Search code examples
microservices

Micro service architecture : Data Access services

In a micro service architecture, Is it good to have separate DAO services for all the Business services or should I have all the layers intact in the service. In my case, I am building a small Banking application where in I have below services 

cbs-accountsummary
cbs-payments
cbs-accounts
cbs-loan
cbs-deposits

So should I really require below services as well 

cbs-accountsummary-dao
cbs-payments-dao
cbs-accounts-dao
cbs-loan-dao
cbs-deposits-dao

Or is it fine to have DAO as part of business services. I am really wondering how it goes in real life applications.

Solution

  • In micro-services architecture you split your Domain to micro-services and each micro-service will have its own: api, business logic and data access.

    Your example

    In your case for example the micro-service "cbs-payments" will have its own API exposed, as well as a business layer(the domain logic of the payments domain) and data access layer. The micro-service will be responsible for the whole scope of the request from api to data persistence. This could include api's, business logic, cache, database and other things.

    Lets say if you have a Create payment api call. You would call your micro-service REST api like POST api/payments which would process the request, apply some business rules(validation and others) and save it to the micro-service specific database. All that code would be in your micro-service.

    The confusion

    Maybe your where working with systems where the the architectural split was not done based on the domain but on some other criteria. Usually micro-services are split based on some Domain boundaries like in your example. Each of these micro-services are isolated. Regardless of business logic, data access logic or any other logic it is still part of that micro-service. Usually people use DDD(Domain Driven Design) with micro-services. It is also a common approach to use Repository and Unit Of Work design patterns. You could create Generic Repository/Unit of Work classes which help in database interaction. If you are using micro-service architecture you can extract these generic implementation to some library and use them in each micro-service(extend them if needed). Still you would use that code in your micro-service code.