

Global unique IDs: UUID, SetNX, Snowflake algorithm

Rule engine: Drools

Storage Technology

Structured data: PostgreSQL (MySQL not recommended)

Semi‑structured data: Redis, MongoDB

Unstructured data: HDFS, MFS, FastDFS

Business Support

LBS: no open‑source solution

AI

Big Data

Full‑text search: Lucene

Static site generation: Freemarker

Intelligent recommendation: Mahout

User tracking: no open‑source solution

IDaaS (identity as a service): not found

SEO/SEM: not found

Web crawling: Python

Feature toggles: Flagr, Togglz, FF4J, Fitchy, Flip

Tenant management: MyBatis‑Plus, Citus, MyCat

Third‑party payment: requires aggregation

Visualization: Hue, Impala, DataDeck, Tableau, Redash, Metabase, Superset

Data visualization: tablesaw, Processing

Visual programming: CoatiSoftware, Sourcetrail

Visualization widgets: ECharts, D3.js, Tableau

Frontend low‑code: 20+ visual building tools

Information push: no open‑source solution

Quality

Code scanning

Automated testing

Chaos engineering: ChaosBlade, Chaos Monkey

DevOps

Runtime environment: Terraform (infrastructure as code)

Upgrade: Flagr

Deployment: Puppet, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack

Version control: SCM

Log management: ELK, Flume

Monitoring: Zabbix, Nagios, Open‑Falcon

Visualization: global visualization system

Continuous delivery: Spinnaker

Metrics monitoring: Telegraf, InfluxDB, Grafana

Application performance: load balancer usage

Tracing: Zipkin, Pinpoint, SkyWalking

API management: Swagger, YAPI, RAP2

Conclusion

The article presents a complete taxonomy of technologies for distributed systems, microservices, and SOA, enabling readers to select optimal tools from this series for their business systems.