Everything you need to know about Laravel microservices

Microservices have become an increasingly popular architectural approach for building robust and scalable applications. The core idea behind microservices is to break large, complex applications into а collections of smaller, decentralized services. Laravel for web development is a preferred choice due to its expressive syntax and а lightweight core because it makes it а great framework choice for implementing microservices. In this blog post, we’ll take а look at what microservices are, their benefits, and how to leverage Laravel to create а microservices architecture.

What are microservices?

Microservices are an architectural style that structures an application as а collection of small autonomous services. In Laravel, microservices can be built as independent Laravel applications that each focus on а specific business capability. Laravel provides tools like queues, events, and RESTful routing that help enable the building of decoupled microservices. Microservices built with Laravel communicate via APIs and can be deployed independently.

For example, an e-commerce app could have microservices built with Laravel for the product catalog, user profiles, shopping cart, and payment processing. Each microservice maintains its own database and codebase, communicating as needed via APIs. This is а common Laravel microservices example that illustrates the modular nature of the microservices architecture.

What Is Laravel?

Laravel is an open-source PHP web framework that follows the model-view-controller architectural pattern. Designed with developer productivity in mind, Laravel aims to take the pain out of development by easing common tasks like authentication, routing, sessions, and caching. Laravel’s expressive syntax, elegant templating engine Blade, and intuitive ORM Eloquent make it easy to build full-featured web applications quickly.

Introduction to Laravel as Microservice

Laravel has evolved into а go-to framework for building scalable microservices. At its core, Laravel streamlines common web development tasks, allowing developers to crank out features rapidly. This lends itself well to the microservice architecture, where applications are broken down into bite-sized services that can be developed and deployed independently.

Laravel really shines when it comes to microservice development thanks to its robust tooling. The Eloquent ORM makes it а breeze to interact with databases and execute complex queries. Features like queues, events, and broadcasting enable asynchronous communication between decoupled services. By leveraging these tools and paradigms like configuration-driven development, Laravel takes care of much of the heavy lifting of microservice development. Developers are then free to zero in on implementing discrete business capabilities in а maintainable and scalable way.

Laravel microservices architecture

Laravel’s expansive feature set lends itself nicely to building scalable microservices. Each microservice can be constructed as its own independent Laravel application. This allows developers to break an app into modular, focused services based on business domains.

At its core, microservices in Laravel decompose an application into а collection of modular services, each with а specific business capability. These services communicate via language-agnostic APIs, typically REST over HTTP. This facilitates polyglot development, where each service can be written in the language most appropriate for its task.

The merits of а microservice approach include fault isolation, independent scalability, and ease of understanding and maintaining complex systems over time. Laravel excels at accelerating the development of these types of services. Its expressive syntax cuts down boilerplate code, while its built-in services, like queues and events, enable simple asynchronous communication between services.

Advantages of Laravel microservices

In this section, we will dive into some of the major benefits of using Laravel for microservices development. Understanding these advantages will illustrate why Laravel has emerged as а premier framework for deploying complex applications using а microservices approach.

• Only involves API calls between services Laravel microservices are designed to handle а specific capability or business function. By keeping the scope narrow, each service can be lean and optimized for its particular task. This results in faster performance compared to large monolithic applications.
• Only involves API calls between services. In а microservices architecture, the different services communicate via API calls, often RESTful APIs over HTTP. There is no direct coupling between the service codebases. This brings benefits like the ability to independently scale the services and develop them in different languages.
• Can use different languages for different services (e.g., NodeJS for notifications). One benefit of microservices is the ability to combine multiple languages within а single application. For example, а NodeJS microservice could handle real-time notifications, while the back-end Laravel services focus on business logic. The services just need to expose consistent APIs for other services to consume.
• Each service can be scaled independently based on demand. If one microservice experiences а sudden spike in traffic, it can be replicated and load balanced as needed without affecting the rest of the application. This level of granular scaling brings cost efficiencies and performance benefits at scale.
• Suitable for large-scale applications. The decentralized nature of microservices makes them suitable for large, complex applications that need to support immense scale and evolution over time. The modular approach facilitates upgrades and helps tackle complexity.

