Microservices Architecture Setup Guide on EKS

Microservices architecture is splitting applications into small, independent, and manageable parts. Amazon EKS is the ideal platform to run these parts. However, microservices also bring the complexity of distributed systems.

For a successful microservices setup, you must configure the following components on EKS:

1. Namespaces

Confine each microservice or team into its own Namespace. This provides resource isolation and access control.

• E.g., payment-service, user-service, monitoring.

2. Service Discovery

Kubernetes DNS (CoreDNS) allows services to find each other. Service A should go to Service B not with an IP address, but with the name service-b.namespace.svc.cluster.local.

3. Configuration Management

Do not embed the settings of each microservice (DB address, API key) into the code. Use ConfigMap and Secret. Use dynamic configuration libraries to detect changes without restarting the application.

4. Resiliency Patterns

If one microservice crashes, the entire system should not crash (Domino effect).

• Circuit Breaker: Cuts off traffic to the failing service.
• Retry & Timeout: Retries if the request times out, but not forever. It is best practice to solve these patterns at the infrastructure level with a Service Mesh like Istio or Linkerd instead of writing them in the application code.

5. Centralized Logging and Monitoring

You cannot look at the logs of dozens of services one by one. Collect all logs to OpenSearch or CloudWatch with Fluent Bit. Perform chain request tracking (Distributed Tracing) with OpenTelemetry.