Top 10 Microservices Frameworks [2024 Updated]

When planning a business application or software development, the main task is to choose the tech stack that could make your application faster, secure, and scalable. So, when building an application, the foundation matters. Choosing the right framework is vital; it affects costs, development time, ease of management, and long-term maintenance.

Microservices architecture splits what would be a single, monolithic application into smaller, independent applications. There’s a myriad of languages and frameworks designed for this purpose, each aiming to facilitate independent deployment. For you here are the top spotlight microservices frameworks that are making waves in 2024.

Top 10 Microservices Frameworks in 2024

Let’s talk about some of the microservices frameworks used by developers in 2024:

1. Spring boot and Spring Cloud (Java)

Spring Boot is like a toolkit for building apps using Java. It’s especially good for creating small parts of big systems, called microservices. With Spring Cloud, it gets even more tools to make these microservices work well together. Basically, Spring Boot is like a toolkit that makes creating modern Java apps much easier and faster by removing repetitive setup steps which are paired with Spring Cloud, which offers specialized tools for building tiny interconnected apps called ‘microservices’, things like finding services, setting configurations across multiple services.

It follows the Model-View-Controller (MVC) design pattern and comes with an ORM (Object-Relational Mapping), which allows the developers to interact with databases using Hibernate instead of complex SQL Queries.

Key Benefits:

1. It has auto-configuration which automatically configures your application, based on the libraries you have in your project.
2. It creates standalone spring applications that can be started using Java’s main method and just needs to put some annotation in the main spring boot application.
3. Spring cloud has service discovery which allows the automatic detection of network locations for service instances, and makes it easier for services to find and communicate with each other.
4. It manages the application configurations across multiple services.

2. Express.js (Node.js)

Express.js is the web application framework for Node.js, it’s designed to help developers build various web applications and APIs easily as well as quickly. So, as a part of Node.js environment, it’s based on Javascript. It stands out as a top choice of developers, as it’s lightweight, fast, and is adaptable enough for microservices which are equipped with the such suitable plugins.

Key Benefits:

1. Express.js provides just the essentials to get a server up and running, making it fast and efficient.
2. By using express.js you can easily use middleware to add functionalities where middlewares are like plugins; they can handle tasks like parsing request data, managing cookies, or even handling authentication.
3. As it’s built on Node.js, it can handle many connections simultaneously without slowing down the server.
4. There are many plugins available for the tasks ranging from template engine integration to the security features.

3. Django + Django REST Framework (Python)

Django is a high-level web framework for Python developers that promotes the rapid development of secure and maintainable websites. It follows the “batteries-included” philosophy, which means it comes pre-equipped with modules and such libraries for many common web development tasks. This includes functionalities like ORM (Object-Relational Mapping) for database interactions, in Django there are automatic admin interfaces, and built-in security features to prevent common web attacks.

DRF (Django REST Framework) which is an extension for Django that is built for creating the RESTful web APIs, as well as it offers the serializers to convert complex data types, like Django models, into the easily renderable formats like JSON. Additionally, it provides built-in tools for authentication, pagination, and view handling, also simplifying the process of API endpoint creation.

Key Benefits:

1. Both Django and DRF are designed for speed, by using them you can easily get a functional application or API up within a short time.
2. Django and DRF have strong community support, and their documentation is comprehensive and user-friendly.
3. Django includes a dynamic admin interface, ready to use without any additional coding, which is a boon for developers who need to quickly set up administrative functions.
4. It includes such plugins or packages for almost everything.

4. Microservices with Go kit in GoLang

Go kit is a programming toolkit for building microservices, Go programming language is renowned for its emphasis on concurrent operations and performance, seamlessly aligns with the microservices paradigm. Basically, the GoLang is known for its robust concurrency model and efficiency, naturally blends with the demands of microservices.

It provides great guidance and solutions for most of the common challenges that are faced during the development of microservices, it aims to help developers in transition from a team of go developers to a team of go engineers. Go kit is designed in such a way that it doesn’t tie you down to a particular method of data transport, whether you use HTTP, gRPC, Thrift, or others, go kit can handle it.

One of go kit’s core concepts is the “endpoint” where each service method gets represented as an endpoint which makes it easy to define and handle the all over functionalities like rate limiting, circuit breaking, and request tracing on a per-method basis.

Key Benefits:

1. Go kit provides tools that help in scaling not just the application but also the team working on it.
2. With its transport approach and the availability of encoding/decoding utilities, go kit ensures that your microservices can interact seamlessly.
3. Go kit integrates tools for logging, metrics, and tracing out-of-the-box, allowing for better monitoring, observability, and debugging of microservices.
4. Go community provides plugins, and community support.

5. Micronaut (Java, Groovy, Kotlin)

Micronaut is just like a rising star in the JVM (Java Virtual Machine) enviornment whether you code in Java, Groovy, or Kotlin, Micronauts ahead-of-time (AOT) compilation optimises your microservices applications, which also reduces the overhead and startup times.

Basically, it’s the modern framework which is designed to make server-side and serverless applications that are easy to write and efficient to run, it builds microservices and serverless functions. Micronaut is built on reactive libraries that can handle a large number of concurrent users efficiently.