Easier to deploy:

• Self-contained services can be deployed on separate VMs and containers. Each microservice is а separate codebase that can run isolated from the others on its own infrastructure. This removes dependencies and makes deployment straightforward.
• Lower risk of system failure. Even if one service fails, the other services can continue operating normally as long as dependencies are handled gracefully. The blast radius is limited compared to monolithic architectures.
• Supports modular architecture for larger teams. With multiple teams each focused on particular services, microservices enforce separation of concerns and clear ownership. This facilitates agile delivery in larger organizations.
• Easy to upgrade and maintain services independently. Microservices empower each team to release updates to their services on their own schedule. New features can be added without coordination across teams or affecting other services.
• Combines different frameworks, languages, and databases. Microservices remove restrictive technology choices. Different services can leverage the optimal languages, frameworks, and data stores according to their specific needs.
• Can build services in any language and provide REST/RPC APIs.Because communication happens via APIs, the implementation language for each service is flexible. As long as services expose consistent APIs, the internals can be swapped out without affecting consumers.

Building а robust Laravel microservices architecture comes with many complexities – from initial design decisions to deployment, scaling, and maintainability over time. While Laravel provides many great tools for microservices, it takes experience and expertise to implement Laravel-based microservices correctly. That’s why it is recommended to hire a Laravel expert to build successful projects.

If you need help building а Laravel microservices architecture, consider partnering with an expert development team that specializes in Laravel for web development and Laravel for SaaS.

When should you opt to go for Laravel microservices?

• Scenarios, where microservices with Laravel make sense, include:
• Greenfield development of new, large-scale systems
• Breaking down aging monolithic applications
• Adding major new capabilities to an existing application
• Scaling or maintainability challenges with а monolith
• Applications with high complexity or rapidly changing requirements
• Applications that need to leverage multiple programming languages
• Applications with components that get heavy individual traffic
• Integration with external services or APIs

To execute microservices architecture Laravel initiatives, partner with an experienced Laravel development company. Look for talent in architecting complex distributed systems, implementing robust service APIs, establishing observability, and automating deployment and testing. With the right expertise, Laravel microservices can propel your systems to the next level.

How to build microservices with Laravel Lumen?

Laravel Lumen provides а lightweight framework optimized for building scalable microservices. In this tutorial, we’ll walk through developing а simple microservice API from scratch with Lumen.

Setting Up а New Lumen Project

First, we’ll create а new Lumen project using Composer. This will set up а fresh Lumen codebase that we can build our microservice on top of.

composer create-project –prefer-dist laravel/lumen blog-api

Configuration

Next, we need to configure our database credentials and connection details in the .env file. This will allow our microservice to connect to the database.
DB_CONNECTION=mysql
DB_HOST=127.0.0.1
DB_PORT=3306
DB_DATABASE=lumen
DB_USERNAME=root
DB_PASSWORD=

Routes

Let’s define а simple test route in routes/web.php to verify that routing is working properly:
$router->get(‘/ping’, function() {
return ‘pong’;
});

Controllers

We’ll use Artisan to generate а PostController where we can define our API logic. Be sure to import the Post model namespace here.

php artisan make:controller PostController

Models

Our Post model will be used to interact with the posts database table. We’ll generate it in the Models namespace:

php artisan make:model Models/Post

Migrations

Running migrations will create the required database tables for our models. Here we’ll create а migration to generate the posts table.

php artisan make: migration create_posts_table

Database Seeding

Database seeding populates sample data into the posts table, so we have data to work with.

php artisan db: seed

Testing

Finally, we can make requests to our API endpoints, like /posts, to test that our microservice is functioning properly!

And that covers the basics of building an API with Lumen! There are many more features to dive into, but this tutorial should provide а good foundation for getting started with microservices development using the Laravel ecosystem.

Key takeaway

The core concepts to take away are how Laravel eases the development of focused microservices, provides tools for communication between services, and enables the building of complex yet cohesive systems from small modular components.

Mitesh Gosai

He loves challenges and adept at finding tech-solutions that complement business ideas. Working in the capacity of Project Manager at Prismetric he strives to leave no chance for glitches in his implementation. He incorporates his extensive experience in his writings about new gadgets, tech stories, updates and innovations in technology, management tips, and inspiring app technology related information.