Key Benefits:

1. Micronauts standout features is its AOT approach that is Ahead-of-Time (AOT) Compilation.
2. Due to AOT compilation, micronaut applications increase the fast startup times and reduce the memory usage.
3. Its reactive foundation ensures applications are scalable, and can manage a large number of concurrent requests.
4. Micronaut brings powerful and fast dependency injection features.

6. Eclipse MicroProfile (Java)

The Eclipse MicroProfile came into the world when there was a need to optimize Java for microservices. Through its specifications, developers can create portable microservices applications that can run seamlessly across various runtimes. Eclipse MicroProfile is more about defining standards and specifications. This ensures that the microservices built with it are not tied to a specific tool or library so that the application could run across multiple environments and runtimes without hassle.

It provides a unified configuration API, that allows the configurations to be sourced from the different locations and gives the application more flexibility in managing microservice configurations. It includes such specifications that provide strategies to handle the failure of services.

It also follows with the JWT Security that helps in securing microservices by generating a tokenization which authenticates and authorizes the new user every time.

Key Benefits:

1. Microservices which are developed with Eclipse MicroProfile that can run across the different environments without modification.
2. It optimizes the microservices with its outstanding features and specifications.
3. It provides great management and flexibility for the developers in managing and adjusting their microservices.
4. It’s easy to integrate MicroProfile applications with other systems and services.

7. FastAPI (Python)

FastAPI is a modern, web framework for building APIs with Python. It’s designed to create RESTful services with minimal effort, FastAPI automatically generates interactive API documentation, offers data validation, and more. FastAPI is its use of Python type hints in function signatures also this enables automatic data validation, serialization, and documentation generation.

FastAPI is built on Starlette for the web parts as it makes it more powerful for writing asynchronous tasks with Python ‘async/await’. FastAPI provides automatic interactive API documentation using tools such as Swagger and ReDoc, which makes it easier for developers to test and understand the APIs, whereas the FastAPI includes security and authentication as a main feature.

Key Benefits:

1. FastAPI applications are extraordinarily fast.
2. It’s easy to pick up and start developing.
3. Developers can achieve more with less code as it enhance productivity.
4. FastAPI represents a modern approach to web APIs development in Python which emphases the performance, simplicity, and its automatic features.

8. Helidon Oracle’s Dual-Purpose Java Solution for Microservices

It’s a collection of Java libraries that are specifically built for the microservices. Helidon MP follows the MicroProfile specification, that gives Jakarta/Java EE to developers and makes easy way to create microservices. It provides a flexible configuration to the system that supports a large number of formats and sources. It also has a built-in security framework which can integrate with both SE and MP versions.

Key Benefits:

1. Helidon offers two styles: a lightweight version and a classic Java version.
2. Helidon is really fast and can handle many tasks at once.
3. Helidon aligns with a popular Java standard called MicroProfile, which means it’s in sync with best practices and the larger Java community.
4. With support from a big tech company like Oracle, Helidon is well-documented, well-supported, and will continue to evolve.

9. Lagom (Scala and Java)

Lagom is a framework or a toolbox which builds highly strong systems of Reactive microservices which specifically targets to Scala and Java languages, it builds systems which give quick responses and remain stable even under such challenging conditions. It ensures that systems must be highly responsive, robust, strong, and scalable, that offer seamless user experiences even when dealing with various failures or high loads during runtime.

Key Benefits:

1. Lagom’s core design ensures that built systems offer quick or swift responses.
2. Lagom offers a development environment that provides hot-reloading, making the developer’s feedback loop faster.
3. Lagom is built for flexible deployment scenarios.
4. It has a strong ecosystem of libraries, tools.

10. Quarkus (Java)

Quarkus is the modern Java framework which is developed for creating the microservices suitable for the Kubernetes, it provides a platform that manages containerized applications. It boosts a quick startup time and reduces runtime memory consumption for optimized performance. Quarkus works well with both OpenJDK HotSpot and GraalVM’s ahead-of-time compilation.

While it’s more compatible with the standard Java VM, its support for GraalVM ensures the faster startups and low memory usage. This efficiency makes it ideal for cloud settings where resource saving and scalability matter most.

Key Benefits:

1. Quarkus creates a dynamic development model.
2. Quarkus offers a broad spectrum of technologies, frameworks, and APIs, making it versatile and developer-friendly.
3. Built for both JVM and native compilation and it ensures the applications run efficiently and responsively.
4. Quarkus uses memory wisely, which makes sure it doesn’t waste any.

Conclusion

The above highlighted microservices frameworks for 2024 are among the best in the industry, each offering distinct features. You have to choose the right one that should be based on your project’s specific needs, features, and potential limitations. By using these frameworks at their fingertips, you as a developers can create efficient and robust applications.

Must Check:

• Microservice Architecture – Introduction, Challenges, & Best Practices
• 10 Microservices Design Principles That Every Developer Should Know

FAQs

What are microservices frameworks?

It enables you as a developers to create independent components within a bigger application or system and build small, independent parts of a larger system or application.

What’s special about them in 2024?

Due to their up-to-date functionalities support, building flexible, faster, and modular software applications.

How should I pick the right framework?

Just think about what your project needs, what the framework does best, and any challenges it might have.